Ok! Just beat Endacopia for the first time and want to do a review.
First off, this review will have mild spoilers in the main section, and a more explicit spoiler section blanked out below. Please do not read too far if you want to experience the game as intended.
SO!
Endacopia is Andyland’s first game, crowdfunded into existence on Kickstarter. You play as Mellow, a child who appears to be trapped in a weird world. Without spoiling anything, this game does a fantastic job of taking all of Andy’s animation styles and using them where they fit being used, it’s honestly incredible to see “Normal” things in his bright and happy animation style, and then more serious or horror aspects immediately drop into that PS2-Era jarring lines and uncomfortable realism look. Its brilliant. The game should run you 6-8 hours depending on the pace you take. The game plays like the old Sam and Max games, with you clicking through options to look at, touch, or talk to things, or using an item from your inventory. Despite this, it’s not nearly as convoluted and you have a helper you can summon at almost any point for guidance, so people who are unfamiliar with the genre will still enjoy it without TOO much frustration.
This is the only spoiler free section. To put it bluntly, this is a damn good game and you should play it. The more spoilery sections will have more critique but that doesn’t change that you should absolutely play it if you love psychological horror.
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Mild Spoilers
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So, In these sections, I will talk a bit more about the general feel of the game and things I thought didn’t work as well as they could.
To start, the game is subdivided into 3 worlds and an “Intermission” zone. The intermission zone is your house, and it divides each of the three chapters you play.
Starting out after the prologue, you have to visit each zone to find a piece of yourself to get back the ability to talk, interact, and see. This sets you up mentally to think that the zones have “Overlap” as in, your progress in one zone might be stopped until you explore another some more, metroidvania style. This is false, the three zones can be played entirely without leaving them once you have your parts back. This was a bit of a disappointment, but not a big deal.
The issue arises in the overall structure of the three zones.
Misery town, the circus themed one, and the Corporate one, can both be beaten in about 20-30 minutes with a fair amount of ease. The “Animal town” area, Timesville, took me 3 hours and was DRAMATICALLY more intricate, more fun, and more “Psychological horrory” than the other two places. This is a big issue for the flow of the game, ESPECIALLY if you play it first. Tip (The talking sign) even mentions this if you play it first, that he is confused or concerned you tackled it first.
This was a huge loss as far as buildup goes, because while the remaining two zones have fragments of the “Horror” style, Timesville has the LIONS SHARE BY FAR, so beating it first essentially took the endgame out of the picture and I played through the less deep things after. It would be like playing the climax of a silent hill game in the otherworld and spending the rest of the game in the fog world, it’s a total distortion of the buildup of the story and the horror, and it just plain sucks that those two worlds got so much less time than Timesville did.
Which brings up an issue that I probably will get some flak for mentioning. We got a trailer for Endacopia In December 2023, lets just say 2024 to be fair. That trailer basically showed off 70+% of the main areas you can go in the release game, a year and a half before release. Andy put out multiple “Need more time” videos in the interim, which is fine, art takes time. It is just an unfortunate mix of “The content feels light, especially being only one area feels fully developed” and “Almost everything I did, I saw in a trailer made before the halfway mark of the game’s release schedule.” Makes the game feel like it was a compromise of the actual full concept. It doesn't feel right that a game divided by chapters player choice deciding where it goes first should have 2 twenty minute chapters and 1 3-hour long Magnum Opus chapter, it just lends more to the feeling that one chapter is truly "Done" and the other 2 are not. The flow of the good chapter is also such that it gets more and more demented as you go deeper, and you end up expecting that from the other chapters, just to get to the end of a 20 minute adventure that was very tame by comparison.
[b]HOWEVER! This is a ~15 dollar game that takes 6-8 hours to beat, so cost wise, its extremely fair, almost too fair. These complaints arise not because I feel like it wasn't worth it, I DESPERATELY WANTED MORE! And would have gladly paid more for what I did get regardless. [/b]
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Big Spoilers
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[spoiler]There are numerous mechanics that feel like they are teased but never implemented. The main questline of Timesville is there is a serial killer detective story, and one of the best horror moments in the game involves him using his main power “Mimicry” to mimic a resident and try to kill you.
The local police station has a document that lists a sort of Mandela Catalogue esque “avoid the doppel” guide, and it includes a number of things to look out for. So, our tiny gamer brains go
“Oh my! A town full of varied residents, a day night cycle that is dangerous, and he MIMICKED SOMEONE in the intro to the town, I am going to have to be careful of him doppel-ing people!”
So you watch, you check anytime you are out at night to make sure none of the listed symptoms are visible. One of them is “They speak silently” so you call out to everyone from a distance to check before getting close, make them say hi…. And nothing. It never happened to me, no one was “Doppeled” and the danger at night basically was just the literal serial killer appearing as a big obvious shadow and chasing you if you got close. No Doppels, no tension from walking near townsfolk, I have no idea why this mechanic was teased and then only used in a scripted event. It would have been a goldmine for apprehension and scares and it isn’t bloody used.
You get told to use the eye tool to check on Mellow early on, seemingly teasing at a sanity system, but this never pans out beyond letting you see what Mellow thinks of an event. No consequences for letting it get "Low"
Outside those issues and the shallow depth of the non Timesville zones, there is kinda just a lack of plot consistency. That is probably intentional, this game calls back to the “What on earth do you mean THAT is how I was supposed to progress” era of point and click games, but it does bum out some of the detective stuff you do when things aren’t linked and are instead just sorta sequential unrelated plot devices. At one point you sneak into a different criminal’s cell to find clues, unprompted, and he has clues to find another person he has never met and has nothing in common with. It fits the genre, but it does ruin the bit a bit.
Last complaint, Tip. He was cute, I love his attitude, but he was basically a cognitohazard. His job is to steer you the right way if you are struggling in an area, but it is often less a matter of “Hey heres a hint” and more often “Do this” and that pulverizes the fun of puzzle solving. I often accidentally clicked and summoned him (He is summoned by using your “Talk” button on yourself, often mellow is very close to something he needs to interact with and thus you click yourself by accident) and suddenly here comes Tip to give me a gamefaqs walkthrough. He really needed a context menu that lets you select items or ask his feelings on other things.
And that’s it! Despite those complaints, I legitimately loved the game and recommend it to basically anyone who loves horror and puzzles. Its really damn good, and I hope we get more in the future! Good Job Andy.[/spoiler]
