Eastern Exorcist Review
Because I play a new video game each week, it’s not very often that any one game makes a significant impact on me. There are games I like to keep playing after my first week with them because I enjoy them so much, but I don’t think there has been a game that influenced a subsequent week’s purchase. That is, until Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights came along. I don’t know which specific aspect of Ender Lilies caused it to stick in my brain so much. Something about the grim story of the dead and the living existing, if unpleasantly, together stayed with me. This subtle obsession lurked until I was deciding what game to review this week, when it compelled me to investigate Eastern Exorcist.
Eastern Exorcist tells two parallel stories of warriors who fight against demons and the unquiet dead. One half of the game tells the story of Lu Yunchuan, a trained exorcist who wanders the countryside banishing ghosts and demons. While on a quest to destroy the demon lord King Mandrill, two of Lu’s companions are slaughtered and a third is grievously injured. Blamed for their deaths, Lu is exiled from his brotherhood and begins a journey to return the ashes of his slain compatriots to their home villages. The other half of the game follows Xiahou Xue, a half-human half-fox demon. After a spectacularly poorly thought-out heist afflicts her brother with a wasting curse, she leaves home to find a cure for her sibling. Both have their pursuits interrupted by the minions of demons, spirits, and humans as well as those they harm, bringing complications into their already difficult quests.
The thing I found most compelling about Eastern Exorcist was the game’s philosophical ruminations about good and evil. In the early levels, the foes players will encounter are demons, sapient creatures with animalistic appearances that meet all my personal thresholds for personhood, and low-level spirits who behave like classic zombies. But soon, players confront spirits that have since become demons. These spirits have become demons thanks to injustices tied to their deaths and Eastern Exorcist is all too happy to point out that, even in a world with murderous demons, there is no greater source of injustice towards humans than other humans. However, now that they have become demons, they pose a threat not just to those that wronged them in life but to all humans, and it is an exorcist’s duty to banish them. This frustrated me so much that I often found myself resenting the exorcists and wanting to let the demons go. Not since Dex-Starr have I wholeheartedly endorsed graphic slaughter and I can’t imagine anyone disagreeing with me once they’ve played this game.
There are even moments where the exorcists question and lament their duty, wondering if they’re treating symptoms of evil and not the disease itself. And in that same style, Eastern Exorcist happily shows that demons, despite their typical evil alignment, are just as capable of good as humans are capable of evil, often fighting for justice and bringing good. Possibly the best aspect of the game’s moral reflections is that all sides are represented in both stories. It would have been easy to have humans be good and demons bad in Lu’s story and vice versa in Xiahou’s story. Instead, there is beauty and rot on both sides in each story, making the issues feel meaningful rather than a surface level gesture. In our modern age of critically examining our heroes and villains, I appreciated Eastern Exorcist’s willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to those we demonize and encouraging people to question stagnant cultural beliefs.
This game isn’t all dour meditations on right and wrong, it also has bombastic, colorful action thanks to the game’s magical Exorcism Arts. Both protagonists will gain access to seven of these exorcism arts by progressing through the story, or earlier if the player opts to take on the enhanced boss challenges, and every one of them is a different kind of technicolor explosion. At the start of their respective stories, Lu gains the Imperial Sword Spell, which conjures phantom swords to attack his foes, and Xiahou gains Spirit Control, which allows her to deploy the disembodied soul of her brother as an ally. Right away, these show the player this game is about blockbuster action and visuals. Not only that, but it shows the player Eastern Exorcist wants cool things to happen when players execute the game’s combat mechanics well. Every exorcism art grows more powerful as the player performs split-second dodges, well timed parries, and methodically timed attacks to harness the special slash attack. At its base level, the imperial sword spell stores one spirit sword per attack Lu lands on an enemy and can be deployed any time Lu dashes or dodges. But the potential swords dissipate after five seconds and can be lost sooner if Lu is hit. Just these two rules already emphasize skilled play, because players must act fast to unleash the spectral blades and be careful to avoid damage. But as the player upgrades the imperial sword spell, new possibilities open up. Soon players will be gaining three spirit swords every time they riposte after dodging an attack and seven swords whenever they parry. I love that all of the exorcism arts have these built in motivations for me to play smarter while not necessarily faster or more aggressive. And it’s easy to tell when I’m doing well because the screen will be a firework display of spirit swords, lightning talismans, shadow duplicates and more, which makes me feel extremely cool.
It wouldn’t be quite accurate to say I had high hopes for Eastern Exorcist because I’d never heard of the developers before, but the opposite wouldn’t be true either. Between surface level similarities between it and Ender Lilies and my eagerness to see what Chinese culture and mythology could bring to the table, I was optimistic. Thankfully, Eastern Exorcist managed to meet my expectations and even go a bit beyond. Assuming you’re not someone stopped by the “one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles” to quote Korean director Bong Joon-ho, and you like action and philosophy in equal measure, I absolutely recommend picking up Eastern Exorcist at it’s full $17 price.
Buy this game at full price
It’s worth every penny they’re asking
