Metroidvania is the backbone of the indie space. At his PAX East last month, PID Games made a good case for why the genre has a strong enough spine to support the media.
Described as “punk rock” by brand manager Stanislas Jun Peyrat, PID Games is a smaller publisher with four games on the show floor this year. Two of his, Elypse and Vernal Edge, are exploratory games that take on genres where Samus and Simon forge interesting new directions.
Jun Peyrat described Elypse as a combination of Moon Studios’ Ori games and Hollow Knight. Once he started playing, he was amazed at the accuracy of the description. The demo ends with a race against a watch that may have been taken from Ori. Using all the abilities you’ve learned so far, you’ll have to quickly jump and dash through tunnels as Indiana Jones-style boulders crash. along behind you. The controls are satisfying and intuitive, so this was fun and not frustrating.
Like Hollow Knight, the world is dark and your character, Faye, has a round white teardrop shaped head and asymmetric jet black eyes. One looks like a crescent moon and the other looks like a bird’s beak. As he travels through the 2D world of the game, he is assisted by Nyx, a dark-cloaked character with a head that looks like a cracked pot that barely contains light from a very bright light source.
Unlike most 2D platformers, the game assigns the most important actions to triggers. Holding down the right trigger will cause Faye to dash in the direction the thumbstick is pointing. Similarly, Faye can fire “thorns” with her left trigger. During the 30 minute demo, we upgraded both abilities so that he could dash twice and shoot twice. The face buttons were mostly unused. You can dash in any direction, so that’s your jump too.
Vernal Edge combines painterly pixel-art platforming with polygonal pastel interludes, piloting an airship between floating islands rendered in lo-fi 3D on a Sega Saturn or PS1, the best I’ve ever seen. It’s a mashup you’ve never thought of.Game. Looking back at some of the shots I took with my phone while playing the demo, I realized that these sections look a lot like Final Fantasy 7’s overworld, but the journey is lifted above the clouds. I played the demo for 40 minutes before heading to my next appointment, but I didn’t have enough time to go through everything.
When I call a game’s aesthetic “painterly,” I don’t mean the way painterly representation is often used. It doesn’t have the vibrant colors or bleeding of watercolors, but it uses pixels in a way that a painter would dab blobs of paint onto a canvas. The game begins with Vernal being ejected from a stowaway airship. The ship and the balloon that propels it are rendered in blocky brown and beige. The caricatures of the characters that appear in the lines are similarly simple. The robot we meet early on His character is made up of balls stacked on top of each other, with shadows outlining his appearance.
Vernal Edge is out now. It has very positive reviews on Steam and I tend to believe those reviews based on the time I’ve spent. I wouldn’t be surprised if it received similar accolades between them.