The Stack

Today, I beat Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. In a sense, anyway.

There was a boss fight against former hero Richter Belmont — I had been expecting Dracula, but when you think about it, Richter has already been established to be tougher than Dracula. The fight was kind of anticlimactic, over with disappointingly quickly. This is always a danger with RPG-like leveling systems that allow the player to keep on leveling beyond the point of challenge, but you’d think they could keep a bit of drama by making it a multi-stage boss. (It’s not like the notion was foreign to the designers. Dracula in the intro had two stages.) Victory was followed by an epilogue cutscene, and then the credits scrolled by, and ordinarily I’d consider that to be enough to get a game off the Stack. But, well, there were indications that I wasn’t actually finished with the game.

There were still passages I hadn’t yet found a way to get through, and even an optional miniboss that I hadn’t managed to beat. That in itself didn’t mean very much: there are a lot of blocked passages that just lead to a single room containing a piece of equipment or two, and in a lot of cases, I only found them after they had been rendered obsolete. But in the castle library, you can look at a sort of pokédex of all the monster types you’ve encountered, and something close to half the slots in the list were yet to be filled in. This made it seem like there had to be more than just a handful of isolated bonus rooms. The really convincing thing, though, was that the map showed a couple of small rooms on the opposite side of, and only accessible from, the room where the final boss fight took place. Which made them clearly impossible to get to, because you don’t get to leave that room: win or lose, the game ends there.

And so, jumping back to my last save before winning, I went to fight that one undefeated miniboss, a magician who summons swarms of bats and flying skulls. I had initially found this much harder than the fight against Richter, and I kind of wonder if this was deliberate, a way to encourage people to fight Richter first. But then, maybe not: after a little thought, I realized that there was a specific special weapon, a book that swirls around you in a defensive cloud, that would take down the swarms easily. Special weapons, the ones that use “hearts” for ammo, have the peculiar property that they don’t go into your inventory like most items, and you can only hold one at a time. It’s a weird mechanic for this game, but it’s one that Symphony of the Night inherited from the original Castlevania, which was just a platformer rather than a platformer/RPG(/adventure) hybrid and didn’t have an inventory. Anyway, it worked, and that led to an item that had obvious application to exploring another previously-unexplorable area, which turned out to hold another item that unlocked a different area, and so forth until I had a new way to handle the encounter with Richter, and, through it, access to those impossible rooms on the other side.

One of my vague wouldn’t-it-be-interesting game ideas that I’ll probably never actually implement is the idea of a game with a secret. You’d have a straightforward quest: rescue the princess, say. You could complete this quest by playing the game in the obvious way, and some people would do that and be satisfied. But other people would put together some details and realize that rescuing the princess isn’t what they should actually be doing: the royal family are all secretly alien shapeshifters, perhaps, and the player characters who win the straightforward way will wind up with their brains sucked out of their skulls while the credits are rolling. The people who discover this would have an opportunity to go off the obvious path and wind up playing a larger game, with different goals.

There are a few games that approach this to various degrees, but none I’m aware of quite reach it. Portal does the subversion, but forces the player into it. The Path lets you either pursue your stated goal the simple and direct way or wander the world around first, but doing the former is explicitly unsatisfactory. Gregory Weir’s The Day has two very different stories wrapped up into a single game, but it doesn’t make a secret of the fact.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night may be the closest thing to the concept I’ve seen. I really can imagine someone defeating Richter and putting the game away, satisfied that they’ve finished it. But I can’t, now that I know the fuller story, that Richter isn’t the bad guy after all, and now that I’ve seen what’s on the other side of that room. Which I will describe in my next post. All I’ll say for now is that I’m very glad that I didn’t accept the false ending. Pursuing the game further has replaced anticlimax and disappointment with open-mouthed delight.

I have a vague memory of reading someone’s commentary on golden age Superman comics, in which much was made of a scene where Lex Luthor, in an laboratory under the ocean, suddenly remembers that he saw an enormous sea monster nearby recently and decides to use it to keep the approaching Superman at bay. That, to the commentator, summarized the old-school sensibility perfectly: suddenly pulling things like sea monsters out of nowhere. Mind you, he felt that the more modern approach, of giving the sea monster an elaborate backstory explained in its own miniseries, was even worse.

Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a similar sensibility to golden-age comics. You’re exploring Castle Dracula and all of the sudden, apropos of nothing, you find yourself in a boss fight against a hippogriff. Why is there a hippogriff in Castle Dracula? I guess because the designers thought it would be cool. This isn’t a game that explains things particularly. It just throws visuals at you and lets you come to your own conclusions. The freakiest monster by far I’ve seen is essentially a huge floating ball of corpses, too big to fit on the screen all at once, that mainly attacks by shedding a rain of animated corpses down on you. Damage it enough, and you can knock sections off of its hull, revealing a starfish-like tentacle monster at its core. And now that I’ve said that much, you have as much idea as I do of what it was or what it was doing there.

It isn’t even just the creatures that come off as gratuitously inexplicable. It’s the architecture as well, which is more thematic than plausible. This is ostensibly a castle, and the outer sections tend to be surrounded by plausible castle exterior, but it contains a colosseum — not just a combat arena, but something specifically called a colosseum, with, furthermore, decaying posters plastered around its entrance, because apparently even colosseums built into inaccessible castles just kind of grow posters. There’s a section called “clock tower”, which does contain a room-filling clock at one point, but it’s in the middle of some longish rooms completely filled with grandfather clocks, their pendulums swinging in eerie unison. One imagines the architect (either in-game or out-) saying “Of course there are clocks. It’s a clock tower. What else do you expect to find in a clock tower but clocks?”

The thing is, I’m not really complaining. It’s clear that this castle is a magical place. One of the few drops of story we’re given is that the castle only appears once every hundred years. This game is supposed to be set in a break in the pattern when the castle appeared 96 years early, but still, the very nature of the place gives it an excuse to be dreamlike and phantasmagorical. Things that don’t quite make sense just enhance an appropriate sense of otherworldliness. Or so I’m willing to tell myself as I play.

If I didn’t already have a notion of what genre Castlevania: Symphony of the Night belongs in, I’d probably invent the category “Platform RPG” for it. It’s simply got more RPG-genre signifiers than any other metroidvania I’ve played. It isn’t just that you earn experience and level up; there are a bunch of games go that far without seeming particularly RPG-like otherwise. (I think of Blood Omen 2 as a good example, although it probably only comes to mind right now because of its long-haired vampire protagonist.) It’s the little influences, like the choice of stats (which use stantard D&D abbreviations like STR and CON), as well as their initial values, which fall squarely into the middle of 3d6 range. And the whole layout of the status and inventory menus is not just RPG-like, it’s distinctly Final Fantasy-like.

The specific powers of the items you can equip include gimmicks of the sort I particularly associate with JRPGs. For example, there’s a suit of armor whose protective power increases with the amount of the castle you’ve explored. Several other items that provide substandard protection make up for it with other powers, such as recovering health, mana, or “hearts” (ammo for special weapons) faster than normal. That sort of thing has been rare so far, though. Most of the weapons, armor, and trinkets you find just increase your Attack and/or Defense ratings to various degrees, and possibly give a stat bonus. Special gimmick items seem like more of a late-game thing, something to give you options beyond maximizing numbers once you feel like you’ve got them maximized enough. (And that’s a phenomenon happening to me already, when I get a new exploration-enabler and go back through earlier sections to reach previously-inaccessible areas: suddenly I find that I’m killing everything in one hit and only taking one point of damage at a time, just like in the intro.)

So I spend enough time contemplating equipment for the game to feel very CRPG-ish, but every once in a while it goes and does something just flat-out old-style coin-op platformer. I thump a crumbly tile of wall with my thumping-stick and out pops a roast turkey: suddenly, I feel like I’m playing Black Tiger. It’s a peculiar mix.

OK, so Yahtzee was talking about Castlevania: Symphony of the Night recently. And that led to some discussion with fellow gamers, which led to me purchasing a used copy on eBay ¹I’m playing the original Playstation version, which I’m playing on my PS2, which is still the most recent console I own. And anyway, it seems like a good synthesis of the last two games I blogged about, Aquaria, a “metroidvania”-style 2D game with an emphasis on exploration, and Amnesia, a horror game set in a spooky castle. The fact that they all end in “-ia” seems to be coincidental, but maybe I should scour the Stack for other such games to see if there’s a pattern.

Not that Casltevania is a horror game exactly — it’s got a vampire antagonist and an over-the-top gothic style, but it’s more fantasy than anything else. In fact, this particular entry in the series has strong FRPG elements, which came as a surprise to me. My prior experience with the Castlevania series is slight, owing to growing up primarily a PC gamer. I recall watching a friend play one of the prior episodes when we were both in college, probably on the SNES, and I’ve played on an NES emulator the first few sections of the original — just enough for the first few segments of Symphony of the Night to be very familiar. Those experiences left me confused about the term “metroidvania”, which didn’t seem to describe the Castlevania I had seen at all. The reason, I now know, is that those weren’t the games that inspired the term. Symphony of the Night was, and that is the main reason I decided to play it.

So, to begin. This is a game where your ability to fight and survive is highly dependent on your equipment, and to emphasize this, it does something I’ve seen a few other games do: it starts you off in an extremely buff state, lets you play through an intro like that, and then takes it all away from you. In fact, it does this twice. The very opening of the game, before it plays the credits, is apparently the ending of the previous game, comprising a few stretches of corridor, a secret passage, and a boss fight against Dracula himself, in which he utters one of the most famous lines of awkward videogame dialogue to ever be loosely adapted from Japanese to English: “What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets,” ²Yes, I realize he’s quoting Malraux. It hardly matters. which is right up there with “You spoony bard!” in my book. Throughout this section, the player controls Richter Belmont, vampire hunter and warrior supreme. But Richter goes missing during the opening credits, and for the rest of the game (as far as I’ve seen, anyway), you get a long-haired bishounen who looks like CLAMP drew him. Perhaps the success of this game is what inspired Hideo Kojima to attempt the same thing a few years later in Metal Gear Solid 2?

Well, maybe, maybe not. Regardless, it’s similar enough to make me wonder why the introduction of Raiden provoked so much fan outrage and the introduction of Alucard, Dracula’s half-vampire son, did not. It probably has something to do with the setting: Metal Gear ‘s military theming is a lot more macho than Castlevania‘s gothic, with its suggestion that immortality and super-powers are associated with aristocracy and poetic souls. But also, Alucard wastes no time in earning his badass cred. Where Raiden is presented at first as a newbie fresh out of the academy (his backstory later turns out to be a lie, but only after you’ve already formed a first impression of him) and spends his first few encounters hiding from guards, Alucard is out there taking out huge monsters with single blows of his terrible swift sword. Which, after a few rooms, is taken away from him, along with the rest of his stuff. But he still keeps his comet-trail of ghostly afterimages!

Anyway, I’m finding this game pretty compelling, and can see why people still like it despite the dated VGA-looking graphics and terrible, terrible dialogue. I’ll probably post again tomorrow.

Amnesia: The Dark Descent has three endings. The easiest to get, and the first I got, is the “Bad” ending, which just requires that you penetrate the Inner Sanctum and then fail to accomplish anything while there. The designated “Good” ending requires you to have solved some optional puzzles earlier (which I had done) to prepare for a wreck-everything action you can take in the final scene (which I failed to do in my first pass, partly due to some confusion on my part about what a certain NPC meant by the word “Gateway”.)

The third ending I got was the Revenge ending, which is better than the Bad ending and requires no advance preparation, but which does require that the player manipulate certain environmental objects the right way. There’s a bit of a problem with that throughout the game: while some things can be clicked to perform discrete context-appropriate actions, like picking them up or reading them or lighting them with a tinderbox ¹An unlockable video of an “early alpha” version shows tinderboxes being applied as inventory items, which you need to open the inventory menu to access, rather than as single-click actions. Changing this was a good decision, as was the elimination of “sanity potions”. , a lot of things need to be dragged through the 3D environment in specific ways. Doors open either inward or outward, levers pulled or pushed. Circular valve handles — which are far denser in this game than in my ordinary life — need to be rotated, which I always find tricky. Anyway, there are items in the Inner Sanctum such that it’s not at all clear how you’re supposed to manipulate them, and on my first attempt, I spent so much time trying to click them, apply inventory items to them, and even just throw rocks at them (an occasionally useful approach, but rendered moot here by the lack of loose rocks in the vicinity) that I wound up getting the Bad ending.

I did figure it out on my third try, though, and I have to say that I think I prefer the Revenge to the Good one, because it feels a great deal more triumphant. The Good ending involves putting your fate (and that of your enemy) in someone else’s hands, and it’s kind of ambiguous about the result, beyond an assertion that it’s going to be okay. Am I alive? Am I still on Earth? It’s not clear. Whereas in the Revenge ending, you know exactly what’s going on: Daniel foils his antagonist’s plans and strolls stoically back to the entrance chamber, not really caring what happens to him next. It still leaves it open to question whether he actually makes it out of the castle, though.

More significantly, all the endings leave it open to question whether Daniel deserves to escape. The dark descent referred to in the title isn’t just a physical movement downward, or a descent into madness, it’s also the lowering of Daniel’s moral standing in his backstory, as his desperation to save his own life led him to atrocity. This is one of the few games with zombies or zombie-like monsters that actually have specific reasons to hate the player character in particular. Yes, he was fooled into doing what he did, but only because he was selfish enough to allow himself to be fooled. There’s a diary entry or two you can find in which you can really see the cognitive dissonance in action: Daniel wants to see himself as the good guy, and thus leaps to accept his host’s questionable assertion that all the prisoners in the castle are unreformable criminals who deserve everything that’s done to them, and that their steadfast protestations of innocence just prove that they’re additionally liars. (Not for nothing is his name an anagram of “denial”, I suppose.) But towards the end, Daniel’s culpability is his greatest weakness, the one thing that can cripple him into temporary inaction and unresponsiveness to player control. In the final confrontation, the enemy tries to use it against him, and the only reason it doesn’t work is that, as Daniel’s mentor in monstrousness, he bears at least as much blame himself.

Still, the ending confrontation leaves me a bit unsatisfied, probably because there’s so little to do: each of the non-Bad endings requires only one action, and they’re pretty much the only actions available. I suppose this is another part of why I prefer the Revenge ending: it makes you perform that action three times, which provides a little bit more opportunity to feel like you’re interacting with the world, rather than just answering a riddle.

“More soon”, I said. I’m nearly a week late with this post. Of all the strictures of the Oath, the one about posting within 24 hours of a session is the one most frequently violated, but in this particular case, I’ve been procrastinating to a degree usually reserved for work. I think it has to do with the immense formal similarity between Amnesia and its predecessor, Penumbra: I’m having difficulty coming up with things to say about the former that I haven’t already said about the latter. So let’s focus on the differences here.

The most obvious thing is the premise and setting. Penumbra is set in modern times, in a secret installation under the frozen wastes of Greenland — an approach that’s reminiscent of some of Lovecraft’s stories of primordial horrors lying dormant in places remote and inaccessible until an ill-advised expedition goes poking at them. Amnesia takes a more classical horror route, putting the action in a moldering German castle in the 19th century, where the protagonist went in hope of help escaping a curse destined to kill him. Note that Penumbra‘s premise is automatically one of exploration and discovery, while Amnesia‘s is not. To make it into one, the authors added the amnesia gimmick. Conveniently, this allows for an absolute minimum of exposition at the beginning (especially in contrast to Penumbra, which had an intro cutscene that dragged on a bit). Amnesia is a cliché in adventure games, but that’s because it’s so convenient.

Penumbra was mainly structured as a series of hub areas, each with a number of puzzle-rooms on its periphery. Solving these rooms provided the means to proceed to the next hub area, after which point the passage back collapsed. Amnesia has some similar bits, but they’re not quite the same. In Penumbra, the hubs were where the monsters stalked you. That way, they didn’t have to interfere in your adventure-gaming in the peripheral rooms, where you could catch a breather from constantly running away, but still dread the moment when you’d have to come out and face them again. Amnesia inverts this: the hubs are the peaceful places, the peripheral areas are where the monsters can come crashing out of a side-chamber at any moment. This makes it all the more harrowing when you return to the hub after completing all the puzzles, and find that the walls have started growing fleshy pustules, a sign that the curse is catching up and it’s time to move on.

It’s open to some question just how real such changes to the environment are. As in the second and third chapters of Penumbra, the player character is definitely hallucinating at least some of the time. In Penumbra, it was plot-linked: at specific points in the story, you’d hit a hallucination sequence. It’s more sophisticated in Amnesia: hallucination is conditional on your level of sanity. In addition to the obvious effects that can be applied anywhere — the screen warps queasily and the camera swerves out of your control, you hear voices, at one point I even had imaginary bugs crawling around — there are less obvious things: in one room I noticed a portrait that can appear as either a normal person or a mutated monstrosity, depending on how sane you are when you enter. This makes me wonder what other places I’ve passed through have similar variations, which in turn makes me wonder how wise a technique this kind of variability is. Players will only appreciate it when they know it’s happening.

I suppose the sanity mechanic invites comparison to Eternal Darkness. I haven’t played it, but judging by various Youtube clips, the insanity effects there are in the nature of pranks: something weird happens, like the player character’s head falling off, and after a moment everything goes back to normal. Insanity effects in Amnesia, by contrast, are continuous: once the screen starts breathing, the only way it stops is if you regain some sanity, and the only way that happens is if you make progress in the game. Since the insanity effects are unpleasant to look at, this helps to drive the player forward — my impulse, on seeing my character freaking out, is to find a safe place and sit there until he calms down, but that just doesn’t work. This is more like the sanity mechanic in the pencil-and-paper RPG Call of Cthulhu, where the chief way to regain sanity is to complete an adventure. CoC also has an interesting notion about an inverse relationship between sanity and knowledge: as your Cthulhu Mythos knowledge goes up, your maximum sanity rating goes down. While Amnesia doesn’t seem to have quite the same thing going on, it does seem like the voices and hallucinations you get from madness function, to some extent, as hints about what’s really going on. We learn early on that the protagonist, Daniel, deliberately induced his amnesia for his own protection. Thus, sanity goes hand-in-hand with suppression of knowledge, and a lowering of your mind’s defenses may be the path to regaining lost memories. But it’s still something that you really don’t want to do.

Which brings us to the problem of darkness. Both Penumbra and Amnesia give you limited light sources, but running out of lamp oil in Amnesia is a more serious matter than running out of flashlight batteries in Penumbra, partly because in Penumbra you could always revert to your infinite glowstick (which, I’ve argued, was a better light source anyway), partly because wandering around in the darkness in Amnesia eats at your sanity (sometimes with audible crunching). You can save on lamp oil by lighting stationary candles and lamps, using up your limited supply of tinderboxes instead. This can be worthwhile if you think you’re going to be spending some time searching a place, or revisiting it later — an element of planning that was absent from Penumbra‘s more diverse but shallower array of lights.

Now, both games have monsters that you need to hide from, and which have a harder time finding you in the dark. Escaping such a creature is a simple matter of turning off your light, crouching behind something, and waiting for the background music to indicate that it has gone away. But in Penumbra, that’s all there was to it, whereas Amnesia has the complication of sanity loss. Ideally, you want to flee into a room with a nice opaque door and a candle you can light. Such rooms are not always available. In fact, if you’ve been overdoing it with the tinderboxes, there might not even be a dark corner to crouch in.

And ultimately, you’re going to wind up wasting a lot of oil and/or tinder by blundering around the same areas trying to find what you’ve missed. Penumbra helpfully posted maps on the walls of its hub areas, helping the player explore thoroughly and plan routes to avoid the monsters. The thing is, by allowing you to feel like you know what you’re doing, aids of this sort work against the sense of nervousness. Areas in Amnesia have simpler layouts than in Penumbra, but you have to figure them out on your own, wasting valuable resources as you do so. You inevitably feel like you’ve wasted more than you should have — the game’s opening screens explicitly discourage save-scumming, so even if you reload and optimize, you’re going to feel like you’re doing it wrong. Well, there’s a close connection between fear and guilt, and some of the most effective horror games play on that. I’m thinking in particular of Silent Hill 2, but also Penumbra to some extent, particularly after Red’s death. Amnesia is beginning to look like it’s venturing into that territory as well.

OK, time for more recent indie goodness. Amnesia: The Dark Descent, by the same team as Penumbra, is one of the games from the past year that garnered the most praise from people whose opinions I respect. Like the Penumbra games, it’s a first-person horror game. True to its title, and also like Penumbra, it seems to involve going downward a lot. There’s a Call of Cthulhu-style Sanity stat, which diminishes not just from witnessing horrors and being attacked by abominations, but also just from being in the dark.

Of course, progressing to deeper underground chambers has the natural result of less natural light. There are lamps and candles located in stationary holders, and a lantern you can carry with you, but these are both based on limited resources that you have to find by exploring: tinderboxes to light the fixtures, oil to keep the lamp going. It seems like the game is inevitably going to make me run out of these things at some point, because that’s how horror in games works.

I have to say that the horror stuff is a bit more on-the-nose than I was expecting from other people’s comments. When you think you’re alone and you suddenly see a humanoid form dodging around a corner ahead of you, there’s good opportunity to make the player nervous: let us catch only a glimpse, and not know what it was that we saw, and our imaginations will run wild. But no, the figure stands there for a moment, and walks around that corner fairly slowly, to make sure that the player gets a good look at it. Having the same figure suddenly turn out to be right next to you when you rotate your view is effective, but only as a cheap jump-scare. But I’m still in the early stages yet; maybe I’m not yet up to the stuff people raved about.

The better, scarier stuff I’ve seen so far is the stuff that’s hard to interpret. Sometimes, for example, the screen just warps as if breathing. Is this a sign that I’m losing Sanity? I don’t know, and because I don’t know, I have to fear that it is. The rules in Penumbra were relatively cut-and-dried: your character had several discrete and easily-identifiable states, and it was always clear what triggered a state transition. Or maybe that’s just how I remember it, and the rules were no more obvious from the beginning there as here.

Anyway, more to come.

The nature of Aquaria‘s end boss is hinted at early on, in the cave where you learn your first song. There, you can find an evil-looking statue of a distorted face, with some kind of horns or tentacles attached. As you approach it, you hear a chuckle from a malevolent disembodied basso with good reverb, a bit like the voice of the Guardian in Ultima VII. On the wall, a word in Aquarian script identifies this being. That word: “Creator”. You’ve been fighting mad gods throughout the game, but this one is the original, the mad god to end all mad gods — or rather, to start them. It seems that all the dead races referenced in the game are his creations, experiments that ran their course and were discarded, leaving nothing but forsaken monsters. Even in your final battle with him, his signature attack consists of spawning new creations for you to fight, including shadowy versions of Naija herself.

Like any self-respecting god, what Creator really wants is worship. But in asking for it, he comes off as a creepy stalker: “You will love me forever”, etc., with a strong undertone of “I want you to give up all hope of ever being anything other than my abject, dehumanized plaything, and if you don’t, you are my enemy and will be destroyed, just like so many others before you”. In other words, it’s the whole “God as Abuser” concept stripped bare. But in the end, after you defeat his final form, he turns out to be no Gnostic demiurge: creator of civilizations though he may be, he’s not the creator of the world. He’s just a traumatized child given way too much power. As the last of his own people, his sincere motivation for everything he’s done is simple loneliness — which is very explicitly Naija’s motivation as well. Is she less of a monster than him? She’s more sympathetic at the moment, but if the root cause of his evil is that he’s too powerful, what are we to say about someone who goes around killing gods?

But I suppose she’s at least got the loneliness kicked. Towards the middle of the game, she meets a human named Li. She immediately falls in love with him, and grants him water-breathing ability with a kiss — it’s one of those stylized folk-tale romances, as unrealistic as their unmoving faces. I didn’t mention Li before because he honestly didn’t seem all that important. He follows you around and provides a certain amount of supporting fire, like a second pet, but otherwise just kind of fades into the background. Sometimes it took me a while to notice that he had gotten stuck somewhere and wasn’t with me any more. Towards the end, you learn a song that lets you use him for a powerful and complicated attack sequence, but once you have that, the game has to come up with excuses to not let you use it, and so Li suddenly develops a habit of getting captured and requiring rescue, like a gender-swapped Princess Peach. In the end, it’s the jealous Creator’s insistence on separating them that goads Naija into direct confrontation. (Well, that and the fact that his inner sanctum is the only place in the entire world that she hasn’t explored yet.)

The approach to the end involves a fair amount of adventure-game-like puzzle-solving, where you’re thrown into unique situations and have to apply the correct song to make progress. The final boss fight itself continues this. It’s a multi-stage affair, going through four distinct phases, some with multiple sub-phases. The most affecting part, I felt, was the bit where Creator morphs into a one-eyed insect-like thing that scuttles off into the darkness, then repeatedly flees from your light like a cockroach. If there’s one thing scarier than a monstrosity, it’s a half-glimpsed monstrosity that doesn’t want you to see it. I’ll probably have more to say about that when I post about the next game.

I’m generally pretty loose with spoilers on this blog. My goal in writing is to examine games in depth and detail, and tiptoeing around the plot just gets in the way of that. And I generally trust my readers to understand that a post with the word “Aquaria” in its title will contain information about Aquaria, and leave it at that. But today, I’m going to strongly recommend that anyone who’s playing Aquaria, or who thinks they might play Aquaria in the future, stop reading now, if you derive any satisfaction from solving puzzles on your own.

I said before that the one way that Aquaria fails to fit the Metroidvania model is that it isn’t a platformer: instead of jumping on platforms, you swim freely in a water-filled vertical 2D space. This isn’t quite true. There are places where you can breach the surface, jump high into the air like a playful porpoise, and come kersplashing down again. And, this being the sort of game it is, there are places you can’t reach any other way — the simplest being sections of water that are cut off from the mainstream by a chunk of island that you can vault over. But there are also things far less accessible than that, such as completely dry vertical shafts. The in-game map shows you the entire shape of each zone you visit, including the shape of the bits you haven’t visited yet, so it’s clear that there’s stuff to be found up above, but getting there is a problem.

Naija can survive on dry land, but, despite being humanoid, cannot walk on it. She’s accustomed to letting the water support her. Without it, she can only manage crouching and salmon-leaps. And there are places where this is sufficient to navigate the land, where the ascent is either gentle enough or irregular enough to leap up in steps. It’s tricky, though, because, just as underwater, you don’t have precise control over where you’ll wind up — the direction you jump in is affected by the angle of the surface you’re clinging to. I spent a considerable amount of time today repeatedly trying to get a sequence of jumps just right. Here, the game takes on all the frustrations of a conventional platformer, such as falling all the way to the bottom and having to start over. It’s sort of an inversion of the usual platformer, where the possibility of drowning means that the underwater sections are the annoying part.

But even that doesn’t really apply to those sheer vertical shafts. It seemed like the only way to ascend those was to take them in a single superhuman leap. There are ways to extend one’s initial jump out of the water: using the Beast form (the only song-form capable of swimming against a strong current), eating soup for a temporary speed boost. But such techniques only take one so far. And so I was left with a puzzle.

And it’s a pretty good puzzle, it turns out. The solution involves a bit of lateral thinking, in that it applies old tools in new ways. I mentioned before the Nature form, the fantasy-druid version of Naija with the power to make phallic-looking thorny plants burst out of the walls, damaging any enemies too slow or stupid to dodge a plant. The Nature form isn’t a very useful one generally, but it does have a few virtues, such as immunity to damage from sea anemones and spiky things — including those thorn plants I just mentioned. And again, this isn’t usually a very useful skill. Why would you want to create a dangerous plant and then touch it?

Because you don’t want to just touch it. You want to land on it. You want to use a series of thorn plants as platforms to let you climb up the shaft. I had been focusing on the problem of how to extend the height of my leap, but what I really needed to do was divide the distance up so that I didn’t need to clear it in a single bound after all. It’s still tricky to do, and I did still sometimes wind up falling clear to the bottom and starting over, but at least it works.

And once you have the insight of using thorn plants on dry land, there are other things you can do with them. Create one right under you, and the force of it springing out of the ground will propel you upward like a rocket. So, in the end, I did discover a new way to jump higher after all, but it’s a way that isn’t much use for ascending those vertical shafts.

If there’s one thing the metroidvania format does well, it’s provoking a sense of place. You gain familiarity with the total layout of the gameworld because you spend a significant amount of time visiting the same places repeatedly — and not because the game forces you to, but voluntarily, because you want all the goodies that you couldn’t get at the first time around. It’s not like grinding in an RPG, because it isn’t about wandering the same stretch of ground waiting for random events. Your actions on revisiting are purposeful, or at least exploratory, and a monster you’ve met before is just something to be got past as efficiently as possible. Thus, revisiting places engenders mastery of technique.

Aquaria‘s cooking system adds an additional motivation for revisiting places: collecting ingredients for cooking. Specific items are dropped by specific creatures which can be found in specific areas, so when you discover a new use for an ingredient, you have a new reason to go back to where it’s plentiful. And if you do, you do in fact wind up essentially grinding, despite what I said above. This is something best pursued in combination with other goals, other reasons for backtracking.

Lately I’ve been going back for a purpose that yields no direct benefit: I’ve been deciphering the runes. There are things written on walls throughout the game in an invented script. It turns out it’s just an alternate alphabet, and that the messages are in English. The first hint of this is actually in the opening menu, which starts off showing all its text in the Aquarian alphabet, then fades to Roman. This can be used as a kind of Rosetta stone for deciphering the rest, but it’s not really necessary — the game provides enough samples of the script to make an easy cryptogram.

I’ve managed to decipher 22 letters so far — the only ones missing from my mapping are J, K, Q, and Z, which simply haven’t appeared in any of the messages I’ve seen. The messages are mostly fairly predictable: the name of a city on a sign at its entrance, the word “Beware” just before a dangerous area, etc. But there are a few that are more interesting. One of the bosses has a lengthy message that I can only make out part of, because it’s partly blocked by the boss’s body, but it says something about someone devouring their own children — which, come to think of it, is a hint for the trick to defeating that boss. Elsewhere, in the place where I learned my first new song, “The light will guide her”. Another hint? At this point, I do have the power to create light, and I played with it a bit in that area to see if it opened up a hidden passage or something. But no, I think it’s just being metaphorical.

The messages may be mostly banal, but simply by putting them in a kind of code, the game invests them with significance. When I passed them by the first time, they were mysteries, and gave a sense of the mysterious to the surroundings. Now that I’ve broken the code, they’re little bonuses, to be eagerly attacked just in case they have something important to say.