As video games have evolved from generation to generation, they have taught a sort of language along the way – not just of jargon, but of mechanics and muscle-memory.  Usually, this works to the long-time gamer’s benefit, as new titles build upon the “rules” established by their predecessors.  It’s why you can pick up a side-scrolling platformer and trust your impulse to start moving to the right, or start a bullet-hell shooter and – well, hope, at least – that a safe haven is hiding somewherewithin the screenfull of ammunition.  It’s why you can sit down to a new PC game and find your left hand settling on the WASD keys, or why you can pick up a console shooter and expect the left analog stick to move your character while the right aims your weapon.  Conventions are invented, then refined, then repeated, until they become instinct.

As a result, there is an uneasy tension between gaming’s past and present.  The savvy game designer can take advantage of historical conventions, either to rely upon them or subvert them.  But invoking the past always carries with it certain risks.  A game that stays too close to what has come before comes off as a soulless copy, while a game that changes a historical model too much forces players to fight against their own expectations.

Which brings us, in a roundabout way, to Octopede, a recent title from British developer Orbital Games.

Visually, Octopede is far more active than Snake ever was, thanks to the introduction of an array of enemy viruses that riddle the system.  The enemy AI is very straightforward – some move along set paths, other shoot you from afar, still others chase you across the screen – but such simple adversaries are threatening when thrown at you by the handful.  Fortunately, you’re offered a variety of tricks to use against them, ranging from the ability to shoot in the direction you are moving to traps you can leave in your wake.  There are also special weapons to collect and use, each of which can be counted on for mass destruction when you find yourself in a pinch.  Darting around the screen, trying to collect data packets and ammo while dodging and dogfighting your enemies certainly makes for an exciting, arcade-inspired experience – albeit one that feels more akin to retro shooter like Geometry Wars than a traditional game of Snake.  Clean, pixellated graphics and chiptune music/SFX complement both this gameplay and the framing story, although I found myself wishing the different enemy types were more visually distinct and that the debris effects that occasionally clutter the screen were less invasive.

This experience is enhanced by the game’s central scoring mechanic, which is perhaps its best element.  Whenever you pick up data packets and extend your worm’s length, you are building up your health reserves as well as earning points – you lose segments when your worm’s head is damaged, and you die when you have nothing left to lose.  However, whenever you have more than eight segments trailing you, you can choose to “cache” them, permanently giving up their utility as health in exchange for increasing your score multiplier.   Judicious caching is a must if you want to climb the leaderboards, but it always comes at the cost of permanently ceding part of your safety – a classy implementation of risk versus reward.  Building an arcade game around the tension between survivability and score is a great idea, and Orbital has executed it well.

Yet, perhaps to make room for all these new additions that are demanding part of your screen’s limited real estate, Octopede abandons the defining element of Snake’s gameplay: the idea that colliding with your own tail is fatal.  The potential for self-destruction informs every instinct I have when playing Snake, not to mention popular culture’s most enduring image of the genre – the iconic visuals of Tron’s lightcycle racing.  But, in Octopede, your tail is mostly cosmetic: aside from one enemy that targets the end of your tail, the game would play rather the same without it.  Any Snake veteran will probably find this a little disorienting.  In my case, I found myself constantly fighting my instinctual self-avoidance, and I’m sure I died a few needless deaths that I could have survived had I remembered that my own tail wasn’t lethal.  Taking the game on its own merits, this is a wholly acceptable design choice – indeed, the game would probably be unplayable if you had to avoid your tail and all the other hazards of the mainframe – and I adapted to the change fairly quickly.  But when so much of the game’s backbone is derived from the Snake tradition, I was thrown for a moment when I realized what had been lost along the way.

Less forgivable is the game’s awkward control scheme.  Orbital boasts that Octopede lets you move in eight directions, giving you an edge over the strict up-down-left-right movement of your enemies.   I liked this idea in theory, but in practice Orbital has made it nigh-unworkable.  On the keyboard, cardinal movement is controlled by the directional arrow keys, but diagonal movement is inexplicably assigned to the WASD keys rather than to the more-conventional combinations of the arrow keys.  (In other words, rather than pressing both up and left to move in the up-left diagonal, you press the A key.)  If there is a logic underlying the mapping of diagonals-to-letters then I never found it, and all the while I struggled to master two-handed movement while also trying to trigger weapons and cache excess data.  Frustrated, I switched to using an Xbox controller, only to find a new iteration of the same problem – rather than assigning eight-directional movement to a single analog stick, the game parcels movement across them both.  Granted, you can control everything with a single hand via your keyboard’s numpad, an option that might help those familiar with such a movement array, but unfortunately that’s a gaming language I’ve never learned.

Using both hands to control the worm’s movement was so alien to me that I ultimately abandoned hope.   Rather than struggling further with the eight-directional options with which I was presented, I just trusted my years of four-directional intuition to keep me safe and ignored the diagonals entirely.  I acknowledge that part of the problem here was my own fault, my own inability to adapt.  But when making a game that holds itself out as an evolution of a video game classic, I would have expected Octopede to default to something closer to more conventional, instinctual controls, to let players like me take advantage of behavior honed over decades rather than forcing us to resist our mental conditioning.  Is this irony, then—that Octopede abandoned the Snake tradition of making my body my worst enemy, only to make me fight myself in order to play it?  (Orbital has, to their credit, stated elsewhere that they rejected single-stick control during the design process but that it will be added via the next update.  I may not agree with the former decision, but I commend them for the latter.)

In the end, once I got myself into the mindset of playing a score-driven shooter rather than a direct Snake homage, learned how to best use my offensive and defensive items, and accepted that eight-directional movement was going to remain an unrealized dream for me, I had a good time with Octopede.   The action is fast-paced, the atmosphere is invitingly old-school, and the caching mechanic is surprisingly intelligent – in my opinion, the game’s biggest strength.  Fans of the genre will find a lot to like, and anyone who tries the demo and finds themselves wanting more should find the game well worth the three-dollar cost.  But I can’t help but feel that the game might have been better if Orbital had been a little more confident in their game’s ability to stand on its own, designing and framing it as an independent experience rather than as the “evolution” of a classic.  Invocations of gaming history carry with them a certain amount of baggage; here, the specter of Snake weighs down an otherwise-well-made arcade experience.

Octopede, by Orbital Games, is available via Desura for the PC and will be coming soon to Xbox Live, Steam, and a number of other gaming providers.  Reviewed for 3+ hours, including two successful trips to the system’s core and many adventures along the way—all without moving diagonally. 

Overall Rating: ★★★☆☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.

During a first playthrough, the game’s debt to The Legend of Zelda is obvious.  You guide our hero (initially Isaac himself, but you can unlock other characters) through a dungeon built from one-screen rooms.  Each floor holds a special item to claim and a boss to defeat.  The interstitial rooms might be empty, but are more likely to house a handful of enemies that you must defeat before you can leave the room.  Enemies leave behind familiar items: keys, bombs, coins, or hearts.  All that’s missing is the Master Sword – Isaac eschews melee combat in favor of twin-stick shooting reminiscent of Smash TV (or any number of modern XBLA games).

If this doesn’t look familiar, you wasted your childhood.

But after you die a few times – and that’s a “when,” not an “if” – the game’s roguelike pedigree becomes clearer, as you realize just how much of the experience is randomly generated.  Every dungeon is guaranteed to house a boss, an item room, a shop, and a secret or two, but the layout of the rooms is different every time you play.  The bosses and items you find on each floor are equally random, giving you constant surprises rather than the strict progression of “get item X, use it to defeat boss Y” so prevalent in the Zelda franchise.  Standard enemy placement is also random, making it so that you never know what challenges lie in the room ahead.  Even some items change their effects from game to game – popping a new pill (the game’s equivalent of NetHack’s potions) is always unpredictable, as the red pill that increased your damage two-tries-ago might poison you this time instead.  Although you could always consult a walkthrough or a wiki to help make sense of this randomness, part of the fun of the game is experimenting for yourself and learning from your mistakes.

Through all of this, the defining aspect of a roguelike keeps you vigilant: if you die, you must start over from the beginning.  The death penalty would get old quick if the game wasn’t so good about rewarding multiple playthroughs.  Countering the problem that even “random” gameplay can be exhausted over time, Isaac’s item and boss lists grow as you unlock more content.  Sometimes, these unlocks are tied to story progression – beating a certain boss might unlock the ability for a new item to spawn, or beating the game might unlock a few new bosses to plague you in the future.  Other unlocks are more unexpected, tied to repeated use of certain items or random acts of destruction.  You can even unlock the ability to play as other characters, each of whom starts the game with a slightly different array of powers and traits.

The result is an addictive sort of organized chaos.  Sometimes, the game will seem stacked against you from the start, and your time in the dungeon will be nasty, poor, brutish, and short.  But those lows are balanced by the highs of success, when a combination of luck and your growing skill in the game transforms you into a veritable god, destroying all in your path as you make your way to triumph (or, perhaps, a heartbreaking NO WAIT STUPID WHAT DID I DO death in the home stretch).  Sure, I can pick nits – the controls are more floaty than I’d like, and the reliance upon randomness means that the game can’t require any of the item-based problem solving common to both Zelda games and roguelikes.  But the promise that there might always something new to find in the depths, coupled with the hope that next time either luck or logic will see you through, makes it very easy to say “ok, just one more try” again and again and again.

Judged just against its elevator pitch, then, Isaac would seem to be a huge success.  But while the mechanics of the game are great, the presentation side of things comes off as muddled and schizophrenic.  For me, these tonal problems centered on three general issues: religion, gore, and “lulz.”

First, the game is full of religious references, and I simply have no idea why.  The story is a modern riff on the biblical tale of God asking Abraham to sacrifice his son, only here Isaac is a child trying to escape his god-touched mother, driven crazy by too much exposure to Christian television.  Many of the characters and items, in turn, have a religious bent to them: play long enough, and you may find yourself running through the dungeon as “Judas” while wielding “The Book of Revelations” as your special weapon.  But while others have claimed to find some clever commentary in the game’s invocations of religion, to me they never became more than mere trappings – I never saw any real purpose to them, nor did they serve to make the game more enjoyable.

The game’s pseudo-religious side stands in sharp juxtaposition to the game’s frequent indulgences in cartoon blood, guts, and filth.  Almost every monster you face is some variation on the theme of “hacked-up child,” be it a floating head that spits blood at you or an endlessly-leaping headless body. Where Zelda had you breaking pots or slashing grasses in search of hidden items, here you’ll be breaking up piles of feces. And while your default weapon is Isaac’s never-ending flow of tears, if you’re truly fortunate you may find an item that lets you attack with his urine instead.

This is a thing that happens.

As with the religious elements, I’m not sure whether all this gore adds anything to the game.  Geysers of blood may have had a place in Super Meat Boy (co-creator Edmund McMillen’s last project), where it was a natural comedic outgrowth of the demented Mario-meets-puzzles-meets-masochism platforming gameplay. But here, it feels superfluous, providing cheap laughs at most.

Speaking of cheap laughs…..Isaac’s references to outside media don’t end at Zelda and NetHack, and some are more successful than others.  At their best, these references do enhance the game in the precise way that the game’s blood-and-gore visuals don’t.  There’s something amusing and heartwarming about the moment of epiphany that comes when you realize that the red-hued monster you are fighting works just like skeletons from the Castlevania games, or that the boss you are fighting bears more than a passing resemblance to the titular character from Bomberman or Centipede.  But when the moment of epiphany is instead the realization that hostile bombs are all adorned with the Trollface or that the special weapon you just picked up is the Shoop Da Whoop Lazer, it’s easy for laughter to give way to a sensation of “ok, wait, but, why?”  These more-random references can be funny (I laughed at some of them, your mileage may vary), but they drive even more of a wedge between the different parts of the game’s fractured presentation.

As a result of all of this, I was surprised to find the game making me think as much about Jonathan Blow’s Braid as I was about Zelda or NetHack.  Like Isaac, Braid put a new and successful twist on the framework of an NES classic – if Isaac is “Zelda with the randomness of a roguelike,” Braid was “Mario with time manipulation.”  But I think that the successes and failures of Braid’s narrative should serve as a cautionary tale for developers trying to put a little art into their games.  [If you never got around to finishing Braid but still intend to do so, now’s the time to skip to the last paragraph of this review.]

Braid’s final level, which shows the player that Tim’s effort to save his princess is something closer to “stalking” than “heroism,” was a triumph.  But it worked because it was a narrative twist that evolved out of the game’s pre-existing tropes and devices, a deconstruction of the “hero saving the princess” story that came hand-in-hand with Mario-influenced game design.  (Conversely, Braid’s babbling about the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb landed somewhere between “inoffensively random” and “insufferably pretentious,” in part because it had nothing to do with the surrounding gameplay.)  Braid’s biggest successes came, then, when the game’s mechanics and narrative worked in harmony.

When I was playing Isaac, I kept waiting for such a bridge to appear – something to link the game’s crass-but-pseudo-religious side with the rest of the game and, in the process, provide some justification for the tone in the first place.  But that moment never came.  After beating the game several times (and consulting a few YouTube videos to be sure that the answers I wanted weren’t waiting for me down the road), the game’s style remains as arbitrary as the design of the dungeon itself, and the story of Isaac’s troubles with his mother might as well exist in a vacuum.

As a result, as good as Isaac’s gameplay is, the visuals surrounding it do the game no favors.  None of Isaac’s flaws are fatal, a testament to the strength of its Zelda-but-random core – there’s a reason I ended up playing it until 5am the night I bought it and have revisited it (for at least a short while) every day since.  But I couldn’t play the game without being aware that I’m enjoying it despite some obvious failings, and I found myself wishing that its creators had been less ambitious.  Had the game to have stayed closer to dungeoneering roots and abandoned its gore and religious iconography in favor of a more traditional framework of adventurers fighting bats, skeletons, and orcs, then the resulting game would have been more cohesive (albeit less creative).  Alternatively, had the game embraced excess, discarding semi-religious metaphor in favor of a dungeon-crawling response to Barkley: Shut Up And Jam Gaiden, I would have gladly buckled up and enjoyed the meme-influenced rollercoaster ride.  But instead of playing to either extreme, the game landed somewhere in the middle – it’s fun to play, but it never lives up to its full potential.

The Binding Of Isaac, by Edmund McMillen and Florian Himsl, is available on Steam for both PC and Mac.  Reviewed for 11+ hours, unlocking approximately half the content and beating the game three times.

Overall Rating: ★★★★☆ 

© 2011 – 2013, The Indie Mine. All rights reserved.