Halfway through the frost giant’s fight, the playing field turns into a sheet of slippery ice when it’s down to a quarter bar of life, a white-out blizzard starts. A terrifying shield-swinging giant can summon a legion of dwarves out of the ground to rush at Thora with a scream. Still, each of the bosses are just wonderfully realized, and you get maybe a good minute to marvel at them before the pain starts. The best is still the first: A nature giant that feels like Ursula from The Little Mermaid made entirely out of living trees and vines. The Jotun are simply awe-inspiring enemy design, taking the rather threadbare descriptions from Norse lore, and extrapolating them to the nth degree, with each one several times Thora’s size onscreen. The main events of the game, however, are the Jotun themselves as bosses. And this is why pruning your garden once a week is just so important. The real problem with that desolation is that more than a few times, you’ll need to backtrack through some of these areas to find much needed power ups, or because you’ve missed a crucial switch in order to get to said power ups, or because you’ve ended up in an area and the game’s obtuse pause screen map didn’t help you. This bolsters the comparisons to Shadow of the Colossus, where the loneliness of what Thora has to do makes the sheer distance between each new obstacle feel like a greater journey. The game isn’t swarming with enemies, except for one particular stage that sends a veritable legion of dwarves your way. They’re also often rather desolate places, dark locales that no mortal has tread upon in ages. Grand, breathtaking vistas are the norm in Jotun, and they often serve as a wicked distraction from the dangers mere inches away. They are deceptively linear, laid out in such a way that gives the impression of vast, stunning tableaus in places dwarfed in size by your typical Diablo III dungeon. Jotun’s six stages, which can be tackled in any order, are impeccably designed. Primarily, timing, cunning, and luck will get Thora to Valhalla.įor most of the game, that cunning involves mastery of the environment. Thora can find massive shrines to the Gods in each stage, and by praying there, she earns new magical powers specific to each one-Thor allows her to use Mjolnir for a short time, Frigg allows her to heal at will, Loki creates a decoy that eventually explodes after a time-but all six of the powers have limited uses, and none are what you would call a guaranteed solution to any sticky situation. You have a light attack with Thora’s axe, a hard-hitting heavy attack with a major delay, and a dodge. Gameplay is 16-bit levels of simple, and yes, that is a compliment. Even if the gameplay wasn’t as good as it was, being able to help Thora achieve glory would be more than worth the effort. Each new piece of her story would be worth it on its own, revealing years of underestimation, neglect, and later, a sibling jealousy that turns tragic. We learn between stages where Thora’s determination comes from in a fantastic, steely narration performed in Icelandic. Otherwise, all she has is an iron axe and an iron will. Along the way, the gods assist her, granting her new power when she finds their shrines and pays her respects. Because passage to Valhalla is only granted to those who fall in battle, Thora is given the chance to earn her way into the golden halls by finding and killing the Jotun, the Titans of Norse mythology. Jotun tells the tale of Thora, a Viking shield maiden who falls from her boat during a voyage and drowns. It’s a wonderfully wild, vibrant bedtime story told with fire and verve, even when the game is at its most stark and lonely. In execution, Jotun is a perfect storybook, a game that seems ripped from the imagination of a Viking child being told tales of warriors of old facing down their gods. Now imagine all of that hand-drawn in a style somewhere between Dragon’s Lair and Princess Mononoke, and you’ve got Jotun.īoiling the game down to its disparate parts does the game a mild disservice, though. Sprinkle in a little bit of Dark Souls’ difficulty and a malevolent sense of challenge, and you’re closer to hitting the bullseye. Imagine the bleakness of the man versus giant creatures gameplay of Shadow of the Colossus as a definitively Nordic tale, and you have a general idea of what Jotun is.
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