Vigil: The Longest Night

posted on 2 Jan 2021

Fallen Eyeball

One listen to the main menu theme song was a prognostication that this was going to be good. I remember seeing this game back when there was a demo available, and I knew I’d buy it as soon as it came out.

I won’t repeat the obvious information that you’ve seen in the description and tags, but I want to say that this game, rather than being a “souls-like,” is more of a “bloodborne-like.” It takes a lot of inspiration from Bloodborne, ranging from the blood vial system to the names of certain areas and the overall dark gothic, cosmic horror aesthetic. Rather than copying directly off of Bloodborne, however, it sort of deviates by doing its own thing with the setting, most notably with the main character and her role.

If you’ve ever watched the anime or read the manga called Claymore, it sort of reminded me of that. You are a light haired warrior female with a sword who seems to have the singular purpose of taking on the abominations and horrors that humanity is plagued with but is incapable of directly facing.

The Technical

If there is one thing that Vigil does very well it’s the gameplay.

Dodging and general movement is very fluid, satisfying, and responsive. I never felt annoyed that my character was not responding the way I wanted her to, possibly leading to unnecessary deaths. As the story went on and I acquired more movement abilities, I found navigation of the environment and the combat even more smile-inducing, perhaps even to the point of being overpowered during combat, outmaneuvering nearly everything.

There are four different weapon classes in the game that you can specialize in through skill trees, each with their own benefits and drawbacks, and there is an additional skill tree reserved for general skills, which encompasses everything from stamina boosts, to item drop rate, to additional mana for arcane item usage. You won’t have a problem leveling up what you’d like to by the end of the first playthrough.

And speaking of arcane (yes, probably a Bloodborne reference), the arcane damage in this game is also implemented primarily through arcane item usage. There are quite a few arcane items you can collect, each unique enough in their effects to not be confused with the other items. I found a lot of them fun to use, but I also found myself coming back to 2 or 3 of them that were extremely overpowered and made some fights trivial provided that you had decent arcane skills. I should mention that the items have some rather strange names if some of my review headings are any indication.

It may be unclear on how to level up your arcane skills when first playing, but it turns out that serves this purpose, which I found kind of neat.

You can also infuse your weapons with gems in this game to provide auxiliary effects. However, instead of Dark Souls where the infusions would often cause split damage with physical and the special effect scaling with a certain stat, the infusions in this game seem to only provide a net benefit by creating an additional effect on top of the base damage. Interestingly, the items of clothing or armor that you wear can also be infused with the same gems, often creating a defensive effect instead of an offensive one.

Weapons, armor, and arcane items were not very common to come by - they are something that require exploration and work to obtain. I liked this feature of Vigil - it meant that my inventory never got absurdly crowded and more effort could be put into the weapons and items themselves by developers since this feature was not spread too thin by its breadth.

The different weapon classes and specializations, infusions, and arcane items allowed for the creation of a character that was satisfyingly customizable. And really, any build you do is viable. This game was not particularly challenging to me personally (with the exception of some of the later bosses), and if you’re a souls veteran, you definitely want to play on the hardest difficulty.

The Creative

I’m going to discuss three of the more artistic sides of Vigil - the art, music, and the narrative and characters. Spoiler alert - the art and music were excellent while the narrative and characters were the weakest part of the game.

I don’t think the screenshots provided in the Steam store really do this game’s art justice. If you like a certain art style, then this game was made for you and it will be a pleasure to look at from beginning to end. The best way that I can describe it is dark gothic aesthetics and monstrosities infused with a glowing, fantasy, fairy-tale-like color palette. I’ve seen some people complain about the glowing and over saturation, but I personally loved it. The world in this game suffers from perpetual darkness yet the blood and strange creatures are accented. It’s beautiful, I think.

To make things even better, several of the areas were vastly different from one another with some examples being vast forests, the catacombs, an ice world, and underground mines. They did an excellent job on the environments and the transitions between them, as well as the fast travel system.

Overall, the music was a strong point, especially the main menu music and the music in the town with its melancholy, brooding tone, reminiscent of some of the more reflective tracks from the Dark Souls series. There are not many times in the game where you are walking in complete silence - in addition to bosses having their own soundtrack, the areas have their own soundtrack as well. Not all of them were a hit - I found the music in the forest to be a bit too over the top for me and highly repetitive, and several of the boss soundtracks were not very memorable. It was not bad by any means, though.

And then comes the narrative and characters. Rather than talking too much about this point, I want to say that a more well developed and interesting plot, as well as more engaging and unique characters, perhaps combined with some solid voice acting, could’ve put this game on a whole different level. What I’d love to see is well done souls game mechanics combined with an astounding narrative and engaging, nuanced characters - a game that is the complete package and ends up being far more than the sum of its equally strong parts - but perhaps this is too much to realistically ask.

I think that if the developers of Vigil could at least hire some skilled voice actors to express the personalities of the characters in this game to get you to empathize with them, things would be more remarkable, but unfortunately, I found myself not really engaged too much with this aspect of the game. And it’s a shame, because I think improvements in this domain would’ve made Vigil far more enjoyable in more ways than the gameplay and art, as it would’ve infused it with emotion and meaning, and of course, these are the things that we remember the most as humans.

Weird P(l)ot

So, is Vigil worth buying? Absolutely - especially on sale. This is the most fun I’ve had in a metroidvania, souls-like game in quite some time. I knew I’d finish it within the first few hours of playing it because I kept thinking about it when I was not playing it, itching to come back and explore new areas and fight different bosses. It’s NG+ feature may enhance replayability as well, but I’m not sure to what extent things change in it.

You may find yourself mashing the buttons on the controller to get through the dialogue sometimes, but the combat and environment will always make up for your lack of emotional engagement in Vigil.

With the exception of a few bugs, I’m impressed that a small indie team was able to make a game of this scope and quality, and I highly recommend a playthrough for something different if you’re a fan of Dark Souls, Bloodborne, or Metroidvania stuff.