Saturday, September 20, 2014

Anodyne

Anodyne looked really appealing in the pictures, good art style and Zelda like.

The puzzles are good, but if felt a bit lacking in that you don't get that many items, so you end up reusing the same trick quite a few times per dungeon. Also, the same layouts/tricks seem to come up quite often. If you see a lock, and have a key, but there is another path, you have to go down the other path first, because there is a second lock a few rooms past the first lock.

Some of the puzzles were much more abusive than Zelda's puzzles, but you do get checkpoints that you can spawn back at if you die. And you'll die a lot... You also get warp gates quite often, so you don't have to spend a lot of time manually backtracking. This was an awesome feature.

The boss fights were almost usually trivial, because I could just swap hits with the boss until I won because I had more hitpoints. I think only one or two fights I had to actually use tactics. The last fight was one of these.

The characters and dialogue in the game are anywhere from simple and random, to amazingly creepy. Like, wow that's creepy. The ambient sounds usually helped with the creepy factor.

The controls are pretty good if you use a controller, but the Android on screen controls were almost impossible for some of the fighting you have to do in the game.

You will have to collect cards to finish the game. All of them. So don't skip any if you see them. The warp gates light up when you have found all the cards in that particular area.

As far as length, it took about 4.5 hours to beat completely. Some of that was a bit tedious, but overall it was enjoyable.

The good:
Good blend of puzzles and exploration keep you entertained throughout
The visuals are really good when they're good

The bad
The visuals can be really bad in some areas, and this is done on purpose.
It gets very creepy at parts, maybe just from a dark sense of humor?
The twitch jumping and bullet hell rooms were not even remotely enjoyable. They were probably the weakest point of the game. For this alone, I am extremely glad I switched to a controller on Steam instead of attempting to finish this on my Android.

These kinds of screens happen too often...

You find red bugs that give you an extra hit point.


This pretty well sums up how often you'll die. By the end I think I died over 30 times. Sometimes just to get back to a checkpoint faster though...