The fractured, post-apocalyptic world of Laika: Aged Through Blood is cruel and unforgiving, with little opportunity to forget it. Their pain and suffering are told through tales of unwilling revenge and desperate survival, heard in the mournful lyrics of an impeccable soundtrack and the thud of the title character’s revolver. All while covering the wasteland and flying through the air on a raging motorbike. With guts. Though sometimes more punishing than it needs to be, Laika manages to blend its satisfying combat, beautiful music and soulful story into a dizzying, bloody action game that’s greater than the sum of its parts.

Laika is a clever twist on a side-scrolling 2D Metroidvania adventure that takes place almost entirely on a sturdy motorbike across treacherous terrain. Whether you’re racing down a broken highway, zooming up a giant tree trunk, or looping along old, rusted pipes, Laika expertly utilizes balance-focused bike physics reminiscent of the Trials series. The level design regularly finds fun twists that challenge players in unexpected ways, testing your ability to quickly adapt to eliminate threats and land dangerous jumps while racing through places your bike shouldn’t be.

I’m not going to make excuses. You’re going to die a lot – and a lot of it will likely be because you’re horribly mishandling your bike, and embarrassment is the real cause of your death. Leaning back too much trying to do a cool wheelie. Trying to take a nasty spin off a ramp that’s too low. Just hitting yourself in the face at 0 mph. Just like you can’t get far in the Super Mario series if you don’t know how to jump, Laika, without mincing words, insists that he really respects his physics. That means being mindful of constantly changing your position. Every jump, slope and incline keeps your bike safe, even when under constant attack from multiple threats.

This might sound like a terribly fun-free disaster, but it might have been if Laika hadn’t softened the blow in such a significant way. Checkpoints are spaced pretty well, and they’re both optional and not too far apart, allowing you to get back on track quickly after a gory death. And unlike the usual gameplay where you lose all of your bloody visceral currency on death, you only lose a fraction of that amount, allowing you to recover your lost items even if you die multiple times, and even build up your bag count. Your currency is split on death. That way, dying doesn’t feel like an annoying setback, but rather a quick restart of a particularly brutal puzzle at hand. Namely, how do you launch the ramp three times in a row, kill every enemy in your path, and land safely at the end?

Stunt on These Crows

Solving these encounters shows how much Laika delivers on her promise. It’s a mesmerizing, brutal ballet as you soar through the air, backflip to parry the bullets, take down attackers one after the other, and then land in a pool of ridiculous blood. Combat is so inextricably linked to the movement and handling of the bike that one cannot fully exist without the other. Even to reload your weapon’s meager ammo requires you to backflip in mid-air. This, aside from being incredibly brutal to look at, encourages you to perform daring stunts and gives you plenty of slow firing time as you aim before delivering the killer shot.

The titular coyote, Laika is like a glass hand cannon. He can kill with one hit, but there’s always just one shot left before he reappears at a checkpoint. However, developer Brainwash Gang isn’t cruel enough to give them a chance to offer up some great additional tactical features. Drifting your bike with a quick tap will allow you to block incoming attacks, in addition to a one-time reflex parry that can be recharged with a front flip (adding a layer of instant decision-making to the daring move). Leaning your bike will allow incoming bullets to bounce off the ground and harm you, unless you remember to land upright. What’s especially nice is that Lyca’s aiming reticle includes a little arrow that shows you where your bike is, and turns bright red if you land badly. Considering how hectic encounters can be with bullets, blood, and explosions everywhere, being able to focus on both aiming and positioning with the same eye (and using the slower time to do both) is a very smart move to make amends for many scenarios that would prevent a sure win.

Despite being set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Laika: Aged Through Blood lets you drive through a variety of terrains, with exceptional hand-drawn environments and intriguing level-design challenges. Zigzagging up the mountain switchbacks of Where Iron Strokes the Sky felt a world away from driving through the scrap heaps and poison pits of Where Rust Weaves, as I threatened to lose my balance by slipping on crumbling scrap while dodging armoured birds. In true Metroid(Motor?)vania style, the lands I explored regularly branched out and connected in new ways, resulting in certain condensed areas that reminded me more of Zelda dungeons than anything else.

Riding a bike through a broken, rusted ship or a creepy temple is bound to feel different than riding on the open road, but Laika made the transition perfectly, forcing me to carefully consider who to attack first in tight spaces full of enemies. I was also impressed with how clever the camera was at zooming out at the right times to quickly alert me to dangers ahead, or expanding the field of view to cover the entire screen in particularly challenging rooms. Most of these dungeon areas offered some fun challenges, like navigating volatile gravity-defying vents or dropping entire floors to create new paths. But the tightrope walk obsession in the ship areas, where I had to constantly maneuver to get to safety, started to become too much, as I had to deal with the unpredictable physics of balancing on a rope while enemies were also trying to kill me.

In addition to the dungeons, Laika also features massive (and often grotesque) boss fights. I thought the various arenas in which these enemies populate were visually stunning, imaginative and entertaining. Some matches require you to navigate half-pipe rooms and halls to quickly reload between hits, but the sections where you’re constantly on the move were clearly the most fun. I was excited throughout, dodging missiles while outrunning a giant mall of sorrow, until I had the perfect opportunity to take a cinematic aerial shot of its exposed weak spot. Climbing a lighthouse in front of a mole-like boss and an armored crab was a great example of the optimal combination of motorbike control and combat with difficult obstacles.

However, some bosses have very long delays between dealing damage, and every death sends you back to the beginning, so it can be a bit frustrating when a small mistake can take several minutes to get back into the fight. I was able to get to the last of the boss’s health. There was also the fact that certain boss arenas were incredibly small, with only a small hill to jump off and reload, and there were chutes falling around every corner with a barrage of bullets that you had to either dodge or shoot. At certain points, it felt like the developers were throwing several obstacles in my path at once and I couldn’t handle them all.

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While the other weapons didn’t quite match the shotgun’s usefulness, each weapon handled and fired slightly differently, and improving ammo capacity and the rotation angle required to reload proved to be a very worthwhile endeavor. I wish the grappling hook upgrade had been just as useful, but I quickly found that it could only be attached to side quests and very specific targets in one dungeon. It felt very much like one of those items in a Zelda game that you use to complete a dungeon and then you don’t need it anymore. It also felt like it wasn’t being used to its full potential, since you can’t use it to grab onto enemies, resources, ledges, etc.

If Laika was just about riding a motorcycle and doing crazy tricks and shooting evil birds armed with machine guns, I’d probably still think it was a good game. What really takes this game to a high level is how well the story flows with everything you do. Laika’s character immediately captivated me. A mother coyote with a motorcycle and a gun witnesses the aftermath of a brutal murder of her compatriots and her first instinct is to try to avoid all-out war? Developer Brainwash Gang took into account how often she dies and made it a central part of her character, so it doesn’t take long to piece together Laika’s trauma. When I realized exactly how her “curse” of immortality makes her a hero to the village warriors, my perspective on her bloody journey fundamentally changed.

Ballads For a Lone Gunslinger

A great soundtrack can set the mood of a game. A great soundtrack embodies its soul and becomes as important a support as the story. It’s hard to praise enough the soundtrack to Aged Through Blood and the clever way it impacts the world around you. Much of the music you hear while cycling through the desolate desert is made up of various collectible cassette tapes from Laika’s early days. Despite its emphasis on brutal shootouts, blood, and guts, Laika’s soundtrack eschews heavy action music in favor of something entirely unique. Composer Beatriz Ruiz-Castillo (Baycoli) instead uses a combination of melancholic ballads, sad Spanish guitar, and emotional lullabies.

In addition to the understated yet optimistic melodies heard in Laika’s village and home, I was struck by how well this music fits Laika’s desperate journey, emphasizing the sense of isolation of the lonely road she travels on her motorbike. I love how music is so important to the characters in this wilderness, how the composer and singer himself exists as a character in this world (whose inhabitants have conflicting views), and how I didn’t expect the events surrounding this encounter. This number would be so powerful. Laika’s soundtrack is a perfect example of how video game music can enhance a game in ways that other media can’t replicate.

Laika’s relationship with her family was a particular highlight (even if it was heartbreaking). Watching Laika try her best to maintain her daughter’s charming innocence in an increasingly cruel and uncaring world was a welcome alternation between candid, upbeat moments and punches to the stomach, and motivated me to spend hours searching for toys and treats in the wilderness. Search. In contrast to Laika’s aged mother, who insisted (and was often stubborn) on preparing her child for the horrors of war, it soon became clear what an impossible burden Laika was carrying. Her journey takes her to some pretty dark places, but it was fascinating to see what the immortal coyote warrior is capable of when the safety of her loved ones is at risk.

Her immediate family isn’t the only one who needs to be protected in this wilderness. Laika’s “curse” makes her the best candidate to defend this very place, named “The Place We Live” (all places in the world have this name and I just think it’s amazing). Not only is this a perfect peaceful base to return to after a long day in the saddle, but it’s also full of strange and quirky characters with their own problems and needs. The villagers have lots of little jobs to do, but as is to be expected in an unforgiving world, these jobs don’t always have a happy ending. I was glad to see that the opposite was sometimes true as well, as characters decide to look for glimmers of hope or fleeting happiness in terrible situations. Quite a few quests can feel a little mundane if they have to track down irrelevant objects in the world, but Laika herself wrote in her journal of one such quest: “I respect that.”

The most exciting side quest so far is the one about Laika’s own mother. This is due in part to the hilarious nature of their difficult relationship and some revelations about Laika’s past that shed a lot of painful light on what they’ve been through because of the family curse. Laika’s journey could probably be completed in just over 10 hours, but by the time the credits rolled 16 hours later, I was so happy to have continued helping those in need, literally bringing the gang back together, and finding every last gift for Laika’s cute puppy (and still missing weapons!).

Verdict

Laika: Aged Through Blood is one of the most unique and fascinating interpretations of the Metroidvania genre, as you relentlessly ride your motorbike through a blood-soaked wilderness. It expertly combines relentless, life-threatening combat with a beautifully hand-drawn side-scrolling world and a compelling story of revenge, desperation, and survival. The game is uncompromising in that you quickly learn how to handle a motorcycle and take on multiple threats, but with numerous checkpoints, revenge is always within reach. Fans of 2D landscape exploration and platforming will definitely find these open roads worthwhile.