Perennial Order Review (PS5) – The Roots Of All Evil

There’s something to be said about the confidence on display from Gardenfiend Games’ debut, Perennial Order. The game is a top-down boss rush, matching the likes of Furi, Titan Souls and Eldest Souls – a genre often reliant on how well the game mechanics are executed, especially within the boss battles themselves. Boss fights are arguably the hardest aspect to master, with only a handful of studios being notorious for them.

Obviously From Software comes to mind, alongside Team Ninja and Capcom for having an often diverse, tough-but-fair and generally unforgettable scraps with monsters that felt impossible. This is a big set-up and a bold comparison to be made for a passionate team of four making their first game. But there are genuinely some of the best ideas thrown into here that shouldn’t be overlooked. However, ideas are one thing, execution on the other hand is a whole other thing that I’ll get into.

Perennial Order is described as a plant horror set in the Dark Ages. During my playthrough, I couldn’t help but think Jeff Vandermeer’s Ambergris series had somehow smashed pages together with Between Two Fires by Christopher Buehlman, creating one bleak dark fantasy where there’s not just Audrey II, but XI, XX too as nature consumes the world you wade through. And no comedic relief from Rick Moranis! So bring your pruning shears with you, as I cultivate just how well Perennial Order is.

I Don’t Beleaf It

You play as the titular Perennial Knight, someone who’s been brought back to life through the rebirth of the Monarch Mother, a strange eldritch-y horror plant womb. Your purpose of rebirth is to kill those who seek to destroy the living world in an attempt to bring order between plants and humans. Easier said than done, however, as the plants are running things more efficiently than the Corleone family and have weaved their evil roots across the land.

You yourself have the effects of them adorned on your right arm, as you have a Birchwood Stinger – a steel rapier – infused into your skeletal body. Whilst Perennial Order is a boss rush game, the surrounding traversal between the fights gives you ample opportunity to photosynthesize the world you inhabit. You traverse through mostly linear areas from the top-down perspective, but areas will have branching paths that’ll usually have some lore significance, weapon upgrade or a new ability – which I’ll get to later.

This isn’t a lonely world either, the game is full of interactable NPCs that provide so much context and knowledge to your mission. It’s all written in that vague poeticism that the Soulsborne series popularised, but I’d say it’s not as confusing. It paints a picture of a war between nature and humanity, where the humans are nearly down and out at this point.

Praise The Sun(flower)

Knights shudder at the dangers ahead, describing what monstrosities lurk. A botanist that somehow ends up everywhere fills you in on the history of plants. Some can even shine a light on your existence as a Perennial Knight, the dangers that come with being half plant, half human. It perfectly instils the world’s lore without plainly giving you the story.

The plants are terrifying to think about, especially in the many ways that they’ve consumed the people and places you’ve interacted with. There’s also a certain claustrophobia I felt going through the world. The fauna obstructs the screen during traversal, you feel engulfed, trapped. It adds so much to the atmosphere, but for a video game, makes it a little hard to get my bearings – even with its linearity. This could be offset with a map but outside of the Hub world, there isn’t one.

It’s a minor issue overall, but it does make any backtracking a bit confusing and as a result, time-consuming. There are some distinct differences in the areas you travel, changes in colour palette and style of ferocious plants but it is just that, daunting plants that obstruct your vision across long paths. There are a few collectibles to look out for but these are hard to track with all these parameters set for you.

Feed Me, Seymour

But what about the main attraction? The boss battles. Being half-dead and plant-based, you die in one hit. Something I’ve been wrestling with the idea of during my 10-12 hours of gameplay. Narratively, it’s a cool idea, gameplay-wise it presents an obvious challenge of a perfect run which is a tough but fun prospect. However, Perennial Order needs to be perfect to match the player’s challenge of perfectionism and it’s just not quite there.

Equipped with your Birchwood Stinger, you attack with complete 360 directional ability using the right analogue stick. Holding in the direction you want to attack, you release the analogue stick to pull it off. If you hold and release with perfect timing you can do a critical hit, a neat way of putting damage in your hands as opposed to a random percentage.

By default, you have three wisps that follow you and act as your dodge mechanic, dodging will use one up till it replenishes. Alongside that, you also unlock instincts as you defeat bosses or find them in the world. Instincts are abilities that can vary from having a Riposte to heavy damage-dealing attacks or being able to double dodge only using one wisp.

There’s a bunch of instincts to find, making it feel like you could really customise how you want to build up your Perennial Knight. Instincts take up memory slots which you only have a few of by default. You can complete traversal challenges that you’ll stumble upon or find Kinokos (very Princess Monoke forest spirits) to increase it, but I didn’t find many. This does build up to great opportunities to hone in on a playstyle as there are no other RPG mechanics outside of those and the ability to upgrade your weapon – making it feel very succinct.

One Hit Wonder

With your arsenal of potential boss-whooping instincts and your sturdy steel rapier, you’re ready to take on an astonishing variety of bosses. The first few I encountered didn’t present too much of a challenge, as it felt like your patience and timing were the most put to the test. I was initially thinking to myself, if this gets a tad more difficult then it’ll be a fun challenge throughout.

Not much further in, however, things really ramped up in varying ways of success. Firstly, I want to commend Gardenfiend Games on their sheer creativity in some of these fights. There were moments I’ve never even done before in Perennial Order that felt exciting to try and conquer. One of which you may see in a trailer is basically playing as a chess piece, fighting against others – Chess rules and all.

There are a handful of moments like this that just felt refreshing to engage with, blending familiar mechanics with fresh ideas really makes this game stand out. To help alleviate some of the stress of dying in one hit are checkpoints during some of the larger battles, which is much needed because Perennial Order is hard. This is mostly due to the one-hit nature and high health pool of the beasts you slay but it is also because it’s not completely dialled in.

Hitboxes sometimes feel unfair, boss attacks are sometimes not telegraphed enough and some of them just don’t work on PlayStation. Oftentimes in difficult games, you can see where you’re going wrong, learn from those mistakes and try to improve but I rarely felt that way during this. Instead, I was cursing some of the design choices and getting frustrated.

Uprooting The Fight

I didn’t manage to play co-op but there is an option for couch or online play if you and a friend want to take on the pesty parasitic plants together. There are a couple of mechanics unique to the co-op, like inheriting abilities if your partner dies and a couple of upscaling in difficulty to match there are two now fighting.

When the game clicks, it really does a fantastic job on all fronts. There’s an obtuseness to the design that people will fall in love with but I don’t think I’m one of them. It harkens to the old From Software games whilst not being an out-and-out Souls Like, but with plenty of ideas thrown into the game, I only appreciated some of them.

Perennial Order features a wonderful painterly art style that shares some of the DNA of The Artful Escape and Hollow Knight. It’s all hand-painted and looks stunning because of it. The plant monsters are daunting and grotesque with blood-red tendrils and bellowing rotting leaves. Environments are all-encompassing hellscapes full of crooked trees, deadly flowers all overgrown medieval ruins.

The titular knight has a cool design of a leaf-like helm and cloak covering your skeleton with your almost body-horror-esque weapon stuck to you. It all breathes confidence in how the team wanted the game to look and it shines despite having an overtly bleak atmosphere. This is accompanied by a fantastic orchestral soundtrack that matches the tone of a trudging horror that sparks hopelessness.

A Leaf In The Wind

All in all, there’s a lot to love about Perennial Order. From an artistic standpoint, Gardenfiend Games are living up to their studio’s name by creating a brilliantly disturbing world – a fiendish garden you could say. It’s a difficult task to debut with a boss rush mode and those difficulties do appear here in the few ways I’ve mentioned.

The gameplay isn’t without its flaws, there are a handful of unfair hitboxes, some poor telegraphing in attacks and some mechanics that are kept vague, like a parry I didn’t know I could do, without accidentally doing it. The world is engrossing but not great to traverse through, as a lack of direction or pathfinding can get you lost.

Perennial Order will find an audience that will love this, obtuse design and all. I just wish I was frustrated less while whacking the weeds.

Perennial Order is available now on PlayStation 5 (review platform), Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and PC via Steam.

Developer: Gardenfiend Games
Publisher: SOEDESCO

Disclaimer: In order to complete this review, we were provided with a promotional copy of the game. For our full review policy, please go here.

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