![]() ![]() Aside from torch sconces and pressure plates, there’s very little consistent vocabulary across Baldo’s world to prompt you toward a point of interest, often making it easy to completely miss key items and events that are necessary to progress. Later dungeons, like the endlessly frustrating Savoca Prison and the hyper-tedious Bobo Pit, are no better – they often find creative ways to waste your time and send you back to the “game over” screen rather than tug you onward. It's immediately clear from the first few moments that Baldo is in rough shape. Aside from some vague dialogue or hints from the Rodia Town library, or the help of the eerily chipper Minisio the Map Merchant, you’re rarely offered guidance at all. Everything from this initial dungeon crawl to the labyrinthine overworld to the painfully nondescript world map is a chore to make sense of. It’s immediately clear from the first few moments in the first dungeon, the claustrophobic Lost Galleon, that Baldo is in rough shape. It’s almost like Baldo is passive-aggressively daring you to stop playing it altogether, pulling and poking you and trying your patience to see what it can get away with before you uninstall it for good. Expect to commonly run into everything from NPCs not giving you correct items upon finishing their quests (essentially stranding you in a location until you revert your save and try again) to near-constant crashes to the dashboard and other glitches that make exploring simply far less pleasant than it should be. In Baldo, bugs are hidden around every corner – and not just the kind you squash with your sword. It's almost like Baldo is passive-aggressively daring you to stop playing it altogether. It doesn’t help that the rest of the interface is equally egregious, often making basic tasks like checking your inventory or your quest list much more arduous than it should be. Many of the major mechanics, including the one that lets you shake yourself loose from spider webs, are not explained whatsoever. Beyond the very first screen that shows you some basic tooltips for your controls, there is absolutely no tutorial. The main problem – at least when you’re getting started – is the lack of direction. You’ll spend a lot of time solving dungeons, exploring an overworld, doing quests, and then backtracking every time you receive a nifty new piece of path-opening equipment like the Owl Bomb or the Sacred Fire. This is a pretty standard Legend of Zelda-esque plot, and there’s really no unique spin here. The premise of a young boy attempting to save a world in danger is simple but effective for what’s intended as a light-hearted story. In fact, experiencing upwards of 50 hours of wildly inconsistent dungeon-crawling and puzzle-solving to reach its meager ending is more like wading knee-deep in a swamp than strolling through a park. Those are lofty ambitions, but Baldo rarely instills the same depth into its story or characters, and very little of it feels good to play. ![]() ![]() It’s rare to see Studio Ghibli’s iconic and instantly recognizable anime art style take shape in a video game, but developer NAPS Team’s isometric action-adventure RPG, Baldo: The Guardian Owls, claims both Ghibli and The Legend of Zelda as its primary inspirations. ![]()
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