As a kid playing RPGs in the 90s, I’d roam backdrops spamming the pick-up button in hopes of secret treasure. I’d do this especially in PS1 Final Fantasies, with their deceptively inert hand-drawn environments, and their greasy invisible walls. You’d smoosh Squall Leonhart’s galloping form up against the level border as though bashing a skirting board with a hoover nozzle, and every now and then, you’d be rewarded with the hitch of a searching animation.
The developers of games like those had lovely ways of hiding things. Sometimes, you’d spy a fateful twinkle or the subtle inclusion of an ‘actual’ 3D object among the painted-on scenery. Sometimes, you’d see the lid of a treasure chest jutting from a cunningly lifted piece of 2D background, like a supermarket voucher discovered in a diary. And sometimes, the object would have no visible presence whatsoever, if only to save computer memory or development resources, and you’d deduce it from the arrangement of the scene, or just the existence of a space in itself. Why leave this carpet with a gap in the pattern? Why slot in an alleyway here, if not to slip something precious between the dusty jars at the far end?
Developers continue to hide things in games, of course – there are plenty of newer Japanese RPGs full of ephemeral goods to reward intemperate massaging of the controller – but videogame technologies have changed, genres have thickened and buckled and flowered and thawed, and play practices have come and gone. So it was lovely to fire up Angeline Era, the new game from Anodyne and Sephonie developers Analgesic Productions, and find myself once again restlessly buttoning the empty spaces of fantasy worlds.
As with Anodyne’s Tardis NPCs, there are whole landscapes concealed inside these landscapes. Hold a button in the right spot, and you’ll push through into a blocky Dreamcast dungeon of single room action-storytelling puzzles – “setpoems”, as developer Melos Han-Tani characterises them (they would probably resist my simplifying Dreamcast parallel) – with a selection of enemies or props to clear away before each room unseals.
The dungeon access points are invisible, given away only by the curiosity of their surroundings – a nook carved out of a block of forest, a pipe mouth befitting a certain plumber who rarely does any plumbing, or maybe just the possibility of moving somewhere in a universe that has purpose: you can slide behind this table, so isn’t it logical that there’s something to find?
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There’s a wittiness to the distribution that leans on knowledge of older games and their habits and foibles – habits and foibles that may seem novel and mysterious today – but Angeline Era isn’t pure homage. As with Anodyne, it recuperates half-familiar ideas into an alternative historical tradition of terms such as “bumpslash” combat, which Han-Tani and Analgesic’s other developer Marina Kittaka have broadly derived from the Ys series.
Bumpslashing characters strike automatically when you barge into something, and the emphasis is accordingly on poise, angle and knockback, rather than button combos and cooldowns. It results in fights where you weave around like a Dodgem car, at once avoiding projectiles and building momentum, rather than circling locked-on foes or letting them come to you, as in many Zeldalikes.
The game design’s casually scholarly method extends to its narrative, in which a lone warrior, Tets, searches for the fallen angelic spacecraft at the heart of a continent full of stubborn Fae wildlife. The setting brings together ideas from “Irish mythology, early Christian philosophy, and Japanese American history”. If that sounds saggingly bookish, fear not – the dialogue is often as trim as the contents of the average SNES textbox, and the writing in general is deft and daft with its allusions, without becoming unserious.
That’s my take after a couple of hours, anyway. If the hidden level premise is what drew me to Angeline Era, the setpoems are what’s holding my interest. They tease out the methodical playfulness of a top-down Zelda, developing a notion from room to room, such as the uses and abuses of rolling logs. But they are also daydreams of their own with peculiar rules. You get a gun, but it only fires up the screen, and must be reloaded by bumpslashing. So you’ve got to keep swooping below anything you want to shoot, and stomping the other enemies in an order that resupplies your ammo.
There’s a sense throughout of creative and crafty people enjoying themselves, without much inhibition. Hidden levels in the overworld are accessed by way of a pop-up Etrian Odyssey-style gauntlet of obstacles and foes. One of the first boss fights consists of exponential fish lasers. Another celebrates Pong in passing while teaching you new applications for bumpslashing. When you sleep at inns, you’re transported to a dream mansion of floating heads and lolloping floofbeasts, where you can trade shimmering scales for upgrades.
It’s a tricky game at times. The combat is as frantic as that of Morsels, with lots of projectiles and enemy types crammed into each screen. The camera angle makes seeing your shadow and landing precisely a challenge when, say, navigating dim corridors of spikes, but this feels like “natural” difficulty, an incentive to get better. Hopefully I’ll keep plugging and write more about Angeline Era next year, once we’ve put the Geoff Fest hangover behind us. It clearly has secrets to spare. Find it on Steam, with a demo still live as of writing.
