Review: ‘Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon’ weaves a wicked tale

At first glance, Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon sounds like a hard sell to fans of Platinum Software’s supremely over-the-top character action games. This prequel focuses on a tween Bayonetta who doesn’t have a suite of demonically powered weaponry, can’t summon a giant stiletto heel to stomp monsters, and hasn’t gained the awe-inspiring confidence of her adult self. Hell, she can’t attack enemies full stop.

It also centers around an unintuitive control scheme that’s difficult to wrap your brain around. Though Cereza cannot attack enemies, she soon summons the mysterious, demonic Cheshire into her stuffed toy, with him playing offense in the game’s battles. This means you have to come to grips with simultaneously controlling Cereza with the left Joy-Con and Cheshire with the right. While exploring the environment, this usually means sending them on separate parallel paths as each unlocks gates for the other. In combat, Cereza’s job is to restrain enemies with magical thorns while Cheshire attacks with meaty claw swipes and crunchy combos.

This isn’t exactly a novel control scheme, though it’s certainly rare in gaming. The most obvious comparison is to 2013’s Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, which wove the dual character control system into its narrative to cement the relationship between its two characters. Beyond that, we’re going to reference a truly deep cut, as Bayonetta Origins has a whole lot in common with FromSoftware’s obscure PS2-era platformer, The Adventures of Cookie & Cream.

Fortunately, the game is well aware that its idiosyncratic control scheme takes a while to master and provides a very gentle difficulty curve that pales in comparison to the Bayonetta games that came before. Even though she’s just a kid, Cereza can take a beating in combat and Cheshire’s attacks boast a pretty generous, automatic lock-on. You won’t have to worry too much about her feline, demonic companion — Cereza’s the only one that can be truly damaged, and healing supplies are plentiful. Even so, in pitched battles, keeping track of both characters and synchronizing their moves is easy in theory but often difficult in practice.

That being said, after watching the credits roll on Cereza and the Lost Demon, I can admit that learning its quirks was well worth the effort. Last October saw the long-awaited Bayonetta 3 finally release on Switch, though Nintendo’s dated hardware clearly struggled to keep up with its blistering action, resulting in a low-res mess that dropped frames all over the place. Cereza and the Lost Demon has no such trouble, smartly leaning into the Switch’s capabilities with a wonderfully stylized storybook aesthetic; low-detail, yet expressive character models; and fixed camera angles that minimize what the console’s aging Tegra X1 chip has to render (albeit at 30fps, though c’mon, this is the Switch).

While the entire game is set inside a forest, there’s a wide variety of environments within, ranging from a ruined and spooky theme park (with fun slides!), a clockwork castle, a peaceful lagoon covered in giant lily pads, and windy peaks above high drops. Bayonetta Origins also frequently drops you into the twisted Faerie world of Tír na nÓg (yes, we triple-checked the spelling on that one), with its eye-popping, bright crystalline blues (which really shine on a Switch OLED). The game hits a home run when it comes to visuals, and is a nice reminder that developers can still achieve something special when they work with the constraints of the Switch rather than try to crowbar a graphically intensive game onto the platform.

It’s also worth underlining that, contrary to expectations, Cereza and the Lost Demon isn’t an indie experiment, but rather a full-blooded adventure. My playthrough clocked in at around 15 hours and I left the game with optional abilities still locked and many collectibles waiting to be found. Beating the game also unlocks “Jeanne’s Story,” a separate hour-long adventure starring a younger version of Bayonetta’s BFF with its own cool quirks.

I’ve been a huge Bayonetta fan since the first installment on PS3/Xbox 360 and didn’t dare to dream this G-rated spinoff could come close to reaching the highs of the mainline entries. But, slightly shockingly, it actually does a whole lot of stuff better than them. For example, even after playing the three Bayonetta games multiple times, I struggle to summarize their convoluted stories, which combine multiple planes of existence, intersecting realities, and (as of Bayonetta 3) a full-on multiverse. Cereza and the Lost Demon delivers a much more straightforward narrative told through a narrated storybook, and actually knowing what the hell was going on in a Bayonetta game was something of a relief.

Beyond that, while the combat never reaches the intensity of previous Bayonetta titles, it comes surprisingly close. Cheshire gains elemental forms throughout the game that require quick changes in combat and comes equipped with the parries, dodges, and punishing finishing moves you’d expect from the series. Plus, without wanting to spoil anything, as the game approaches its climax, it neatly segues into the intense and over-the-top action you expect from Platinum Games, with both Cereza and Cheshire getting significantly more powerful the longer the game goes on. We’d love to see another Bayonetta Origins game (teen Bayonetta. maybe?), but this alone nicely sets up the character’s arc prior to the 2009 original.

There’s also a surprising amount of visual and aural DNA transplanted from an unexpected source: Platinum Games’ brilliant 2017 Square Enix team-up, Nier Automata. The tangled forests, weird inhabitants, and comic yet unnerving enemies feel like they’ve got Yoko Taro’s fingerprints all over them, as does the incredible Celtic-influenced soundtrack, which goes heavy on woodwind to crank up the otherworldly atmosphere.

If I was really looking for flaws, it’s arguable that the storybook cutscenes go on a teeny bit too long. The narrator delivers a great performance, though it’s also very slow and ponderous. You can skip the voice acting and just read the dialogue, though if you do that you’ll miss out on some of the flick-book animations. Beyond that, there’s an almost entirely extraneous potion-concocting system, and, health potions aside, I barely used them in battle. Granted, it’s fun to twirl the analog stick and stir the cauldron to nice music, but perhaps they could have been a little more useful.

We hope fans of the series decide to give this a chance as — and we can’t believe we’re about to say this — we enjoyed this a tiny bit more than last year’s fun but flawed Bayonetta 3. It gets a hearty recommendation from me, though don’t be put off if the control scheme gives you a headache for the first hour or so.

This review is based on the Nintendo Switch version of the game. A copy was provided to us by Nintendo.