Review: Anodyne (PC)

I'm writing all of these reviews in a row while flying from Cleveland to San Francisco. So, if my word choice is getting stupider as we go, that's my excuse.

Anyway, next up on the review treadmill is Anodyne, a game I actually finished and generally liked. I have no ulterior motives when it comes to this review. I just want to talk about something that was nice and that I liked.

I liked this.

I played a demo of Anodyne and it won me over. I paid $10 for it on Steam. I don't know that it was worth that much, but I was at home alone in my parents house at night and was bored because I sort of hate TV. If you see this game on sale for under $5, I'd recommend it. If you are not strapped for entertainment sources in the middle of the night and you pay $10 for it, you might come away feeling a little bit ripped off.

How's that for topical cohesion in a paragraph?!

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD LASERS WORK, FELLOW LEMON GIANTS!!! AOUVAE;JAFDKFJKADLJAE?

Anodyne is pretty clearly based off of the early NES and SNES Zelda games in terms of gameplay. Even the status bar thing at the top of the screen is basically lifted from the original Zelda. Unlike the other recent Zelda-homage The Binding Of Isaac, though, there's no roguelike action welded on here. Instead, it's just a straight-up action-adventure from out of the old days. A well-designed overworld and dungeons, subtle ambient-ish soundtrack, solid “feeling” controls, and great art direction (within a classic Game Boy Color-esque palette) all help make it a fun six-hours-or-so playthrough.

The premise of the game, as near as I can tell, is that it takes place inside the main character's subconscious. The main gripe I've seen online about Anodyne is that it doesn't actually have a “story,” but I'd disagree with that. Sure, it doesn't have a lot of obviously meaningful dialoge. There's no MacGuffin, per se, and we don't learn directly about the main character's backstory. However, if you're willing to read a bit between the lines Anodyne says a lot by saying very little, using colors, visual cues, and musical themes to communicate a lot of what would usually just be communicated via a text box and clunky exposition. I liked this. I can see how some people wouldn't, but to me, Anodyne is one of the more successfully “literary” games I've played.

THIS IS JUST A MOVIE ABOUT PARTIES AND HOW AWESOME THEY ARE

In the same way that someone outside of a literature class might read Ulysses for five pages and conclude that it's utter, worthless madness while someone in such a class might pore over details until patterns of meaning start to emerge, paying close attention (performing a “close reading”) of Anodyne is rewarding. But if that sounds stupid to you, it's probably going to be stupid and you won't like it. But that's not because you're stupid. Anodyne isn't especially “deep” in the way that guy in your English class with the patchwork pants and bandanna was, but it communicates in meaning in ways that we generally don't expect games to, and that makes it interesting to me. Morever, it does this well, not just as a gimmick, and that makes it satisfying to me as a gameplay experience.

If you're the kind of player who doesn't need much out of a five-hour game except a little low-difficulty puzzling and dungeon-crawling as well as a little hack-and-slash, you could also probably just ignore all the high-falutin' shit and enjoy the game purely as a game. But on this level there are a million other games like Anodyne already out there, so why choose this one?

What elevates this already-solid game is the way it presents its themes and conflicts. If you feel like searching for meaning as well as for keys and weapon upgrades in a low-fi Game Boy Color world, this is a game that's going to feel like it was made just for you.

Semi-gripe: it's a bit short for $10, but honestly by the time the game was over I felt sort of done with it, in an I-liked-this-but-now-it's-starting-to-get-repetitive way. I didn't really expect it to show me anything else interesting, and it didn't seem to want to. I did figure out how to do the tile-switching post-game thingie, but wasn't really compelled to revisit the game just for the sake of that.