Qliphah in Providence’s Shadow‘s immediate first impression when I launched the game was “this would easily have been a 7/10 PS Vita cult classic”, which is perhaps damning praise; when I first launched it on my PC, the game made the fullscreen version of the game eat up 4x my actual monitor real estate, forcing me to use Alt+Tab to navigate to resize the game. Once I could actually see it, I was presented with pretty generic options: no voice settings, a handful of the usual graphics settings, and then which protagonist I’d like to start with, Rena or Soma. Once I launched the game properly, I was immediately thrown into an unskippable tutorial of the battle system, the main selling point of the title and some of the most baffling parts of it.

In battle, players can select from 3 attacks, which are color-coded as Blue, Yellow, and Red. These attacks can be upgraded and changed later, and there are sub-commands that include guarding, dodging, healing, and more that can also be utilized; by pressing the left stick of your controller, your character can also dodge. There’s really not much else to say about what you do in battle, as Qliphah’s actual battle system is functionally rock-paper-scissors with a timer and some extra lizard-spock style additions. Enemies will attack with color-coded attacks, and your character can counter these with attacks of the same color, or dodge them. You can also lightly “program” your attack flow by hitting buttons in advance, but more on that in a second. When countered, enemies enter a staggered Downed phase, in which they will take actual damage, and racking up multiple hits can help close out battles. That is functionally the entire game, and over the roughly 12 hours I spent with it, the only wrinkle is that after the tutorial, you control BOTH Rena and Soma: one character is controlled by the face buttons, and the other by your left-side controller d-pad. I had the most trouble getting used to this dual control system, but once I got it under control, it didn’t really change much.

You see, the issue with Qliphah, before we get into the story or other aspects, is that the game feels like a Vita game and a Mobile game had some sort of weird child. It has a lot of the late-Vita library’s cool Japanese Game aesthetics, with a gritty, dark post-apocalyptic color scheme and characters that feel slightly adjacent to a Shin Megami Tensei title, which is further complicated by the fact that the art style changes kind of wildly. The in-game renders feel very Anime Game, the menu character art is very SMT Stylized Art, and then the other art is kind of a blend of the two. Rena gives off cool anime-woman-protagonist vibes while also making the game seem unsure how much cleavage it wants you to see, while Soma sure is a guy who exists.

The story and non-combat presentation also lean into this odd hybrid of being fairly unremarkable: characters talk to one another in static, visual-novel-style snippets, and players navigate a flat, static map from point of interest to point of interest, reading and eventually engaging in combat. There’s no real exploration, no overworld, and the story is a standard post-apocalyptic police vibe: investigate this mystery, discover who Soma and Rena are, and fight the same monsters over and over again.

And boy, is that combat repetitive. As I said above, you can program attacks, but there’s no real benefit to doing so; enemies take so little damage outside of Counters and Downed status that button-mashing attacks while waiting for the next counter just feels like you’re being encouraged to feel like you’re doing something while you wait for “Paper” to come off cooldown again. When you have both characters, this doesn’t really change, as you’re encouraged to have the characters both Counter and unlock a more powerful cinematic attack; after you do this, the game will generally prompt you to hit LB to do a burst attack for big damage, and then the cycle repeats.

On normal and easy difficulty, this feels cinematic and sometimes cool or stylish; it can even feel a bit like a character action game without managing timing and big combos with movement abilities and button presses, instead just hitting the right button at the right time. Unfortunately, it begins to drag, as you are often left waiting for enemies to attack instead of doing anything else, and there’s no way to speed up battles. If you happen to try playing on hard difficulty, your reward is enemies having enormous health pools and being 20+ levels above your own, which was where I became frustrated the most; it didn’t feel like I was being challenged to play the game better or learn the system, but instead lied to me that this would reward me with more drops and resources. The reality was that in the time it took to complete a Hard difficulty fight, I could do 2-3 Normal versions for more net rewards.

Which really sums up the overall problems with Qliphah: It feels like a game from 20 years ago and would probably have been a cult hit at least, but by today’s standards it feels like a slapdash, half-hearted attempt at being cool and stylish. The story is dull and very by the numbers, and the combat never really evolves to be anything more than rock-paper-scissors on a timer; perhaps the thing that made me most take note of how little the game believes in its own story and setting was that it immediately allows players to skip all narrative scenes with no consequence, allowing you to skip to the battles, which also lets you skip a majority of the animations. When even the game says “hey, you can skip all this”, I’m left wondering what it really wants me to even do; if it doesn’t want to be there, I certainly don’t.