itch.io tast.io

[Thad]

Don't have much to add to what I already said about Anodyne -- great job on the mood, and the gameplay remains mostly-excellent throughout. A little too heavy on the jumping in the late-game, both in traversal and in combat; I hurt my thumb doing one of the sequences where you have to do long diagonal jumps, and the last boss took me a bunch of tries mostly because it relies heavily on jumping to dodge. Look, jumping in top-down games is tricky to pull off effectively; Link's Awakening does it, and Anodyne does it in the early going, but it pushes it too much near the end.

Still and all, a really quite good indie game. I probably wouldn't recommend it to anyone who hasn't played Link's Awakening, because, much like Axiom Verge and Metroid, it's such a direct inspiration that I don't think you can really understand it without playing the game it's riffing on. But then, I'm not sure "person who's interested in playing Anodyne but never played Link's Awakening" is a demographic that even exists.

[Thad]

Got stuck on a puzzle in Lenna's Inception, quit for awhile, came back to it, and figured it out. That's always nice.

Finally got to the part where you get the power to "glitch" through walls. Not the first time I've seen this kind of thing -- Axiom Verge used it as a plot point, and Anodyne gives you a kind of similar ability you can use postgame -- but it still feels novel enough that I dig it when I see it. Having fun with it so far.

[JD]

The fun part is when you play it again to get the good ending and discover just how much of the game is procedurally generated.

Also when you get to the guys who craft armor out of potions, and make pee armor

[Thad]

Yeah, I figured the procedural generation would give it a certain amount of replay value. That's always the tradeoff -- every time you play through is fresh and you can't rely on memorization, but the layouts are never as good as in a game where they're intentionally laid out by someone who knows what they're doing.

[Thad]

I don't think the "hold a face button to activate the glasses" control is very comfortable, but fortunately Steam's versatility at remapping buttons has that covered. I double-mapped the Y button to L2 so that I can hold down the left trigger to use the glasses (so long as I have them selected with the Y button, of course), and I also set L5 and R5 (two of the four bottom paddles) as toggles for holding down the Y button, so that I can use a toggle instead of a hold if I prefer to.

[nosimpleway]

I don't remember liking Anodyne all that much, but according to my email they've added a new feature