While the industry was preparing for the summer presentations of video games, Astalon: Tears of the Earth . Behind the complex title lies the best Metroidvania of the year – at least until it comes out Axiom Verge 2 And Hollow Knight: Silksong. It so skillfully combines the ideas of other great games that you don’t want to think about borrowing and dividing it into components – you just disappear for two dozen hours and regret that so few people know about the new product.
Deal with the Devil
There are three main characters here: the swordsman Arias, the archer Kyuli and the magician Algus. They go to an ominous tower to find out how to help the villagers – they are very sick due to the poisoned water. After the first death, it turns out that Algus is hiding something – he made an agreement with the Titan of Death named Epimetheus. Thanks to him, the characters will be resurrected again and again until they complete the main task, and for this Algus will give his soul.
The premise is gloomy, but the game doesn’t make you feel depressed and doesn’t make you feel sorry for yourself. There is a slightly depressing atmosphere here – just look at the visual design a la Axiom Verge. Dirty locations, creepy faces on the walls, sometimes strange opponents (including worms with human faces and beating hearts) – all this works especially well if you leave the mode without anti-aliasing turned on. There are two more modes that make the picture clearer, but “nostalgic” is considered standard – the authors say that this is how the game was intended.
History cannot be called a foundation Astalon, but she gets enough attention. Gradually you learn the backstory of the main villain (and even begin to empathize with him a little), and the characters communicate with each other on various topics around the fire. These episodes are easy to skip (conversations are optional), but thanks to them you can restore your health – there are practically no other ways to do this. When you do look through them, you don’t regret the time spent in the company.
Collection of the best ideas
Gameplay Astalon is a hybrid of roglite and metroidvania. The map here is always the same, and, gradually gaining new abilities, you learn to penetrate previously inaccessible locations. But sooner or later you die, after which Algus is transferred to Epimetheus and can spend the accumulated currency in his store. Here the game already reminds Rogue Legacy, where building a castle with collected coins made the character much stronger. Here the system is approximately the same: you buy an increase in health for all heroes, increase their defense, attack power and speed individually, and for especially big money you even unlock bonus combat abilities.
No one forbids “farming” currency by https://casinosnogamstop.co.uk/review/slottio/ killing enemies in the room, leaving and returning back. But doing this is boring, and there is no need.
There are other goods – either a red ball with additional health points will periodically appear next to you, or the currency will begin to be attracted to the character by a magnet. You make the map more useful by purchasing the ability to automatically mark closed doors and the place of the last death on it, you acquire instant resurrection after death – the number of upgrades is constantly growing. This is a kind of compensation for a failed attempt to pass the section – even if you died, but you can buy something useful.
And you have to go to Epimetheus often – the game is not easy. The further you go, the more often you encounter difficult challenges. The enemies become increasingly unpleasant – at first they are helpless bugs, and later you defeat turrets and flying demons. Traps are becoming more and more common: there are disappearing platforms and spikes that periodically crawl out of the ground. And sometimes enemies are great at camouflaging themselves – every little thing likes to hide in the water. At the same time Astalon far from merciless – opponents do not become stronger after leveling up, and bosses and mini-bosses do not respawn.
What fascinates you most about Astalon, so this is the card design. It’s quite large for a metroidvania, but there doesn’t seem to be a single extra room in the world. You will either stumble upon dangerous enemies, or have to carefully jump across platforms, some of which are falling apart, or run along a floor with spikes, dodging boulders falling from above. All regions are unique, there are a lot of types of opponents, so the game is very addicting.
Over time, you realize that not only the main rooms were made interesting and special – there are also plenty of secret ones. You can play through the game and complete exploration of the map only two-thirds of the way through – there are hidden passages in the walls, cracks leading to a hidden button, and sometimes you need to interact with certain objects in different rooms to get a prize. You find health upgrades, increase attack power, meet new heroes, get to multi-colored keys – some doors in the tower are the last to open. If you couldn’t get the key right away, it doesn’t matter – it will remain marked on the map.
All this does Astalon an excellent metroidvania, which is both similar to the best representatives of the genre and looks like roglites. And there are even RPG elements in it: for example, the same characteristics of heroes can be improved several times – if you want, you can not invest money in health at all, spending it on increasing the protection of a specific character. Astalon looks and sounds like an 8-bit adventure from the NES era, but doesn’t try to cover up its shortcomings with nostalgia – it plays like the best metroidvanias of recent years.
There and back
What you can find fault with is the backtracking – even if it is familiar to the genre, here there is too much of it. At the beginning of the game, when the characters have not yet found any artifacts, they only need to switch between them at the aforementioned bonfires. This means that if you take the wrong team member and get to a place where another would be useful, you will have to run back.
The heroes differ enough from each other not to be interchangeable: a swordsman can cut blue doors, an archer bounces off walls, and a mage shoots through obstacles. Luckily, after a couple of bosses you get a story item that allows you to switch on the fly.
But backtracking will still not go away – it will just become a little less. There are several hundred rooms on the large map, and about ten teleporting elevators – even if you don’t visit all the areas, running from the elevator to the point of death is a little tedious. And you don’t always remember or know where exactly you died, so you peer at the location of the doors in the nearest rooms on the map. On the other hand, this encourages you to be more careful and not run headlong towards the exit. The main thing is that there are usually elevators in front of bosses.
Astalon: Tears of the Earth deserves what we got Hollow Knight, Bloodstained And Axiom Verge — so that Metroidvania fans would buy it, be surprised by the quality and quantity of content (it takes about 15 hours to complete) and recommend it to everyone. An almost flawless attempt to mix great ideas, create an interesting atmosphere with an unusual story and decorate it all with a modern retro look.
Pros: an excellent mixture of metroidvania and roguelike, in which elements of both genres work equally well; a large map filled with secrets and making you want to explore it; different heroes who are equally fun to control; nice visual style inspired by NES games.
