This is the game I've been waiting for ever since I really started to understand the mechanics of Super Mario Sunshine as a kid. The 3D Mario games have always been more or less unmatched in terms of movement in a 3D platformer; right from Mario 64, you have what, seven different types of jumps? Plus the slide? Other 3D platformers didn't even deign to try for that kind of complexity in their movement. Even Nintendo stepped away from that complexity for Super Mario Galaxy, and didn't really return to it until Odyssey. And as much as I love those Mario games, I've always wondered what could be if you took that movement into a different place. I wanted to see a game that really demanded you understand everything you can do with that movement, instead of just letting you play with it as a little treat. A game that builds that movement into its very being.
Pseudoregalia is basically that. Or at least, it's the first version of that I've seen; for all this game's successes, it's also a game that really opens my eyes as to what could be. And given that this is developer rittzler's first "major" release (defining "major" as "it's on Steam", I guess), I'll bet that this game opened their eyes as well. (I'm very much keeping my eyes on their next game, Electrokinetic.) But right out the gate, they got the movement—what I imagine to be the hardest part—right. Every type of jump feels good to use, the options feel intuitive, and understood exactly how I could use each option to get where I wanted to be. A few of the options are basically lifted right out of Mario 64, and they feel just as good here. The one that I really love is this game's wall jump, which is actually a mid-air kick that gives you momentum in a direction you choose, which results in a jump if you hit a wall. This lets you aim back at a wall, giving you a little more control over how you want to use it. This is the realization from Mario I'd been waiting for; countless times in Mario I would wall jump off of a wall that was slightly too tall for me to scale, trying to fade back to get that little bit of extra height to get me over the edge. Or I would try to wall jump in a corner, even though the angles weren't really in my favour. There's creativity all over Mario's movement, and sometimes the exact situation I described would actually work. But usually it didn't, because the levels weren't built for you to be able to do that. Pseduoregalia's are, and so the mechanics give you that particular kind of freedom to match.
Which brings us to the second-hardest part that this game succeeds at: making levels that enourage players to use those movement options. It's tricky; to make a Metroidvania—a 3D Metroidvania, no less—based around movement means that there are inevitably going to be opportunities where it looks like a player can do something, but they actually need a powerup. But you also want that ambiguity, because otherwise the movement's not actually any fun; it's just lock-and-key stuff without any opportunity to actually be creative. I won't say that Pseudoregalia always gets the balance right, but I think the general approach here is correct: err on the side of ambiguity. There are a few sections where I tried, without success, to get past an area I simply didn't have the tools for. But that's okay, because this game is structured in such a way that I didn't even know if something I needed was beyond there. And the game is not so punishing that I felt like I was supposed to do insane feats to complete the game, so I knew there was probably something somewhere else I could use. By the same token, there was an entire somewhat difficult area that would've been a lot easier to traverse if I had an ability I missed earlier in the game, but I still made it through by just being clever with the abilities I had. I thought that was pretty cool.
The game's lack of clear direction is a fair point of contention with some; you're never explicitly told what you're even supposed to be doing in this world, much less where to go. There's no map, and the (well-realized, non-trivially Undertale-esque) low-poly art direction results in a lot of rooms lacking distinctive features. It's very easy to get lost. But I liked that approach for this game. For one, the game's movement options make it so that it's quite easy to navigate the world (especially later in the game), so trying to get back to a familiar location to reorient yourself isn't a huge deal. It's also a relatively small world for a small game (I beat it in a little under 6 hours), so there's not that much to actually learn. With the difficulties mitigated, I liked spending the time to learn where I was and try to figure where I could go and where I hadn't been. Eventually you can start to figure out what you're actually supposed to be doing, and from there things click into place pretty easily.
The rest of the game's aspects—combat, story, whatever—didn't really impress me, but they're also not given much priority in this game. I certainly didn't come here for them, and as it stands they most exist to break up the rest of the action. Fine by me! This game succeeds at something we should have gotten literal decades ago, and it does so in a way that doesn't feel perfunctory. It's not so simple as "Mario 64 Metroidvania", and you can feel dozens of very specific design choices that went into this. I'm so happy I got to play this, and I can't wait to see where rittzler goes from here.
Pseudoregalia is basically that. Or at least, it's the first version of that I've seen; for all this game's successes, it's also a game that really opens my eyes as to what could be. And given that this is developer rittzler's first "major" release (defining "major" as "it's on Steam", I guess), I'll bet that this game opened their eyes as well. (I'm very much keeping my eyes on their next game, Electrokinetic.) But right out the gate, they got the movement—what I imagine to be the hardest part—right. Every type of jump feels good to use, the options feel intuitive, and understood exactly how I could use each option to get where I wanted to be. A few of the options are basically lifted right out of Mario 64, and they feel just as good here. The one that I really love is this game's wall jump, which is actually a mid-air kick that gives you momentum in a direction you choose, which results in a jump if you hit a wall. This lets you aim back at a wall, giving you a little more control over how you want to use it. This is the realization from Mario I'd been waiting for; countless times in Mario I would wall jump off of a wall that was slightly too tall for me to scale, trying to fade back to get that little bit of extra height to get me over the edge. Or I would try to wall jump in a corner, even though the angles weren't really in my favour. There's creativity all over Mario's movement, and sometimes the exact situation I described would actually work. But usually it didn't, because the levels weren't built for you to be able to do that. Pseduoregalia's are, and so the mechanics give you that particular kind of freedom to match.
Which brings us to the second-hardest part that this game succeeds at: making levels that enourage players to use those movement options. It's tricky; to make a Metroidvania—a 3D Metroidvania, no less—based around movement means that there are inevitably going to be opportunities where it looks like a player can do something, but they actually need a powerup. But you also want that ambiguity, because otherwise the movement's not actually any fun; it's just lock-and-key stuff without any opportunity to actually be creative. I won't say that Pseudoregalia always gets the balance right, but I think the general approach here is correct: err on the side of ambiguity. There are a few sections where I tried, without success, to get past an area I simply didn't have the tools for. But that's okay, because this game is structured in such a way that I didn't even know if something I needed was beyond there. And the game is not so punishing that I felt like I was supposed to do insane feats to complete the game, so I knew there was probably something somewhere else I could use. By the same token, there was an entire somewhat difficult area that would've been a lot easier to traverse if I had an ability I missed earlier in the game, but I still made it through by just being clever with the abilities I had. I thought that was pretty cool.
The game's lack of clear direction is a fair point of contention with some; you're never explicitly told what you're even supposed to be doing in this world, much less where to go. There's no map, and the (well-realized, non-trivially Undertale-esque) low-poly art direction results in a lot of rooms lacking distinctive features. It's very easy to get lost. But I liked that approach for this game. For one, the game's movement options make it so that it's quite easy to navigate the world (especially later in the game), so trying to get back to a familiar location to reorient yourself isn't a huge deal. It's also a relatively small world for a small game (I beat it in a little under 6 hours), so there's not that much to actually learn. With the difficulties mitigated, I liked spending the time to learn where I was and try to figure where I could go and where I hadn't been. Eventually you can start to figure out what you're actually supposed to be doing, and from there things click into place pretty easily.
The rest of the game's aspects—combat, story, whatever—didn't really impress me, but they're also not given much priority in this game. I certainly didn't come here for them, and as it stands they most exist to break up the rest of the action. Fine by me! This game succeeds at something we should have gotten literal decades ago, and it does so in a way that doesn't feel perfunctory. It's not so simple as "Mario 64 Metroidvania", and you can feel dozens of very specific design choices that went into this. I'm so happy I got to play this, and I can't wait to see where rittzler goes from here.