Laika: Aged Through Blood is part bloody Excitebike, part furry Mad Max

On paper, Laika: Aged Through Blood is the kind of game I would normally avoid at all costs. It’s a bloody and violent Metroidvania starring an anthropomorphic coyote on a motorcycle – or, as the developers like to call it, ‘motorvania’. It makes no compromises about the need to ride and shoot and spin and land all in perfect sync. I am straight-up awful at it.

And yet somehow I can’t stop playing. That’s partly because I haven’t been able to make it terribly far into the game, and also because I’m still enjoying myself despite the fact that I can’t seem to stay on my bike for longer than a minute at a time. Each time I simply pick myself up, dust myself off, and give it another go. Wash, rinse, repeat.

While I keep harping on the difficulty of Laika, it’s important to understand first and foremost that this is not hyperbole. I cannot count the number of times I died just while trying to get through the first section of the game before it even really opened up. It’s a bit like playing a deadly combination of Excitebike and Super Meat Boy starring John Wick mixed with Mad Max mixed with a fursona.

Exceedingly difficult rider

The world of Laika: Aged Through Blood is a crumbling post-apocalyptic wasteland with your tribe under occupation. The game doesn’t shy away from this and it’s clear from the jump that there have been horrible, terrible atrocities committed against you and your people – and the opening prologue is just one further in a long line. And as you explore further, there are yet more to discover.

Despite the setting’s admittedly dark and gloomy background, the actual environment of Laika: Aged Through Blood is a gorgeously rendered, richly layered, hand-drawn world. While the natural inclination is to speed through it – you’re on a motorbike for quite a lot of it, after all – and there’s a solid patina of dust and viscera to nearly every surface, there is also a lonesome beauty to it all if taken slowly.

This is what originally drew me to the game in the first place, and what kept me going after the initial wave of failure after failure. It’s lovely to look at and the soundtrack rules, and both made it a little easier to accept that, yes, lifting my bike too much could in fact have me flip over and immediately die. Yes, successfully navigating a given encounter requires being able to time my flip (it’s how you reload) with my shots (which slows down time so you can aim) and my speed and angle (you have to hold a button to turn a different direction) all at once.

But when the mechanics all come together and you manage to chain a series of flips, shots, reloads, and landings together, overcoming a section of the wasteland you thought previously impossible… There’s nothing quite like it. And while the game is absolutely punishing and brutal, it also does not linger. Respawning after a death is fairly quick, and it regularly peppers checkpoints you can attune with across levels so you’re rarely, if ever, too far away from where you bit the dust both literally and figuratively.

I don’t know if I’ll ever actually beat Laika: Aged Through Blood. The nature of my job and personal life often leaves me little time to play games for pleasure; the release schedule for games is packed from January to December and something new is always on the horizon. But even now, writing this, I’m puzzling out in my head how to get beyond the gaggle of angry birds with guns I’m stuck at. And I suspect I’ll be thinking about Laika for a long time after I stop playing it.

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