There are many simple joys in this life: the crunch of fresh-fallen snow underfoot, the chirping of birds on a new spring day, and the familiar comfort of your own bed after a long time away. Yet, in all the world, nothing is so sure to bring a smile to my face as the awful garbled English on a terrible Chinese bootleg. Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage, a title that gives the impression that its own writer doesn’t know what any of those words mean, is ready to bring the Chinese bootleg experience to a steam library near you. It’s also an OK hack-n-slash.

RainBlood Chronicles: Mirage (which also cannot keep the spacing and punctuation of its name straight between Steam pages) tells the story of a secret cabal known only as Cabal. Cabal sends its two best assassins, the wild orphan Soul and the unflappable fighter of average skill Shang to the South Martial world because an evil floating pirate ship is there, but actually the pirate ship is part of an organization called Mirage, which is run by a guy called Mirage. I think. Honestly, I lost track pretty quickly, because I was too busy laughing.

The delightful ineptitude of the translation is made all the better for the fact that someone, somewhere in the production line *clearly* cared a heck of a lot about the game’s story. There are pages upon pages of complex backstory and world-building side stories scattered throughout levels, and every single enemy in the game has their own origin included in their character profile. It’s all virtually incomprehensible, of course, but it’s clear someone thought they were writing an epic masterpiece here, and someone else ruined it with total abandon.

Like a good Chinese knockoff, the box (or in this case steam page) for Mirage is chock-full of pernicious lies. There are small lies, like the entire story summary, which is barely even related to anything that happens over the course of the game. Then there are the bigger falsehoods. The game claims to have over 100 achievements to earn, but it appears to be entirely impossible to actually unlock any of them on steam. The page also boasts “full controller support,” which is only technically true insofar as the game includes key configuration options. You have to do an egregious amount of fiddling to get Mirage up and running. It makes “batteries not included” feel like a negligible setback.

The Steam page also advertises local co-op, which can only be unlocked by fully beating the game. Still, at least that’s not a total lie, and it does play into the game’s most interesting conceit. As a single player, you control two characters with their own skillsets, swapping between them as needed to clear levels. Soul can perform a limited teleport to dodge and counter attacks, whereas Shang is able to create magic energy swords that can be used for defense, double-jumping, and ranged attacks. The two characters handle very differently, so there’s clear value in swapping between them frequently. Frequent swapping is also necessitated by the fact that only the active character can gain points to purchase upgrades.

The game offers a variety of upgrades that can be purchased for your attacks and abilities. These are purchased using the souls of your fallen enemies (because what else would you use), along with treasures that can be found throughout levels. Again, only the active character will gain souls, so the game risks saddle-pointing itself by forcing you to pour all your efforts into one character at the expense of the other. The game has a separate currency, silver, which can be used to buy and upgrade equipment. Theoretically there’s a wide range of equipment options to try, but in practice, you only ever need the one that can heal your characters over time.

The core gameplay here is standard hack-and-slash fare. There’s lots of jumping, cutting, and air juggling, with combat that’s vaguely reminiscent of Muramasa. Attacks feel weighty and generally satisfying, and the game does a good job of making you feel cool and competent. The ability to switch between Shang and Soul at will adds a lot of variety to the player side of the combat equation, opening up a wide range of options. Sadly that same variety doesn’t extend to the other side. There’s a decent range of enemies early on, but by the fourth level you’ll have seen most of what the game has to throw at you, minus a few palette swaps.  Swapping characters isn’t quite enough to keep the proceedings from getting repetitive.

The regular enemies also don’t pose any threat on normal difficulty. No matter what combinations the game throws at you, you can mow them down with ease. As a result, it feels like the game is killing time between boss fights, since those are the only instances when you have any chance of dying. The bosses are, admittedly, quite fun to fight (even if a few of them feel exceptionally gimmicky), and are generally speaking the highlights of the game. It doesn’t hurt that they tend to bust out wonderfully garbled villain speeches at every opportunity. They’re also accompanied by some kickass fight music. Actually, the music in general is a highlight in itself, a fun mix of traditional Chinese instruments and hard rock.

Though the game feels cool, it doesn’t really look it. Backgrounds and characters are universally drab and grey, and the art used to depict everything is… rough-hewn, to say the least. The game’s visual style can best be described as low-budget knockoff anime, which certainly compliments the tone of the writing, but isn’t great in terms of pleasing the eye. It also causes a lot of gameplay problems, particularly when it comes to platforming, as it’s very difficult to figure out where a platform begins and ends, or what even qualifies as a platform in the first place.

Closing Comments:

Rain Blood Chronicles: Mirage is as rough around the edges as games come (sometimes literally, with artifacts and aliasing on certain background elements), but that’s kinda part of the charm. It’s a clumsy, low-rent hack-and-slash without much in the way of depth, but it tries so hard to be cool, only to be hilariously hampered by its own ineptitude. Genuine unintentional hilarity like this is rare in games, and it’s worth experiencing. Maybe not at the asking price, but if you see this in a steam sale, snap it up and have a good laugh.

Platform: PC