YMMV / Laika: Aged Through Blood

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • When Laika bitterly calls herself "a pawn in someone else's game", the Elder does not reply. Was she ashamed of what she had to do in order to keep the village safe, or was she annoyed that Laika wasn't blindly loyal like the others?
  • While Maya seems to be abusive and insensitive at surface level, there are several factors that make her a much more complex character. On one hand, she's an ornery old woman who denied Laika a proper childhood to turn her into a killing machine, not to mention subjecting her to immense trauma in order to maintain their family's curse, and while she has moments of kindness, she still constantly belittles and criticizes her daughter for not living up to her standards. On the other hand, Maya clearly loves her family in her own way, never neglects her grandchildren and, deep down, she is proud of Laika. Even in her worse moments she's shown with a weary, tired look in her face.
• Anti-Climax Boss: Despite his name, the Two-Beak God doesn't do much besides trying to hit you with his beaks in a very telegraphed manner inside a small area. He possesses two health bars, one for each head, but those can be quickly shredded, especially at close range with weapons like the shotgun and crossbow. Killing one of the heads takes it out of the fight, making killing the other even easier.
• Awesome Music: Has its own page.
• Breather Boss: Pope Melva VIII is surprisingly easy compared to A Caterpillar Made of Sadness and especially A Gargantuan Swimcrab. He only has two attacks—both of which are slow and can even bounce off Laika's bike—and all you have to do to kill him is grapple onto his head five times and pull. There isn't even a second phase, and his arena is flat and easy to drive upon.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • The game never provides the player with a good enough reason to dequip the Revolver, purely because being able to quickly and precisely kill up to four Birds before having to reload is always so incredibly useful no matter the circumstances.
  • The Shotgun is also pretty much always a must-have due to the Recoil Boost it provides being used for mandatory jumps in some locations and in general just being a useful movement tool.
• Complete Monster: The Two-Beak God is the tyrannical, bigoted ruler of the birds. Longing to see all non-bird creatures eradicated, the Two-Beak God allowed his soldiers to keep the Wastelands' Hopeless War going by having them all torture and murder any creatures who didn't support or bow down to the birds. Even his own soldiers weren't exempt from this, as deserters, rebels, and birds who refused to fight were slaughtered. Upon hearing of heroine Laika's invincibility, the Two-Beak God had her daughter, Puppy, kidnapped in hopes of using her blood to extract the source of this power. When this fails, the Two-Beak God has Laika lured into a trap within his domain. After successfully capturing Laika and having the birds' rebel leader killed, the Two-Beak God attempts to drop a nuclear bomb onto the Wastelands, not caring that thousands of his own troops and the birds living in the Undernest will be caught in the blast.
• Cult Soundtrack: While the game's reception itself has been more divisive, the game's amazing soundtrack has gotten unanimous praise to the point that there are some who would rather not play the game in favor of just listening to the game's songs.
• Demonic Spiders: The heavy machine gun birds sit behind a shielded turret with a high rate of fire. This makes them invulnerable to all attacks from the front, and their sheer firepower kills you in an instant unless you keep your bike angled to block the shots. You have to either jump over or flank them to access their vulnerable back. They're also rarely alone, so focusing on them might leave you vulnerable to other birds.
• Disappointing Last Level: Not only is the last third or so of the game a direct linear path of going to the Floating City and ascending to the top with almost no exploration or ability variation required, but the game's ending smashes to the credits three seconds after Laika sacrifices herself to stop the Egg from wiping out the wasteland. We don't get to see if the Birds give up their war, what happens to Puppy, or anything else story-wise the player might have been invested in for the whole game.
• Friendly Fandoms: There is some overlap between fans of this game and fans of LISA: The Painful, as both tell the story of sole parents trying to keep their children safe in a post-apocalyptic wasteland.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: A common issue with the game is that its gameplay does not facilitate it being a Metroidvania, which leads to a lot of unnecessary backtracking in order to stretch a six-hour game into a 20-hour one. Add on how the combat can sometimes feel janky and overly punishing and there are a number of reviews describing how they like the emotionally resonant, heartbreaking and powerful story much more than the actual game.
• Game-Breaker: Once you get the dash upgrade the game becomes a cakewalk. It allows you to blink a short distance at any direction, without any restrictions other than having to touch the ground to "recharge" it. You not only keep, but also gain momentum if you launch yourself into the air, which makes exploring the wasteland a lot easier. You will no longer be dependent on ramps to reload either, as you can simply blink upwards to flip yourself at any place that gives you enough space to do so.
• Goddamned Bats: Mimics are a special bird unit that hide inside boxes suspiciously similar to the ones you can get resources from, only to pop out and toss a bunch of knifes in all directions when you get close enough. They're considerably tricky to deal with even after you become familiar with how they work since they're usually positioned in places where they will catch you off-guard if you aren't paying attention.
• Harsher in Hindsight: Laika constantly worries about Puppy growing up, which initially can be chalked up to her just being overprotective of her daughter in a chaotic, post-apocalyptic world. Once you learn about the nature of the curse and what happened to Laika's previous daughters, it becomes clear that Laika is afraid that she'll have to experience the same sorrow yet again.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Riding on ropes requires you to angle your bike in a specific way, always keeping your front wheel up in the air. This is a lot harder than it sounds. Leaning backwards too much will kill you as touching the rope counts as hitting the ground, and leaning forward too much will make you fall off the rope, forcing you to restart the whole process. All while having to maintain a constant speed as well, because going too slow also makes you fall from the rope.
• Scrappy Weapon: The Machine Gun is a much weaker choice than other weapons. Instead of depleting its ammo normally, it completely depletes its magazine the second you leave Bullet Time in an attempt to balance how large of a magazine it has. This would still probably be fine if the gun wasn't so shittily inaccurate, meaning there's no reason to try to take out a large group of Birds by spraying and praying when you could just take them out very precisely with an upgraded Revolver and Sniper Rifle and therefore avoid accidentally dooming yourself by forgetting to hold down the fire button.
• Signature Scene:
  • The opening, where Laika finds Poochie's mutilated corpse. This is the one scene that immediately set the tone for the rest of the game and is cited for showcasing that this game is absolutely not for kids, and that it's capable of being mature with its dark subjects without being overly gratuitous.
  • The Lighthouse. After defeating the Gargantuan Swimcab, Laika tells a dying Roy that she (maybe) sees clean water and actual whales from the top of the lighthouse. After he dies, Roy's spirit tells Laika to let his corpse rot on his ship so he'll remain at sea forever with the ghost whales. Most people who talk about the game cite this scene as the moment where they broke down crying, both from how beautiful and equally tragic the scene is and from the somber song "My Destiny" playing at the time.
• That One Boss: A Gargantuan Swimcrab is an absolute nightmare. You start off by having to drive up several steep inclines (some of which are easy to fall from) while the Swimcrab chases you. When it stops, you have to dodge both its missiles as well as its bubbles; the former kills you instantly, while the latter can flip you over and have you lose track of where you are (the red ones, in particular, kill you instantly if they hit you). After wounding its driver, you must repeat these steps two more times, all while occasionally taking out bird soldiers in your way. Also, unlike A Caterpillar Made of Sadness (which autosaves after each phase), there are no checkpoints. If you get to the very top and die for any reason, you have to restart from the very beginning.
• That One Level:
  • Where Water Glistened. Between the main gimmick of the level involving ropes you have to do a wheelie on to cross over (which consistently feels harder to pull off than it ought to be), a fragmented, confusing map which large portions of can only be accessed by using said ropes and driving Roy's boat around looking for mooring points, and an overreliance on the sometimes wonky and unpredictable Recoil Boost from the Shotgun for required jumps, it's not exactly super engrossing to play through. Cap all that off against a fight with A Gargantuan Swimcrab and you have a recipe for one excruciatingly frustrating level. At least the story beat at the end is really good if you can persevere through it.
  • The Big Tree is a sprawling and simultaneously confusingly labyrinthine pyramid which is extremely frustrating to navigate, as the in-game map doesn't do a great job of showing where you need to go, especially since certain paths are blocked off until you find a requisite Bishop head in a nearby Sacristy or loop back on themselves. Then, when you finally think you're done and weaken the main support pillar, you find yourself having to drive all the way back up to the very top and begin ascending a newly-accessible obstacle course filled with different enemy compositions in order to get to the Papal Terrace. It's telling that while Where Water Glistened and Where Rock Bleeds can be completed in around thirty minutes with a little exploration, The Big Tree can take hours to complete, and that's if you don't make any mistakes.
• That One Sidequest: Reuniting the Wastelanders can be a bit of a chore at times, since all but one of their quests boil down to "Find a Wastelander, go find the Merchant, buy an item from him that only appears in his shop after you've talked to said Wastelander and then return to them with the item". Not helping matters is that the Merchant travels between a multitude of different spots on the map, so unless you get super lucky and bump into him exactly when you need to, you'll be wasting a lot of Candles trying to even find the guy (at least before you get Maya's Pendant). Granted, the good feeling you'll get from fully reuniting them may make it worth it, but it's still a more irritating set of quests than it needs to be.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The grappling hook you gain from the Hectist has 2 uses: dragging objects and tearing down pillars. It is only relevant in one area during the main questline, and in the wasteland it can only be used to tear down bird statues. It cannot latch onto terrain nor grab enemies, so besides those niche situations, it's completely useless.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Besides the game taking place in a World of Funny Animals, nothing about it is for kids. Outside of the game opening with the graphic Death of a Child, the plot focuses on many adult themes such as genocide, nihilism, violence, and even touches upon suicide and rape. Before the game starts, the developers even leave a few Content Warnings about said themes.

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