Odallus: The Dark Call

Odallus: The Dark Call is a side-scrolling action-platformer from JoyMasher, a small Brazilian studio with a clear, almost devotional love for late-80s and early-90s console design. The inspirations are worn proudly: Castlevania, Ghosts'n Goblins, Demon's Crest. But what separates Odallus from the crowded field of retro-revival games is how well it actually understands why those originals worked, rather than just borrowing their pixel clothing. You play as Haggis, a warrior returning to a land being consumed by darkness and demonic corruption, searching for his missing son. The story is lean and appropriately grim, told through sparse cutscenes and environmental suggestion rather than walls of text. The world is built across interconnected stages with branching paths, hidden rooms, and optional sub-weapons you can find and equip, including the classic spread of axes, crosses, and fire-based tools that fans of the genre will recognize instantly. There is no hand-holding here. Secrets are rewarded to curious players, not marked on a map. The level design itself is the language, and JoyMasher speaks it fluently. The controls feel tuned to a standard that would satisfy anyone who grew up timing jumps on original hardware. Haggis moves with deliberate weight, not sluggishness. Enemy patterns require reading and patience rather than reflexive button-mashing. Boss encounters are fair but punishing enough that clearing one gives genuine satisfaction. The difficulty sits in that precise zone where death teaches you something every time rather than just frustrating you arbitrarily. Some players newer to the genre may find the opening stages rough before the rhythm clicks, but the pacing does reward persistence. The pixel art is where Odallus earns extra attention. JoyMasher did not chase a modern hi-res aesthetic layered over old-school design. Instead, they committed to strict hardware limitations as a creative discipline, and the result is sprite work and backgrounds that feel genuinely period-authentic rather than nostalgic pastiche. The Gothic architecture, the monster designs, the flickering torchlight in underground crypts - it all carries a consistency of vision that small teams with this level of craft can pull off when nobody is forcing compromise. The soundtrack matches the atmosphere: organ-heavy, mournful, and propulsive in exactly the right moments. It stays in your head in the way the good Castlevania tracks always did. At roughly six to eight hours for a first playthrough, Odallus knows its length and does not overstay. There are no padded filler stages, no artificial difficulty spikes thrown in to stretch runtime. The game ends when it has said what it wanted to say. That kind of editorial restraint is something a lot of larger productions could learn from. If you have any affection for the games that inspired it, or if you are simply curious whether the pixel-action genre can still produce something with genuine craft behind it, Odallus makes a very strong case. Kai, Scout Team