Lysfanga: The Time-Shift Warrior is the best of quite a few worlds. Equal parts hack 'n' slash roguelite and tactical strategy, the aim of the game is to coordinate attacks between myself and four time-shifted "clones" to dispatch enemies in quick succession.
I was already hyped for Hades 2, and Lysfanga's similar isometric camera angles looked set to feed that excitement as soon as I sat down to play it at Gamescom 2023. But for all of Zagreus's son-of-the-Underworld abilities, though, I've never known him able to team up with past iterations of himself to take out his foes quite as effortlessly as Lysfanga.
Looking shifty
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When I first saw a trailer for Lysfanga, I wondered how its signature time-travel moves would work. Rewinding time forms the basis of your combat strategy: you attack as many enemies as you can within a 10-second timeframe, either letting the clock rewind autonomously or doing it yourself before going back out to finish off the ones you missed. Slain enemies have a grey skull over their heads to help you plan out your attack, meaning you can let your past-selves do the work for you as you hunt down other foes. You can do this numerous times before you run out of health, allowing you to strategically kill enemies across the map in, technically, one fell swoop.
That might all sound a bit confusing, but rewinding time in Lysfanga: The Time-Shift Warrior is as easy as holding down the left trigger on my Xbox controller. The fast-paced hack 'n' slash machinations of a rogue game can sometimes feel at odds with my desire to plan my attacks out more thoughtfully, but, being a demo, I quickly devise a way of working the maps that allows me to be speedy and tactical at the same time. I use the rewind function liberally to clear the map in neat thirds, but it still takes some getting used to.
Things really get interesting when I meet a new enemy type. These two monsters are connected by an energy thread, meaning that unless you kill them both at the same time, they will just come back to life all over again. Enter: my time-shift clones. By dashing to one of the linked enemies and hacking it to death before rewinding time and repeating this on the other side of the map, I've cleared the most annoying part of the dungeon in just a couple of moves.
By the time my session is almost over, I think I've gotten the hang of Lysfanga and her time-bending ways. I'm introduced to a litany of new enemy types, including a flying creature that explodes once its health has been depleted low enough, making it an excellent improvised bomb when you send it flying into a host of unsuspecting foes. I also take some time to explore Lysfanga's beautiful world in between dungeons. Unlike the static overhead angle we occupy while playing Hades, Lysfanga features an isometric character that follows close behind her. That means I just need to use a single joystick to move her around, making for a fast and fluid experience that still feels like a storybook world opening up before me.
So, what kind of game is Lysfanga: The Time-Shift Warrior? It's a hard one to place, but that unique blend of rogue and tactics is what sets it apart from similar games. My brief demo session was a fleeting yet incredibly fun experience that introduced me to the basics of being a time-altering, one-woman frenzy of blades and fists, but it did a great job at whetting my appetite for more. Developer Quantic Dream has yet to announce a release date, but with early 2024 given a rough ballpark window, it's a relief to know I might not be waiting long for it at all.
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