Death is not a reason not to go to work. Korean fairy tale at 8doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure

Slavic folklore is quite popular here and often dominates video games, which cannot be said, for example, about Korean. Therefore, the game 8doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure can be considered its revival.

I see how many people still write about how they redeemed themselves in Blasphemous, how they fend off enemies with a “black hole” instead of a head in Grime, or about how beautiful the pixels are in Death’s Gambit and argue about the masterpiece of Hollow Khight, and so on. Dada, I went through all this too, but in all the time since the game was released 8doors – and this has been three years already – I have never seen a single review or recommendation about her. And this is surprising and even offensive, because personally she won me over right away and left a pleasant impression. On some wave of passing metroidvanias, I was looking for what to play next and IT caught my eye. At first he captivates with his cool drawing. Despite the seemingly scarcity of colors, everything in it looks harmonious and stylish. And then everything is in a fog and by the 40th hour of the game you have cleared every location 100%.

Such modern folklore

The game is a rather touching story about a girl who is looking for her father’s soul in the afterlife. The game is based on a fairy tale passed from shaman to shaman about To Princess Bari, telling the story of the seventh and last child of a king who had no sons. But there were six daughters and, apparently, on the seventh his patience ran out and they abandoned the princess. But when the king needs help, Bari bravely goes into the afterlife to get a healing elixir and is reborn as a goddess who transports souls to the underworld.

The funny thing is that in Korea there is a legend about To Princess Bari is understood as a blow to patriarchal society, and the topic of feminism often comes up in Korean folklore. But I found information that the tale has now been reworked in a modern way and now it is also about the refugee crisis and the condition of unregistered migrants. This is even weirder, because now, taking into account this information, imagine what the main character is doing in 8doors? Armed with a battle scythe, Arum catches runaway souls who have not registered in the registry. In fact, this is practically how Koreans imagine life after death. Souls often escape, because no one wants to be judged for all their accomplishments during life.

The main message in the game also remains: we play the role of the Guardian of Death [I think you already understand that in Korea, in general, the birth of people is not as important as death] and as a result, in one of the endings (spoiler alert!) they will reveal to us the secret that we are the very seventh daughter of the King.

The structure of the afterlife

What is this world like?? Oh it’s simple. This is a typical office with a bunch of departments, stacks of papers and colleagues standing near the water cooler. Oh, and some kind of emergency must happen, which we have to figure out. In this case, these are not deadlines, of course, but there was chaos in purgatory, fugitive souls went crazy – catch and punish everyone! First we will visit the Tavern of Death, where we will be introduced to the situation and, having given out the scythe, will be called Guardian of Death, after all, only guardians can stop the chaos, and if not, then “the order maintained in purgatory and in the land of the living will be destroyed».

The game has a compact world of death – although 8 locations are not so few – with a convenient teleport system. Stop by the Department of Purification, stopping by the Department of Reincarnation along the way to pick up a couple of additional quests and chat with the locals who are complaining about the work. Oh, how I understand you. The game has several endings, both bad and true, and you can go through each of them without replaying the game, but simply by fulfilling the necessary additional conditions, for example, finding all the flowers of life. You no longer just need to save your father, but, it seems, you also need to save the world of the dead and the living.

When I played through the game, it was in 2021, it was funny to me that the local “rat” was a hero named Oxy, because then at my work there was a very unpleasant manager, whom we called in exactly the same way.

Look, in every office there is a nook with IT specialists, but ours didn’t play fighting games, of course, but some kind of linear. At the end of the video, be sure to check out and remember the frog’s gait.

Comrade in a hat

By the way, the main character is not wearing a headdress. This is our friend Dakwa [he already has a hat]. He’s not just a funny frog you can chat with. So that you understand how important it is, our friend has a whole leveling thread Messenger, in which there are both his enhancements and useful perks for gg, for example, increasing the dash speed or the ability to hear secrets nearby.

By transforming into this frog form, you can move around the world with Nevsky’s gait [evidence above!] and hit enemies with your tongue and powerful fists. Its usefulness doesn’t end there, we’re playing a metroidvania with a bunch of secrets and inaccessible passages, so as Dakwa levels up, he’ll be able to break obstacles that are inaccessible to the hero.

I feel a lot of tension when I’m not sitting on someone’s head

Dakwa

How are we offered to beat out our sins??

A total of 7 types of weapons are available in the game: the scythe, Kiddo’s sword, Derdemien’s bow, Bulgasari’s club, the umbrella of the red runaway soul, Sen’s lamp and the fan dropped by Sul. And again, as with our friend, not all weapons are so simple and do not perform only one role. For example, with an umbrella you can not only stab enemies, but also protect yourself from damaging waterfalls. The fan will help not only knock down opponents, but also open access to secret places. What does the lamp do? Well, I think you can guess – it illuminates the dark corners of the world, of course. And with a club you can get more money out of your enemies, hehe.

Absorbing the energy of sins [white stripe under HP] gives an enhanced blow. Personally, I most often used a sword during my playthrough, which can reflect projectiles, and in the game, believe me, there are plenty of spitting abominations. But sometimes you need to change weapons faster while you’re flying onto some damaging SPIKES, but you’d like to avoid this and glide safely onto some ledge.

The leveling branch is https://noverificationcasinos.co.uk/review/mr-jones-casino/ divided into three sections: Reaper, Envoy and Pathfinder. In fact, I didn’t upgrade all my skills in one playthrough, even though I collected all the upgrades. Apparently this is impossible. But I just didn’t upgrade protection from Miyazaki’s poisonous swamps and protection from traps. I wanted to put more emphasis on collecting purified sin in order to use weapon skills more often or improve my dash. As a result, pumping Messenger it turned out to be my priority. There is an opportunity to hear ringing next to the secrets, and I wanted to collect every single one of them! By the way, I collected it.

The game has such color minimalism, and each location looks unique, be it the Scarlet Mines or the Frozen Plateau. I highly recommend that you check out 8doors, if you, like me, like to find secrets with pleasant tunes, test yourself in battles with bosses, go crazy with platforming… well, okay, by the way, there are no problems with it here, as in the same Blasphemous. There, from this part of the game you can burn significantly, more than from dying on spikes.

I’m glad I was able to get acquainted with a piece of Korean folklore through this cute game, and I was also able to share it with you. I hope you give her a chance!

8Doors: Arum’s Afterlife Adventure

Best comments

The first Comment is that I’m a fool and didn’t remove the FPS counter when recording videos, but you can find out that the game was running at a stable 60 FPS 😀

Don’t worry about it. This omission only adds to the trusting feeling that the author herself played through the game.
And the game is damn beautiful, and the blog itself opened another good game for me.

I’ve reached this stage 🙂

Ooooh, sounds like a cool game! Thank you very much for your review! ❤️

Thanks for the interesting text!

By the way, I haven’t played the game, I haven’t even heard the name.

Phew, I’m very glad, thank you!
The game is very cool, what a pity that so few people tried it, but those who tried it were extremely impressed 🙂

Thanks for the blog!
I found several places that can be corrected, for example:

Well, the commas also have something to adjust.

In terms of the game itself: a really high-quality metroidvania. I myself gladly completed it to the true ending, by the way, having upgraded all my skills – it’s possible. Lots of room for exploration, fair balance of weapons, and most importantly, variety of bosses. Battles with them force you to maintain concentration and train your memory. Among the minuses, I would highlight the somewhat clumsy animation, not always honest hitboxes and the default Cyrillic font in the domestic localization.

It’s great that you covered such a modest project. The game deserves more attention!

You could safely call the blog "the game you REALLY missed" 😀

Suddenly! I was also surprised by the game, for which there is not even a single guide on the Internet 😀

Yes, towards the end the game is no longer shy about throwing serious challenges. By that time, either your hand is already full, and such moments slip by once or twice, or an additional opportunity is given to practice control over the character, which will definitely be needed in the future. Well done for overpowering!

By the way, 8Doors gameplay was very reminiscent of my favorite duology Guacamelee! If suddenly for some reason both parts passed by, I highly recommend.

Here is the first review)

For me personally, this is the best Metroidvania since Hollow Knight.

Thank you very much, especially for the edits!
It’s cool that I didn’t go through it alone, otherwise it’s kind of sad)

There was only one moment that infuriated me, by the way, when I had to jump upward for a long time and quickly on platforms, I’m in a hurry and I had to seriously concentrate so as not to mess up)

Yes, we passed by, but I heard about the project, so I’ll add it to my wishlist) blasphemous 2 will be released now and I’m mentally preparing for it 🙂

Ahah, thank you! Now you know 8)

Firstly, my respect for promoting this pleasant game to the masses, about which I have extremely warm memories. Everything about it is somehow competent and cozy: original aesthetics and art; easy to learn and responsive combat; balanced difficulty; not overloaded platforming; help in finding secrets and stuff; convenient exploration in a compact world; interesting dialogues and nice story. And even a certain predictability of the character’s progression and the acquisition of abilities is rather beneficial here, complementing the bouquet of numerous advantages.

Secondly, a question from a metroidvania lover to a metroidvania lover (judging by the communication under my blog). How do you like Afterimage?? The game is simply incredible, which could sometimes be very surprising and very demotivating, but at the same time made you come back to it again and again for two weeks (70 hours in the game). It has a painstakingly drawn huge world with a wide variety of biomes and tons of secrets; a decent number of beautifully animated various monsters that are found only in their habitat; the choice of weapons is small, but each has acquired spectacular and sometimes effective techniques; and the techniques, abilities and amulets will be very useful, because some bosses tear apart the player’s well-known place with enviable regularity; the player is not led by the hand here: they said – go east, and then look for the road yourself, which is why by the middle of the game the map will begin to be full of marks that the player will put in all sorts of interesting places, but where he cannot yet get to due to the lack of elementary ability; there are sidequests that are not so easy to complete, but which lead to other endings; enchanting music is also in place. These are not all the advantages, but there are too many letters). The only negative is the careless presentation of the plot, since already in the exposition the player is dumped a lot of information about strange lore with a bunch of names and terms. If you miss the thread at the initial stages, then it will be completely unclear. But perhaps this is due to my age-related dementia, because in the reviews, people who understand the story praise the plot and lore)

Blasphemous II may dominate the genre this year, but Afterimage is definitely one of the coolest and most balanced metroidvanias of the last few years, in my opinion)

Thank you. Thanks to you, I learned about this game and played with pleasure, completing all the achievements.

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