Anodyne

Note: I played a couple of hours of the Steam version, but ultimately beat the game on Switch. Both versions are the same. Anodyne is a surreal game with some hard to follow plot elements, but mainly plays like a Game Boy Zelda game, albeit with less items to swap between. There are several entertaining dungeons and bosses, and a lot of overworld exploration, some of it required and some for optional collectibles. The ultimate meaning of the game is still debated online, but as you seem to be exploring someone's subconscious, it can have some very unsettling elements, while not being an outright horror game. I really enjoyed the unusual atmosphere. As for negatives, some of the puzzles can be a little unpolished, and the difficulty isn't going to push you very hard. If you haven't been looking carefully for items along the way, you may get blocked from finishing the game until you do some backtracking later. But there's a good several hours of content here that's worth trying.

Although Anodyne starts as a predictable retread of Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening for the Game Boy (Cue a whole 5 minutes of me asking: "Ok, when will you give me Roc's Feather, because it looks like you want me to have that"), it dared to then ask me of the sins I committed to my personal copy of Link's Awakening DX on the Gameboy Color as a Teenager and then blurred the lines between "Familiar Romp" and "Love Letter". Once it had me tied around it's finger, it tugged at my heartstrings into an inevitable impassable brick wall with a final message: "Now, I bet you wish there was more, because that was why you did this 20 years ago, right?" 9.5/10

I got this along with Angeline Era, and had never played it before. This is a really good surreal Zelda-style game, and I can tell the story is building up to something memorable. 👍👍👍

This review was originally me ripping the game apart for being "not as good as Undertale" and "feels like it came out of the early 2010s and has all the marks of a bad creepypasta"... until I realized it released before Undertale. In 2013. Oops. But, that goes to show how impossible it is to appreciate this game when other similar projects have so far superannuated it. Anodyne is still its own game, it still has its own quirks- but this is something like Tower of Druaga or Pac Land. A very influential game to a small handful of people who went on to make stuff even cooler than it, so most people have heard way more about its progeny than the ancestor. If you try to play this game after having played Undertale, Oneshot, Miside, Doki Doki Literature Club, or Everhood, please try to keep the time period in mind. This game takes inspiration not from those, but from the true OGs like OFF and the MOTHER games/EarthBound. It WAS a good game, but you'd find it difficult to play now for the first time.

Local janitor sweeps the nation

I Recommend

Sometimes a game sears into your brain. but you don't understand why. I mean it's really good, but there is something unsettling that doesn't make sense the same way the world doesn't make any sense. A decade later you replay it on a whim and the confusion is no more. You've changed so much.

Ca parle beaucoup d'Angeline Era ces jours-ci donc j'ai décidé de faire les 2 jeux Anodyne, faits par les mêmes personnes, d'abord. A l'époque je m'étais perdu et j'étais passé à autre chose assez vite. Ca fait un peu penser à Zelda 1, jeu vu de haut avec un mélange de puzzle (dans l'ensemble rien de trop dur mais suffisamment pour se sentir malin) et de combat (basique). Pas mal de secrets à trouver et la map est plutôt grande, mais y a suffisamment d'indices pour savoir où aller (donc avec le recul je sais pas trop pourquoi j'avais abandonné la première fois). Quelques donjons avec chacun leur boss attendent. L'écriture est très typique des jeux indés d'une certaine époque mais pas au sens péjoratif. J'ai essayé le post-game parce qu'il donne accès à un pouvoir qui semble broken et je me suis immédiatement perdu dans Glitch Land donc on va passer au 2. Très sympa dans l'ensemble et à essayer si vous aimez un peu les jeux à la Zelda 1.

I've not played a lot of classic zelda to completion but this game was a breath of fresh air in its design and narrative. a very cute game that made me smile

クリア日: 2017/04/27 👍️👍️👍️👍️👍️🎵