This game's title does it such a disservice. An interesting and somewhat novel experience hidden under word salad.
ITSP - because I refuse to type it all out - is the one and only game from Michel Gagne, who worked as an artist and animator for the beloved film The Iron Giant. You probably didn't know that, because this game received almost no fanfare whatsoever, before, during, or after its heyday. It was a casualty of the indie floodgates opening, lost in the shuffle. Taking heavy inspiration from the tone and concept of the original Metroid, you play an alien piloting a little flying saucer through the caverns of the titular ITSP, a sentient mass of limbs and goo that's infected your home galaxy in the name of voracious expansion. The planet is draped with bold shapes, jagged thorns, sporing plants, sprawling machinery, and an eerie silence.
Your saucer is easily the game's best attribute, and what helps it stand out from the sea of 'm-words' that populate digital marketplaces everywhere. It has complete 2-axis movement, removing any element of platforming, and in its place is a fairly robust and demanding twin-stick shooter system to deal with the bulbs and bugs and other nasties in the depths. Your ship is fitted with a smattering of utilities that all have multiple use cases for combat and unlocking areas of the map. They all re-use the twin-stick aiming, and this makes the more innocuous attachments, such as your little hand-claw and Metroid Prime-esque scanner, feel fluid and snappy.
Where ITSP does not meet the mark of its inspiration is in the structure. There is a slowly-uncovered map, yes, and it does have multiple themed sub-areas, yes, and there are minor rewards available for the backtracking-inclined as you unlock new abilities, yes, but it is all overwhelmingly linear. The subareas unlock sequentially, and a series of mandatory one-way vents that connect the areas can unfortunately draw a straight line that the player is meant to follow to complete the game. I still enjoyed my time with the game, but this feels misleading, the early game implying a degree of exploration and freedom that you come to learn is mostly guided. What surprised me most, however, was that the first subarea is far and away the most geographically complex, housing the majority of optional backtrack collectibles. Not only is your path through the areas predetermined, but the areas themselves become more and more like corridors as you progress. These two level design issues blunt an otherwise extremely solid set of puzzles and combat encounters, which were respectively neither obvious nor trivial.
In this way, I wonder if having someone from the film industry as your project lead is a hindrance. In the name of a curated experience, the mechanical foundations adopted here are more akin to window dressing than real substance. ITSP may be mostly a novelty, but it's a compelling novelty nonetheless. It probably needed more from Metroid than it ended up taking.
ITSP - because I refuse to type it all out - is the one and only game from Michel Gagne, who worked as an artist and animator for the beloved film The Iron Giant. You probably didn't know that, because this game received almost no fanfare whatsoever, before, during, or after its heyday. It was a casualty of the indie floodgates opening, lost in the shuffle. Taking heavy inspiration from the tone and concept of the original Metroid, you play an alien piloting a little flying saucer through the caverns of the titular ITSP, a sentient mass of limbs and goo that's infected your home galaxy in the name of voracious expansion. The planet is draped with bold shapes, jagged thorns, sporing plants, sprawling machinery, and an eerie silence.
Your saucer is easily the game's best attribute, and what helps it stand out from the sea of 'm-words' that populate digital marketplaces everywhere. It has complete 2-axis movement, removing any element of platforming, and in its place is a fairly robust and demanding twin-stick shooter system to deal with the bulbs and bugs and other nasties in the depths. Your ship is fitted with a smattering of utilities that all have multiple use cases for combat and unlocking areas of the map. They all re-use the twin-stick aiming, and this makes the more innocuous attachments, such as your little hand-claw and Metroid Prime-esque scanner, feel fluid and snappy.
Where ITSP does not meet the mark of its inspiration is in the structure. There is a slowly-uncovered map, yes, and it does have multiple themed sub-areas, yes, and there are minor rewards available for the backtracking-inclined as you unlock new abilities, yes, but it is all overwhelmingly linear. The subareas unlock sequentially, and a series of mandatory one-way vents that connect the areas can unfortunately draw a straight line that the player is meant to follow to complete the game. I still enjoyed my time with the game, but this feels misleading, the early game implying a degree of exploration and freedom that you come to learn is mostly guided. What surprised me most, however, was that the first subarea is far and away the most geographically complex, housing the majority of optional backtrack collectibles. Not only is your path through the areas predetermined, but the areas themselves become more and more like corridors as you progress. These two level design issues blunt an otherwise extremely solid set of puzzles and combat encounters, which were respectively neither obvious nor trivial.
In this way, I wonder if having someone from the film industry as your project lead is a hindrance. In the name of a curated experience, the mechanical foundations adopted here are more akin to window dressing than real substance. ITSP may be mostly a novelty, but it's a compelling novelty nonetheless. It probably needed more from Metroid than it ended up taking.