In the spirit of From Software's games, but more welcoming, the Spiders studio's new game with the memorable automaton heroine is a great success. Follow Steelrising Game Review.

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Streelrising Game Review
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Streelrising Game Review

With every release of a new From Software production, from Dark Souls to Elden Ring via Sekiro, the same debate resurfaces: vast and majestic, but with a difficulty that borders on belligerent, wouldn't these games benefit from having an "easy" mode, for those who would like to practice them without regularly hitting the wall?

Influenced by Hidetaka Miyazaki's tough (but fair) approach to video games, Steelrising solves the problem with an almost disconcerting ease. Suffering not your thing? A quick trip through the menus to activate the "assist" mode and you can now reduce the damage caused by enemy attacks or increase the speed with which your character recovers energy. 

Some rewards reserved for standard mode purists can no longer be obtained, but who cares! The key value here is consent - the game will only harm us if we want it to.

Learn from each other's mistakes

This is excellent news because if, as in From Software, an important part of the experience consists of learning from your mistakes in order to gradually master the combat system and triumph over opponents who at first seemed invincible, Steelrising is not entirely based on this quasi-sports logic of progression and training, but can also benefit from being practiced in a more fluid and relaxed way.

Even though it's often allusive and elliptical, the game from the Spiders studio directed by Jehanne Rousseau has things to tell us.

disneyland literacy

It's 1789, in the middle of the French Revolution. We are Aegis, an automaton who will face the army of androids used by Louis XVI to suppress the revolt. From the Château de Saint-Cloud in Paris, from the Palais du Luxembourg to the Jardin des Tuileries, there are only a few living beings, and the streets seem to belong to the machines. 

And if, here or there, Lafayette, Robespierre or Mirabeau appear, it's in a strange sense of unreality, like a themed mini-show after a parade of bickering puppets.

Basically, Steelrising observes the fact that any historical re-enactment game will always be, at least in part, a mechanical amusement park, a literate Disneyland, and that it's probably best to take it on and play it. The result is a fantastic and intoxicating adventure that is displayed with all the seams, or welds, visible. To the point of appearing both as a response to Assassin's Creed, which also retraced the French Revolution in the Unity episode, and as a French-style Dark Souls.

Ballerina

And so Aegis is a wonderful non-human character, thrown into a battle that is not his. Aegis, who was a dancer before becoming a warrior and who, in this dark and brutal world, brings a strangely touching elegance that is due as much to her almost decomposed movements as to her almost inexpressive mask - it's all in the "almost". A lonely, graceful automaton who fights for the people: what else could anyone expect from a video game alter ego?

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