White Lavender

dark souls but make it bug

Souls games don’t all have to be grim dark fantasy melancholic guilt-trips. White Lavender is a short, surprising challenging trip through a critter infested garden with simple graphics and an absolute beast of a soundtrack that is so good I’ve been listening to it ever since. Don’t expect to be saving the realm or banishing gods here. Your only goal is to find three ingredients to brew a tea that can cure your sick sister. To accomplish this you’ll be exploring old tin cans, a frog pond, a watering can and more all while helping out the inhabitants of the aptly-named pot village along the way. Much like in Another Crab’s Treasure, a similar whimsical soulslike, you’ll be wielding spoons, twigs, and pins, and clothing yourself with leaves, a split pistachio, or, my personal favourite, an entire mug so enormous it covers up most of you little bug’s body. Combat is simple but satisfying, with familiar dodging, blocking, and stamina management, although I found that the dodge roll was the way to go, with its generous i-frames and long distance that allowed me to dodge an attack, retaliate, then roll away without fear of repercussions. Speaking of combat, despite its cutesy setting and characters, White Lavender is by no means and easy game. Even normal enemies can kill you in a couple of hits, and while as far as I can tell you don’t lose any pollen (souls) or progression, you still have to approach each encounter methodically to avoid getting splattered. Bosses are equally challenging, with a good variety of both larger animals like birds or snails, mixed in with some more bug-sized opponents, including King Louis and his royal subjects. The hardest by far was a bouncing frog with a whopping three thousand health points – three times more than the final boss - something that I found out later was … a bug (pun intended). I found levelling to be fairly generous, although I’m not sure all the stats are really useful. There are only a handful of spells in the game which, along with the plethora of strength-based weapons, is obviously trying to steer players towards melee builds, for better or worse. White Lavender is a short, fun soulslike that’s actually quite a bit harder than its lets on, and one that I would recommend to souls fans looking for a change of pace between longer, gloomier games that are suffocating the genre.

Goofy fun and short

Like Elden Ring but 8x harder and with a lil bug :) 10/10

It was pretty good