As a child enjoying RPGs within the 90s, I’d roam backdrops spamming the pick-up button in hopes of secret treasure. I’d do that particularly in PS1 Ultimate Fantasies, with their deceptively inert hand-drawn environments, and their greasy invisible partitions. You’d smoosh Squall Leonhart’s galloping kind up towards the extent border as if bashing a skirting board with a hoover nozzle, and now and again, you would be rewarded with the hitch of a looking animation.
The builders of video games like these had beautiful methods of hiding issues. Typically, you’d spy a fateful twinkle or the delicate inclusion of an ‘precise’ 3D object among the many painted-on surroundings. Typically, you’d see the lid of a treasure chest jutting from a cunningly lifted piece of 2D background, like a grocery store voucher found in a diary. And generally, the thing would haven’t any seen presence by any means, if solely to save lots of laptop reminiscence or improvement assets, and also you’d deduce it from the association of the scene, or simply the existence of an area in itself. Why go away this carpet with a spot within the sample? Why slot in an alleyway right here, if to not slip one thing treasured between the dusty jars on the far finish?
Builders proceed to cover issues in video games, after all – there are many newer Japanese RPGs filled with ephemeral items to reward intemperate massaging of the controller – however videogame applied sciences have modified, genres have thickened and buckled and flowered and thawed, and play practices have come and gone. So it was beautiful to fireside up Angeline Period, the brand new sport from Anodyne and Sephonie builders Analgesic Productions, and discover myself as soon as once more restlessly buttoning the empty areas of fantasy worlds.
As with Anodyne’s Tardis NPCs, there are complete landscapes hid inside these landscapes. Maintain a button in the correct spot, and also you’ll push by right into a blocky Dreamcast dungeon of single room action-storytelling puzzles – “setpoems”, as developer Melos Han-Tani characterises them (they might most likely resist my simplifying Dreamcast parallel) – with a choice of enemies or props to clear away earlier than every room unseals.
The dungeon entry factors are invisible, given away solely by the curiosity of their environment – a nook carved out of a block of forest, a pipe mouth befitting a sure plumber who not often does any plumbing, or perhaps simply the potential for transferring someplace in a universe that has function: you may slide behind this desk, so isn’t it logical that there’s one thing to seek out?
There’s a wittiness to the distribution that leans on information of older video games and their habits and foibles – habits and foibles that will appear novel and mysterious in the present day – however Angeline Period isn’t pure homage. As with Anodyne, it recuperates half-familiar concepts into another historic custom of phrases comparable to “bumpslash” fight, which Han-Tani and Analgesic’s different developer Marina Kittaka have broadly derived from the Ys collection.
Bumpslashing characters strike mechanically whenever you barge into one thing, and the emphasis is accordingly on poise, angle and knockback, fairly than button combos and cooldowns. It leads to fights the place you weave round like a Dodgem automotive, without delay avoiding projectiles and constructing momentum, fairly than circling locked-on foes or letting them come to you, as in lots of Zeldalikes.
The sport design’s casually scholarly methodology extends to its narrative, wherein a lone warrior, Tets, searches for the fallen angelic spacecraft on the coronary heart of a continent filled with cussed Fae wildlife. The setting brings collectively concepts from “Irish mythology, early Christian philosophy, and Japanese American historical past”. If that sounds saggingly bookish, worry not – the dialogue is usually as trim because the contents of the common SNES textbox, and the writing on the whole is deft and daft with its allusions, with out changing into unserious.
That’s my take after a few hours, anyway. If the hidden stage premise is what drew me to Angeline Period, the setpoems are what’s holding my curiosity. They tease out the methodical playfulness of a top-down Zelda, growing a notion from room to room, such because the makes use of and abuses of rolling logs. However they’re additionally daydreams of their very own with peculiar guidelines. You get a gun, nevertheless it solely fires up the display screen, and have to be reloaded by bumpslashing. So that you’ve obtained to maintain swooping beneath something you need to shoot, and stomping the opposite enemies in an order that resupplies your ammo.
There’s a way all through of artistic and artful individuals having fun with themselves, with out a lot inhibition. Hidden ranges within the overworld are accessed by the use of a pop-up Etrian Odyssey-style gauntlet of obstacles and foes. One of many first boss fights consists of exponential fish lasers. One other celebrates Pong in passing whereas instructing you new purposes for bumpslashing. If you sleep at inns, you are transported to a dream mansion of floating heads and lolloping floofbeasts, the place you may commerce shimmering scales for upgrades.
It’s a tough sport at instances. The fight is as frantic as that of Morsels, with a number of projectiles and enemy sorts crammed into every display screen. The digicam angle makes seeing your shadow and touchdown exactly a problem when, say, navigating dim corridors of spikes, however this appears like “pure” problem, an incentive to get higher. Hopefully I’ll maintain plugging and write extra about Angeline Period subsequent 12 months, as soon as we have put the Geoff Fest hangover behind us. It clearly has secrets and techniques to spare. Discover it on Steam, with a demo nonetheless stay as of writing.
