I’m pretty sure that if I was 18 years old and had any modicum of games development talent, I would fart out a game like Valfaris (or at least attempt to, no doubt nabbing many 2/10 scores in the process). Twenty years later, 38 year old me is ecstatic that such a game exists – not least because it’s done by folks who actually have talent, and inspired styling aside, is a bloody good side-scrolling shooter that comprehensively erases the sacrilegious stink of Konami’s recent ‘work’ on the Contra franchise.
Valfaris is a largely uncomplicated affair, which is exactly how it should be. As its long-haired, no-nonsense, metal adorned protagonist, Valfaris follows a classic design throughline; players control what amounts to a murderous engine, its purpose being to thoroughly deaden everything in its path in one level before moving onto the next.
Achieving such destruction by unleashing three different weapon categories in primary, secondary and melee, Valfaris’ arsenal of weaponry is as aptly named as it is devastating to employ. Whether you’re unleashing a barrage of homing rockets from the aptly named ‘Envoy of Destruction’, an XXL-sized rocket-launcher, or cleaving enemies in twine with the ‘Bastard’, an unreasonably wieldy battle-axe, you’ll struggle to not be satisfied by Valfaris’ particular side-scrolling brand of monster bloodletting.
Then there’s the sheer visual imagination of the whole thing. Just about every level in Valfaris is some sort of variation of metallic biological construct – grim, Giger-esque realms where metal structures are threaded through pulsating walls of eternally bleeding flesh and where bulging pustules feed and connect to some unseen, far-flung nexus. It’s the stuff of nightmares for sure, and also, there’s nothing else like it right now in the genre.
Equally evocative and linger long in the memory are the creatures that you’ll be eviscerating in each of Valfaris’ realms. Their infernal rank and file made up of foes that straddle a wide spectrum of varying grotesqueries, our protagonist will clash with creatures of elemental terror; massive bipedal bugs with rail cannons where a skull should be and towering serpents, birthed out of pools of flesh melting acid.
In amidst the seemingly endless shower of blood, guts, ugliness, and metal there’s a surprisingly thoughtful core to Valfaris that helps to elevate it above and beyond the usual genre beats. For a start, the secondary weapon – which very often ends up being the most powerful of any armament you might have on hand at any one time, consumes precious energy reserves which can be replenished from murdering enemies and looting supplies from caches made of, yep, skull piles stuck together with sinew.
More than that, the energy which those weapons leverage is also the same which is consumed by a handy (and often life-saving) directional shield that allows you to reflect projectiles of nearly any kind back at the sender. And so a consideration must be made – do you prioritize attack over defense, or are you frugal enough to balance the two deftly?
Further afield, various materials can be collected which permit the upgrading of any weapon collected; providing a neat sense of progression into the bargain. Pleasingly, a level of sophistication emerges here too, because to upgrade your weapons you must do so at special shrines that act as checkpoints. The kicker, however, comes in the form of Resurrection Idols which are stashed in areas, both obvious and less so, around each level.
In order to activate these checkpoints, one Resurrection Idol must be spent – however, saving them up to a specific threshold rewards you with much higher health and energy caps. So it is then, that Valfaris once more reveals depths and complexities that might have gone unassumed simply by taking in its bombastically violent audiovisual presentation alone, as it constantly forces the player to consciously perform a risk and reward analysis whilst the old muscle memory goes about its murderous enterprise.
And so we come to the music. In a similar way to how Nu-Doom’s relentless, though timely turbo metal riffs propagate a feeling of adrenaline, so too does Valfaris perform a similar feat in matching its own music to the on-screen action. In this instance, the pied-piper to all that face blasting is none other than former Celtic Frost guitarist, Curt Victor Bryant, whose furious extreme metal thrum acts as the perfect symphony against which Valfaris’ brutal spectacle unfolds.
Valfaris then is a rare curio. A keen and masterful homage to Contra in a way that Konami either seems unable or willing to match, it’s a timely reminder that indie developers such as Steel Mantis are often best placed to do appropriate justice to those seemingly bygone franchises. Of course, it also doesn’t hurt that in Valfaris’ case, that its raucous and visceral audiovisual presentation makes it the most bloodthirsty and foot-stomping game since Nu-Doom, too.
