It fits a fairly minimalist pixel art style with some palatable but ultimately forgettable music. This is genuinely something I quite liked about this game. You miss details and crucial points that are only discovered as you play. Where the opening animation is bright, the story is further fading with every second. The cut-scenes include stills and voice acting which helps with the feeling that it is going for – one of remembrance. This all being said, the story itself is certainly not a bad one. You will likely use the sword more than any item in this game as minions are a little too dumb and buffs are a little too situational.

If you can carry a minion or a sword in there, there seems to be little point in wasting one slot on something temporary. The worst offender of the inventory system are single-use items. You can level them up by letting them fight but they’re just so dumb, they usually just get themselves killed, and you cant resurrect them a second time. The limited inventory space leaves you often only carrying one or two minions at a time. The necromancy system is a nice idea but clashes with some of Sword of the Necromancer’s mechanics. Once you’ve killed them once, that’s all you’ll get out of it. Most enemies just rush at you, some of them have interesting effects and spells but none of them have any depth. Enemies have different attack patterns but they fail to solidify themselves as anything interesting. You attack and an arc appears, but you can’t swing too fast and angling it often makes you just miss the enemies in front of you. Swings feel dull and too strict to deal with unique situations. The opening animation is great and vibrant, the idea is cool, and the story has a decent setup, but it’s just not very fun to play. This is Sword of the Necromancer’s main issue. You can attempt to find more enemies to kill and raise from the dead but they start to all feel very similar after a while. This means that if you have a decent setup, there’s little reason to bother searching around any more. For instance, you can only hold up to four things at one time. Unfortunately, rooms look the same and exploration is killed by many of the game’s own mechanics. Every time you die in a dungeon, the layout changes and you have to tackle it again. The floor design is rather mediocre as the game functions like a roguelite. They can level up over a floor to defeat the boss much easier. After killing enemies, you can resurrect their bodies to fight on your behalf. Perhaps, the best idea this game has relies entirely on the sword. Retreading old ground and putting it in a new light can often be a fascinating thing.

This is essentially the plot of Shadow of the Colossus except it has a magical necromancy sword. If you’re thinking you’ve heard this before, you have. You must venture further into the dungeon to gain the power necessary to bring her back. You bring it back to her corpse only to find out it is not nearly powerful enough to bring back a human. You find it very quickly after a short tutorial that teaches you the basic controls. You bring her to the foot of a dungeon and find the Sword of the Necromancer. You fall in love with her and she dies in your company, resulting in a mission to try to bring her back to life.

In Sword of the Necromancer, you play the role of Tama, a young recruit/former bandit tasked with looking after Koko, a princess. Sword of the Necromancer has some lovely visuals in the opening, an interesting idea but not much more. If you’ve read anything about Sword of the Necromancer, I think it’s pretty clear which one it has. You can have just one of these to make something interesting but you need both to make something worthwhile. There are two parts of a game that can make it really stand out: the concept and the design, for example.

Tama sword of the necromancer