Metroidvaniasare the backbone of the indie space. AtPAX Eastlast month, PID Games successfully made the argument why the genre has a spine strong enough to support the medium.
PID Games, which brand manager Stanislas Jun Peyrat describes as “punk rock”, is a small publisher that had four games on the show floor this year. Two of those, Elypse and Vernal Edge, are explore-em-ups taking the genre thatSamusandSimonfounded in interesting new directions.
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Jun Peyrat described Elypse as a mix of Moon Studios’Ori gamesandHollow Knight, and once I started playing, I was surprised by how accurate that description was. The demo even ends with a race against the clock that could have been taken from Ori, which requires you to use all the abilities you’ve learned thus far to swiftly jump and dash your way through a tunnel as anIndiana Jones-styleboulder crashes along behind you. The controls are satisfying and intuitive enough that this was fun, not frustrating.
As in Hollow Knight, the world is dark and your character, Fay, has a round white head, shaped like a teardrop, and asymmetrical pitch black eyes. One looks like a crescent moon, the other like a bird’s beak. As you travel through the game’s 2D world, you’re helped by Nyx, a character in a dark cloak with a head that appears like a cracked pot barely containing the light from a very bright source.
Unlike most 2D platformers, the game assigns its most important actions to the triggers. Holding down the right trigger causes Fay to dash in whichever direction you point the thumbstick. Similarly, Fay can fire a ‘thorn’ with the left trigger. During my 30 minute demo, I upgraded both abilities so I could dash twice and shoot twice. The face buttons were mostly unused. Because you’re able to dash in any direction, it’s your jump, too.
Vernal Edge is a mash-up I don’t think I’ve ever seen before either, combining painterly pixel art platforming with polygonal pastel interludes in which you steer your airship between floating islands rendered with the lo-fi 3D of Sega Saturn orPS1games. Looking back through some shots I snapped on my phone while playing the demo, I’m realizing that these sections look a whole lot likeFinal Fantasy 7’soverworld but with the journey hoisted above the clouds. I spent 40 minutes playing the demo before I needed to run off to my next appointment, and that wasn’t enough time to see everything it had to offer.
When I call the game’s aesthetic ‘painterly’, I don’t mean it in the way painterly is often used. It doesn’t have the bright colors or bleed of watercolor, but rather uses pixels the way a painter might dab globs of paint on the canvas. The game begins with Vernal being chucked off of an airship where she has stowed away. The ship and the balloon propelling it are rendered in blocky brown and beige. The character portraits that appear during dialogue are similarly simple. A robot character you meet early on is made of balls stacked on top of each other, with shadow shaping the contours of his look.
Vernal Edge is out now. It has Very Positive reviews on Steam, and based on the time I spent with it, I’m inclined to believe those reviews. Elypse is targeting a release sometime in Q2 of 2023, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it ends up receiving similar acclaim among the players who discover it. Both games make exploration and action equally fun, and that’s all I want from a Metroidvania.
