A truly wonderful sub boss fight in "Bramble"

I'm really enjoying this game despite the one and only flaw that I can find in it and that is the walk speed being a bit too slow. That's not really a huge thing to try to get past.

The bosses come in various ways and most of these ways are that you need to avoid them rather than take them on headfirst because until later, you don't actually have any offensive weapons.

But once you do get a weapon, which is just a bright light that you can flash and throw, things change in the game a lot and it becomes fun for a different reason. No longer are you seeking a neat and safe place to hide, you are trying to discover your window of attack.

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You are given a little bit of lore before you head out to this swamp land, but when you see this thing on a cross you don't need to tell me twice that this is something evil. The name of it is Kärrhäxan and yes, I C/P'd that because I wouldn't be able to write it otherwise.

There is a story here about how some mothers will sacrifice their baby to gain some sort of power and your job is to prevent it. They tell you to hurry but I don't think you can actually prevent it from happening. I suspect there is no way to not fail in that regard.

But while you are looking at the crucified creature, that we are simply told is a "midwife" you notice that it notices you as well, and that's pretty scary considering the rather cartoonish nature of most of what we have encountered in this game.

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You spend most of your time wandering a dark swamp pursuing a mother that has run off with her baby and the platforming that you have to do is easy enough to be very possible but also varied and challenging enough so that you don't feel like it is a pushover.

When you get to one particular part of the swamp and a familiar face is in front of you, you start to figure out that S**t is about to get real.

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Is this the same creature you saw at the start? Is it a different one? Well after you use your light offense on it a couple of times to loose the arms you definitely find out.

It scrambles down into the water and you have to keep a sharp eye out in all directions because this creature comes at you from the depths and then pops up near you. When this happens you have a very limited amount of time to turn towards it and light attack it before she reaches you.

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This "boss fight" is really good because it isn't terribly difficult. You will defeat it after a few times. I was getting a bit frustrated because once you hold down the light button that you would use for aiming the light, it slows your ability to turn around and for good reason: In other portions of the game micro-searching or searching small areas for small things is a very necessary part of the game but when we are talking about a creature in the water that is stalking your floating pattern and could pop up 360 degrees, that slow moving search is far too slow for what you need to do. Once you figure out that you need to use your normal 3rd person searching for her rather than the slow "micro search" dispatching her is rather easy.

But this doesn't make it not creepy.

Once you hit her 3 times she goes away and you are able to proceed.

The bosses and sub-bosses (this one is not the main boss of the are) have unique move-sets and various methods of attacking and defending but none of them are the frustrating kind that are going to make you want to quit or need to go on the internet to find out a solution. To hardcore gamers this might seem a bit boring but for casual gamers like me, this is sometimes exactly what I am looking for. I thoroughly enjoyed this fight, if you can even call it that and feel the same way about all the others that I have been in. The boss of this level that Kärrhäxan was actually protecting, was the most difficult one that you encounter up to this point in the game.

That was a wonderful fight as well but took me more than a couple of times to figure it out. But we'll talk about that a bit later because we got some more swampin' to do before we get to that point. It encompasses one of the only poorly made and kind of full of doo doo portions of the game as well.