The AA Report: May 19, 2020
Here I am, catchin’ up on The AA Report again! I have no real good excuse, other then I fell down a deep, dark hole of musical biographies, one that began with my recent consumption of Ministry: The Lost Gospels According to Al Jourgensen, an unflinchingly debaucherous, semi-lucid tale of Al Jourgensen, founder of the the seminal industrial band Ministry, and his back-and-forth with copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. Al is a fascinating human being, and as I often do when I read an autobiography on a pop culture icon such as him, I’ll usually absorb a lot of their work when I’m not reading about their life. I’ve been a fan of Ministry for a long time, but I never bothered to really dig my heels in on their history or background. Now that I’ve done that in full, I can return to normal operations, which includes… well, catching up on The AA Report!
What I have for you today is from two weeks ago: first-impression reviews on Unformed, She Will Punish Them, and The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]. Enjoy!
Unformed
Unformed bills itself as a Souls-like Metroidvania 2D horizontal ARPG, all of which are accurate descriptions, I suppose. The game is more or less a Souls-like to its core, which comes with preconceived notions attached to it already. Souls-like is the new “it girl” of gaming fads, but I can’t say I’m entirely upset as a big fan of the Dark Souls series. It’s cool to see different developer takes on the iconic From Software franchise that made dying ad-naseum so popular, and Unformed is one of the newer contenders to enter the arena. Unformed takes the Souls formula and puts it into a 2D platforming landscape, not entirely dissimilar to other games of its ilk like Death’s Gambit, Salt and Sanctuary, or Blasphemous, but also adds in a twist of Sekiro or Nioh with an Eastern setting and matching lore. The game starts in traditional Souls-like setting: you wake up on a beach, unsure of why you’re there, with little defense and little direction, and an enemy awaits your arrival. You equip one of 3 starter weapons (a heavy broadsword, a more nimble katana, or a quick set of dual blades), and make your way through this new and mysterious land. Combat felt good, though at times movement did feel a bit slow and plodding. The art style of the game looks great, didn’t really have a lot of complaints there. I would venture to say that there are perhaps some things the game could stand to add to make it stand out from the rest of the pack, and while the Eastern setting could be that thing for them, in my short time with Unformed I’m not sure there was enough there just yet to give it a unique edge over the other Souls-like games that have come out, and are coming out, on the market. It’s okay to stay within the lines when coloring in a game of this genre, but it also speaks volumes when a game can manage to define it’s own terms and boundaries that make it unique within that genre. Unformed is still in its early development stages, so perhaps these are things that will be refined during its development cycle. The proof of concept is there, and I think what they have so far for the game is a solid concept. Unformed is currently available on Steam.
She Will Punish Them
Listen… this is a game that I felt I had to check out on my stream. Like, I had to. Look at it. She Will Punish Them bills itself as a “dark fantasy ARPG that lets you engage in brutal and gory combat in the demonic realm.” You play as a succubus, starting out in a castle of what I can only assume is one made of pain, and you spend your days going out into a map to, as the title suggests, punish them. Who is them? Skeletons. Goblins. Zombies. Them. The purpose of why you’re out to punish them is a bit unclear, other then the fact that you’re a succubus, and that is your entire purpose. Otherwise, I think the purpose is to decorate your castle of pain, and to buy increasingly skimpier outfits that are somehow equipped for battle in the demonic realm. Seriously though, She Will Punish Them‘s gameplay loop isn’t really that BAD – shockingly – but it does feel pretty cut-and-paste from already existing assets in other games. The game basically looks like the thumbnail for an erotic Skyrim mod, and I do not think that was an accident. The developers of this game make other titles featuring busty, half-naked women, such as Beauty and Violence: Valkyries and Her War. I feel compelled to check these out for the good of the stream, but I digress. I spent around an hour and a half playing She Will Punish Them, which has the feel of a dungeon crawler like Path of Exile if it were zoomed in way too close to the character. Default control mappings were a bit confusing, but as I said a bit ago… the gameplay wasn’t altogether awful. I actually found myself progressing through each map to see what the next one had to offer, and as you got further down the rabbit hole, you found that they added more enemies, tougher enemies, and the walk through your lingerie tangerine dream wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. In She Will Punish Them, when you die, you lose all of your armor and character progress, and die I did. You are able to start over on the map that you died, but it’s not going to be easy – encouragement to start over from the bottom to at least gather weapons, armor, and coin, is probably high. However, there wasn’t a lot of variety in She Will Punish Them to warrant wanting to do that – revisiting levels wasn’t a big deal per se, but only because each level looked like the last one, and outside of the morbid curiosity to see just how far I could get, or what kind of armor I could find, the motivation to continue trekking through She Will Punish Them waned quickly as its novelty wore thin. I didn’t hate the concept of the game at all. I think its execution was a little cheap, and while I’m willing to forgive it for many of its shortcomings, I think that She Will Punish Them is a one-and-done kind of game for me, and probably for most people.
Buy She Will Punish them on Steam
The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]
The Eternal Castle is a bit of an enigma for me, and probably for most people. Right off the bat, the game tells you it’s a remaster (the official title is The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]), telling that while the original came out in 1987, this updated version of the game features additional game mechanics and other modern concveniences. Doing a little research lands you on articles from sites like Eurogamer or Polygon, which state that the game simply is not remastered from any original source; this is just a clever ruse to set the tone for a nostalgic experience in one way or another. Yet, you can also find other pockets of the internet where people have uncovered real places to download The Eternal Castle in its original glory. I would venture to say that the viral marketing of this team is influenced by old guerilla campaigns for traditional media, such as The Blair Witch Project‘s entire basis for existing and being released, or Nine Inch Nails’ dystopic ARG for Year Zero. I deeply appreciate when companies go to those kinds of lengths to invoke an emotional investment in something beyond surface value, because it adds another layer of narrative or commentary to the entire experience. Such could be said for The Eternal Castle, which I still have yet to talk about in terms of the actual game. So, here we go. The Eternal Castle is a discomforting 2-bit CGA game that bares a lot of similarities to one very memorable game from the past: Another World. Another World, for lack of better words, was simply ahead of its time. Released in 1991, the game featured minimalism in both graphics and storytelling, vector form and rotoscoping to convey character movements, and innovation with cinematic effects that reached far into the influence of more modern day titles we’ve come to know and love. The Eternal Castle, for all intents and purposes, is homage to titles like this, or Prince of Persia – another title that came up often during my time with the game on stream. The game drops you into an uncompromisingly brutal and desolate world, where your ship has crashed and you must find the pieces of it that were lost in combat. Trudging through forgotten cities, battlefields, and laboratories, your character journeys onward in search of the mother AI that you were sent to find and return to space. I’ll be honest here: The Eternal Castle‘s use of CGA is both a blessing and a curse. I love how it looks, but I also hate it. It’s endearing as a style, and you definitely get used to it after a while, but it can be very difficult to look at over time. Fonts are nearly impossible to read, and controlling the character can sometimes feel like you’ve been jettisoned back to the 80’s, when archaic control peripherals were a thing you had to endure on a regular basis. And you know what? This is absolutely by design, which sends me back into the loop of love and hate with this game. The more I played it, the more I got sucked into what was going on. I’m very big into homage work in all mediums, and self-awareness of that kind of work and the capacity to take it seriously, but not too seriously, is huge. The Eternal Castle unapologetically understands this concept, and I think it’s wonderful. The soundtrack to the game is also a very slamming heavy synthwave piece put together by French artist kiiro, and that alone is worth picking up the game for, if nothing else. Fans of retro-style platformers will likely enjoy this one, but don’t be surprised if you have a hard time looking at it: but also, don’t expect The Eternal Castle to coddle you about this, either. The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] is available on Nintendo Switch and Steam.