The Haunted Hoard: The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition (Xbox Series X)
The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition stars a hero who has a demon bound to his body, and while the game shows him and the demon both wishing to end this relationship at first, and oddly filial relationship develops over the course of the game that makes you start to wonder why the two should ever be separated. Not only does the demon aid Benedict Fox in his investigations, it lends its powers for the exploration-focused platforming and combat, and while the story nominally pursues other topics, it’s clear that there is an intentional focus on this strange partnership between a man and a Lovecraftian horror.
In The Last Case of Benedict Fox, a secret organization helps to research many elements of the supernatural for its own private use. Believing his father’s ties to the organization might have lead to his father’s death, Benedict returns to his family’s mansion and finds the trail has run rather cold. At least, that’s the case on our plane of existence. Utilizing the incredible powers of his demonic Companion, Benedict is able to enter a warped realm constructed from his father’s memories, this Limbo protected by hostile horrors and difficult to navigate as it tries to keep its secrets. You do eventually utilize another character’s Limbo to help with the investigation as well, and the visuals of the Limbos are often striking and gorgeously rendered. A space may technically be a cave, forest, or icy mountain, but the memories of the Limbo’s owner have altered these natural settings to have representations of things meaningful to the deceased. An organic environment broken up by one large stained glass window or a loving couple’s canopy bed make it quite apparent this mixing is going on, but stopping to look around at times will help you realize how much of the environment has had man-made objects seep into it as part of the memories asserting themselves over the domain. The dark touch of supernatural forces can make the areas imposing, eerie, and uncomfortable, their uncanny unnatural elements even stranger with the incursion of pieces of everyday life.
Sadly, despite being called the Definitive Edition, these evocative visuals can cause a few issues. They may not load in properly at times, the game playing with so many light effects and dense details that sometimes need a bit to appear. When things are not out of sight though, sometimes the game instead struggles to keep the movement fluid, it not too rare to have hitches and slowdown when trying to perform actions in a visually interesting area. The impressive environments are sadly an occasional detriment to the world as it makes navigating it feel less clean, but they do sometimes feel let down by the story as well. While this plot is nominally an investigation of your father’s fate and the rituals he was investigating before he perished, long stretches can feel like they don’t add much to the main plot. It can sometimes feel less like you’re trying to learn the dark truth behind who killed James Fox and more just looking into whatever neat mystical thing you happened to find laying around such as James’s efforts to make a golem. There’s still enough details to start piecing things together, but it feels like the more compelling throughline is Benedict’s interesting relationship with the Companion. The shadowy tentacled familiar inhabiting Benedict’s mind warms up to the player in an odd way, mostly because it can’t help but contribute its thoughts after most discoveries or conversations. It speaks slowly and with purpose, at times obviously trying to push Benedict towards doubt or darkness, but at others it is outright protective of Benedict even in more personal ways. It’s hard to believe Benedict is just a convenient vessel for it after a while, and with one of the main questions hanging over the adventure being if Benedict can purge the Companion from his body, it’s hard to care so much about a man you only know through scraps and visualized memories compared to this demon who is both complicated but has his fate still up in the air.
Zeroing in too much on the relationship between Benedict and his Companion could have dispelled some of the fascinating uncertainty though, but enough is done to address it that the game clearly understands it has built up something interesting. The main story does have some effective complications and new actors enter it, but unfortunately the voices for most of the characters are a letdown. A lady known as the Tattooist speaks as if her sentences have no punctuation marks and few characters really display appropriate emotion, including Benedict himself. The Companion however is voiced excellently by Craig Hustler, knowing how to space out its words to sound imposing and sinister when needed and the added effects over it helps it sound more otherworldly. Craig Hustler also voices another character whose booming voice almost evokes Christopher Lee, these effective and memorable performances not truly able to rescue a sometimes shabby story that can’t keep its focus or best sell its key moments.
The exploration and platforming of this Metroidvania game though are handled in an interesting way that does need a bit of time to grow. Your main tools for combat initially are a knife and a flare gun, the gun needing its energy built up by slashing the horrors you find throughout the Limbos. Your knife attacks won’t make enemies flinch, and parrying with the right timing initially is crucial to being able to block even the simplest foes you face. It does feel like the monsters in the supernatural realm are abnormally strong when you’re just beginning and it could have become tedious if every fight even with simple foes was so hard fought, but over time your weapon and attack options expand. Finding relics in Limbo will earn you credit for use at Harry Houdini’s shop, the escape artist and spiritualist allowing you to get new tools like a smoke grenade you can use for temporary invincibility or a petrification potion that makes you dangerous for enemies to touch even though it keeps you locked in place while its effects are active. More interesting though are the upgrades to your Companion that the Tattooist helps you tap into in exchange for the Ink you collect from defeated foes. That ink has to be banked by reaching portals within the labyrinth and enemies who are drained of ink are weaker next time you encounter them, but there’s an odd system in place where dying will lead to you leaving the ink where you fell so you have to go pick it back up if you don’t want enemies to regain their ink. It’s an inconvenience but not a potent one, just more a feature that makes it less likely you’ll shift tasks on death but since the ink just returns to its source if you don’t grab it, it’s not tense to try and run back and grab it.
The Companion powers you gain over time really help the combat evolve. At first you slash enemies until you can utilize your powerful gun, but soon the tentacles of the demon within you can be used to lunge out and snag foes to hurl them around. You can snap a flying foe out of the air and instantly squash it to the ground, keep enemies from attacking by throwing them about, and a diving slam attack can easily disperse a group of foes. Those early somewhat clunky fights are eventually replaced with surprisingly smooth ones, Benedict able to slide into an enemy to launch them in the air, fire the flare gun at them quickly, slam them back down to the ground with a tentacle, and do that all before other enemies nearby even had time to really begin their attacks. Unfortunately there are not many bosses in total, and the ones you do face are often more restricted in what even works against them, the game again having a pacing issue as a boss drought stretches on for a while unless you count things like chase scenes as boss encounters.
The Companion also provides you new ways to navigate, that diving slam able to break through certain bits of ground, its tentacles able to eventually rip open organic doors, and it later even gives you additional midair jumps that are an apparent improvement included in the Definitive Edition in an effort to remove sloppy attempts to have the Companion’s tentacles pull you to edges previously. You’ll actually find yourself traveling back and forth between the two Limbos and the family manor quite often, not only to buy upgrades back where it’s safe but because the game’s progression encourages revisits that are made easy enough through the fast travel system involving portals. There is a helpful map you can pause and view most any time although the often perplexing and winding areas may see you opening it far too often, and unfortunately the map will display many helpful symbols for important places and ability requirements but not items in the area that you may have failed to see because these sometimes vital objects are just tiny sparkles in areas with often quite busy visuals. However, actually figuring out where to go works well when it is done in reference to your expanding powers and more importantly, your expanding knowledge.
Not all obstacles in your path are tied purely to powers, Benedict sometimes finding helpful artifacts and notes that help you open doors and passages blocked by puzzles. The Conundrum Device in particular is used for a plethora of puzzles for required progress and additional goodies, the player having to construct arcane symbols with it based on clues left in notes or on the doors themselves. Sometimes these can feel more like using a decoder ring to figure out a hidden message, and while most of the time you’re constructing some number by way of a sigil combining the associated symbols, the puzzles blocking your path aren’t usually as simple as a translation. You’ll sometimes be shown a host of symbols and numbers and need to parse which ones are special enough to warrant your attention, or you’ll be asked to work out a puzzle solution and then translate it into the device as your way of showing you figured out the logic at play. Sometimes you’ll feel quite clever working out what was asked of you, and while the game involves a good degree of backtracking, it’s also satisfying how often you realize you now have what’s needed to deal with areas you had to skip over previously. The Conundrum Device does start losing its luster later down the line when it reaches potential overuse though, and there’s an absolutely baffling choice made with a vital tool for deciphering symbols. A journal helps provide reference for how numbers line up with parts of the sigils you create, but even on a large screen, the way your character holds at an angle when deciphering a puzzle can make it tough to read. I don’t sit too far from my screen but it felt hopeless trying to read it even on my large display, it ultimately wiser to pull up a picture of the book online to reference on a second screen instead of in the game itself. I’ve even made sure to screenshot the book to include in this review mostly to help potential future players who should find themselves in a similar situation, this an unfortunate dampener on puzzles that are otherwise an entertaining way to gate progress and clever enough that it doesn’t feel like you’ll need to look up answers despite looking complex on the surface.
THE VERDICT: While the demonic pact that forms the most interesting part of The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition seems to have few conditions, most of the successes found in this action platformer do come with a downside or two. The world is often gorgeous and full of interesting details that sometimes cause unfortunate slowdown or lead to the player leaning on the map too often to make sure they don’t miss important things. The combat starts off too rough before it starts granting new Companion powers to expand your options without sacrificing difficulty entirely. Decoding puzzles and frequent interesting return trips to areas around the map make discovering things more intriguing and progressing more personal and satisfying, but also the map leaves out crucial info and the decoding is perhaps trotted out too much. The Definitive Edition branding unfortunately means it likely won’t get another pass over for the clean up it needs, but the best elements of the adventure still squeak through enough to make sure it’s no lost cause.
And so, I give The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition for Xbox Series X…
An OKAY rating. Some of The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition’s issues like the combat starting off on a weak foot do serve some clear tonal importance, the idea you can leap into Limbo ready to destroy supernatural monsters not really fitting with the imposing and off-putting design of this alternate dimension. It gets its act together eventually too when your Companion starts unlocking helpful abilities that can make the fights feel surprisingly fluid if you line things up right, but other issues have less justification. Poor voice acting hurts important scenes, the vividly detailed environments are eye-catching but also cause the interruptions to game flow when they seem to be too much for the game to process. The visual trouble could have been fixed with concessions even if it made Limbo feels less ethereal, and other areas of weakness like the fading relevance of the murder investigation and the overpresence of decoding puzzles could be fixed just by spacing things out better. Traversing both Limbos and hopping back to the mansion often makes for a surprisingly compelling gameplay loop at least, the player pressing forward until they’ve found enough to get some new upgrades or suddenly open up a wealth of new opportunities elsewhere across this game world. There are periods that drag, especially because a simple issue like the visibility of vital items is surprisingly weak, but after you clear the first boss, the game stops feeling too demanding and when you do need to dig into something like the decoding puzzles, it is satisfying to utilize the Conundrum Device because it is a good mental test.
The Lovecraft-inspired nightmares of The Last Case of Benedict Fox: Definitive Edition are its strongest tool for earning the player’s interest, even when the Companion feels like an oddly complex demon without the game feeling the need to overly dig into it and potentially dispel the mysteries behind his behavior. Your activities sometimes tying into trying to understand the abnormal realms you find yourself in feel appropriate too, and the act of the discovery is sustained well with some decent action platforming to back up your hunt for helpful new finds. The experience’s instabilities and weak sense for distributing things does make it harder to stay committed to Benedict’s detective work, but this Definitive Edition needs an even more definitive edition if it wants to smooth out the wrinkles that only lessen the experience.