Summary:
Jotun transports you into the realm of Norse mythology through its beautiful imagery, striking voice acting and contests of skill and valor. This is a game aimed at hardcore gamers that enjoy a challenge. You likely won't win your first attempt against each jotun, but retries quickly get you back into the fray. Achievement hunting and Valhalla Mode are a blast and made for my most enjoyed moments with the game. Environmental levels that you must traverse to unlock each boss have good atmosphere but ultimately are very forgettable compared to the giants. The main game can be completed in about 5 to 6 hours, even with the environmental levels as padding, so it is not a great value at full price.
Full review:
Even though Jotun does a respectable job in other areas, its boss fights are what make it noteworthy. Each one is unique in how they play. There's the chaotic battle against the Storm jotun, Hagalaz, that will test your perception and focus as you are barraged from multiple sides at once. Or there's the high octane fury of Kaunan, the Fire jotun that tests your reflexes by upping the tempo. Each giant can be freely refought after you've unlocked them. Valhalla Mode, added in September 2016, reinvigorates each boss with additional challenges that expand on their initial patterns. This makes them both familiar and fresh, not to mention more deadly than ever.
Your repertoire of combat abilities seems deceptively limited at the outset of the game, featuring only a quick attack, a strong attack and a dodge roll. You can get by with just these by learning your enemies moves, à la Super Punch Out or Dark Souls. However, you'll regularly gain new God powers over the course of the game that significantly spice things up. These God powers have two to three charges so they must be used wisely. A couple examples of them are a short period of invulnerability or a temporary boost of speed. On their own, each component is rather simple. But as a whole, they add up to an engaging experience with a lot to stay mindful of in the midst of battle.
The story that puts our protagonist, Thora, on her quest to impress the Gods is a relatively simple one that leans heavily on its Norse mythology setting. I am not familiar with these legends so I enjoyed the story presented here, but I suspect that someone who is more knowledgeable on the subject might be disappointed with how basic a lot of this seemed to be. In the end, it does its job of driving events forward and creating a great atmosphere, knowing that its strength is not in character drama.
Choosing to do the voice-overs in Icelandic is a detail that I really liked. The woman who played Thora delivered a powerful performance that sounds authentic to the game's world. She conveys strong personality and emotion, even without understanding the language. There are, of course, subtitles. The hand-drawn art style, while lacking finer details at times, is striking and more unique than many games out there. I'd call it something like a less childish 2D Disney movie style. Animations at times can look "floaty", or in other words like the animation playing doesn't fully match how the character is actually moving through space. Otherwise they are very good, properly telegraphing attacks and generally adding to the intensity and epic scale.
My biggest complaint would be in the apportionment of environmental levels to boss battles. There are two of them per boss. While that works well for dolling out power ups and elongating the game, I'd much rather have seen them use their development resources to design more jotun instead. Most of these exploration levels do not have enemies to fight and instead have some sort of environmental hazard like bursts of fire, poisonous clouds or icy gusts of wind. I commend the developers for trying something different, but in this case I wouldn't call it a success. Too often these places felt mostly empty. The best moments in these levels are the locations where the camera pulls back to reveal a grand view of some noteworthy creature or landscape while Thora or the narrator briefly explain what it is.
I am giving this game a recommendation, but a cautious one. It is a highly rated game but it is not for everyone. I found my greatest enjoyment after completing the game once. Then I could go straight to each boss and hone my skills against them until I was capable of unlocking their achievements. However, judging by Steam's global achievement statistics, I am part of a very small minority that ever made it this far. Just less than 1/5th of all players who have slain the first starter jotun ever go on to finish all six. For such a short game, that seems like a bit of a red flag to me.
P.S. Thanks to the dev in the Steam Discussion threads, ClockworkXI, for getting me a quick response and solution to my PS2 controller problem that cropped up after the December patch.