The story behind the Baba Yaga explored | Blacktail - Review

Slavic fairy tales, good and evil, and a first person archery survival adventure. The story behind the infamous Baba Yaga is explored in this new game titled Blacktail. You play as the teenage girl Yaga, trying to find his twin sister Zora and other children who have all gone missing.

The story is narrated by our main character Yaga as it happens, in other words, at the time of occurrence, which is an interesting design choice. It definitely helped the developers to relay to us useful gameplay information without only using meta elements like text or UI prompts. This is clearly evident with the early parts of the game, especially the tutorial section, where Yaga frequently speaks to herself in order to assist the player and provide minor plot exposition.

The writing as well as the voice acting in this game — especially with Yaga — is what impressed me the most. The storytelling is believable enough to be a bewitching origin story for the Baba Yaga, one that fits the slavic folklore profile that it is trying to adapt. Dark as expected, with heavy usage of Witchcraft, Monsters, and Spirits. The voice acting legitimately sounds like characters from a fairy tale book, like all them have come to life and read their own dialogue, telling a fairy tale story in front of the player.

Very early in the game, you are immediately given a seemingly hard choice, the dark or the light. Any of which will supposedly have a lasting impact with the story. This is a bit misleading though and the writers could have been more clear with this part. As this is just a sneak peek of what is going to happen depending on your choices throughout the game and not really make a big impact as far as I know.

The story and gameplay are blended well in Blacktail and compliments one another. Aside from the engaging narration coming from Yaga as you play the game, you are also presented with a morality system that will determine your dialogue choices and provide you with different bonuses and even skills, depending on your moral stance. You can affect this stance by doing good deeds or bad deeds; such as freeing trapped birds, helping NPCs, or killing animals.

Across the game you will also meet various characters and creatures that will further define your character's morality. While the choices do matter in Blacktail, the story is not as dynamic as I expected, with some encounters resulting in all the same outcomes in the end, just with different explanations and motivations depending on your moral stance.

Blacktail’s main gameplay focus is on its archery survival adventure throughout the open world forest, all in first person view. You can gather materials and craft them into items like potions for healing, or arrows for your bows. Hunt wild animals and gather resources to eat and survive. Find scattered treasures for additional loot. You will also unlock new witch powers and be able to cast spells by brewing and mixing different ingredients.

The combat of Blacktail felt slow and methodical. While those descriptions in itself aren't in any way indicative of a bad game, overall it was not engaging enough and I felt that it was too simplistic in its approach. Just shoot an enemy enough times and they’re dead, perhaps occasionally push them off with a spell or dash around to evade the already slow moving enemies.

Even the boss fights are like this just with higher health and damage levels. If many games have a simplistic story that just serves to move the gameplay forward, Blacktail has a simplistic gameplay that is just there to push the interesting story forward.

The landscape is accurately made in a sense that it genuinely feels like it's from a fairy tale. Sometimes it is dark and murky. Sometimes it is lush and vibrant. Fantastical elements such as Magical talking creatures, giant insects, all co-exist with regular animals like birds and deer. Since it's open world, do expect a lot of walking and backtracking especially with the questing and the crafting system in place.

Blacktail is a unique fresh take on a relatively unexplored mythology. Where your choices matter, but only slightly. And the gameplay — despite its best tries to be interesting — takes a backseat to the story.