REVIEW: Bloodless provides stylish, unforgiving, non-lethal action

Action games are a dime a dozen these days. You want swords? Guns? Fisticuffs? Take your pick, there’s plenty to go around! So how does an indie developer like Point N’ Sheep make an action game that stands out from the rest…? How about one in which you don’t use any weapons at all!

That’s the basic idea behind Bloodless, a heavily stylized indie game in which you take on enemies without ever drawing a single drop of blood. You play as Tomoe, a ronin in feudal Japan. Due to traumatic events in her past, Tomoe has vowed to give up her formerly violent ways. In Bloodless, she returns to her former home after a long time away in order to set right the mistakes of her past.

Of course, just because Tomoe has decided to use non-lethal methods doesn’t mean anyone else has. As the player, you’ll have to find creative ways to take your enemies down while avoiding their unambiguously murderous attacks.

Make no mistake – Just because there aren’t any weapons in Bloodless doesn’t mean it’s a cakewalk. This is a challenging action game that will put your reaction time to the test in a big way.

You may be wondering exactly how you go about defeating armed enemies without the use of a sword or any other weapons. The basic answer comes in the form of two techniques: sprinting and dashing. These techniques will be your bread and butter in Bloodless, as you learn enemy tells in order to deduce the precise times at which to counter them.

Just before an enemy strikes, they’ll give a brief flash of color; if the attack is red, it’s unblockable and you’ll have to sprint out of the way; if the attack is white, that’s your chance to dash into it and throw the enemy off balance. Do that successfully one or more times (depending on how strong the enemy is), and they’ll run off, leaving you the victor with a clean conscience.

Dashing is your most important tool in Bloodless. You can use it to counter and defeat enemies, or as a speedy method of avoiding attacks. You can’t abuse it too much though – you have a limited stamina meter, and sprinting or dashing depletes it, forcing you to wait a few seconds for it to fill back up.

This was a tough lesson for me to learn early on as I got used to the game’s combat flow. Even one second of downtime can be deadly, and you don’t want to be caught without a little extra stamina in the tank for an unexpected strike. Don’t get used to the idea of dodge rolling out of the way constantly. You’ll need to be vigilant and conserve your energy only for when you really need it.

If sprinting and dashing repeatedly sounds a little simplistic, don’t worry. Bloodless gives you a variety of different techniques to take down foes. Maybe you’re not all about dodging and reacting to foes, and you’d rather take the initiative to overcome them yourself. For that, you’ve got your secondary Ki attacks.

Ki attacks will shoot an enemy with pink flower petals, causing a pink meter to appear over their head. If you hit them with enough Ki attacks, that meter will deplete, leaving the enemy stunned and vulnerable to a dash move.

Ki attacks are great for tackling enemies whose patterns are trickier to figure out, or for when you just don’t have the patience to wait for an opening. However, using one does put you at risk of the enemy retaliating if you don’t get out of the way in time. In addition to your basic Ki attacks, you also have some more powerful versions which cost flower petals, another resource which you can recover by defeating enemies.

In fact, there are several more ways for you to customize your fighting style in Bloodless. In addition to your choice of special Ki attacks, you can equip crests which have unique effects, and choose new moves and abilities via a skill tree. Plus, you can purchase additional health, stamina, and Ki petal upgrades at shops. Which stat is most important depends on your personal play style.

There’s also a simple tea brewing system, for which you’ll be collecting ingredients in order to brew different kinds of tea. These ingredients can be purchased or found all over the map, and each type has its own effect. For example, one tea gives you unlimited stamina for fifteen seconds, while another gives you more powerful Ki attacks. Which tea to drink and when is something else you’ll have to master, as taking a sip on the battlefield leaves you open to attack. If you’re like me, you’ll mostly be loading up on the matcha tea that restores your health, but it’s nice to have choices.

In a game with no weapons, it’s easy to assume that your combat options would be limited, but the developers clearly went out of their way to make sure that wasn’t the case here. In any given fight, you always have several attack routes available to you. You’ll probably find yourself swapping out teas, crests, and Ki attacks every so often depending on the types of enemies you’re encountering.

Let’s take a break from the combat for a minute to talk about the look and feel of the game. As you can see from the screenshots, the game has a very distinct pixel-art style. The color palette is super minimal, even monochromatic at times, giving it a rather striking aesthetic. The game isn’t actually in black and white, but it does hearken back to classic Kurosawa samurai films, or perhaps the pages of an Usagi Yojimbo comic. Maybe you’d even compare it to more recent properties like Ghost of Tsushima or Shogun. Either way, you’ll definitely vibe with the themes and storytelling in Bloodless if you’re a fan of this genre.

Tomoe’s story unfurls gradually as you play. She’s returning to her homeland after a long time away, and you’ll learn exactly why she left, and what’s changed since, through conversations with various NPCs. I give Bloodless a ton of credit for featuring a nonviolent older woman as its protagonist. That’s an atypical combo for any video game, let alone the action genre, and it helps the game stand out in a much appreciated way.

The central narrative isn’t exactly groundbreaking, and it hits many of the beats you’re probably familiar with from other “fallen hero” stories, but it is appropriate for the game’s tone. The relationships you’ll discover between Tomoe and other characters like her nephew help make the world feel richer and more lived in, even if they are on the shallow side. Plus, because Tomoe is learning new things right alongside you, it feels like a natural way to discover the state of things without having exposition spoon-fed to you.

As charming as the game’s stark visual style is, it can sometimes be a disadvantage. Every character is represented as a black and white sprite with the occasional flash of color to help differentiate them from each other. Many of them have unique character designs and shapes as well, but when you’re being introduced to so many people so quickly, it can be easy to lose track of who’s who.

That goes doubly so for anyone who’s not familiar with Japanese names. This was a definite weak point in the narrative, as I found it hard to get too attached to most of the characters. It would’ve helped if they had been fleshed out a little better, or even if the game included a simple character glossary in the menu. As it was, the game’s plot didn’t quite hit me as hard as I felt it should have, and served more as a break between the action.

The game’s murky visuals were sometimes an issue in combat as well. There are a handful of enemy types with different attacks, as well as variants of each of those enemies that might be slightly stronger or faster. For example, there are swordsmen who will run up and slash at you directly, and there are ranged fighters who toss throwing stars your way. There are also larger enemies and minibosses who are slow, but have powerful attacks.

It’s easy to distinguish between the larger ones, but I often had difficulty telling the smaller enemies apart until it was too late. Their attack patterns tended to be so similar anyway, that it became less a game of learning their tells, and more one of doing my best to react to them on the fly. This really hampered my enjoyment of the fighting. I frequently felt like I got lucky, or brute forced my way through a battle, rather than feeling like I actually got better at the game.

These issues are compounded even further when there are multiple enemies on screen, something that happens constantly in Bloodless. This was my biggest source of frustration with the game, especially early on. As soon as you get out of the tutorial sections, the training wheels come off completely. You’ll be thrust into fights with multiple waves of enemies, usually between two and four of them on screen at a time. In many games that wouldn’t be much of an issue, but the way things are set up in Bloodless, I found it annoying and haphazard.

There’s no elegance to the way that the game’s enemies interact with each other. They all just bounce around the screen and attack you as they would on their own, resulting in one big, chaotic mess. In a typical battle, I would barely have any time to differentiate and react to one enemy before another was attacking me from a different angle. I might be preparing to dash into one foe’s attack, when out of the corner of the screen another one was shooting a projectile at me. Many enemies have final attacks that trigger once they’re defeated, meaning that even if you time things just right and manage to just barely eke out a win, you might still get caught by one of those last-ditch attacks and die after all your effort.

At its best, Bloodless feels like a little chess match between you and your opponent as you stand back and wait until the opportune moment to strike. At its worst, you’ll most likely find yourself running around desperately, charging at enemies recklessly, and praying no one else happens to be striking at you from an unseen corner at that precise moment.

Controlling Tomoe herself feels a bit slow and clunky. I think that’s by design, but it may not give you the feeling of being a badass ronin that you’re expecting. The feel of the combat is definitely closer to something like Dark Souls or Monster Hunter, in that you need to be precise and measured in your movement. You’ll have to figure out exactly how much stamina it takes to dodge an attack, or how long it takes to drink tea to heal yourself, in order to carry out a fight effectively.

There’s also a slight slowdown that occurs when you strike an enemy, similar to that half second of slowdown upon a sword strike that you might be familiar with from Legend of Zelda games. With timing being so important in Bloodless, that little bit of slowdown can mess with your flow, and overall make combat feel less fluid. For some players this style of fighting will really click, but it won’t work for everyone.

Obviously, combat is the primary focus of Bloodless, which is both a strength and a weakness. I appreciate when a game hones in on one particular activity and excels at it rather than cluttering things up with numerous messy systems. However, if the combat doesn’t work for you, or if you simply want a different activity to break up the monotony of it, you’re not going to find much else to do. There are a few towns with NPCs, and some light exploration elements, along with additional quests to find and shops to buy items at. However, inevitably, all of those things are just going to lead to more fights.

Frustrated with a particularly tough battle? You can wander away and search elsewhere on the map, but you’re almost certainly going to find yet another battle, and it might be even tougher. Just finished a particularly challenging boss fight? You’ll now be led to a path which leads to… you guessed it, more battles, and more boss fights. The purity of it is admirable in a way, but with the game being as unforgiving as it is, I really could’ve used some light puzzles or minigames to break up all the action.

One nice thing about Bloodless is that you’re free to explore most of the game’s map as you see fit. It’s just big enough to be interesting, without feeling overwhelming or confusing. (Even still, you can pay to unlock fast travel points to get around quicker.)

In addition to the main quests, you’ll run into a handful of optional side quests in towns and other locations. These are often worth seeking out as they’ll reward you with upgrades and additional story content. You might also want to explore the world map just if you’re stuck on a particular fight. Wander long enough and there’s a good chance you’ll find some extra money to purchase an upgrade with.

You can also find Idols which lead you to special one-off challenge arenas and even more rewards if you can beat them. There is no level-up system in Bloodless, so you can’t exactly “grind” to increase your skills, but exploring in this way can help you improve your stats if you’re tired of beating your head against a certain group of enemies.

Difficulty is a tricky thing to talk about in video games because it’s so subjective. More experienced action gamers might not have the same frustrations that I did, but I found Bloodless to be far more exasperating than I would’ve liked. It thrusts you into some very punishing situations far too early on, and I really think it hurts itself by not upping the challenge more gradually. That said, the fact that I kept pushing myself to try again is testament to how much Bloodless does have going for it – the style is gorgeous, the tone is perfect, and combat does feel incredibly satisfying when you pull it off correctly.

If you’re looking for a new take on the action genre and you aren’t afraid of a challenge, you should give this one a shot. It doesn’t overstay its welcome (depending on how many times you have to die and retry any given fight), but there’s enough optional side content to make you feel like you got your money’s worth. For my part, I would love to see Bloodless get a sequel, whether directly connected to this game’s narrative, or simply a spiritual successor. I love the foundation that’s been laid here, but with a better onboarding process, slightly less punishing fights, and more gameplay variety, this concept could really be a homerun.