Anodyne

Anodyne is a pretty odd game, taking aesthetic, mechanical and structural cues from the GBC-era Zelda titles, but wrapping it in a very strange atmosphere of surrealist landscapes, moments of unease and horror, and a dark mysticism that can be likened to Yume Nikki and the more otherworldly stages in the Mother series. It's a respectable set of influences to draw from, and a lot of its value as an experience comes from these roots - but the severe lack of polish and over-reliance on cheeky parody and meta-commentary drag it down into the "rough gem" category for me.

The theme of the game is exploration, where the protagonist Young and his trusty broom have to explore The Land in search of keys and cards that will open the path to the mysterious Briar's domain, whom you must save. Along the way you'll explore mazes, fight some enemies a la top-down Zelda, and explore gridset mazes and dungeons. I particularly like the variety in scenery - The Land itself works as a hubworld that feels convincingly material, with forests and a beach and a lake and some small houses throughout. As the player delves further in anyone direction, and away from this hub, the locales get progressively more ethereal and incomprehensible. There's a cheery black-and-white town a la Tranquility Lane where the music stops almost entirely and you're chased by shadow people, a smoggy red alien world with giant bipedal walkers roaming the landscape, a shady circus with anecdotes of all of the freak accidents that happened during training with the trapezes and animals, a haunted apartment complex with Ghostbusters and cockroaches... it all adds up to a consistently engaging, off-kilter experience traversing the world and making progress. The music is also consistently excellent, with some fun chiptunes sprinkled in a stew of dark ambient soundscapes and unsettling pad synths. The soundtrack consistently elevated the experience for me in just about every area there was to explore.

The lack of continuity or really any connection to the overarching plot is what kills the mood with this aesthetic variety, though. Non-euclidean or unexplainable worlds are fine, I actually quite like them, but having basically no relevance beyond being cool setpieces is slightly annoying. In that way, you could reasonably frame Anodyne's strange tone and pacing as an excuse to string together ideas that normally wouldn't work if the game took itself seriously at all. There is also a smattering of dialogue that is simply there to crack jokes at the expense of the game itself, for leaning into cliched dialogue or as references to other games. I strongly feel that these moments hurt the overall experience, as they felt like an admission of sorts that the game did not have a strong enough identity to stand on its own merits. The rest of the NPCs speak more philosophically, with many monologues working more as prose, and unforunately no major theme stringing them together beyond some motifs of isolation and loneliness. However, in both of these scenarios, the narrative at hand takes a backseat. Having freshly completed the game hours ago I remember these scripted moments of dialogue much more than the actual storyline, for better and for worse. In a more focused project, there's a some potential here for something interesting, and I hope Analgesic can get to the heart of it.

I also need to talk about the technical limitations - it may have been the Switch port I played Anodyne on - but the game ran incredibly poorly, with dropped frames in areas with high sprite counts, slowdown on pause, and glitchy AI getting stuck on tiles and even clipping out of bounds. Young also controls on the slipperier side, and the platforming sections tend not to care about how erratically the protagonist moves. The combat also feels awful because of the lack of enemy pushback, meaning that for enemies with set movement patterns, hitting them never deters their path unless it's a killing blow. The GBC Zelda games Anodyne takes influence from unanimously had this feature, because without it, battles are less like a physical swordfight and more like swiping at balls of gas. This was hardly an issue for most of the game thanks to generous and frequent max healthy upgrades, but the final bit of the base game is brutally difficult because of some enemy spam gauntlets where this pushback is not present. After completing the main game, you unlock the ability to swap tiles everywhere in main world, encouraging you to boundary break and find additional secrets. This sort of incentivized OOB stuff is really interesting (you can even navigate to your own sprite sheet, basically breaking the game), but the interface for navigation is so clunky and tedious that after a couple of objects found I wasn't very interested in continuing. Still, a unique extra diversion that apparently returns in the sequel.

Despite my complaints with Anodyne, I'd be hardpressed to say I outright disliked it. There is a distinct lack of polish or focus throughout but what is there is certainly worthy of discussion in both what is succeeded and failed to communicate. The pieces are in place to build on this foundation, but it needs to shed its self-pitying tone and reach for something greater, past the cues of its influences. Its sequel, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, has been garnering something of a cult following, so I hope to see how Analgesic builds on this going forward.