Before ever playing La-Mulana I had heard warnings that, were I ever to play it, it's effectively mandatory to take notes, not counting resorting to guides of course. As someone who has historically enjoyed games with some form of note-taking--ranging from the original Tex Murphy game Mean Streets to more modern mysterious action puzzlers like Fez and Tunic--this warning served as a highly effective sales pitch, and I knew there was a very good chance I would like it when I finally got around to it.
Mechanically, it's a very focused action platformer somewhat analogous to the likes of the original Castlevania. It has confidence in its feel that makes it highly predictable and satisfying to pull off. While I did get a little frustrated with some of the boss fights, others were fun to figure out [or, at worst, easy enough to circumvent with subweapons]. A game like this would fail with poor mechanics, so it's nice that the foundation is strong.
But the adventure-puzzle side of this is the main attraction, and even knowing to some small degree what I was in for, I absolutely wasn't prepared for the kind of surprise La-Mulana offers. Specifically, it's difficult to create a Metroidvania-style game that lasts anywhere near as long as La-Mulana does, while also evolving what those areas are to the player basically the entire time. One of my biggest problems with Hollow Knight, a game I did ultimately enjoy, was that it was way too long. A lot of playing it was backtracking through environments that you have more or less "experienced" the first time you move through them. This is a problem with a lot of Metroidvanias, but most of them also aren't 20+ hours. It's a difficult problem to address, and I don't know that La-Mulana's solution is universal, but I do know it's very appealing--it is, essentially, "you have no idea what you just walked through," a sentiment often delivered by the game with a little bit of mischief.
Notes from the final hours of the game would reveal secrets about a room I may have seen within a half hour of starting. Sometimes, as long as I was decent enough with my scribbles, I'd come to realize that I should backtrack to the source of the note, where I'd find I actually wasn't thorough enough, and key details failed to register with me. No potential source of information is off limits, which can be intimidating and occasionally present some rough progression walls, but the moments in which an idea would come to me or something would click as relevant gave me an indescribable amount of joy. I started with a notepad file that served as my main research companion and ultimately surpassed a thousand lines, but by the end of my 40-hour journey I had supplemented those notes with numerous photos on my phone, a spreadsheet documenting connections between clues, a few notebook pages of translation notes...
For a particular brand of individual, this is heaven. I was absolutely smitten with this, and weeks after finishing I still think about some "a-ha" moment I had and what I felt when I had it. I know its reception isn't quite the same, but I'm excited that I have a sequel I can pull out whenever I want to chase even a semblance of that high again.
Mechanically, it's a very focused action platformer somewhat analogous to the likes of the original Castlevania. It has confidence in its feel that makes it highly predictable and satisfying to pull off. While I did get a little frustrated with some of the boss fights, others were fun to figure out [or, at worst, easy enough to circumvent with subweapons]. A game like this would fail with poor mechanics, so it's nice that the foundation is strong.
But the adventure-puzzle side of this is the main attraction, and even knowing to some small degree what I was in for, I absolutely wasn't prepared for the kind of surprise La-Mulana offers. Specifically, it's difficult to create a Metroidvania-style game that lasts anywhere near as long as La-Mulana does, while also evolving what those areas are to the player basically the entire time. One of my biggest problems with Hollow Knight, a game I did ultimately enjoy, was that it was way too long. A lot of playing it was backtracking through environments that you have more or less "experienced" the first time you move through them. This is a problem with a lot of Metroidvanias, but most of them also aren't 20+ hours. It's a difficult problem to address, and I don't know that La-Mulana's solution is universal, but I do know it's very appealing--it is, essentially, "you have no idea what you just walked through," a sentiment often delivered by the game with a little bit of mischief.
Notes from the final hours of the game would reveal secrets about a room I may have seen within a half hour of starting. Sometimes, as long as I was decent enough with my scribbles, I'd come to realize that I should backtrack to the source of the note, where I'd find I actually wasn't thorough enough, and key details failed to register with me. No potential source of information is off limits, which can be intimidating and occasionally present some rough progression walls, but the moments in which an idea would come to me or something would click as relevant gave me an indescribable amount of joy. I started with a notepad file that served as my main research companion and ultimately surpassed a thousand lines, but by the end of my 40-hour journey I had supplemented those notes with numerous photos on my phone, a spreadsheet documenting connections between clues, a few notebook pages of translation notes...
For a particular brand of individual, this is heaven. I was absolutely smitten with this, and weeks after finishing I still think about some "a-ha" moment I had and what I felt when I had it. I know its reception isn't quite the same, but I'm excited that I have a sequel I can pull out whenever I want to chase even a semblance of that high again.