I haven't seen sunsets like this since, oh, 1996. Explicitly
modelled on the look and feel of 3D PS1 and N64 games, the island
setting of Anodyne 2 is like a version of Hyrule Field engulfed by the
coral reefs of Square Enix's Chrono Cross. It's an exquisite recreation
of a lost period in videogame landscaping, from the aliasing on the
waterfalls to the smudgy paintings of distant environments that serve as
portals to other areas. For all its pristine historical specificity,
however, this realm is host to a creeping decay - the Nano Dust, an
enigmatic force that infests the minds and bodies of New Theland's
residents, giving rise to (or at least, revealing) strange anxieties and
desires. You don't need play the original Anodyne, released in
2013, to enjoy Anodyne 2. The games share concepts and themes but are
standalone stories.
Which is where you come in. You play Nova, a silver-clad,
spiky-limbed agent of recovery hatched from an egg by the Center, the
island's unseen creator and overseer. Using your ability to shrink to
microscopic size (which involves a faintly mystifying, but pleasing,
rhythm-matching minigame), you must teleport into each New Thelander's
soul and clear the blight from their inner workings with your vacuum
gun, vanquishing odd fancies let loose by accumulated Dust. You'll then
offload this Dust at a containment facility in the game's one city,
Cenote, where it can be used as energy to push back the island's Dust
Storms and expose new areas. It's in the act of shrinking that Anodyne 2
plays its ace: curled up inside each character's psyche is another,
older kind of game, a beautifully wrought 2D mosaic dungeon in the
spirit of Link to the Past.
This is industry history defined not as the heedless march of
technological progress, but as the rings of a tree - hardware
constraints, design conventions and aesthetics traditions wrapped around
one another. Except that's far too static a metaphor: Anodyne 2's
achievement lies with how it goes beyond even the brilliance of its
generation-switching conceit to embrace a universe of shortform
experiments. In the process, it also creates scepticism for the ethic of
symmetry and authorial control represented by the Center, as Nova
learns to perceive the Dust in a less fearful light. The game's
overarching fable is quite straightforward, for all the mildly
terrifying theoretical flair and self-reflexivity of its writing. It is a
coming-of-age tale, about learning to live with life's ugliness and
uncertainty for the sake of life's beauty and surprise.
As in the old Zelda dungeons, each inner world is its own little
bespoke, Polly Pocket confection of props and stories, resting on some
simple recurring concepts: locks and keys, treasure chests and
checkpoints, gates that won't open till all enemies nearby are slain.
Many of them also harbour a boss whose defeat yields a Top Trumps-style
collectible card you'll use to expand your Dust storage facilities and
progress the story. Like Kirby, Nova can hoover up hostile critters,
which range from Dragon Questy slimes to exploding kamikaze snowmen, and
spit them out as projectiles to destroy otherwise indestructible
threats or interact with out-of-reach objects.
From these bare beginnings, Anodyne 2 finds its way to some
ingenious and startling places. There's a vast spectrum of tones and
genre precedents in play: one moment you're roving a vaguely solarpunk
apartment complex, fetching commissions for a fashion designer, the next
you're adrift on a sugar-pink purgatorial ocean redolent of both Dark
Souls 2's Majula and Spirited Away. Some dungeons hinge on a particular
puzzle gimmick: a mad science lab, for example, in which another
character mirrors your movements in a neighbouring room. Other setups
are more grandiose: there's a medieval fantasy kingdom with a delightful
faux-Beethoven score (the game's soundtrack in general is sublime),
where you'll quest for pieces of magic armour to un-petrify a prince.
As Anodyne 2 evolves, it puts its own two-world structure under
pressure. Sometimes, travelling through a person's psyche takes you
somewhere else in the overworld. On reaching a certain area, you also
gain the ability to travel inside creatures inside other
creatures, winding back the game's art direction still further, from
8-bit consoles to the days of the ColecoVision. These formal
explorations are of a piece with the whimsy and relentless, bruising
self-referentiality of the writing, which calls to mind the artier
variety of leftist Twitter feed. There are jokes about, for example,
whether the Ancient Greeks painted their statues, and Shakespearean
jesters seldom being as foolish as they appear. There is a surprising
abundance of poetry, from free associative verse in database entries
(consider: "Bicalutadmide tricks and porridge twicks, snap the marketing
research into delectable crisplings") to the kind of breathy, bloody
love plaints you get at open mic nights in London's East End.
Above all, though, there are countless jokes about videogames,
including gags about 2D staircase tiles and the convention of darkening
the screen during an inner monologue. Many of these send-ups are
throwaway, but some of them have a larger purpose. There's an unlock
later on, for example, which parodies corporate cults of innovation by
subverting the classic mid-campaign gambit of adding collectibles to
restore interest in a well-travelled world. The whimsy can be
exhausting, but I never found it gratuitous - partly thanks to the sheer
imaginativeness and often celebratory quality of the jokes, and partly
because there is a poignancy to everything that cuts through Anodyne 2's
cynicism.
This isn't "breaking the fourth wall" - it's not the complacent
self-own of the blockbuster sequel gesturing to the hollowness of its
conventions. The gags, together with the miniaturised stories about
community and family that often frame them, are a means of defence
against an uncaring universe. They are both consolations and ways of
expressing anger, fear and sadness. This goes hand in hand with an
understanding that the rules that comprise games (including those of
Anodyne 2) are social scripts, a means of comprehending our relationship
to other people and environments. As one character puts it at a
critical plot juncture, "a card has power only if we all agree to its
rules". To joke about those rules, then, is to offer up the associated
social practices for reinvention.
The value of indie period recreations like Anodyne 2 is partly how
they resist the chronology of obsolescence laid down by videogame
hardware manufacturers. They might harken back, but they don't do so out
of mere nostalgia. They are assertions of the validity of aesthetics
and methods of structuring and interacting with a world we have been
trained to perceive as outmoded - save, of course, for when we're being
asked to pay through the nose for a remaster. Anodyne 2 suggests an
artform coming into the fullness of its own expression, free to adopt
techniques as needed to say something worth saying, without worrying
about whether it looks "new enough" or conforms to genre expectations.
It harkens back in order to look forward, sideways and within.
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