I mean, they don’t, but spinning them round a bit let me line them up in a random fashion and the so-called puzzle let me through. There’s a puzzle early on where you rotate discs with glowing symbols on the floor, Aleshia commenting that they match up to the drawings on the walls. Yet I unashamedly find myself enjoying the game, often laughing at how ridiculous some of these elements are. It’s a sudden difficulty spike that’s instantly off-putting, alongside the difficulty of hitting those damn bat things. Haring after them, you drop down into a smokey cavern, get flash-banged and find yourself being shot at by a dozen different enemies with only one or two rocky stalagmites to provide any kind of cover. Having battled through the first few arenas of mythical and reanimated enemies, Shelia spies the spec ops goons clambering up into a cave up ahead. The challenge that you face across the game’s 30-60 minute runtime sometimes feels randomly unfair. However you tackle the enemies you face, you’re awarded a Devil May Cry-esque rating for each fight, building up from D through to SSS if you can continually land attacks and headshots. You can use the EMP to knock enemies flying, leaving them floating in a temporary stasis while you unload your shotgun into them, which can fire as fast as you’re pulling the trigger. Still, the combat remains fast and fluid, with plenty of flexibility to mix and match abilities and weapons together. Only a handful of enemies, predominantly the spec ops baddies, will fire weapons at you, but even then, it’s best to think about breaking line of sight to try and manage how much damage you’re taking.

Your sword is your only real close-ranged attack, and even that can deal damage from afar. You might feel that way, but in truth, it’s often better to lean on more typical FPS techniques of backing away and strafing. There’s more to unlock as well, but it means that from the very first moment you feel empowered to engage in high-paced front foot combat. You’re given a number of abilities right from the off, with your SMG, shotgun and pistol accompanied by a dash ability, EMP force blast, energy-based zipline and a sword that can send slashes of power at your enemy.

There’s still the encounters with special forces goons thrown in for good measure, and it all adds up to a completely mad hodgepodge of ideas. Now it’s time to fight tigers with Jurassic Park Dilophosaurus neck frills, reanimated enemies with swords and shields, fire-shooting giant bats and more. Then, some basically meaningless dialogue and one exploding security door later, it’s time to fight them again with a submachine-gun before you and a terribly generic-looking bad guy who you seem to know are sucked up through an inter-dimensional portal. There’s next to no preamble outside of some brief, you’re just in the middle of a high stakes covert mission, wielding a pistol to take out a few enemy goons. Bright Memory throws your protagonist Shelia right in at the deep end.

Bright memory publishers