The Haunted Hoard: MediEvil (PS4)
In the kingdom of Gallowmere the people tell the tale of the brave knight Sir Daniel Fortesque. When the sorcerer Zavok threatened the land with his legions of undead, Sir Daniel lead the charge to take him down, carving his way through monsters and receiving a mortal blow, but not before ensuring the necromancer was slain as well. The thing is, that story is just that: a story. The truth of Sir Daniel’s exploits are far more ignominious, this supposed hero at least still leading the charge against Zarok but dying to the first round of arrow fire without even reaching the enemy. However, since the layabout knight had schmoozed his way into being a close friend to the king of Gallowmere, his pointless death was ignored in favor of an impressive legend. Unfortunately, another falsehood in that tale is that Zarok did not truly die in the battle, instead needing 100 years to regain his power afterwards.
When the action game MediEvil begins, Zarok makes himself known to Gallowmere once more, possessing the populace with dark magic while reviving the dead to serve as his foot soldiers. The magic cast to do so wasn’t exactly precise though, so as zombies rise from the graveyard, so too does the fallen knight Sir Daniel Fortesque. Back as a skeleton, Sir Daniel sees his chance to actually live up to the legend and save Gallowmere truly, sprinting off with a charming gangly gait in an effort to redeem himself. While he still can be irritable and a little selfish, especially since he can barely talk thanks to a missing jaw, Sir Daniel isn’t always met with the greatest of welcomes even from allies. Talking gargoyle heads that often introduce new concepts or upcoming dangers tend to throw in jabs at Fortesque’s unearned honors, but with Gallowmere filled with its share of kooky and spooky monsters, the ribbing our skeletal hero receives is often phrased in a fun way or serves as a nice little motivator to try and earn those honors truly this time around.
Gallowmere has many eerie locations you’ll be traveling through in your quest to stop Zavok as Sir Daniel, early traipses through zombie-filled cemeteries turning into explorations of areas like the village and asylum where the residents have been corrupted, and even some fanciful trips to places like a flying ghost ship with its skeletal crew. This remake of a 1998 PlayStation game can make its locations both moody and gorgeous thanks to a mix of lighting and texture work. The Sleeping Village for example has some warped shaping to its buildings but could pass for a legitimately eerie town before the possessed villagers and their cartoonish proportions come charging at you. The Ant Caves have large insects in golden lit tunnels that could potentially unsettle a player if they weren’t helping chubby fairies who mixed their cherubic bodies with a face befitting an old dock worker. The blend of menace and silliness helps keep the world fresh, the player unsure what side something like Rhinotaur might fall on when they first hear of it and even something like a giant pumpkin boss can be a bit surprising as it leans towards more gross rotting detail than a Halloween jack-o-lantern. Sir Daniel himself is perhaps a good representation of the game as a whole, his knight armor quite impressive and many of his weapons looking like standard kit for a medieval knight, but then you see his goofy face and the way he moves about and you come to understand the balance between artistic craft and comedic indulgence at play here.
The levels of MediEvil are a particularly varied set of stages despite the early levels making the game seem like it’s just a hack and slash. While early stages having you slashing your way through undead to a clear ending point, levels start getting a bit more complicated and start embracing new ideas. The earlier mentioned ghost ship is actually where the game most embraces platforming in a set of various jumping challenges in a game otherwise light on them. The Sleeping Village is non-linear, the player needing to enter different buildings to find specific items to use elsewhere. One level can be just a series of large battles while the earlier mentioned Ant Caves are actually found as a level within a level, one you can only reach if you popped open a side path in a previous level to get the item needed to enter. The basic mold is never completely discarded in favor of some new gameplay idea, so even though a hedge maze has you solving riddles, MediEvil still focuses in more on the combat elements throughout that stage despite featuring a few moments more about puzzley interactions than combat.
Even when MediEvil is putting forth a more standard stage though, it manages to keep the action interesting mainly through enemy design and your growing arsenal of battle tools. Sir Daniel can have two weapons equipped to swap between easily while you can also pull up the weapon menu generally without too much issue mid-battle to boot. Your blade is an effective baseline weapon, although it does rub up against one of the weaknesses of MediEvil in that enemies can deal contact damage quite easily. This can lead to moments where you slash at a foe, they flinch back, but when they recover they touch you causing damage without it really being shown well in how Sir Daniel reacts. Health can almost feel like it’s going missing when you’re doing a close range slashing spree to dispense with a monster, but later weapons have better reach including some of the superior swords you can unlock. Where things get quickly interesting though are the weapons that control differently. Your weapons have two different attacks, so when you get something like the hammer at first it presents itself as a slow tool mostly for breaking through rocks. However, charge it up with its secondary attack and it can be an incredibly strong opener to a battle, it sometimes the best way to deal with a foe like the spinning scarecrows who will chew through your life if you try to face them head-on. When you get an axe it can be used close range but its long range throw is strong and without cost, making it seem like an upgrade to the bow or throwing spears but its slow travel time may still give you reason to rely on the other projectiles if you’re facing many flying or distant foes. Your shields can be incredibly useful, although most of these are found within levels and break through overuse, but they can still sometimes prevent those unexpected cases of touch damage or even block some of the stronger moves bosses use against you.
The weapon spread adds the needed layer of depth to combat that starts to make the enemies you encounter more interesting. The Lake level is a good example of how the game encourages diversifying your battle options. Fish leaping out of the water to hit you are hard to hit with anything but a projectile, an the eyes watching the piers will call in back up if they spot you before you kill them from afar. The enemies that leap out of the water also are good at blocking, but in other stages if you try and hang back to attack the enemy will reveal their own projectile, making close range combat more likely the one you’ll come out on top in. Enemies like impervious large knights ask you to use the environment to take them out instead, but one other idea that helps the action flow well is how your health is handled. Sir Daniel has a decently large health bar but different foes deal a range of damage. When your life bar runs out you will “die”, but this skeletal knight has ways to get back up on his feet. Life Bottles work like a mix of extra lives and health bar extensions. As long as you have life bottles in reserve, you’ll be revived shortly after you fall. What makes them more interesting is that, when you have full health and heal in some other way, that extra credit will be stored in Life Bottles, meaning you can find value even in small health pick-ups and restock your reserves frequently.
Threats to your life are common and at least a little bit potent even in the simplest cases, meaning the life bottle system definitely feels impactful. Even if you get a game over in a stage, you are only made to retry it, allowing you to better preserve your health and life bottles or figure out ways to fill them up after the tough parts for the second attempt. However, MediEvil is a remake of a PS1 game, and some elements of it were kept that don’t gel the best with other elements of the game. The platforming, even in a devoted level like the ghost ship, isn’t always the best, especially since sometimes the camera tries to shift its angle on the action while you’re leaping over a gap or past a danger you now can’t see well. MediEvil has a way to instantly die in many levels, from falls down pits to monsters in the tall corn to just stepping into water that is a bit too deep, and while the game will try to have Sir Daniel’s body float away from what killed him and revive him with a life bottle, this can sometimes mess up and drop him back onto the danger. Other times a slightly tricky jump might deplete a fair few life bottles despite the trickiness feeling like it derives more from the somewhat slippery movement. Sir Daniel can sometimes find himself partially inside walls or objects too, this remake not quite as polished as it could have been when it came to the actual game substance.
One element that improves most every level though is the soul collection. Every level has souls to collect, these mostly released from monsters when they’re slain. If you can collect every soul in a level, you can then collect a chalice that lets you access the Hall of Heroes where various quirky heroes of legend will grant you new weapons or boons like health refills and the gold used to buy more ammunition or magical charges for your gear. Some of the levels in MediEvil could be very short if you just tried to run to the end, but the soul collection will ask you to engage with the design and search them for foes, your life put in a bit more danger if you want to get the incredibly useful tools the Hall of Heroes provide. This remake does try to provide another reason to play levels, the idea of Lost Souls introduced late in the game where you need to revisit old levels and help a soul pass on by performing a certain task, but some of these are shallow while others involve a new concept added to the level and they’ll only trigger if you first find them in another level and hear them out. The reward for pleasing all the Lost Souls is the original PS1 version of MediEvil to play, but a bit a more creativity and a less convoluted search for them could have made it a more interesting extra activity more in line with the Hall of Heroes objectives.
THE VERDICT: MediEvil’s levels would already be enticing with their mix of comedic designs and genuine creepiness, but the range of concepts that don’t stray too far from the central action keep things fresh and in line with the shift in setting. New levels promise new experiences and ideas like the soul system ask you to engage with them more while the health is well balanced for the assumed risk added by needing to hunt down the souls for the well realized mix of weapons. It’s a shame occasional issues like the moments of fiddly movement or how contact damage is handled crop up, but once you understand the advantages you can earn and how to utilize them, it’s more than worth it to press on past those rough patches to see what the next stage has in store.
And so, I give MediEvil for PlayStation 4…
A GOOD rating. It’s a shame that the extra bit of polish elements like platforming and close-range combat needed weren’t included as part of this remake as MediEvil’s creative concepts and smart systems to add more depth to its stages would have done so much to make it an excellent game. Every trip to the Hall of Heroes is exciting even if it ends up not being the most rewarding because you know the weapons you are granted can be strict improvements to your current tools or provide a new battle option against the new range of enemies you’ll soon face. The Life Bottle system makes finding any sort of healing feel rewarding while levels are tough enough that you won’t be walking around with so much reserve health you don’t fear them. The instant deaths are perhaps good to have in some places just to balance out the Life Bottles a touch and there are points it is tied to a more legitimate hazard than slipping off the edge of a platform, and fixing the contact damage issue too might also put the health system at jeopardy if there wasn’t some appropriate difficulty adjustments. MediEvil does feel wisely handled in terms of how much the formula is changed in a level so you’re still usually getting some action on top of whatever new consideration an idea like The Sleepy Village’s building exploration add so it’s still easy to find the enjoyable ideas at play, and a dash of humor in places like the bestiary or character interactions can keep the player’s spirit up even after squeaking by in a tough level.
Sir Daniel Fortesque’s legend is a little marred by some elements that this PS4 remake didn’t fully address, but the basic ideas are still so strong it’s easy to love this medieval adventure. Its environments impress with their appearance, provide great action stages thanks to their sometimes unique goals and structures, and the battles are elevated by the range of options you can eventually bring to a fight. MediEvil got a second chance at excellence much like Sir Daniel received a do-over on taking down Zarok, and while it has its quirks, so does Daniel, and both show they can rise above their flaws to become something good.