Overlord: Escape From Nazarick is a 2D Metroidvania title starring the infamous villain, Clementine. Understandably, this will mean nothing to you if you haven’t watched the Overlord anime, as will most of this story and characters. There isn’t an in-game wiki to catch people up on any of the lore. Still, know that it is a puzzling decision to center an entire game around a character that appeared briefly and was seemingly hated by many. Puzzling but not necessarily bad. I’m all for the villain-versus-villain setup, which isn’t something you often see in games.
Before starting the game properly, you must select one of three difficulty settings. This choice can not be changed later on. If you are an achievement hunter, most of them are unlocked by playing through the Hard mode, yet to 100% will require three separate playthroughs. With that being said, our journey begins as a recently resurrected corpse stuck at the bottom of Nazarick Castle. After some exposition, we’re off and must find a way to escape this immeasurably massive place. They keep things simple in the beginning. Our moveset just consists of a basic attack and a sprint button. We are drip-fed mechanics, such as flipping levers to unlock areas and the magic system. You’ll be able to cast fireballs and whatnot as you’d expect, but the real usage comes from being invulnerable to the current element you have equipped. If you have the appropriate element equipped, a streaming jet of fire will be like walking into a store and feeling the cool AC breeze.
It surprised me just how many mechanics are introduced throughout. They really packed this game full of abilities and skills that have an actual in-game effect. By the end of it, you’ll be able to latch onto specific tiles to swing your way through areas, wall run, and slow down time to get past otherwise impossible obstacles. There are more I haven’t mentioned, which I’ll let you discover yourselves. True to the character of Clementine, our defining features come from her sheer agility, which is reflected well in the game. It is fun to traverse areas thanks to the depth of movement options and passive abilities. As overwhelming as all this may sound, it gives players time to master a skill before introducing another. Not to mention that traps and falls into spikes do very little damage. You’ll lose a few hitpoints and be set back to the last solid ground you’ve touched.
This is a Metroidvania, as stated before, yet the player never needs to backtrack. It wouldn’t hurt to go back and collect items that permanently increase your health or defense, but this is not necessary. Once you slay enemies, they stay dead forever, and many rooms also have levers that shut off traps. That gives us little to do when traversing already explored areas. This fact did not go unnoticed by the developers. Most places have a loop-back design that has a locked door or something of the sort to quickly get back to the start of a section from its endpoint. On top of that, magic doors are scattered all over the map to freely teleport between them. I may as well leave a slight spoiler on why they may have done this. To get the true ending, you need to collect every memory piece, of which there is a boatload. Going back to collect hidden memories in empty rooms without enemies is about as fun as it sounds. Doubly so with your reward for each being a heavily compressed JPG of the show.
Before I get around to the flaws, I would like to mention that there are various weapon types to wield. Larger weapons force your character to slightly move forward due to their weight, spears have greater range, and smaller swords allow more hits in a combo. Clementine’s Stilettos become worthless compared to any other weapon you find throughout. That makes it all the more annoying how you automatically swap to them after activating magic. The weapons you find later on are straight upgrades to your preferred type, so you’ll have little reason not to equip them immediately. There is also an upgrade system to upgrade them up to five times with the gems you gain from defeating enemies or collected in a level. If you stick to one or a few weapon types, you’ll be drowning in gems with nothing to spend them on aside from the hidden skill/stat boosts.
Right, so the flaws. The most obvious one is how cheap this game appears visually for a 30-dollar title. It looks like the type of game you’d find in a Wii bargain bin. Those compressed JPGs when collecting memories is what planted that image in my head. Not only are they pixelated, but a good portion of them are also plainly inadequate images. You’d think they’d at least add some text for people who haven’t watched the anime, but nope. That brings me to my second point. Escape from Nazarick is tied too deeply into the main Overlord plot. There is no way they will kill off a character or have much wiggle room to add much of anything to the overarching story. Overlord’s world is rich in lore, so it is a shame Clementine never escapes the gravitational pull of being in Nazarick. As negative as I make both these problems sound, they are far from being enough to pull the overall experience down.
Problems in the gameplay department include the camera zooming in when not sprinting. If you are in a platforming section, you should get a move on quickly before being unable to see much in front of you. There is also the Morning Star that you use to latch onto certain tiles. Its range is so short that they may as well have replaced it with a gauntlet. And then there’s the lack of variety in combat, which is a shame compared to how in-depth traversing becomes. It never becomes more complex than mashing the attack button and occasionally jumping over an enemy. They never give you a reason to use your Stilettos or Morningstar either, both of which are permanently equipped. This title is on the shorter side, clocking in at around five hours from start to end with moderate exploring done, so it isn’t enough for combat to get boring. Helping matters significantly is the large amount of enemy variety. Trying to remember where in the anime each monster came from was fun.
Another source of fun is seeing how the characters from the show fight, as a large portion of them are bosses here. I found it amusing that the bug girl was far more formidable than anyone else, short of Ainz Ooal Gown. No surprise that much of the enjoyment comes from recognizing things from the source material. This is a solid game in its own right, especially when it comes to platforming. It felt like a budget title, though with the limited time they surely had to develop it, they focused on the crucial part, the gameplay. Sadly, Overlord: Escape from Nazarick does not exist in a vacuum. When it comes to Metriodvanias, the Indie scene has been dominating this genre with plenty of excellent games at lower prices. I’d be amiss not to mention that despite how much I ultimately ended up liking this title. What I can say is that while Overlord fans may enjoy this based solely on the IP, don’t be afraid to take the dive if you haven’t seen the source material and liked what you saw here. At the end of the day, Escape from Nazarick is a solid addition to the genre and a game I’m glad I took a chance on.
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