AI Limit (Demo Impressions)

Written by Jared T. Hooper on 28 Oct 2024

Souls-like is a genre I've always held on a special pedestal, for their ranks often combine three of my favorite things in a piece of fiction: a dark and moody atmosphere, a lore-rich setting, and rewarding combat. While titles like Another Crab's Treasure are bucking that dark and moody trend, AI Limit sticks to the tried-and-true formula, adding an anime aesthetic much like Code Vein before it.

Story

AI Limit's story kicks off with a young woman waking up in the depths of a massive sewer system. According to the game's Steam page, this young woman's name is Arrisa, but her name never comes up in the demo, NPCs only referring to her as a Blader, so for the sake of this preview, I'll be using her name.

Upon awakening, plenty of questions will be bombarding you. Who are you? Why are you here? What's up with the hellions littering the place? How did Arrisa not drown sleeping facedown in a puddle? And the questions only compound as you make for an exit, as NPCs are discursive in their ramblings, their sticky notes have no context, and even tutorial HUDs use proper nouns without any preestablished or accompanying definitions. The closest thing you get to adequate exposition is a mission statement from a two-and-half-meter-tall lady instructing Arrisa to find magical saplings to recover her missing memories.

Vague and misconstrued as AI Limit's opening act is, herein also lies its greatest storytelling strength, familiar to any veterans of the genre, which is non-verbal conveyance. A lot of what you pick up about the world comes from the environment and the beings populating it. The sewers are infested with rejected Doom demon concepts, but sprinkled here and there, often behind closed doors, are sparse survivors cursing their alleged deity, and every now and then, you'll also come across androids exterminating the hellspawns. Even though the game isn't forthcoming with any information, you can still snap together the pieces by simple observation and start stretching strings between disparate elements.

My only real criticism of the narrative so far comes from Arrisa herself. She doesn't talk much, which doesn't bother me, but what does bother me is that she only engages in conversation with the giant lady, and even then, she speaks like a toddler learning how to form sentences. I think she's supposed to be a silent protagonist, only having a voice when it's pertinent to the plot, but she could use some better dialogue, maybe lines holding the confidence to match someone who can go toe-to-toe with Cloverfield hatchlings without soiling their knickers.

Atmosphere

Upon starting the game, the very first emotions I experienced were dread and unease, and this was before creating a new save file. The title screen is one of the best I've seen in recent memory, sitting on a wide shot of a post-apocalyptic cityscape, with strange machines floating in the air and a massive obelisk sketching itself from the dense fog, heavy notes droning from my TV's speakers.

My anxiety continued into the game proper, the cacophony of indescribable sounds and cramped corridors squeezing my nerves tight, and it was a slow-going first few minutes as I checked every corner and tiptoed up to unfamiliar creatures, unsure what was what and what was going to eat my face. Even after I got my sword and the hang of combat and was more comfortable in my forward progression, the game liked nailing me in the glabella with wrenches to remind me why I shouldn't get complacent.

Souls-like games have this curious attribute of at once making the player feel like an ant waging battle against mighty giants and giant themselves when they fell said giants. But then titles like Dark Souls 3 aren't shy about shoving that pitiful smallness back down the player's esophagus to demonstrate how their many victories accomplished and could accomplish nothing in the end, and AI Limit has a moment like this, of making me feel small, when I stepped out a hallway and onto the edge of a cistern so massive, its far side was indiscernible for the thick fog. It was like putting foot into a panel from BLAME!, wherein Killy is but a speck in astronomical chambers of enigmatic architecture.

And this cistern is the calm before the storm, because shortly thereafter, I poked my toe into a drainage tunnel and saw seated in the reservoir shaft this mahoosive mammoth of a machine clearing the access of its infestation with a barrage of lasers, and I was in such shock and awe that I just stood there watching this beast obliterate the legless creatures crawling about. It's easily my favorite moment from the demo, and it's so good, I wish they had designed the sewers around this very machine.

Imagine after Arrisa wakes up, these loud groans reverberate through the earth, and maybe some snatches of the machine's frame flash into view once or twice, and it's this encounter in the drainage tunnel where we learn just what's been haunting us. This could've created a tremendous level narrative, in which a mystery is stoked, a reveal is made, then it's a cat-and-mouse game as the player skulks about the reservoir, trying not to snatch that thing's eye.

Since I'm speaking in a hypothetical, it's obvious this isn't the approach the dev team took. The giant robot is a one-scene wonder you have to charge like it's 1944 on Normandy, and once you're out of the drainage tunnel, it's out of sight, out of mind.

Whether the oversized pest control has greater narrative significance will be confirmed or disproven in the full game, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was inserted with gameplay as priority, when one of the developers said, “Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we put a giant robot here?”

The “Quality of Life” Improvements

Something bound to break a rift in the Souls-like community are the numerous alterations from the traditional combat and design.

First that's missing is the stamina bar. Gone is balancing your need to dodge with your need to attack, unshackling a variable chewing up mental real estate. The limitless dodges does make it too easy to skip around to enemies' backsides, so also gone is the backstab*, which is fair game. I avoided the sewer boss's attacks by magnetizing my body to his spinal column, so I could've beaten him with an acupuncture session.

(*The only remaining backstab is for sneak attacks, but once the enemy's aware you're there, that option goes poof.)

Replacing the stamina meter is a gauge that flows somewhat opposite: normal attacks increase this gauge, and heavy-duty attacks expend it. So extensive combat takes on a flow more similar to 2016 Doom, where in order to build up your gauge, you have to get right in the enemy's face so you can skewer their eyeballs. Combat against the common rabble is pretty hack-and-slash, but when in a showdown against something meatier, the only waiting is for the enemy to attack so you can react and counterattack. This does, however, diminish some of the tension that comes with a stamina meter, that being when you're out of gas, waiting for a refill, and it's a tense few seconds as you're begging the enemy not to nail you in the babymaker while your pants are down.

Another change is that there's a pause button. Here's how it works: when you hit the menu button, it pauses the game and brings up the menu. No catch, no upshot. You could be in the heat of battle, half a nanosecond away from having your eyeballs gouged out, and when you hit that pause button, the game pauses. No longer will your spouse call you a liar when you're swearing up and down you can't pause because you're in the middle of a boss fight.

The final major change is that when you die, you don't lose all of AI Limit's version of Souls, Crystals. Instead, a percentage is taxed off your total upon respawn, similar to Pokémon, but even the early Pokémon titles were less forgiving. The percentage of Crystals lost is maybe a quarter at most, and there's no need to return to your grave to retrieve any dropped.

This is a change I'm two-minded about. On the one hand, I no longer have to do the wacky stuff I did in Code Vein, which was retrieving my dropped Souls before hauling a marathon back to a spawn point so the procession of monsters giving chase would lay off. On the other hand, I played AI Limit like I would any other game, which is to say, like my mistakes bore no consequences. This was nice when I made a mad dash at the giant robot like I was Rei Suwa from Buddy Daddies in order to progress (I learned post-demo this is not the intended path forward), but not once the rest of the time, after learning about the lax penalty, did I think to myself, “I need to get back to a spawn point so I can cash in my Crystals.” AI Limit provides an, dare I say, easier and, dare I say this, too, more relaxing experience than your typical Souls-like affair. Depending on the angle you look at it from, it's Dark Souls but with more forward momentum, or it's Dark Souls but without the reward for the risk.

Other Stuff

The first question I want answered every time I start a new game—how do I save?—is never answered in the demo. Whenever I boot up a game with autosave, one of the first things I see is a message explaining that a specific icon signals the autosave kicking in, but AI Limit has no such message, and manual saves aren't allowed. I did notice a symbol in the corner of my screen when I rested at a respawn point, and I could only surmise from past experience that that was the autosave, but since I couldn't confirm that, I played the demo hoping not to draw the good misfortune of a blackout.

I saw brief snippets of gameplay from IGN, and in the corner was text, clear as day, that read Saving... Evidently, they had an earlier build of the game, and at some point, the text was replaced with the Rod of Asclepius as designed by a minimalist.

The alignment on paragraphed text was sometimes a bit wonky. Take the below example:

Th' ore o' this arm,

whetted to perfect plane,

eyes cast on fringe

see naught in air.

In AI Limit, there's a chance it would be aligned like so:

Th' ore o' this arm,

whetted to perfect plan

e, eyes cast on fringe

see naught in air.

This happens two or three times, and there's a lot of copy-and-paste placeholder text, even for player stats, so I'm slightly suspicious the translation team didn't have a long deadline to finish scripting and proofreading before the demo went out. Even the master list for the game's areas when teleporting is headed by Chinese characters.

I played the demo on PC, and even though my specs were top-of-the-line eight years ago, the game ran just fine. The only issue was that the game took quite a while to load in, though the Steam page strongly encourages that players get an SSD, a solid state drive, and my entire game library's on a hard disk drive, so I imagine that's why I could perform a hundred jumping jacks while the game loaded. The difference between an SSD and an HDD, in terms for the impatient layman, is that an SSD is faster but more expensive, while an HDD is the opposite: slower and cheaper.

Do note that this is just my hypothesis on loading speeds, since I can't test it, but if all you've got is an HDD, that won't prevent you from checking this demo out. Just roll out the yoga mat beforehand so that you can get your daily Pilates in. Or if you have a PS5, you can disregard the last two paragraphs, because the demo's also on PS5.

Conclusion

If Souls-like is a genre you've had an interest in but have avoided because the high difficulty and punishing mechanics were pushing you away, AI Limit might be a good kiddy pool to wade your ankles in. It's got the atmosphere and general combat feel of a Souls-like, but it's also ensuring the player isn't having too tough of a time. Plus, this is a demo anyway, so there's no upfront commitment for your wallet for giving it a try, at least until November 3rd.

The demo's only a temporary download on Steam and PS5 and was originally slated to last until October 21st, but I got lucky with getting to try it out when its availability got pushed back until the 3rd of November. I beat the demo in about 2½ hours and spent another half an hour sampling the Boss Challenge mode and exploring a section of the sewers I had missed, so it's a fairly healthy serving of game. The release year is for 2024—no specific date as of this review's publication—but since we're inching up to 2025, I'm somewhat dubious about the game releasing this year. Regardless of when it comes out, I'm looking forward to the full course.