Baldo: The Guardian Owls

Baldo is a vast action-adventure RPG that looks like it should be Zelda meets Ghibli, but it trips over its own feet at nearly every opportunity, from frequent bugs to frustrating combat.

If you’re wondering why it took so long for this review to show up on Destructoid, I’ll tell you: I dreaded playing Baldo. Every night over the past three weeks, I looked down at my Xbox controller with unease, worried the next two to three hours of my life would be agonizing. And every night, that intuition turned out to be correct.

Baldo: The Guardian Owls is a beautiful looking Ghibli-esque adventure that draws you in with its wonderful art style and atmosphere and then beats you into submission with its bewildering gameplay. This is an excruciatingly frustrating game filled with bad design choices, clunky combat and traversal, a terrible UI and map and instant, unfair death waiting around every corner. For a small number of gamers who thrive on pointless, unfair punishment, there may be some joy to be found here. For everyone else this is one adventure you'd do well to avoid taking.

Baldo: The Guardian Owls falls short of the heights set by its inspiration, but it is still a respectable action RPG.

Baldo: The Guardian Owls may have had a rocky launch, but the issues have been cleaned up to such a degree that the low scores earned months prior don’t necessarily apply anymore. I’d recommend caution before jumping into it, however — even in a perfectly playable state, Baldo: The Guardian Owls is still a polarizing title. If you love cozy aesthetics with design choices that feel more suited for the 90s – 00s, Baldo: The Guardian Owls should definitely be on your Wishlist. If not, well… in the worst case, I’ve found it to be a fantastic cure for my insomnia.

Baldo: The Guardian Owls tries really hard to mimic the best games in the genre but fails to conquer its glaring flaws. Combat is unfairly difficult and the camera is absolutely atrocious. The game's quests and puzzles are also frustrating due to the lack of any real direction to follow and no types of hints for puzzle solving. Thankfully, Baldo's art style is fantastic and for the most part, exploration is a joy.

Baldo: The Guardian Owls is a curious case. The legend of the pure-hearted child has its merits, but as time passes in its world, it becomes clear that it lacks the refinement that makes its greatest references shine. Patient The Legend of Zelda and adventure games fans will find fun here, but it's not hard to think about what was missing for this game to reach higher levels.

Far from being a perfect adventure, Baldo: The Guardian Owls still has its rhythmic and structural problems. However, its qualities are strong enough to make it stand out in Switch's indies library. With a huge world full of content, robust gameplay mechanics and an artistic style that causes fascination, the story of Guardian Owls presents itself as an interesting indication within the fantasy adventure genre with RPG aspects.

The small NAPS team spent almost 15 years making the Baldo The Guardian Owls game and finally managed to release an incredibly lovely title that didn't reach all its potential due to several small and coarse problems.

Baldo The guardian owls is the sort of game that you'd dig out of a bargain bin but that's not necessarily a bad thing because some of my fondest gaming memories came from such bins. In other words, it may be clunky but you'll still appreciate what it has to offer.