Angeline Era preview — Bump into adventure

Indie games are having quite the renaissance right now. As the AAA industry burns thanks to greedy investors and shareholders, smaller games by small teams only grow in quality and creativity. One of my favorite indie developers, Analgesic Productions, offered me the chance to sit down with a demo for their upcoming title Angeline Era, and I adored it. It feels like it’s bringing back the magic of discovery in games from before data miners and leakers spoiled everything. You can play the demo yourself as part of Steam’s Ludonarracon, but if you need more convincing read on.

Angeline Era is a top down action RPG, but the genre names are really the only thing conventional about it. You start on a world map, but there are no levels visible at first. You have to discover them by finding a suspicious tile and holding the Y button to investigate. Going in, I thought this would make for a cumbersome experience of searching every tile before eventually finding something, but it actually inspires a fun curiosity in your exploration. Every time I thought “wait, that area looks weird” there was something there to discover. You might find a main level with a Scale at the end to help you level up, a side level with interesting challenges, a level that I think is about deforestation where you need to kill yourself on spike traps to make trees grow(?), or even just some coins to spend in town. From start to finish, this demo constantly surprised and delighted me.

As for what you actually do in those levels, you bump into stuff. Much like the original Ys games, Angeline Era uses Bump Combat. Want to hit an enemy? Bump into it. Talk to someone? Bump. Eat some food? Bump into a crystal. It’s an interesting form of interaction, especially combined with your gun. While bumping with your sword is the main method of attacking, you can hold down the right trigger to shoot anything north of you. And I mean only north, you can’t aim in any direction. It’s a bit weird at first, but can be incredibly helpful when you need to slash an enemy below you to replenish ammo, and shoot an enemy just out of bump range on a cliff above.

In addition to your sword and gun, you can unlock new bump weapons such as a spear or wand and use sub weapons by pressing X. Sub weapons like the grenade are great for crowd control, while the mines can be used to set traps. These have limited ammo, shown by a circle of blue pips, so use them wisely.

There’s also a surprising amount of platforming in the game. On the world map you can only jump once, so you need to complete levels to open up new routes, but while in a stage you have a double jump. Just like Anodyne 2 (reviewed here), it feels like the game expects you to almost go out of bounds to complete some of these levels. Unlike that game, you don’t need to use glitches to progress, but if somewhere looks like you could reach it you probably can.

Finally, the music and art are top notch. I love the low poly aesthetic and it’s used to great effect here. Most of the game takes place in a 4:3 aspect ratio, but certain things like the coin counter or level clear screen break this convention and go into the more modern 16:9. I’m excited to see if this effect is expanded on in the full game, but if not it’s still very neat. As for the soundtrack, it’s ethereal yet catchy as we’ve come to expect from the developer duo. It’s not the most conventional sound, just like the rest of the game, but I love it nonetheless. I can’t wait to see what the full version of Angeline Era has in store when it launches next year.

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