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Saturday, 1 February 2020

Anodyne, Artefact Adventure, and Aveyond

So, Anodyne is a weird little game.  It's Zelda-style (apparently, I never played the early Zeldas), with a very symbolic, eerie atmosphere, not I'm not really sure what it's symbolic of exactly.  I'm not really up on my Jungian psychology, which is apparently what it's inspired by.  Possibly, it's just that everyone is Jesus in purgatory.  A lot of it seemed to be about being a gamer - some of it referenced things people say to gamers when they want them to stop playing, other parts referenced how weird it would be for an npc to live in those worlds, and at one point someone starts talking about how repetitive the days are, which makes a lot of sense when you're trying for a speedrun.




My first playthrough took 7 hours, but a lot of that was exploring, getting lost, and forgetting which exit lead where.  I quit my second playthrough at just over 3 hours, since the speedrun goal is 3, but, again, a lot of that was getting lost and forgetting which exit went where.  You get exactly one save, and the game autosaves, so you can just reload and do it more quickly.  On my third go, I finished in around 2:40, and then I went and got all 48 cards - there are 37 to collect in the main game and another 11 post game - and all 13 ??? items, little easter eggs spread throughout the game.  One of them involves waiting nearly 2 hours for a bunny to move across a screen, which is very reminiscent of one of the seven stars in Braid.  I left the game running and went and sewed myself a shirt.


I don't like that the game played in full screen.  I did get an x-box controller just before my second playthrough, and that was definitely a lot easier than using the keyboard.  I got the controller to play FF-Type-0 because that game is absolutely impossible without it.  I had been using my old PS2 controller - and when I say old, I mean 16 years - but Anodyne didn't accept its input.

I didn't enjoy the game at first, though the difficulty in downloading it was probably a part of that.  I got into a little bit more once it started to make sense to me, and I enjoyed it enough to do the speedrun, which I don't normally do (see, for example, FF9 and Braid).  It helped that the speedrun time was quite generous.  You don't have to do everything perfectly, and you can get lost a little bit, just not quite as lost as I did the first time I attempted it.  Overall, I spent around 19 hours playing this game and, considering I bought it for 69p, that's a really good deal, that's less than 3p per hour of entertainment.

The next game on my list is Aveyond 3-1: Lord of Twilight.  I have no idea what this game is.  I didn't buy it on steam, so presumably I got it as part of a humble bundle, alongside a game I actually wanted.  Apparently it's the first chapter in a four part series, all of which are prized at £6.99 and which, together, contain 20 steam achievements.  Honestly, it seems like they've tried to milk as much money as they can from it.  I'll try playing the first one and see how it goes from there - either it's good enough to buy the rest or it's just...not.

The next game on my list would have been Artefact Adventure, which is another game I didn't actually buy on Steam.  I deleted that one because I played the first few minutes and there was a coding error.  If they can't be arsed to check their code, I can't be arsed to play their game.  Maybe it got better after that point, I don't know, but I'm currently making a similar type of game and you can be damn sure I'm checking it for bugs throughout.

ETA:  I had a quick read of the TV tropes page to see if they made any sense of the symbolism, and learned about a 49th card.  So I went and got that one and opened the damn gate.  I'm pretty sure there is nothing else in this game, since there's no way to open the 50th gate.


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