Bloodless review — The strength of mercy

The lands of Bakugawa were once stained red by a legendary Samurai, known only to their victims as The Slasher. After years of killing and growing weary of the name, Tomoe deserts the Shogun to reflect on the lives she’s taken. Returning to her homeland once more as a pacifist ronin, Tomoe seeks to confront her old master Akechi and overthrow his violent rule that lives on from her past.

Bloodless is a non-lethal brawler where you’ll travel the lands in search of your old master while coming to terms with your savage past. There are various different areas that you’ll travel to in Bakugawa, each with their own stylish palette-swap to differentiate themselves from one another. Of course these areas will feature different enemy types, but you’ll also encounter new merchants and characters as well, often with small side quests to complete. While the narrative didn’t blow me away, the story and characters within it still felt cohesive and engaging to interact with. Meeting people from Tomoe’s bloody past was compelling for a brawler style game, and I enjoyed seeing the differing opinions and reactions to the return of the ronin.

Vowing never again to wield a sword against her foes, Tomoe instead wields arm guards to disarm her enemies and stun with non-lethal ki attacks. The main combat flow involves dashing through enemies right as they strike to knock their weapon from their hands, and evading unblockable attacks. These are differentiated by the color of the strike, being white and red respectively. There are also skill trees to unlock more abilities, but they’re pretty tame as far as changing the way you interact with enemies. Usually these will just add small bonuses, but a few do add some moves to your arsenal which was appreciated. Combat can feel simple at first, but Bloodless ramps up the difficulty by introducing enemy variants with more oppressive moves, such as projectiles or additional follow-up attacks after a parry. 

The main mechanic of dashing into attacks to parry feels really satisfying when you get a good string of counters. It can be a blast when you get the flow down, but during some of the larger fights it lost some of its charm. Plenty of times I would move to disarm an opponent only to be struck by a projectile from offscreen or a teleporting enemy appearing right in front of me. With four or five enemies on the screen, the pixel art does little to improve on the visual clutter, meaning it was very easy to lose track of my character when fighting. It also doesn’t help that the environment is also working against you, with bamboo bouncing you around like a pinball if you happen to dodge into it.

Beyond the fights you take on throughout the story, there are also numerous challenge arenas for you to take on by collecting small statues hidden around the environment. These usually had a small clear reward like Mannen (Bloodless’ currency) or a skill point. I didn’t really find them all that interesting, as they usually just toss a wild amount of enemies at you with little differences beyond that. Since they’re mostly just a side dish though, I can’t fault them that much. It was at least a great way to practice fighting against tougher enemies, and allowed me to get the parry timing down without the worry of wasting items. For the most part, combat was still an enjoyable aspect of this less than lethal brawler, just with some hiccups in the loop.

As for items, there are a variety of plants and herbal medicines that you can harvest to place into your tea gourd, Bloodless’ version of a healing item. These can do more than just provide health though, with items like ginger providing unlimited stamina for a time, or cherry petals restocking some of your ki-charge for special abilities. While I was hoping that this would let me tailor a loadout to fit my current situation, more often than not I just simply relied on my gourds to heal. Sure some extra stamina might be helpful during a fight, but I often felt that it was a slot that could have just been used for healing instead and have more value that way. Gourds also do not automatically get refilled when you die, which is more of a minor menu annoyance than anything, but it did get tiresome having to manually refill them every time.

The real game-changer though were the crests, which are gear items that can drastically change the way you play the game. You start out with a small number of slots for these but can unlock more as you progress through the game. Some of these provide small stat bonuses, like decreasing the amount of stamina used when dodging, but others fundamentally change aspects of your character, like removing the light attacks from your ki-attack combos. This lets you use the more powerful finishing move anytime you want, but locks every attack into a longer animation. While I do wish there were more of these larger-impact crests available to play with, I was still satisfied at the ability to make some decisions on how I wanted to approach the game.

Bloodless is certainly on the shorter side, but it felt like a neat experience that accomplished what it set out to do. Sure I had some gripes with the combat, but it wasn’t enough to make it feel like it got in the way of my enjoyment of the overall experience. There’s a lot of fun to be had when you’re spinning spears out of your enemies hands, or burying their sword in the dirt and watching them run away. It’s a stylish take on the brawler genre where dashing is more important than spamming attacks, even if the complexity doesn’t stretch far beyond that. It’s a game that takes one unique mechanic and runs with it, while maintaining a narrative of peace beyond the violence.

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