Even better than starting the game with no expectations, it’s okay to start the game with false expectations. When I first heard about Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon, I noticed the child protagonists, the hand-drawn illustration art, and the fluttering of parchment, and I thought the whole thing was a kind of visual novel. Sure enough, Cereza starts out with a lot of story and a lot of reading, and it only takes a few minutes to move 3D characters between blocks of text.
But then I found myself in the first battle and I thought: Hmm. Maybe I’m not right about this. I was wrong about this. All in all, Cereza is an exploration, combat, and puzzle game. It’s hard to define even before you understand how it relates to Platinum’s Bayonetta action game. Most importantly, though: it’s cute. It is cute, generous, playful, and extremely beautiful. Someone is being very careful here, and it’s clear from the start, whatever misunderstandings one might have.
Actually, let’s start with the Bayonetta business. This is the story of an apprentice witch and her stuffed cat. The Witch will one day become Bayonetta, but for now she’s young, inexperienced, and timid, embarking on an adventure that will outshine her in every way. While there’s a lot of combat here, it’s a very, very different game from the main Bayonetta adventure. It’s much slower, even in combat, and it’s more concerned with mixing fights with different business parts for a change of pace than with one fight after another. In the second half of the game – and the boss fights throughout – you’ll get Platinum in excess. But you just get these things all of a sudden.
You spend most of the game exploring mysterious forests, solving traversal puzzles, and battling scheming elves. The hook is that you control Cereza with the left Joy-Con and her cat Cheshire with the right. Cereza can cast a few spells, most notably a bind move that locks enemies tightly together for a while, but most of the combat is handled by Cheshire, who can grow to be a bit of a beast in size and has lovely sliding and smashing attacks scope, you start collecting new powers even before the story begins.
Cheshire is designed around combat, with a nice combination of offense and defense as you deal damage and build combos with your right hand, while keeping Cereza out of danger with your left hand, and hopefully work in some bind-based situations along the way. As the game progressed, I started to really look forward to the combat, not just because of the surprisingly ferocious animations, but also because different enemies require different approaches. Binding shield guys, grabbing floating guys from the air, and defusing various magical protections are all in play, and every few levels a new enemy type pops up from the ground or falls from a tree, making You have new ideas about.
But Cereza and Cheshire also collaborate in puzzle solving. Cereza can control Cheshire in a so-called cuddle mode, which makes navigation a bit easier, and then they can perform more and more moves together and individually. The game likes to keep them separate, but for the most part, they’re close together, with Cereza exploring one path, Cheshire another, and the puzzles encourage them to pull things back and forth, break things, flip switches, etc., making them both at the same time Make progress.
The puzzles are entertaining and interactive, but rarely are proper brain teasers, and for the most part they involve the stages needed to carve out a path forward. Cereza throws the Cheshire onto a ledge they can’t reach on their own, and they can then pass through some thorns to another level. More and more powers come here in interesting ways: for example, Cheshire’s plant forms can pull parts of the environment, while their stone forms can smash rock walls. Working with Cereza, it’s been great to see how many different challenges some simple ideas can create when combined in new ways. Crucially, I’m one of those people who can never tell left from right, and Cereza’s unusual control scheme didn’t mess me up.
There are many other things here. There’s an upgrade system you can access from a Vault save point, there’s Zelda-esque combat and Wonderland-based puzzle-solving dungeons, and sequences where you don’t think the world you’re exploring is entirely believable. There are potions to make, resources to collect, and lots of cute little stories. Plenty of the game is also optional: I was still in the 60% range when I finished the main campaign.
All of this is to tell you that there is a lot going on with Cereza, but what really amazed me was how beautiful it looked and kept me going. Cereza’s world in the game is a haunted, enchanted forest, and the levels, while linear, never appear to be that way, forming curlicues, crawl paths, grottoes, and glades. Bushes hide collectibles, but also rustle beautifully as you pass by, while later levels introduce rusty, complex, clumsy faerie architecture. There’s the swimming pool, shaded from the sun by thick foliage, which feels magical and fantastic, none of it photorealistic, opting for Mary Blair’s watercolor and mixed media feel.
A friend recently told me about Metroid Fear and why it feels disappointing in 2D, not because it all takes place on one plane, but because it forgets to use the foreground and background to create depth. I think about this a lot when playing Cereza, because every few minutes there’s a path that takes you away from the hovering camera, and under a tree’s curling branches, with animated owls standing and watching, or through swaying grass The network temporarily blocks your view. It’s those things, along with the range of engagement and the hectic second half of the game, that make Cereza feel so luxurious, I think. There is caring here, rising from the page like a story emerging from the opened pages of a children’s book, drawing you in.
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