Inside: Evoland, Evoland 2, Anode Heart, Dragon Spirits, Mind Over Magnet

Evoland
Action Adventure/RPG

A meta game that “evolves” as you play. The first upgrade you get is the ability to walk left. Yes, it’s that kind of game. Unfortunately, like most games of its type, the meta elements are just there for the sake of it and have nothing meaningful to say. The meta elements end about halfway through, after which we’re left with just a mediocre action adventure game. It also makes the bizarre choice of parodying The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy, and Diablo simultaneously, so you switch between radically different gameplay styles with no warning, which is just confusing and annoying. Speaking of which, it also “parodies” Final Fantasy stories by simply regurgitating them: The girl gets fridged and the bad guy is a genocide victim, but we’re not going to critically examine these cliches or why they’re so prevalent.

I also really, really want to make a law that you can’t do this kind of pretentious meta parody thing if you don’t know how to write. The number of typos and grammatical errors in this game would be appalling for any commercial product, but is particularly galling given the meta smugness. Learn how to tell a regular story before you deconstruct one, please. The 3D graphics were also bad enough that they only served to, once again, convince me 2D is better. (And the starting areas don’t have 3D versions, which is just lazy.)

Evoland 2
Action RPG/Platformer/a lot of other genres

But the version I got was bundled with the sequel, so I decided to try that out too. Fortunately, it is much, much better by stint of being an actual game instead of a joke at the player’s expense. There is an actual story and characters with personalities this time, and you actually get to avert a genocide instead of finishing one. The twists were obvious a mile in advance and the ending left a lot of things unresolved (possibly to set up a sequel?) but hey, at least they genuinely tried this time. There are still abrupt gameplay shifts (and many more of them), but they’re actually fleshed out into genuinely enjoyable minigames instead of juvenile “Haha, isn’t this type of gameplay stupid?” jokes. It gives the feeling that the parody elements come from a place of love this time, rather than a sneer. (But it can screw off with that “Hur hur random encounters are so dated” joke, that’s pretty rich after I had to sit through them during the entire first game and it’s nonsensical because they aren’t actually random. Chrono Trigger was famous for pioneering fixed encounters, what are you even talking about?)

Grammatical errors still abound. Hire an editor, for the love of God. I am also genuinely shocked the game hasn’t been sued for copyright infringement, as there are several items and characters lifted wholesale from their home franchises. As in, the Master Sword and Hylian Shield are prominently on display in one shop. They’re not even slightly redesigned for plausible deniability. I guess the game is obscure enough Nintendo didn’t notice?

Anode Heart (Demo)
RPG

This is Digimon World with Pokemon‘s battle system and Yo-Kai Watch‘s recruitment mechanics. As in, the layout of the starting area is literally identical to Digimon World even before mentioning that your central quest is recruiting people to repopulate a run-down city. Unfortunately, while it undeniably succeeded at making a more functional game by excising Digimon World‘s core gameplay, it doesn’t really replace it with anything more interesting. Dual-types don’t exist, so the gameplay is even more shallow than Pokemon‘s even before accounting for the fact there are about half as many types. (Why do Pokemon clones keep doing this?) The battle UI also feels janky and amateurish. Damage numbers and effects have weak outlines and thus blend in with the brightly-colored backgrounds; the battle log is too narrow to display messages clearly and advances way too quickly; and as far as I can tell there’s no explanation for what status effects actually do. (It also glitches out if you play at anything lower than 1920×1080 resolution, which is an inexcusable level of sloppiness for a commercial game.) While I support the concept of “Digimon World, but good,” the designers didn’t seem to have the chops to actually elevate it to “good”, only “functional”.

I only played the demo, so maybe the mechanics just need a dozen more hours to really shine, but I’m not willing to spend $18 on that gamble.

Dragon Spirits Prologue
RPG

A Chinese game that unfortunately had a really sloppy English localization. Just about every text box contains a grammatical error. Some are minor, but others make the text incomprehensible. As a result I can’t fairly judge the writing. I can, however, judge the plot, which is that a game developer gets isekai’d into the world of the game he’s developing. Yes, it’s the video game equivalent of authors writing novels about authors. Except they don’t even do much with this, because the protagonist immediately forgets his past life and thinks he’s a regular inhabitant of the world, and just, why. Why couldn’t they just make a regular game without this layer of weirdness?

The dragons are really pretty, the battle system uses an ATB system which I’m meh about, and capture mechanics seem to be slightly more consensual than Pokemon’s, but I can’t really tell because the translation is incomprehensible. That’s about all I can say.

Mind Over Magnet
Puzzle Platformer

A game by Game Maker’s Toolkit, a game design channel I’ve mentioned here before. I followed the development extensively, so it was fun to finally play the final product. The game is a puzzle platformer based around using magnets to move around and activate machinery. It’s somewhat simple and can be finished in only a few hours, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I didn’t find any of the puzzles terribly challenging, but that’s not very surprising given I’m a veteran gamer, and there were still a number of clever twists on the mechanics that surprised me. I was worried that there would be a lot of fiddly timing- and physics-based puzzles (which were prevalent in the alpha demo), but fortunately that wasn’t the case, and the game proved very good at communicating things. I also appreciated that the story, though bare-bones, was pro-socialism.

One noteworthy thing is that the game has a lot of accessibility options, which the developer talked a lot about in his dev diary. I didn’t need to use any of them, but I think it’s good to highlight when developers make the effort. Colorblindness is accommodated particularly well: In addition to giving the option to change the color of important elements in the menu, elements are denoted with both colors and symbols, adding a layer of redundancy in case you have trouble reading color.