There's a neat crossover here between aesthetic appreciation and more practical objectives. The feeling of peering through a keyhole has the effect of teaching you to linger over the details, especially the ones with sharp edges: glowing mushrooms, exquisitely patterned trunks, rusty sarcophagi in the backdrop. It's quite a beautiful game when you can see it clearly, with some lustrous, organic colour choices and elegantly squishy sprite animations, which makes Nuke Nine's taste for the shadows feel incredibly perverse. But after that come the Catacombs, which - well, you can imagine. You do make it back to the surface in the second area, which has the ambience of a sleepy pond pierced by sunbeams. Then the game whips it all away and chucks you into a cave system's worth of damp stalactites and fog of war. The title screen gives you a brief glimpse of an astonishing forest - trunks like twists of silk, a moon solemnly rising from the last, fading band of daylight, a wagon trundling leftwards among sloping copper surfaces. I reviewed it on the Switch, which is in many ways the absolute worst platform to play it on, because Vagante loves darkness, and it also loves pressure plates a pixel wide, and spikes waiting below ladders like dogs below tree-bound cats, and arrow traps in far corners that must be anticipated rather than spotted. Vagante is gloomy, but the gloominess grows on you. With apologies to developer Nuke Nine for being a cocky arsehole, here are a few bulletpoints of my own creation. But then I played for 15 minutes, got sat on by a Baby Dragon and realised that Vagante is a game of quiet originality and verve. I probably don't need to tell you that it's a pixelart affair. Vagante's Steam feature sheet certainly didn't set my world on fire: procedural generation, "choose how you play", "tough but fair", some unabashed debts to Spelunky plus a dollop of RPG-style levelling. Originally launched 2018 on PC, Linux, Mac.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |