Anodyne
Anodyne is perhaps the best title to give this game because that's how I felt playing this.
It almost lands in terms of gameplay. The main issue is that enemies rarely pose much threat to you on virtue that none of them can hurt you more than one health piece, including the bosses. The only exceptions are two enemy types that you can't hurt and are designed for the purpose of avoiding. The ghosts are placed in wide open spaces so avoiding them is trivial. Some of the houses cluster them a bit, but it's too easy to escape the house entirely and reset their ai if they're becoming too dangerous. The other is a mummy in the 8-bit level and considering that level is designed to waste your time 75% of the encounters with these enemies don't serve as a barrier and are usually ignored. The scenarios you do have to avoid them in are a very obvious "hide in a corner and wait for them to walk past you" setpiece that's so rudimentary that these sections are boring.
Since enemies do low damage, it's way too easy to mindlessly brute force everything. Often times I'd be ramming myself into enemies since their layouts rarely cover for each others space nor do nearby hazards threaten you enough to care. Hell, you don't even get damaged if you fall down a pit. This wouldn't be so bad if health pickups weren't so generous and there weren't so many savepoints that healed your entire life bar. Or that your lifebar wasn't so big. Or the enemies didn't die so quickly. I wager the intent of this design is to make the every room its own compact challenge without leaning too much on the overall attrition of dungeon crawling, especially since the screen resets upon leaving and reentering, but I think that just makes the game boring when the moment to moment is so rudimentary.
It's a shame because I do think there are some creative ideas in the enemy design. I like the enemy that sprays gas to mess up your controls which could have been cool if hazards and other enemies posed more of a threat since stuff that can mess with your flow is neat. I like the big lion enemies that shoot fire, those could control space in cool ways but they just put them alone in a room and usually you can just walk past them unless the game forces you to fight them. Hell, I think the template for most of the bosses is solid but they all run into the issue of not hurting you hard enough and dying too quickly. I felt like I was being blue balled in every boss fight given how quickly all of them end up dying so quickly, especially since some like the circus fight have a strong setpiece but I ended up being able to brute force it too easily because they barely did damage to me.
Aside from combat, a lot of the level design is puzzle based but I think the issue with them is that they're too easily solved. In virtually every case, the first solution you come up with is going to solve it. The only time it gets a bit creative is with the centipede enemies but I feel they put the scope of them too low to be interesting. Any time you encounter them, there are only 1-3 of them in the room at most and they typically section them off to a small section of the room, which makes the scope of their puzzles too simple to be interesting.
Mechanically, it's intentionally limited. The main weapon has an arc like NES Zelda but movement is more akin to the GBC games. Nothing wrong with this, but it feels kinda meaningless when enemies don't take advantage of your vertical range and come at you at differing angles to force you to reposition properly. You also get a jump which is fine when you're using it for the intended purpose but it's very funny how many cases there are where you use the jump to skip sections of the gameplay. The dust mechanic is novel but you're not able to take it with you beyond the screen you're in and that limits its utility drastically, and it's only used for two things: blocking wall projectiles and as a raft. The former is always conveniently laid out to you making it trivial whereas the latter is mostly just gating, since nothing really changes mechanically while you're on the dust raft other than there being occasional currents that affect movement speed. These *could* be cool but the only thing these currents affect is pacing since they're never used for any setpiece to challenge you or provide obstacles in fighting enemies.
Narratively It's a subtext heavy game that inspires a lot of different interpretations. But I think the main conceit is about social anxiety and isolation with the pains the come with that. Everyone is looking to find ways to escape pain or danger, and the abstractions point to the difficulties of social acceptance. But the issue with this is that any interpretation of this is superficial about how social interactions are played into and its shock value doesn't exactly make it more biting when the direction it's taking is simply pointing to the existence of social anxiety and how this can exist. Okay, what are the ideals your family embrace that put you at odds with them? What's the social environment and how does your identity tie into this? What does the social anxiety turn you into? What exactly is the "dark side" that represents your negatives? What makes you, YOU? The symbolism seems to only want to address the existence of anxiety and social isolation without any real context that these things exist in. The "just accept yourself :D" conclusion it reaches with all this is also painfully bland in a way I find eyerolling.
But to give it credit; for as superficial as it is, the way these ideas are communicated are very cool. The normal people being harmless obstacles that seem threatening at first but easy to run past is a really cool way to represent generic social interactions and how self-imposed these fears are. The "Youngtown" segment is a great way of communicating complacency in the face of catastrophe underlaying in society. I take little issue with the way its symbolism is represented.
But I feel what doesn't deliver to me is that as a game that comes from the heart and from someone's personal experiences, I feel like I have no idea who this person is. It asserts high value in human connections but doesn't feel it wants us to connect to anyone beyond a superficial representation of what they are. It's overly broad to the point of feeling indistinct and there's thousands of stories that more directly deal with the same superficial themes, it's just this one coats this in heavier symbolism than most. I can get the reasons people resonate with this because such broad framing is easy to self-insert relatability into but I find surface level relatability boring and shallow. I want something more meaty if you're going to do an abstract representation of your life experiences and the only meat here is abstraction. It's far less biting about social interactions than it thinks it is, and honestly if I can find similar conclusions and themes in something like Legally Blonde and Little Miss Sunshine then I don't think what Anodyne boasts is all that impressive in actuality. At least those films had people in them that are more tangibly defined.
It almost lands in terms of gameplay. The main issue is that enemies rarely pose much threat to you on virtue that none of them can hurt you more than one health piece, including the bosses. The only exceptions are two enemy types that you can't hurt and are designed for the purpose of avoiding. The ghosts are placed in wide open spaces so avoiding them is trivial. Some of the houses cluster them a bit, but it's too easy to escape the house entirely and reset their ai if they're becoming too dangerous. The other is a mummy in the 8-bit level and considering that level is designed to waste your time 75% of the encounters with these enemies don't serve as a barrier and are usually ignored. The scenarios you do have to avoid them in are a very obvious "hide in a corner and wait for them to walk past you" setpiece that's so rudimentary that these sections are boring.
Since enemies do low damage, it's way too easy to mindlessly brute force everything. Often times I'd be ramming myself into enemies since their layouts rarely cover for each others space nor do nearby hazards threaten you enough to care. Hell, you don't even get damaged if you fall down a pit. This wouldn't be so bad if health pickups weren't so generous and there weren't so many savepoints that healed your entire life bar. Or that your lifebar wasn't so big. Or the enemies didn't die so quickly. I wager the intent of this design is to make the every room its own compact challenge without leaning too much on the overall attrition of dungeon crawling, especially since the screen resets upon leaving and reentering, but I think that just makes the game boring when the moment to moment is so rudimentary.
It's a shame because I do think there are some creative ideas in the enemy design. I like the enemy that sprays gas to mess up your controls which could have been cool if hazards and other enemies posed more of a threat since stuff that can mess with your flow is neat. I like the big lion enemies that shoot fire, those could control space in cool ways but they just put them alone in a room and usually you can just walk past them unless the game forces you to fight them. Hell, I think the template for most of the bosses is solid but they all run into the issue of not hurting you hard enough and dying too quickly. I felt like I was being blue balled in every boss fight given how quickly all of them end up dying so quickly, especially since some like the circus fight have a strong setpiece but I ended up being able to brute force it too easily because they barely did damage to me.
Aside from combat, a lot of the level design is puzzle based but I think the issue with them is that they're too easily solved. In virtually every case, the first solution you come up with is going to solve it. The only time it gets a bit creative is with the centipede enemies but I feel they put the scope of them too low to be interesting. Any time you encounter them, there are only 1-3 of them in the room at most and they typically section them off to a small section of the room, which makes the scope of their puzzles too simple to be interesting.
Mechanically, it's intentionally limited. The main weapon has an arc like NES Zelda but movement is more akin to the GBC games. Nothing wrong with this, but it feels kinda meaningless when enemies don't take advantage of your vertical range and come at you at differing angles to force you to reposition properly. You also get a jump which is fine when you're using it for the intended purpose but it's very funny how many cases there are where you use the jump to skip sections of the gameplay. The dust mechanic is novel but you're not able to take it with you beyond the screen you're in and that limits its utility drastically, and it's only used for two things: blocking wall projectiles and as a raft. The former is always conveniently laid out to you making it trivial whereas the latter is mostly just gating, since nothing really changes mechanically while you're on the dust raft other than there being occasional currents that affect movement speed. These *could* be cool but the only thing these currents affect is pacing since they're never used for any setpiece to challenge you or provide obstacles in fighting enemies.
Narratively It's a subtext heavy game that inspires a lot of different interpretations. But I think the main conceit is about social anxiety and isolation with the pains the come with that. Everyone is looking to find ways to escape pain or danger, and the abstractions point to the difficulties of social acceptance. But the issue with this is that any interpretation of this is superficial about how social interactions are played into and its shock value doesn't exactly make it more biting when the direction it's taking is simply pointing to the existence of social anxiety and how this can exist. Okay, what are the ideals your family embrace that put you at odds with them? What's the social environment and how does your identity tie into this? What does the social anxiety turn you into? What exactly is the "dark side" that represents your negatives? What makes you, YOU? The symbolism seems to only want to address the existence of anxiety and social isolation without any real context that these things exist in. The "just accept yourself :D" conclusion it reaches with all this is also painfully bland in a way I find eyerolling.
But to give it credit; for as superficial as it is, the way these ideas are communicated are very cool. The normal people being harmless obstacles that seem threatening at first but easy to run past is a really cool way to represent generic social interactions and how self-imposed these fears are. The "Youngtown" segment is a great way of communicating complacency in the face of catastrophe underlaying in society. I take little issue with the way its symbolism is represented.
But I feel what doesn't deliver to me is that as a game that comes from the heart and from someone's personal experiences, I feel like I have no idea who this person is. It asserts high value in human connections but doesn't feel it wants us to connect to anyone beyond a superficial representation of what they are. It's overly broad to the point of feeling indistinct and there's thousands of stories that more directly deal with the same superficial themes, it's just this one coats this in heavier symbolism than most. I can get the reasons people resonate with this because such broad framing is easy to self-insert relatability into but I find surface level relatability boring and shallow. I want something more meaty if you're going to do an abstract representation of your life experiences and the only meat here is abstraction. It's far less biting about social interactions than it thinks it is, and honestly if I can find similar conclusions and themes in something like Legally Blonde and Little Miss Sunshine then I don't think what Anodyne boasts is all that impressive in actuality. At least those films had people in them that are more tangibly defined.
Mini Review: Anodyne is perhaps the best title to give this game because that's how I felt playing this. It almost lands in terms of gameplay. The main issue is that enemies rarely pose much threat to you on virtue that none of them can hurt you more than one health piece, including the bosses. The only exceptions are two enemy types that you can't hurt anyway and are designed for the purpose of avoiding. The ghosts are placed in wide open spaces so avoiding...