Inside: Astalon: Tears of the Earth, BioGun, Tunic
Astalon: Tears of the Earth
Metroidvania
A character-swapping Metroidvania likely inspired by Castlevania III. You swap between the warrior, who can only use melee attacks, the rogue, who can only use slow long-range attacks, and the wizard, who uses medium-range attacks that penetrate obstacles. The wizard has made a deal with the Devil, allowing you to level up by spending currency when you die. I found the whole thing oddly… mid? Maybe I’m just suffering from Metroidvania burnout, but the experience didn’t stand out to me very much. Having to go back to save points every time I needed to switch a character was really tedious, but at the same time, once I got the upgrade to freely switch characters I felt the game lost a lot of depth; having to navigate a path with a character who was unsuitable to the challenges forced me to think a lot more than when I could just swap them out every time I entered combat. It doesn’t help that combat becomes trivial once you start getting the combat skills — the wizard’s damage boost, in particular, can obliterate nearly everything with minimal effort. It really made me nostalgic for Hollow Knight limiting respawns to save points instead of room transitions — having to re-fight the same enemies every time you pass through an area looking for secrets is really tedious.
But, like, it was fine. If you like Metroidvanias you’ll probably like it.
(Why is it called “Episode 2”, though? I can’t find any reference to an episode 1 anywhere. Is it a writing goof? There were a disconcerting number of grammatical errors in the text, too. Please hire an editor, people.)
BioGun
Metroidvania
A run-and-gun style Metroidvania where you play as a vaccine attempting to destroy a virus within a dog’s body. In many ways this is a similar premise to Moonlight Pulse, but I liked it a lot less. The designer clearly has a very limited understanding of actual biology, and so does nothing interesting with the premise. Bacteria, viruses, and multicellular parasites are all roughly the same size; the obligatory electricity area is, for some bizarre reason, the lungs and not the brain or heart; the text acts as if an antibody is a type of cell (it isn’t); and the white blood cells’ headquarters is the heart even though a major problem in medicine is the fact that white blood cells can’t stay in the heart. There’s also a plotline about cells getting corrupted by the virus, and everyone acts as if this is totally unprecedented instead of how all viruses operate. This isn’t helped by a truly inexcusable number of grammatical errors in the text. They can’t even claim they didn’t have money for an editor, because there’s tons of unnecessary voice actors that doubtlessly cost far more.
Gameplay-wise, there are way too few fast travel points and way too many one-way passages, which made combing the map for secrets — you know, the core of Metroidvania gameplay — an absolute chore. I was also really surprised to discover you never get the ability to use more than one chip, especially when the defibrillator is so much better than anything else I never saw any reason to experiment. I never used any of the gun mods, either.
Tunic
Action Adventure/Puzzle
A Zelda-like that combines hard ability gating with knowledge gating. The central gimmick is that the game’s instruction manual exists in the game itself, assembled out of pages you collect from exploring the world. These will teach you about abilities you didn’t know you had, and as an added layer of obfuscation, the pages are written in a fictional cipher, forcing you to rely on illustrations and context. The endgame shifts from action-adventure gameplay into pure puzzle-solving as you decode the clues left by the manual, but I felt it did a better job of this than Fez, as this shift only occurs at the very end and is totally optional, being used only for the game’s most obscure secrets. Both halves of the game were very enjoyable.
My one big criticism is that the cipher language felt very extraneous. I was excited to dig into it since I normally love that sort of thing, but you only get the clues needed to decode the cipher towards the very end of the game, after you’ve already solved most of the puzzles. Even then, the cipher is so incredibly obtuse I genuinely can’t understand how people figured it out. (It’s phonetic, which is awful when English has such nonstandard pronunciation.) But to add insult to injury, the vast majority of the deciphered text isn’t even useful, only containing flavor text or hints for things you’d have to have figured out by that point in the game anyway. I don’t think my experience would have meaningfully changed if everything had just been in plain text.
Also, I have no idea how you’re supposed to figure out the “caustic light” puzzle. It’s the one puzzle I looked up the solution for and I felt no shame in doing so.