It is that time of year again. Time for me to play another Soulslike and inevitably get angry at a video game.
I am notoriously bad at these games, but False Hero caught my attention immediately. The modern retro visual style looked really good, and if you know anything about my channel, you already know I am a huge fan of that kind of aesthetic. I went into this expecting to get destroyed, but I also wanted to see if this was one of those Soulslike games that could actually pull me in.
It didn’t take long to convince me that there was something here.
The game opens with a pretty straightforward premise. Everything is bad, except for you, and apparently you are here to save the world. After putting on a mask and discovering that my character’s face had seen considerably better days, I was dropped into the world and immediately started exploring.
The first thing I noticed was how good the game felt to play. The controls are extremely responsive, which is especially important in a game like this. I was playing with an Xbox controller rather than keyboard and mouse, and movement and combat felt natural almost immediately.
I also appreciated the fact that the game uses actual voice acting. That might sound like a small thing, but there is a real problem on Steam right now with the sheer number of low-effort games being flooded onto the platform, including games that lean heavily on AI-generated content. False Hero, at least from what I could tell, feels like a game made by people who actually put time into the experience.
The opening area does a good job of teaching you how things work without throwing an enormous amount of information at you. At first, I only had a dodge, but before long I found my first weapon, the Blade of Wisdom. The sword has a proper combo system, and the combat immediately started to feel much more satisfying than I expected.
Of course, I still had to learn how to actually play the game.
That is where things started getting difficult.
False Hero has the usual ingredients you would expect from this kind of game. You have health, stamina, healing flasks, dodge timing, enemy patterns and a system that encourages you to learn how each enemy behaves rather than simply running in and swinging wildly. There are also Blood Springs that function much like the familiar campfire system. Resting restores your health and flasks, but it also brings defeated enemies back.
I quickly discovered that I am still terrible at dodging.
My biggest problem with these games is that I panic when I need to actually pay attention. I would see an attack coming, hit dodge too late, get hit, panic again, dodge at the wrong time and suddenly find myself wondering why I was doing this to myself.
The game does give you some interesting tools to work with, though. Every creature has a chance to drop Insight, and collecting enough Insight from individual enemies allows you to learn their signature combat art. You cannot simply farm the same enemy repeatedly to build it up, which gives exploration and fighting different enemies a little more purpose.
That system eventually gave me access to Book Throw, which was exactly as ridiculous and entertaining as it sounds. I could lock onto an enemy, throw a book at them and watch their health disappear while I desperately tried to dodge whatever they were throwing back at me.
It turns out books are pretty effective weapons.
There is also a crafting system involving scraps of ink, which can be used to upgrade combat arts. As I explored further, I started finding new equipment, including different pieces of armor and a pointed wizard hat. Naturally, I put the wizard hat on immediately. If the game is going to give me the opportunity to run around in a giant pointed hat, I am going to take it.
The more I explored, the more impressed I became with the level design.
False Hero has a really cool sense of place. The areas loop back into each other, paths connect in ways that are not always immediately obvious, and I found myself recognizing locations I had previously passed through from completely different directions. It creates that feeling of gradually understanding an environment rather than simply moving from one level to the next.
I also really liked how much the game lets you discover as you go. There were new pieces of armor, new combat abilities and hidden areas that rewarded me for actually looking around instead of simply following the most obvious path.
At one point I unlocked the Spectral Blade, which summons a large blue blade and swings it around your character. It was another example of the game giving me something new to play with just when I was starting to get comfortable with the basic sword combat.
By this point, I was having a problem I did not expect to have when I started the game.
I was actually having fun.
I generally don’t consider myself a Soulslike player. I like watching people play these games, and I can appreciate the design behind them, but actually sitting down and dealing with the same enemy over and over until I finally understand its attack patterns is usually enough to make me want to play something else.
False Hero was starting to change that.
Eventually, I found the key to the auditorium, and that could only mean one thing.
Boss fight.
The creature waiting behind the door was one of the stranger things I had seen in the game so far. He had his last eyeball betwixt his thumbs and pointer finger, which he promptly squished, and the whole encounter looked like something that had crawled out of a nightmare. He looked like the corpse of Heihachi, which only made the whole thing even stranger.
Jokes aside the fight started, and I immediately remembered why I don’t play these games.
The boss absolutely destroyed me.
I tried dodging. I tried attacking. I tried throwing books at him. I tried mixing my combat arts together. I tried waiting for his attacks and looking for openings. Sometimes I felt like I was starting to understand what he was doing, and then he would hit me with something that completely threw me off.
The most frustrating attack was one where he would come down from above. I kept dodging too early, only to get caught by the attack anyway. Eventually I realized I needed to wait for the attack to actually start coming toward me before moving, but by then I was already making enough mistakes to keep myself in trouble.
And somehow, that was what made the fight fun.
I was getting destroyed, but I genuinely felt like I could beat him. There were moments where I had him down to nearly half health and thought I had finally figured things out. Then I would panic, dodge directly into an attack or completely mistime something and lose the progress I had made.
Eventually I had to admit defeat.
Not because I thought the boss was impossible, but because I could have sat there trying to beat him for the rest of the day. I was literally sweating while playing this game. At some point I had to move on with my life.
That is probably the biggest compliment I can give False Hero.
I started this game expecting another Soulslike that I would play for a little while before getting frustrated and moving on. Instead, I found myself genuinely wanting to keep playing. The combat feels responsive, the environments are interesting, the progression systems give you reasons to explore, and the modern retro art style looks fantastic.
It is also just a fun game to look at. There is clearly a lot of work that has gone into the world, and I was constantly finding something new to look at or another path to explore. The combination of the visual style, exploration and combat gives the game a personality that made it stand out to me.
And yes, I still suck at it.
But for once, that didn’t really bother me.
False Hero is a free demo, so there is really no reason not to give it a shot if this kind of game interests you. I went into it expecting to get frustrated, and while that definitely happened, I also found myself enjoying the process enough that I wanted to keep going after I stopped recording.
I still want to beat that boss.