Dokuro (PC) Review

Is the Princess suicidal, blind, or just surprisingly stupid?

Platforming games used to be extremely popular in the early 2000s, but their long reign was usurped by the FPS and action genres. Nowadays, platform games are mostly found on handheld devices, with only popular titles making it to consoles. The unusual side-scrolling game, Dokuro, made its debut on PS Vita in 2012 and was ported to iOS in 2013. Now Dokuro has landed on the PC, and the result proves that some games need more than a straight port to be successful.

Dokuro is a 2D platformer with a great art style and an unusual take on the worn-out “save the princess” premise. Players, instead of fighting their way into a castle to save the damsel in distress, take on the role of a common skeleton who has become so frustrated with his Dark Lord master that he decides to save the captive princess by himself. This means that Dokuro has to escort the princess out of the menacing castle while fighting former cohorts and bosses and also avoiding a wide variety of dangerous traps. Since the princess is not only completely helpless but also dumb enough to walk straight into a pit of spikes, Dokuro must also carefully time his actions so she doesn't kill herself.

Just like early adopters waiting in line for the next iPhone, the princess will always blindly move forward even if it makes no sense. Not surprisingly, her suicidal tendencies lead to plenty of cursing at the screen and also plenty of restarts. It can be extremely challenging to fight enemies, pull levers, jump over cliffs, and rotate platforms all while trying to ensure that the princess doesn't plunge to her death. I know that it's an intentional feature meant to add challenge, but it leads to copious amounts of unnecessary frustration.

Thankfully, Dokuro has some really cool abilities to help with his arduous task of saving the brain-dead princess. For starters, he can transform into a swashbuckling hero and destroy enemies with his sword. In this form, he can also pick up the princess and carry her down steps and other challenging barriers (only a blonde princess would consider steps to be a barrier). This is a nice dichotomy from Dokuro's skeleton form since his attack will only knock enemies back rather than killing them. His attack is useful if there are pits of spikes to knock enemies into, but destroying them outright as the hero is more effective.

Another cool ability is using chalk to draw on the screen to repair ropes, light bomb fuses, and even to create a water surface. This ability has a myriad of uses, but it's not nearly as fun to use on the PC as it is on the Vita since there's no touchscreen. Instead of drawing with my finger, I'm forced to use the mouse to draw items and also to switch between chalk powers, which doesn't evoke the same interactive feeling that a touchscreen would.

This leads to the most frustrating part of the game, which is the odd control setup and inability to change the controls. Since chalk powers are assigned to the mouse, the action buttons are distributed among the comma, period, and question mark keys. When you add the fact that players move forward with D and backwards with A, the result is a weird placement of hands on the keyboard where players have to use their right hand to switch between mouse and keyboard. This is a bad idea for a platform game where precise timing is necessary to proceed. I suggest using a PC controller instead of keyboard and mouse.

While I love this game's unusual art style and I enjoy the story premise, playing Dokuro is more frustrating than fun. It doesn't help that the controls have such an odd layout. Without any actual rewards for progression and no upgrades, there's little motivation to save the princess. Maybe it would be more fun if a tough-girl princess was saving a dude in distress.