Iconoclasts

Playtime: 10.7 Hours

Just beat the game once on the default difficulty, with 62% collectibles and 65% tweaks crafted. Didn't do the sidequests. The game doesn't really incentivize any further exploration or backtracking to collect the rest of the stuff since the tweak system sucks, so I've got no interest in touching this anymore. No interest in the extra modes and NG+ either.

My initial impressions of this game were very positive; as can clearly be seen from the screenshots, the game's pixel art is beautiful - each environment is visually diverse and vibrant, the creatures are interesting, and the characters ooze life through their different poses and expressions despite being such small sprites on the screen. It all looks just as good in motion, too - this game places a huge emphasis on character interactions, and it would never have worked without the variety of explosive gesures and gesticulations that each character has. My favorites are probably the ChemiCo Contras with their ridiculous elbow-dance walk and T/Y-posing greeting animations. Speaking about the game in motion, it feels great mechanically - controls are very responsive, animation "tells" are clear without going overboard, weapons and traversal also feel intuitive and functional in general. Mistakes from unresponsiveness or clunkiness were very infrequent, except for maybe some of the Usurper setups. It's nice to play a game like this where my struggles are almost entirely with the game/enemy design, rather than with the player controls.

Unfortunately, overshadowing the great fundementals of the game is a great host of issues that I have with many other elements of the design; while some come from my own misaligned expectations going in, many others are things I simply don't like and hurt the overall experience. Firstly, this game isn't actually much of a Metroidvania as I originally believed it to be. Rather than the gradual upgrades and steadily-increasing arsenal of most Metroidvanias, the only mechanically-distinct collectibles in this game are a series of 4 upgrades; 2 new guns and 2 new wrench mechanics. These are also generally used to solve the puzzles in the game, which form the bulk of the actual gameplay segments; there isn't really a noticeable increase in combat prowess between the beginning and end of the game. There are still a lot of other collectibles for crafting a number of minor, customizable upgrades known as tweaks - examples include blocking one damaging strike, slightly faster move speed, etc. - but the effects are very minor and typically not noticeable (except for wrench spin duration, which allows you to charge your wrench in one swing), and you lose their benefits when you get hit, making them next to useless in most cases.

The consequence of the very flat upgrade structure in this game is naturally that there is very little incentive to explore the game at all. It's easy enough to accrue enough materials just from the crates you find out in the open to craft all the tweaks you'd really care to use, and so there is no reason to waste more time finding the more well-hidden chests containing all of the same things if they don't actually power you up at all. Not only that, but there are no traversal mechanics that make exploration faster or more fun when revisiting areas. Being able to Space Jump, or switch to Bat/Mist forms to more safely and quickly explore areas are examples of this done right, and play a huge part of the "power fantasy" aspect of other games. Having to slowly trudge through the areas and do all of the same puzzles again is so mindless and boring, taking away the excitement of solving a new puzzle while retaining the monotony of going through all of the motions to get where you want. It also means that the puzzle design barely evolves from the beginning of the game to the end; almost all of it revolves around the same concepts of wrenching something, shooting some bombs or powering electric coils to get a key or unlock a door. The game tries to bait you with some of the unlock chests by placing them just out of your reach, but several of them lack good indicators for the powers you need to obtain them. Consistently being just a couple of pixels away from a platform to grab a chest is more frustrating than being nowhere close; at least that way you'd notice that you need another unlock to get it.

The other half of the game's structure outside of the puzzle segments consists mostly of a very extensive series of boss fights, far too many for this game in my opinion (I think a walkthrough counted 23 distinct boss enemies, not including the fact that some of them have multiple phases). Not only that, but the vast majority of them are pretty awful and only get worse as the game goes on - the player is stuck with the same 2-3 weapons as they had at the start, so the new mechanics tend to come from the boss fights which tends to be frustrating and an example of poor design. So many bosses do this, introducing mechanics that are never seen again after the fight (like tagging, or stealth) and are almost always not fun to interact with. These mostly feel like concepts that the developer tried throughout his time working on this game, but instead of filtering only the good & fun ones, decided to use ALL of them regardless of quality. The silver lining here is that they aren't very difficult as a rule, and there is a very generous option to retry at the start of a boss when you die (as opposed to the previous save point), I don't consider that redemptive of the fact that most of these bosses don't justify their existence and make the general experience more irritating to play.

It's clear that a huge focus of this game is the story, as this game has much more dialogue and many more cutscenes than comparable games like Metroid, Castlevania et al. While most games in a comparable genre generally use a backstory as a thinly-veiled excuse to dump the player in some interesting location to explore, this game really wants to push the idea of an expansive adventure. It works quite well in principle and technically in execution, if not for the fact that the writing feels very juvenile, with the subtlety of a sledgehammer (plus some early-2010s memespeak too!). The themes (see the title of the game) are so tactlessly thrust into the game that it kind of ruins the story, as you can pretty clearly see how every character and scene is basically set up to tell the player something. In other words, none of the characters feel natural or real, and the script's tone matches that of a high-schoolers waifu fanfic. There is a very obvious irony of a game centered around describing the evils of ideological control, totalitarianism, and religion entirely written by a single person, and the game itself ends up falling into the same hole. The developer really needed a script editor or someone to bounce ideas against, since he appears to be completely unable to synthesize any sense of nuance in the characters he creates. It's an arrogant perspective he takes, and like so many other anti-religion commentaries fails to properly acknowledge any of the core reasons why many people find religion enticing to begin with.

At the end of the day, with all my conflict opinions on the different aspects of this game, I still managed to beat it eventually though I found it more and more exhausting to play as time went on. By the end, I was only able to play about 30 minutes to an hour before getting bored of it and going off to do something else - I only decided to press on because some of the fundamentals of this game are strong enough to just barely carry my interest forward. By the very end, I was more excited that I could finally uninstall the game than I was interested in the ending, because it simply drags on far too long. Even the 11 hours I played felt like too much for a series of samey puzzles, shitty boss fights, and amateurish commentary; I can't help but feel at the end of it all that some of the time I ended up spending on this was wasted in lieu of something ultimately better.