Sometimes there are games that seem like they will be great from the very start. Selfloss begins with promise. A beautifully illustrated world brushed in muted blues, filled with unique folklore, explodes upon the screen from the very start. It presents itself as a meditative journey through grief, where an old healer’s quest becomes a metaphor for mourning and redemption. Unfortunately, while its visual style and overall vibe succeed in creating an enchanting adventure, the experience quickly sours when it comes to actually playing it. Sluggish controls, technical hiccups, and uneven pacing drain the emotional power, and what could have been a deeply resonant adventure becomes one that would have probably been better off lost itself.
The star of Selfloss is Kazimir, an elderly war veteran navigating a fantastical island filled with giants, mermaids, and one particularly cute doggy. He sets off in search of a ritual to mend his own soul from some initially vague bad thing that has happened to him, but the powers that be in this world have some favors to ask of him before they grant him what he seeks. To calm his own suffering, he must first aid others in finding peace through a mourning process called selfloss. The narrative delves into themes of loss, suffering, and a sort of spiritual connection to nature, offering a more contemplative experience than can be found in a lot of other indie titles.
For a while, it is the strength of this world that really drives the success of the game. Selfloss gives players this wonderfully imagined world to explore, and the lore dumps here are great in making the world of Selfloss a really interesting one to be immersed in. The main collectable in this game are these pages from some historian that have been scattered throughout the land, and it is a great example of a collectable actually being meaningful to the adventure. There is this great incentive to explore and find these things, because there is a lot of hidden, interesting history to this world that can only be found by collecting the lost pages. There is a great mythology also underpinning a lot of the actual story of the game, so these pages are good enough to make it worth playing almost just by themselves.
The environments do a nice job reinforcing the overall vibe. This is not a happy quest, and poor Kazimir is hit with one sad story after another as he makes his way to the end of his adventure. The game, however, looks great even if the world Kazimir is exploring is a depressing one. The world is a melancholic tapestry of fog-laden forests, serene coastal villages, and mythical creatures, all serving as the backdrop for one unhappy tale after the next. It feels like it might be drawing heavily from Slavic and Icelandic myths, even if that isn’t necessarily the case. The environments are really well crafted, each one imparting a sense of haunting, otherworldly beauty. The score also helps highlight the themes and mood, and all the various little bells and whistles help reinforce the tone of the game. This is where Selfloss is at its best, and if this was a title judged solely on just vibes it would wind up ranking significantly higher.
The narrative and aesthetic of Selfloss might be great, but pretty much any good thing it does is undermined by each and every aspect of the gameplay. The core gameplay revolves around exploration, puzzle solving, and light combat. Unfortunately, the game does none of these things well. This is a title made up of several different parts, and each of those parts is a bit broken and busted. Kazimir wields a magical staff that emits a beam of light used to interact with the environment, solve puzzles, and combat enemies. It isn’t necessarily a bad idea and each of those different parts of the gameplay could’ve been interesting if done right. There is a version of this game that worked very well, but Selfloss is not a good execution of that vision.
There is a lot that isn’t quite right with the game, but a lot of the problems stem from the controls. They are imprecise and sluggish, and because of that there is a lot of frustration during the combat and platforming segments. Kazimir needs to shine his staff’s light on enemies to damage or freeze them, but a lot of the time it is kind of hard to tell when that light is hitting the enemies and when it is off by a fraction of an inch and doing nothing. Kazimir seems to stutter with his movement sometimes, and there are parts that feel borderline impossible because Kazimir can’t quite keep up with the movement patterns. There is a very simple door puzzle at one point in the game where Kazimir just needs to keep his staff lighting up a moving target. It is a very simple task that quickly becomes a not-so-simple task because of how sticky and clunky the movement is.
It doesn’t help that combat lacks depth and variety, either, and almost every battle plays out the same way. The game gets very lazy with enemy patterns, and almost every fight boils down to using the staff’s light to freeze enemies before shattering them with a melee attack. That’s how the first fight will go and that’s essentially how the last fight will go. It is a very boring system that never quite hits any highlights because of how samey things become. Boss encounters, while visually impressive, are marred by both repetitive mechanics and awkward controls, and it turns what could’ve been a highlight into a slog to get through.
Exploration in Selfloss is conducted both on foot and by boat, and Kazimir will need to navigate the archipelago’s various islands and rivers to make his way to the goal. The game does a good enough job of encouraging exploration through side quests and unlocking bits of lore, and that is the part of the gameplay that works best. Wandering around semi-aimlessly, solving these simple sort of puzzles is the part that feels the most engaging and that is primarily because it is the one time when players don’t need to really wrestle with the controls. Still, even here, the pacing often feels uneven. Certain segments, such as fishing for ritual components or navigating rotating platforms, get really repetitive particularly because the game has a fondness for reusing the same tasks or puzzle types over and over again.
The boat mechanics, in particular, are truly awful. Steering feels unresponsive, and poor Kazimir here sank more boats than the Bermuda Triangle. Certain sequences require precise timing and subtle movements, and the controls never really seem to agree with what the game is trying to execute. This is not a system that works well with either of those things, and the awkward boat controls result in repeated failures and frustration that simply isn’t worth it.
On top of all of these problems, Selfloss is borderline broken at times. Technical issues further impede the game’s potential and it seems like this is the kind of game held together by twine and chewing gum. It always feels seconds away from breaking. Sometimes it isn’t even in harmful ways. There were multiple times where Kazimir would die in some strange way and accidentally bypass a checkpoint. The loading screen would disappear and suddenly Kazimir was somewhere two segments away and multiple puzzles and fights were skipped because he fell in some strange way that confused the game. This sort of thing happens a lot, so much so that it feels like Selfloss could have benefited from additional development time to refine its mechanics and address performance issues.
That is just ways the game is broken, too. There are even more examples here of not being broken but being broken adjacent. Performance issues are particularly pronounced and seem to be a constant companion on Kazimir’s journey. Frame rate drops during combat and exploration are common, and there is some truly awful slowdown whenever the screen becomes too crowded. One boss fight was borderline impossible on the Switch version, and not because the fight was actually hard. The boss itself was easy enough, but his companion “the awful lag monster” would end up killing Kazimir multiple times as attacks would appear out of nowhere while Kazimir seemed borderline stuck. There are a lot of problems here, and all these technical shortcomings significantly impact the overall enjoyment.
Looks visually impressive! A shame the gameplay itself doesn’t quite match, though!