The Last Oricru is a game that attempts to do a million things at once. Gameplay-wise, it feels like an extremely sloppy Dark Souls, with brutal, deliberate combat that’s made especially difficult by how unresponsive it all feels. But the game world is this weird blend between The Witcher, Biomutant, and Halo. This is a Medieval-style world populated with extremely-not-cute anthropomorphic rats, but there’s also weird mechanical ruins in the background, as well as aliens and spaceships.
I’ve spent about two hours with the game so far, and I’m not really sure how much more time I’ll be able to play this.
It’s not that I don’t admire its jumbled pretzel of a universe. No, I actually enjoy how familiar-yet-off-the-beaten-path this game feels. Trying to describe the game world feels like trying to recall a dream a day later when the memory of it is slipping away. You’re left with the feeling that somehow all of this made sense at some point, but when you try to actually piece it all together, you realize that none of the pieces really fit.
In the time I played, my character never really figured out the strange world he’d woken up in. At one point, I was doing favors for a guy named Tobias, and just a little later, I was snitching on him to the queen and getting him killed. In fact, pretty much every character I’ve tried to befriend has ended up dying a horrible death. But I still kind of feel like my character has a chance to score with the queen in some super awkward Far Cry 3-style sex scene, so I’m curious to see where that goes…
But this game suffers for its jank — at least on the Xbox Series S, which I played it on. The camera never works properly, no matter how loose or tight I adjust the slider in the settings menu. It always feels like the camera moves really slowly, then jumps into position, so if I hold left on the left stick, the camera will rotate too slowly, then start to rotate way too quickly. Because of this, I was struggling to turn corners.
Worse than this, though, is that the framerate during combat drops to an abysmal low, causing everything to feel like it’s jerking around. The effect was literally making me feel physically sick.
Now, I’ve had this issue before, particularly with Dark Souls 3, so this might be a me issue. I tried to stream Dark Souls 3 on my PS4 but felt too sick, so I started playing it on PC. Eventually, the PS5 seemed to clear up this problem, and I spent the rest of my time playing Dark Souls 3 with a buttery smooth hard-locked 60fps. No more barfy feelies.
But with The Last Oricru, I don’t really have any options to address this. I suppose I could attempt to play it on PC, but I was given a review code on Xbox so I’m hesitant to pay for a second copy as an experiment that could still possibly result in me losing my breakfast all over my keyboard.
It’s a shame, because I’m really curious about where this story is going. I do want to learn more about this conflict between the rat-people and the Snoke-looking people, and I also want to see what my chances are of scoring with the queen. But I don’t think I can. I’m not sure I can stomach the stuttery framerates and janky camera for much longer.
I was honestly looking forward to The Last Oricru. I think the bizarreness of its world is well worth putting up with some jank for, and this is really compelling blend of sci-fi and high fantasy. However, that jank reaches a tipping point when it starts causing me to feel physically ill and triggers real-world nausea. So for the time being, I think I’m going to have to put this one down and hope for a performance patch in the future.
Disclaimer: I was given a review code for The Last Oricru for Xbox Series S, but the opinions expressed in this article are my own.
