When is a game too difficult? For my sanity, it’s when playing it becomes such a chore that you’d rather do household chores instead. For me, Laika: Aged Through Blood is one such game; obviously brilliant but stupidly hard.
Released on PC and other consoles back in 2023, Laika: Aged Through Blood has now been ported over to Nintendo Switch. It tells the dark tale of Laika, an anthropomorphic coyote. Half mum, half warrior, half butt-kicking bad ass, Laika is up against the Bird faction, a tyrannical bunch of megalomaniacs, intent on taking over the land and wiping out her village.
Despite its gorgeous hand-drawn artwork, sumptuous animation, and cute animal characters, Laika: Aged Through Blood is unrelentingly bleak. The game opens with the depiction of a child cayote who has been strangled to death and strung up by their own innards. Grim. Frankly, the levels of gore, despair, and cruel unrelenting violence were rather too much for me. But hey, to each their own, and regardless of my sensitive constitution, Laika: Aged Through Blood tells an engaging and emotional story. Maybe just don’t eat before playing?
The game is an intriguing hybrid that’s Metroidvania and part motorbike sim. That’s right, you get the exploration, power-up gathering, puzzle solving and resource gathering of a Metroidvania, alongside the motorbike controls and physics of an entry from Ubisoft’s Trials series. It’s an eclectic mix to be sure, but it works, forging the two disparate elements into a cohesive experience, one dubbed ‘Motorvania’ by the developers.
Laika speeds around the environment with a squeeze of the trigger, leaving you responsible for spinning her bike into front flips or back flips. Doing so will recharge both your parry ability – only, you know, parrying with a motorbike – and your ammunition. Shooting from the bike activates slow motion bullet time, which is absolutely essential to stand a chance at hitting one of the many bird henchavians, blasting away with their rifles as you zoom along. Ammunition is scarce, your first weapon, a pistol, carries only two shoots, so incorporating opportunities to flip your bike is integral to success.
It sounds like it shouldn’t work but it does, brilliantly so. Gameplay is satisfying and morish. Each encounter will result in your death numerous times, but on each try your reflexes improve a little, until you finally nail the timing of that back flip, blocking a spray of bullets with your bike, before landing perfectly, reloading, and blowing away the crow that blocks your path. Alongside all the action there’s some welcome downtime, allowing you to explore the gorgeous labyrinthian surroundings, discovering new abilities that might, just might, keep you alive a little longer during the next battle.
So, as you may have gathered, Laika: Aged Through Blood is unrelentingly difficult. Get hit, you’re dead. Fail to land your bike just right, you’re dead. Do pretty much anything wrong, you’re dead. Controls are precise and demanding, but there’s little room for error. Accessibility is almost absent – other than the option to not die quite as instantly if you mistime a landing – with no difficulty levels to choose from, meaning you’re stuck with evil mode. Thankfully, quick save points are plentiful, but that doesn’t mitigate the unrelenting grind of the difficulty, which quickly wore me down.
Normally the darling of Indie games, the Switch in handheld mode is a poor fit for Laika: Aged Through Blood. The 6.2″ screen is too small to enable you to see the teeny tiny bullets that you’ll need to dodge and reflect with the required ninja-like timing, and the controls of the Switch are too fiddly to provide the precision demanded. It’s also rather erratically laggy when the screen gets busy, making the game even harder than anything should have any right to be. Docked mode is frankly the only way you stand a chance of success, and even then, chances are slim.
