Sundered (PlayStation 4) review "Honestly, being the tool of an Elder God probably would be a life upgrade."

Over the past few years, I’ve definitely gotten more into Lovecraftian horror. Perhaps that’s just a sign of the times — after all, I live in America, where the current political landscape does seem like something devised by a particularly malevolent deity during a temporary fit of boredom before moving on to something else and forgetting all about our situation. Or maybe, as I get older, I’m just more receptive to my entertainment telling me that everything is futile. Whatever the reason, I’ve gained a newfound fascination for the stuff and am not the only one. After all, the video game Sundered exists and even got an updated Eldritch Edition one year after its initial release date in 2017.

Created by Thunder Lotus Games, Sundered is a Metroidvania. You’ll control a woman named Eshe, who is wandering a wasteland until mysteriously being pulled underground near some ruins. Upon taking note of her new surroundings, she’ll find an artifact that gives her the ability to fight back against various hostile creatures and also is capable of communicating with her. With it in tow, you’ll explore vast chambers of a fallen civilization and hear tales of two warring societies that had a huge confrontation due to one group not wanting the other to perform a particular ritual. Said confrontation interrupted said ritual in just the right way for things to end in disaster for both sides, with one group turned into monsters and the other turned into machines, with the entire area turned into one of those unstable eldritch locations where reality takes a back seat.

So, what’s a girl to do? Initially, the answer is simple. Eshe explores what appears to be a military base that’s partially overrun by vegetation. She’lll fight all sorts of hostile creatures and use the “currency” they drop to purchase all sorts of upgrades in the safe room she resurrects in each time she dies. Most of the nodes on her skill tree give tiny improvements to her attack power, defense, heath, shield and so on; however, others give more notable bonuses. Such as additional stamina blocks so she can dodge and perform other special moves more frequently, or more doses of life-restoring medicine.

Things will get a bit less straight-forward after a certain amount of exploration has been done, though. Sundered has three main regions in its world with all sorts of doors you’ll be able to unlock when you’ve worked around to their other side in order to create shortcuts. Each of those regions will contain a couple abilities for Eshe to obtain to give her a new combat and navigational skills, as well as three mini-bosses and one major adversary. Defeating each mini-boss gives you one-third of an Elder Shard and each major one gives you a full one.

As you gain abilities, your artifact will tell you that it can make them more powerful, if you let it. As you collect Elder Shards, it gives you the means to do so. By returning to where you obtained each ability, you can spend a Shard to alter it — a process that makes it more useful, while also making Eshe a bit less human. Or you can choose to piss off your navigator by taking those Shards to an incinerator room and disposing of them. Your decision in this matter impacts how the game plays out. By using the Shards, you can greatly improve Eshe’s ability to move around the game’s world and fight its monsters. Your double jump will now allow you to glide a long distance, while your shield can now also damage foes when they attack. And there are three different final bosses in the game depending on if you used every shard, used some of them or destroyed them all.

When it comes down to whether a person will enjoy Sundered, I would guess it comes down to their feelings about two particular elements of the game. First, there is a bit of random generation to its world. Each of the three main regions is divided into a number of large chambers, with each of those chambers containing a number of small rooms and corridors to traverse. Every time you die — something you can count on happening more than a few times — the main layout remains the same, but those small rooms and corridors rearrange, so you won’t be able to follow the exact same path to get back to where you were going.

So, why do I feel it’s a sure thing you’ll die frequently in this game? Because of the second of those elements: The random nature of combat in this game. Other than those boss fights, there aren’t really any set encounters with foes in this game. You’ll occasionally have small groups of enemies rush you, but a lot of the combat comes from hordes. You’ll be exploring one chamber or another and hear a sound and then find yourself utterly besieged by foes from all angles until you’ve managed to kill them all, get killed or flee far enough that horde stops following. Probably because another one just got unleashed upon you. After a bit, I had to laugh at myself. You see, at the very beginning of the game, you get a shield that absorbs a certain amount of damage and will regenerate if you can avoid taking damage for a bit. I thought that would make things easy. And then realized that when hordes of foes are constantly assaulting you, that recharging time isn’t easy to come by.

In essence, this is a game where you’ll explore, get killed, cash in your currency to purchase as many upgrades as possible and then try to make it a little farther — hopefully unlocking a shortcut or finding a useful ability that will help you make it even farther the next time or the time after that. Progress is a gradual process in Sundered and every time you think you’re in a good place…well, how does that usually work out for Lovecraftian protagonists?

After progressing a ways into the first region, tougher versions of its monsters start appearing to make it more difficult to navigate. Moving to the second region, you’ll find a number of tougher foes that also have multiple versions AND you’ll also have to deal with a more confusing lay-out and environmental hazards placed in more inconvenient locations. Reach the third area and it can be like pulling teeth to simply make progress initially in a massive place which would be pretty wide-open if not for how there are all these deadly miasma clouds littering the environment. For me, successfully exploring the entirety of the game involved me going in occasional grinding runs through the tougher rooms of previous regions in order to boost my stats enough to survive longer wherever I was trying to explore.

Sundered was a fun and challenging game that kept me coming back to it until I was finished, though. The bestiary could have been larger, as you only fight about a dozen or so different sorts of enemies and those mini-bosses are little more than powered-up versions of them with additional health and possibly a gimmick to add to their difficulty. But there was something thrilling about playing through a chaotic world where I could be attacked by any number of monsters at any time. I’ve played a lot of Metroidvania games and this one might have made me work the hardest of any of them to navigate its world simply due to how I could only make educated guesses as to how much opposition I’d be facing and when it’d come at me. Add in little details such as how I had no real complaints about controls or gameplay other than how things could get so crazy it was tough to make out Eshe amongst all the monsters and projectiles flying through the air and this one was a winner for me!

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (July 10, 2024) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.