1348 Ex Voto Review Southeast Asia Home Amazon Deals Pro-tips by Codashop PC PS4 Xbox One Nintendo Mobile Entertainment EsportsMoreSearch Home More About IGN SEAContactAdvertisePressUser AgreementPrivacy PolicyCookie PolicyRSSIGN Southeast Asia is operated under license by Media Prima Digital Sdn Bhd (199901014126) Change Region United States United Kingdom Australia Africa Adria Serbian/Croatian Adria Slovenian Benelux / Dutch Brazil China / 中国 Czechia / Slovakia France Germany Greece / Ελλάδα Hungary India Israel Italy / Italia Japan / 日本 Korea / 한국 Latin America Middle East – English Middle East – الأوسطالشرق Nordic Poland Portugal Southeast Asia Spain / España Turkey / Türkiye world.ign.com Register / Login Register / Login Login Register 1348 Ex Voto 1348 Ex Voto – Review An action game that makes a promising first impression it doesn't live up to at all. This post might contain affiliation links. If you buy something through this post, the publisher may get a share of the sale. By Jarrett Green Updated: March 19, 2026, 7:37 a.m. Related reads:MapleStorySEA Celebrates 20th Anniversary With Massive Summer Updates From its gorgeous landscapes, gripping acting, and historically inspired combat animations, 1348 Ex Voto makes a strong first impression in its opening moments, seeming to promise something bold is about to follow. It doesn’t live up to that promise at all, however, quickly abandoning the interesting bits of its story and leaning most of its gameplay on shallow and shoddy combat and mission structures. Even it’s beauty is compromised by bugs and glitches that make playing through it a burdensome vow to keep.The story of Aeta, the knight errant we pilot through this blood-soaked Black Plague-era hack-and-slash, and her charge Bianca is a bit of a mess. On the whole, it’s pretty straightforward: Bianca is meant to be shipped off to a convent because her low-born parents can’t afford to raise her anymore – but before that happens, their village is sacked, Bianca is kidnapped, and Aeta pursues the bandits to get her back. It’s played like a standard damsel-saving endeavor for most of its brisk five-hour runtime, and the backdrop of the closest thing humans have to a real post-apocalypse makes for a promising setting for such a tried and true tale.But its attempts to upend this classic trope, specifically through Aeta’s gender, land pretty flat. A woman as the gallant knight is certainly subversive, and she spends the first half of the story being identified by others as a boy and not correcting them. This is an interesting thread that’s left bare early on – and when it is eventually pulled around midway through, it immediately unravels before the concept is dropped completely. Same goes for the mild implications of a queer romance between the two leads. Aeta’s pining can be read as infatuation, but as the story progresses, there’s less and less room to call what these two women have a romance. It’s far easier to interpret her one-track minded mission to save Bianca as a desperate need to not lose the last person left in her life, as the rest of her high-born family have been killed by the ongoing pestilence. And look, I’m a cis, straight, not-Italian man – I am no expert here. But this feels more disappointingly platonic than anything else, unless you think Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins’ relationship is romantic, in which case you know what? Fair, and I wish your AO3 account many blessings in the future.More like thisOpen Back Headphones: A Sound Experience Like No OtherIt’s all at least very well acted, unsurprising considering the main pair is played by Alby Baldwin and Jennifer English, but even the sparse few minor characters that get more than one speaking line are delivered with gusto. The camera work and shot framing really speaks to how inspired by prestige film Ex Voto is, and while this is no A24 cinematic event, it does a great job filling the blanks in the story with palpable tension and tone. Some animation glitches really mar the affair though, specifically how mouths and eyes twist and bulge unnaturally during moments of heightened emotions. The way the lips curl on a certain sinister flagellant about a third of the way through was uncomfortable to the point of comedy in a scene thick with very not funny drama.This finicky responsiveness was my own personal plague relatively often.When you aren’t watching the story unfold, you can interact with Ex Voto in two very simple ways: Exploring its linear environments and killing everything that moves in them. Every chapter starts almost exactly the same way, zooming in on some distant point of interest unsubtly calling you towards it and then trudging your way to the finish line. The process through every leg of the journey plays out almost exactly the same way too – quieter sections of walking and climbing broken up by little skirmishes in areas that only exist for bad guys to materialize in them. It’s generations-old game design, but not in the way some contemporary games might use to invoke a sort of “simpler time” energy from the era. Instead, it plays how I imagine the loaves of bread used for healing in Aeta’s pack taste, cold and stale.Most of the locations look good from mid range or farther, especially outdoor zones like the white rocks of the mountain side or the verdant emerald forests, though blobby textures and jagged edges betray the grandeur of it all while up close. These areas have lots of nooks and crannies where collectables can hide, but there’s only one path to your main objectives, and without a map it can be hard to know when you’ve searched a side route or not as some of the poorly landmarked layouts start to blend together. I missed a lot of extra goodies my first playthrough, and during my second I found that quite a few of them were in places I definitely looked previously, but because I maybe didn’t stand close enough or at the right angle near them, no prompt appeared to grab them. This finicky responsiveness was my own personal plague relatively often. On the occasions where I needed to crouch under a log or hop down from a ledge, it would always take me several attempts to push the designated button to actually do the thing.When it’s time for Aeta to wield her blade, the proceedings are usually pretty drab. Mixing one-handed and two-handed attacks, you flail through four-hit combo strings in order to break enemy guard gauges and slice them up when they’re vulnerable. Holding the attack button while in either stance charges up heavy attacks, which do more stagger and damage but are telegraphed and easy to avoid. There’s no obvious difference between light attacks in either stance besides that some enemies are more keen to parry a specific kind more often, usually at a predictable point in a combo that you’ll be forced to attack around. I found no real benefit from switching betw
