Testament: The Order of High Human is a ‘retro-style’ first-person single-player action-adventure game by Fairyship Games which uses RPG, Metroidvania, and Souls-like elements. Now, you’re probably thinking “ah, ‘retro-style’, like The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or Baldur’s Gate?” No… Fairyship Games means ‘retro’ as in the 2010s… feel old yet?
When I first saw Testament, it reminded me a lot of Skyrim with some Souls-like elements. For one, its setting, Tessara, is quite Nordic-inspired, similar to the land of Skyrim. And the graphics also bear a resemblance to Bethesda’s. Though Testament, which is linear as opposed to open world, adds in a flair of dodging and reflecting in combat and even parkour.
We take control of Aran, the king of the High Humans who, after being betrayed by his brother, Arvan, wakes up stripped of his powers and being tended to by a Nature Father. After leaving the Nature Father’s hut, which pisses him off for some reason, we embark on our quest to regain our powers and find out what happened to our kingdom, Tessara, and stop Arvan from destroying the world – because of course he wants to do that for some reason. Aran belongs to an immortal race known as the High Humans, who oversee the realm as instructed by a higher species known as The Seekers.
We reclaim our powers by finding The Seekers’ temples and solving a boat-load of platforming puzzles. The puzzles in the Seekers’ temples are fun and a nice break from Testament’s bland combat experience. I especially began to enjoy them later as the puzzles became more challenging and I grew more frustrated and bored with the average levels in the rest of the game. That being said, like many elements of Testament, these went on for far too long – which would often rob them of full enjoyment.
Testament has a problem with enemy variation. Although some of the boss fights are fun, each area has one core enemy type which it sticks to throughout with hardly any variation – sometimes it will throw an enemy in from a previous level just to spice things up. This makes the general gameplay outside boss fights really tiresome.
This wouldn’t be so much of an issue if Testament was just around ten hours long… it’s not. It’s 20 hours long, which made me want to cry when I research how long it would take me to finish when I started getting fed up with it about half way through. Testament has a lot of problems, the length increases these by tenfold as you’re forced to bare through them for twice the length that this game should have been.
On top of a lack of enemy types, there is also no variety in combat. Aran has three weapon choices: his sword which he can use to deflect attacks, his bow which also acts as a tool to solve certain puzzles, and his magic. He can also equip temporary powers which are craftable using the in-game currency. Stealth is thrown out the window pretty early on, archery is pointless in large battles, and the spells also don’t do much damage with the later spells taking far too long to cast to actually work. So, we’re left with blindly swinging our sword and hoping for the best because Souls-like dodging DOES NOT work in first person when you cannot see where you’re dodging to. Testament’s idea of combat is just shoving you into a room and piling a load of enemies inside. You’ll have to do this every five minutes with few breaks in between. There’s no exploration elements, no NPCs to meet and learn about, and no settlements to wander around. Just the same enemies over and over again until the level is done.
I also think Testament fails completely with its controller support. Since half the buttons don’t work on my controller, I would say there is no controller support – which becomes a problem when you take into account the Souls-like combat which includes deflecting and dodging. In short, I had some serious problems with hand cramping from trying to play Testament on a mouse and keyboard.
On top of this, not even the skill tree is designed well. You have three branches to level up: your sword combat, your archery and your magic use. But it’s very restrictive; a lot of the higher perks require you to have unlocked a certain number of perks below it in order to unlock it… which usually means all of them, this means unlocking a perk for a fighting technique which you might not even be using – such as heavy attacks.
The narrative is filled to the brim with McGuffins that Aran must collect before he is ready to face Arvan. We meet a handful of NPCs in this process, none of which are particularly interesting or developed. Aran himself also lacks personality; he’s just a ‘good guy’, and his brother is a ‘bad guy’ because he’s covered in veins and likes dark magic. Arvan is also a painfully dull villain, with his only ambition being power and destroying the world for some reason. His whole presence in Testament until the very end is to portal in every now and again, brag about how powerful he is and how weak Aran is, and then hop out. At some point in the game, you also find out about Aran’s deceased love interest… who’s so childlike that I thought we were visiting an old memory of her until I realised that she wasn’t aging up…
Both the dialogue and voice acting is utterly atrocious. Aran sounds like he’s voiced by Tommy Wiseau and the rare appearance of other voiced characters in the game don’t fair much better. The dialogue sounds like it was written by someone who has never consumed another story outside of children’s media, with the whole plot being about good and bad people and saving the kingdom from the bad guy who wants to destroy it. No one has anything else going on besides that.
Aran himself is so dull that I wished he was mute. His only contribution to the game is to occasionally fill your head with expository monologues about each area you enter, gasping the name of the enemy type you’re currently fighting as if it’s his first time seeing one, and then he’ll repeatedly point the obvious out in combat: “I need to heal myself” – YES, I’M AWARE.
To top it all off, although the graphics are pretty good for an indie game, the environment has barely any creativity put into it. It’s just fighting level after fighting level. Not at any point in my playthrough did I feel an impulse to explore outside of the main quest or take the time to delve into one of the fetch side quests. I just wanted to get it over and done with as soon as I could with a twenty hour play length.
Were there things that I liked about Testament? The parkour and boss fights offered a moment of solace from the absolute mind-numbing combat, but that’s about it. I do not recommend this game to anyone as the greatest testament is trying to make it to the finish line.
Jess played Testament: The Order of High Human on PC with a review code.
