Day Four

• Game: Castle in the Darkness (Matt Kap/Nicalis).
• Release Month: February.
• Source: The Steam Halloween Sale.
• Quick Look: Here. (Vinny/Alex.)
• Started: 01/12.

All right, so the three days we spent plumbing TheBUTT for treasure was more of a warm-up for Go! Go! GOTY! proper. Now that we're in December, it's time to get serious and switch things up with... a throwback Indie game filled with references and in-jokes that belongs to a genre that has long since fallen out of favor with the AAA industry. Oh. I guess I have a few of these this year? Castle in the Darkness is your run of the mill standard 2D side-scrolling platformer with a hint of SpaceWhipper that borrows liberally from numerous NES and SNES games to construct an overall experience that feels very familiar without also feeling too generic or too stale. Not an easy balance, but CitD (aw, that's not a funny acronym) handles it as well as can be expected. It's no Shovel Knight, but then very few games are.

Let's start with a strength, a weakness and then another strength. Classic compliment sandwich. As with almost every retro throwback, Castle in the Darkness is abundant in pixel art, though here it's actually all fairly decent. When the game throws large enemies at you, and it will do often, they all look and animate brilliantly with lots of little quirks that ably demonstrates the artist's style and attention to detail. I prematurely dismissed the game as being inferior to Yacht Club Games's ode to shovelry, but in the art department they're about neck and neck. I tend to think of pixel art the same way I do as anime: the strict conventions of the form tends to result in a lot of samey-looking mediocrity, but that makes the exceptional work stand out all the more. Pixel art has an additional problem, in that if you're focusing on smaller sprites there's only so much room for artistic flair. Not a whole lot you can do with a 16x16 pixel grid, though it's important for games like these that the player's hitbox is as minuscule as possible.

Because, yes, Castle in the Darkness is one of the many retro throwbacks that has incorrectly conflated "old-school" with "needlessly difficult". It does at least keep most of the asinine difficulty safely ensconced in some optional areas, and while the checkpointing ceases to be as generous after a short while, the player can upgrade their HP after defeating bosses and withstand a number of hits from enemies and traps before perishing. Well, unless they hit a spike. Or a stalactite. Or a stalactite that's falling on them, but only sometimes for whatever reason. There's a distinct lack of consistency with some of the traps in the game, though it's a good rule of thumb to avoid anything pointy. When you get to the aforementioned "harder optional areas" like House of Ruth or the Sunken Temple, the game suddenly decides to do away with "challenging but fair" and swerves straight into the muddy ditch of fake difficulty bullshit. This includes taking away checkpoints before bosses, forcing you to repeat half a dozen screens of traps and enemies before you can get a rematch; pits that require pixel-perfect jumps that you often need to cross twice before you can save; Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles poison seaweed that slowly drains your health (see below. Yep, the developer thought that would be a fun reference); and various other transgressions against the player experience for the sake of being a little tougher to complete. I despise fake difficulty, and it's putting this game in a very harsh light.

Here's the other compliment: Castle in the Darkness has a neat soundtrack. All right, fine, something a little more substantial than that: the game is clearly a one-person labor of love in the same way that Dust: An Elysian Tail or Undertale are. It feels like the non-team that built this game poured a lot of themselves into it, and it shows with a lot of the game's obscure little in-jokes, its secrets and its many varied, distinct and cool boss fights. It controls well, though the double-jump can be a little unresponsive at times, and deaths rarely feel unfair in the way masocore games with poor controls often make them seem. The concise controls assures the player that they have no-one to blame but themselves if they happen to faceplant into lava inches from the next save point, in other words. I'm presently hovering around 70% completion and presumably fairly close to the end, though I was fortunate enough to save up enough money for some powerful gear to make the last few bosses a little easier. Provided I don't keep running into insta-death spike gauntlets with no checkpoints - a.k.a. The Ryckert approach to scenario design - I imagine I'll have it beat tomorrow, though 100% might be a tall order. I'll have more to say about it then, including more on the RPG and SpaceWhipper elements and its versatile magic system. Toodles.

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