The Bearer & The Last Flame aims for dark fantasy, but on PS5 it is dragged down by abysmal combat, confusing level design, and unstable performance.
The Bearer & The Last Flame opens with the kind of dark fantasy intro you have heard a hundred times. The world is dead, darkness has consumed everything, and you are the one person carrying the final flame. It is not just familiar, it is flat. The game never gives that setup enough detail or personality to make it feel like more than placeholder lore.
Then it hands over control and things get worse fast. The opening tutorial area has heavy screen tearing, so bad that it wasn't just distracting every few seconds, but nausea-inducing level bad. My OLED has VRR support and most of the time, that mitigates screen tearing, but not with this game.
Generally in games, the starting area is supposed to be a gentle tutorial space, but here, the layout is a mess. I spent more than 20 minutes running in circles just trying to find the exit. Paths blend together, everything looks the same, and the game does not guide you clearly. A first area should teach players how to read the world, this one teaches confusion.
Combat is not any better. You fight skeletons and dead knights early on, but the hitboxes are absolutely abysmal and feel inconsistent on both sides. Swings that look clean fail to connect, enemy attacks whiff for no clear reason, and movement around targets feels slippery and floaty. You are not learning patterns, you are just hoping the game registers what just happened.
Visually, the first zone looks dated and muddy, and the sound mix is weirdly hollow. Also even though I was in an open space, the sound effects carry this echo effect that makes everything sound like I was inside a closed space.
Anyway, I found the exit portal and was teleported to a hub area with vendors and a huge war elephant in the middle. Again, the layout was pretty confusing. I spent several more minutes guessing routes, going up and down some giant elevators, until I accidentally found the correct portal.
The next region is even more confusing than the opener. It is full of stairs and ladders that loop back into the same spaces, so progress feels circular instead of deliberate. Sure there were a lot chests, some of those were mimics who tried to eat my face, but many gave me items with some confusing "soulslike" descriptions. Anyway, the enemy density was higher and a lot of skeletons, knights, archers and whatnot tried to murder me, but since the combat is still unreliable, I mostly stopped fighting and ran past everything.
After like 10 more minutes of just running around, going up and down stairs and ladders, I finally found a lever to unlock a shortcut back to the start of the area and the other path was this giant chasm with just a tiny strip of land to walk on with just 2 enemies, a sword guy and an archer. Now, since the combat is absolutely attrocious, I tried to just run past them and a couple of times I fell down to my death and other times the archer would just one-shot. Anyway, after a couple more tries, I managed to get past them, down a ladder and encountered a spider and my attacks were just not connecting with it, so I just quit the game right there.
Performance in this second level also shifts for the worse in a different way. Tearing improves a little compared to the first area, but now you get a lot of stutter and frame drops. It also crashed a couple of times. Truly awful stuff.
On paper, there is a complete game here. The official description talks about five locations, side quests, weapon variety, and different enemy types. Those are fine building blocks, but the fundamentals are way too weak for any of it to matter. The combat is awful, level design is rubbish, and the performance on PS5 is abysmal.
I gave it a fair chance and pushed past the bad first impression, hoping it would settle into something better. It did not. The longer I played, the more obvious it became that this is not just rough around the edges, the core experience feels unfinished on PS5. My recommendation is straightforward, do not buy this version. It is frustrating, unstable, and not worth your time let alone your money. Thanks for reading!
This game was reviewed on PS5 using a promo code provided by PR. The Bearer & The Last Flame is available on PS5 and PC.
