Controls are simple: you can move, dodge-roll, and shoot and retrieve your arrow. That’s it. Your weapon of choice is a bow with a single, mystical arrow. Shooting the bow requires standing in place and charging the arrow, with the arrow shooting farther and faster the longer you charge. After shooting the arrow you can retrieve it by walking on top of it or drawing it back to your location (which, like charging a shot, requires you to stand in place). The arrow can actually damage enemies if it gains enough momentum when returning to you, opening up new opportunities and potential kills.
As noted in the first paragraph, the core concept of the game is that everything dies in one hit. That means you as well as the titan bosses you face. Each boss has a weak point, which, combined with the fact that you die in one hit and need to charge your shot, means most battles consist of dodging until you hit an opportunity where you have both the right angle and time to safely charge your shot. Of course, it varies from boss to boss—some bosses have a weak point that is rarely exposed, requiring you to pace yourself and handle the fight methodically, while other bosses are fast and frenetic, making the best strategy trying to get off a winning shot in the first few seconds.
Of course, just because each boss dies to one shot to its weak point doesn’t mean that each fight can be won in one shot. Some bosses have armor or other puzzle-type mechanics that need to be resolved before they can be slain. The fights and boss designs are incredibly varied. Some are more difficult (and more frustrating) than others, but since they all ultimately have one health, no fight is overly obnoxious. Dying simply returns you to an overworld checkpoint, which is invariably just a few seconds away from the boss arena (although those few seconds do build up against particularly tough bosses).
The hardest part was usually getting the angle of the shot right; maybe it was just me, but I found it was difficult to line up angles at diagonals the way I wanted. I’m not sure if I was misjudging the angle needed or not tilting the controller’s analog stick in the exact intended direction, but angled shots rarely hit unless they were point blank. As a result, I eventually stuck to trying to line up orthogonal shots.
Titan Souls has gorgeous pixel graphics conveying a pastoral fantasy world, but 3D effects on the bosses add a sense of dynamism not present in fully sprite-based games. The story is minimal and leaves much for interpretation, but the wide fields and elegant ruins convey a sense of sublime majesty. The music accents the mood, and provides a dynamic backdrop to the boss fights. The overworld conveys mood, scale, lore hints, and one or two puzzles, which is all it needs to do in a boss battler.
Because Titan Souls uses pixel graphics and your character is so small their design is extremely simplified, which makes them look a bit derpy. And the contrast between the derpy appearance and massive power they were accumulated always made me chuckle every time I defeated a boss.
The game can be cleared in a few hours, but there are some ways to milk some extra value. Each boss has an achievement for doing something in the fight or defeating it a certain way, which adds a unique goal for each fight. You can also do a playthrough with a challenge setting turned on, such as removing your ability to dodge-roll or giving you one life. Of course, you’re still fighting the same bosses, so the challenge is purely about mastering the game; you’re unlikely to have the wonder and discovery of your initial run.
Titan Souls is a fun albeit short game, distilling the experience down to its core components while designing fights around an interesting gimmick. It’s easy to pop in for a few attempts on a boss as well as lock in for a longer session, and great for the ability to just jump into boss fights without needing to sort through a bunch of auxiliary mechanics and systems. Despite the massive name, Titan Souls’ core strength is its simplicity and minimalism.
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