Severed is a colorful, morbid, corporeal, dungeon-crawling Punch-Out!! with zero mercy, smart progression, and impressive physical demands. This sounds like nightmarish assembly of ideas, but consider DrinkBox Studios’ past work; Guacamelee (Día de Muertos + metroidvania featuring luchadores and sometimes chickens) and Tales From Space: Mutant Blobs Attack (2D Katamari Damacy expressed through a cataclysmic but cute blob). Severed, while unpredictable, is simultaneously right on course.
It starts with a young woman, Sasha, and a grievous demand for action. Her arm is freshly disconnected from her body and her family is missing from their home. A dubious entity relays brief instructions for their safe return and sets Sasha free in some kind of tortured fantasy land. Neither dream nor reality, Severed’s environments are a vibrant yet menacing thrash of angular nature and rotting subterranean horrors.
In spite of this, Severed’s crafty narrative maintains a measure of optimism. The sense that Sasha is from a lineage of feminine warriors, a notion gained from a flashback and tutorial where Sasha’s mother teaches her how to fight. Severed’s plot is mostly threadbare, relying more on scenery and supposition than a tangible story, but it conveys a sense of duty and perseverance to rise above adversity. There are also some moments of levity here and there, thanks to a two-headed bird creature who evenly distributes foreboding terror and helpful advice.
Severed presents a unique point of view. Rather than a fluid sense of motion, it projects its first-person perspective behind a shifting series of rooms. Four cardinal directions dictate a path and the player chooses where to proceed. This provides Severed with a diorama-in-motion aesthetic that fits neatly with its paper-craft 2D style. Some of the areas, in all of their pastel hues, can run together, though this is alleviated through a detailed and quickly accessible map.
Combat is Severed’s core. Overtly, it relies on a flurry of swipes and sweeps across the Vita’s touchscreen that emulate the more chaotic challenges in Fruit Ninja. A closer look, however, reveals a system as reliant on tells and timing as Punch-Out!!. Short swipes cause low damage and longer, screen-filling swipes incur substantially more harm. It’s an interesting system because it’s entirely dependent on how fast you can move your fingers. Repeated motion and tons of tiny swipes makes the numbers fly out quickly, but I usually saw a greater return from prolonged, screen-conquering attacks.
Enemies carry out their own offensive and defensive measures, ensuring the player’s behavior exceeds mindless swiping. Attacks can be repelled if you swipe in the opposite direction and at the opposite angle of the attack. This usually opens the enemy up to your own volley of offense, at least until the opposition starts getting more complicated. There’s a spider creature that blocks all but one quarter of his body, an eyeball tree thing that only shows its flesh when you’ve extinguished all of its leaves, and a cluster of eyeballs that requires a strategic dissection of its own eyeball shield. You’re rarely, if ever, just wailing away on an opponent.
What starts off as a one-on-one can quickly escalate into a myriad of simultaneous fights. Each enemy, essentially, has an active-time gauge, which means your absolute attention is only demanded in short spurts. Early on this will mean just swiping over to block incoming attacks. Later in the game you’re expected to contend with a multiple opponents showcasing a mess of shields, buffs, and other complications hell bent on wrecking your patience.
Thankfully, Severed provides Sasha with a few tricks of her own. A focus meter, built by attacking enemies only when they’re vulnerable, is employed to sever (there it is) an opponent’s parts upon defeated. Time slows down and the player is granted precious seconds to cut off specific appendages. Parts can be collected and assembled into upgrades for Sasha. The amount of damage dealt, the time available to sever parts, health regeneration, and the viability of a focus attack, among other upgrades, can be affected.
As dungeon bosses fall, Sasha adds pieces of their carapace to her armor. These grant her a couple of magic options. The most useful is her ability to not only de-buff enemies, but steal their buffs and make them her own. As expected, you can also level up individual abilities inside her magic by consuming the same parts severed from surrounding enemies.
There is a strange and somewhat unwieldy economy powering Severed. Short of (what I believe was) one special area toward the end, enemy encounters are finite. There appear to be a limited number of battles available inside Severed. There are no experience points, enemies are basically roadblocks that can drop upgrade parts, which may be a daunting proposition for less skilled players. Severed seems to be aware of this, filling jars scattered about the environments with giblets that can be transmuted into any desired component.
While not as focused on progression-based exploration as Guacamelee, there’s plenty to explore inside Severed’s segmented confines. Each dungeon features a handful of rudimentary puzzles along with certain doors that are only accessible after getting a certain power-up somewhere down the road. This provides a significant incentive to go back, particularly toward the back third of the game where I was scrambling for every health and mana upgrade I could find. These sections are almost always protected by additional enemy encounters, which I saw as another opportunity to earn more monster parts.
Severed is a hard game. Considering Dark Souls III was the last game I reviewed, Severed proved to be more of a challenge. The back third of the game demands a remarkable amount of applied skill, and there were several times where I was poised to either hurl my Vita through the nearest available window or attempt to snap the small device in half. I do not think Severed is frustrating, but I know that I was frustrated with parts of it. Enemies can have so many buffs and so many seemingly coordinated plans of attack. When you’re dealing with four at a time, all with a myriad of buffs and different levels of health, Severed’s battles can feel impossible to overcome.
Almost like your favorite Wii game of yesteryear, Severed physically wore my arm out. Undertaking its seven hour runtime in one day probably isn’t the recommended dosage, but a day later my shoulder is sore from all of the swiping. The myriad of angles demanded by different challenges required me to hold the Vita and strange angles and swipe away. Sometimes this lead to me accidentally switching enemies instead of creating new attacks. Overzealous play may be at fault, but occasionally—and somehow especially when I was holding my finger down for a charge attack—the action wasn’t what I had intended.
I kind of can’t believe that Severed exists. It’s an original title on a fading platform that’s otherwise surrounded by PC/PS4 ports and regrettable anime tie-ins. Furthermore, after Guacamelee’s critical success through its Xbox One port, I assumed Severed wouldn’t survive past its debut video. Instead Severed is here, and it’s good enough to make you wonder about a world where the Vita survived and kept delivering stacks of exclusive, modestly-budgeted experiments.
