Josh Journey: Darkness Totems

My first impression of Josh Journey: Darkness Totems was straightforward: this thing should not exist as a game, and I mean that as a complicated compliment. Brazilian brothers Iuri and Guilherme Araujo built Provincia Studio around illustration and animation, trained at GOBELINS in Paris, and their craft shows in every frame. The four heroes, Josh, Farquol, Melina, and Z.O.Z., are drawn with the kind of loose expressive line work you associate with Saturday-morning cartoons, and the four provinces, Wind, Water, Desert, and Industrial, each carry their own visual palette and scrolling parallax depth that makes the backgrounds feel alive even when the foreground is chaos. If you put a screenshot next to Adventure Time fan art, you would struggle to tell the difference. That level of handcraft is rare in this price bracket, and I want to acknowledge it plainly before getting into the friction. The core loop is a classic side-scrolling beat-em-up with light RPG bones. Solo players manage all four characters at once, cycling between Josh, Farquol, Melina, and Z.O.Z. using the shoulder buttons or right stick, which opens up the game's best mechanic: chaining abilities across characters mid-fight to build longer combos than any single hero could manage. Each character occupies a distinct combat lane. Josh and Farquol are melee-focused, sword and hammer respectively, while Melina brings ice-based crowd control plus a unique revive clone ability, and Z.O.Z. covers ranged fire with explosive projectiles and environmental hazard tricks. An ability board system lets you unlock special attacks between levels, and character progression is noticeable across the four worlds. On paper, that roster gives you real variety to play with. The problem is that the combat underneath all that variety is brittle. Enemy aggression is tuned high from the first stage, and the game ships with no difficulty options. Block and dodge moves exist for some characters but must be unlocked from the upgrade shop, which means early chapters can feel punishing before your kit opens up. Bosses summon persistent adds throughout the fight, and the respawn timing on those adds creates situations where taking damage feels unavoidable rather than earned. Some reviewers found the balance actively broken at points, comparing the difficulty curve to titles with far deeper mechanical foundations under them. The camera stays pulled back farther than most beat-em-ups, which reduces the visual impact of individual hits and makes it harder to read incoming attacks at a glance. The music, too, has drawn divided responses, with some players finding it mismatched to the game's cartoon energy. The co-op framing is where the game was clearly designed to live. With two to four people on the couch, swapping characters becomes less of a juggling act and more of a coordination game, and the chaos of the encounter design reads differently when each person is responsible for one hero rather than all four. The critical caveat is that there is no online multiplayer, only local. For a game whose strongest argument is shared-screen play, that restriction quietly removes the experience from reach for most adult players who cannot physically gather two to four friends with controllers in the same room on a regular basis. I keep coming back to the origin story here. This started as an animated short film, and the Araujo brothers turned it into a game because their audience asked them to. That impulse is genuine and the love for these characters shows. But the gameplay did not receive the same care and iteration that the art did, and what you get is a title where the visual ambition consistently outpaces the mechanical execution. If you are a beat-em-up enthusiast with a couch full of people and tolerance for uneven difficulty, the art alone makes it worth a look at the right price. If you are buying solo and expecting something in the Castle Crashers lineage with similar polish under the hood, set expectations accordingly.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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