Cruel, unforgiving, desolate landscapes. A desperate journey across frigid mountain peaks and through pitch-black underground caverns. Violent, bloodied, monstrous beasts. One directive: find your way home. This is the premise of Unto The End, a 2D combat survival adventure that pits a lone adventurer against a harsh wilderness and a variety of wild, savage creatures.

There’s little fanfare at the beginning of Unto The End. The protagonist, a nameless Viking-esque man, takes up his sword and ventures out into the wilds with only a lock of his wife’s hair to indicate his destination. There’s no verbal explanation, and the story is told entirely through environmental clues. Setting out into a two-dimensional, side-scrolling world, the protagonist’s goals, feelings, and motivations are entirely up to your interpretation.

Swords and Monsters

The bulk of Unto The End’s gameplay is in its combat, each element of which is readily available from the start. At any campfire, you can access “sparring” which takes you through a combat tutorial. Each enemy requires you to read its movements and respond to break its guard and get in an attack. With your sword, you have access to high and low attacks and blocks, as well as feints and a dodge roll. You can also throw a bone dagger to do some damage from a distance. Movements are slow, methodical, and deliberate, and it’s important to precisely react to the attack the enemy telegraphs: even though the controls are responsive, your character is not speedy. Multiple button-presses will also be buffered by the game, discouraging you further from button-mashing. It’s even possible for your weapon to be knocked out of your hand mid-battle, requiring you to scramble to retrieve it.

There’s an element of creativity and improvisation to the combat that makes you approach each encounter differently. Underground fights usually take place in near darkness, meaning you’ll have to strategically decide where to drop your torch and make a stand. Foes can damage each other with projectiles, so you can strategically dodge a thrown rock or spear and take out an enemy in the process. Dropped spears can also be picked up and thrown by the player. The environment is also important, as dodge rolling or swinging your sword into a wall makes the player stagger, almost certainly leading to death. Unless you’ve crafted extra armour at a campfire, one or two hits will always be enough to bring you down, so avoiding damage is vital.

“Hard” vs. “Challenging”

There’s a wider conversation about challenge, accessibility, and gatekeeping to be had in the context of “difficult” games. Mark Brown has an excellent series of videos on designing for varying levels of ability which, while coming from an able-bodied person’s perspective, discuss the reasons why a developer might choose to include or exclude certain kinds of player from experiencing their game. I don’t mean to turn this review into an essay, but Brown’s video about indie platformer Celeste’s Assist Mode came to mind regularly while enduring my repeated brutal deaths in Unto The End. While the former has a variety of assist toggles like damage negation, lowering game speed, and infinite dashes, the latter’s only assist option slightly delays enemy attacks. When you’re stuck in a particular fight, that’s it. Grind it out until you either master the combat or get lucky.

Unfortunately, this also means that your progress is inherently tied to how well you can perform in a particular encounter, as the adventure is mostly linear. A few hours in I ran into a combat situation that I couldn’t beat, no matter how many times I tried. I spent about an hour repeatedly attempting to get through and failing. I took a break, tried again, walked the dog, tried again, had a whinge to the Checkpoint team, tried again, drank a beer, tried again, got through (!) but suffered a fatal blow soon afterwards, tried again, then gave up. I’m not exaggerating when I say that half of my total gameplay time has been spent on this encounter. The one time I did defeat the enemy, I suffered a stab wound that meant my character was “bleeding” which prevents the game from saving until you can patch your wounds at a bonfire. I can’t tell you just how furious I was slogging across that empty tundra, bleeding out without a bonfire in sight. I even came across a heartbreakingly beautiful encounter with an animal warrior clutching its dying mate, and I couldn’t even enjoy it because I was so desperately searching for a save point.

On reflection (and after a good night’s sleep), this bothers me less than it usually would. Unto The End is appealing to a specific kind of player, and this is reflected in its marketing and presentation. Publisher Big Sugar is careful to always describe the title as a “challenging combat adventure” that “places player skill at the heart of the experience”, and this certainly rings true in its gameplay. While this may not be an experience that I usually look for in a game, I acknowledge that there is a not-insignificant player base that craves challenge and I appreciate that they would be very satisfied with Unto The End’s savage learning curve. I’m only disappointed that my own skill and level of patience provided a barrier to experiencing every single one of the game’s unique encounters. Although with that said, it wouldn’t have harmed the core gameplay to include a few more accessibility options so that players with different skill levels could still enjoy and progress through the adventure. Moments of triumph can still feel earned even when the player can set their own level of challenge.