Indie Game of the Week 409: Teslagrad 2

Rounding out the month of February, in very much the same style I started it, we have another explormer I'd like to share with you all. Mercifully, this one's much briefer than Afterimage though the adage "short but sweet" might not necessarily apply in this case. Teslagrad 2 is the long-awaited (by someone, somewhere, presumably) sequel to the first Teslagrad, released over a decade ago now, which presented a steampunk world filled with technology governed by magnetism and electricity and the despots that ruled over all in their tall, lightning conductor towers. Teslagrad had a classy hand-drawn art style and striking aesthetic but was regularly let down by its imprecise movement—especially where magnetic fields were concerned—and its overly frustrating bosses. Surprisingly, despite a ten year long gap between the games, absolutely nothing has changed.

Teslagrad 2 reintroduces Lumina as its heroine: one of the four playable characters from one of developer Rain Games' intermittent projects World to the West (my IGotW review of which is here) who has since found her way back to her overcast homeworld of red-and-blue magnets as she gets trapped on an island after air pirate/Vikings (or maybe both) shoot down her dirigible and try to capture her. Fortunately, this island also has a big electricity tower with a weird looking cyborg guy at the top and he helps the heroine evade her would-be captors a few times until he decides... he's evil? And then becomes the final boss for some reason? This is one of those games that doesn't really reveal much of what's happening up front, but rather trusts the player to lean into their explormer instincts and go about collecting a set of 81 picture cards that detail the game's story and background when they're all put together. Doing this also unlocks the true final boss of the game, supposedly. I can't say I'm entirely motivated to go after them all given the game's overall quality level but I know the completionist urge to, uh, completionize will galvanize me into doing all this scrounging before too long.

Speaking of galvanizing, let's talk about the game's electricity-based traversal skills and general gameplay loop. Its progression is about as rudderless as the story, though it will helpfully point out the next boss and accompanying power-up location on the map for you to vaguely head towards. The game's actually fairly linear in this regard: the only detours either lead to obstacles you can't surpass yet, collectibles, or shortcuts to a small central village hub area between the game's more vertical "dungeons" such as an iceberg, a tower, and a bigger tower. The skills you acquire early on include a "blink" air-dash, which also lets you warp through barriers, as well as a cloak that activates a blue magnetic field around you. This repels you from other blue surfaces while attracting you to red ones: by using these in tandem early on you can get around some twisty level design, albeit in an awkwardly floating sort of manner. Later abilities include a couple of weapons—a false Mjolnir I'll call "Mjolnearly" and a familiar flying axe that you can recall back to your hand, which I guess has now become de rigueur for Norse deities or possibly Greek deities slumming it in the Other Great White North—and a sliding tackle that magnetizes you to metal floors, which is admittedly kinda cool in practice as you go around loop-de-loops like a certain gravity-defying hedgehog.

Trouble with a lot of this is that the game does a poor job of teaching you how many of these new abilities work, and certain other functions—like picking up items—is never conveyed or explained at all. I spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out how to get past a blue barrier with a nearby red crab that temporarily gives you a red aura, but that aura never lasted long enough to repel yourself through said barrier. The solution was just to pick the crab up, which never would've occurred to me because it's a weird moving robot with sharp parts that looked like it would've protested being lugged around. The boss fights are like this too, making you guess at the obtuse methods required to damage them all the while getting blindsided by each new surprise attack pattern as they go through phases. The game's chill enough to give you a temporary power-up that doubles the amount of hits you can take (i.e. it goes from one to two) but you have barely any post-damage invulnerability so you're more than likely just going to get two-shotted as you try to escape. Meanwhile the penultimate boss—the leader of the viking/pirates that was set up to the be the main villain (and comically got around by holding his shield over his head and gliding like Olaf the Stout)—died in like thirty seconds. Some very odd decisions went into almost every aspect of the game it feels like, and it almost gives the game a sense of weary obligation; like the fanbase had been clamoring for a Teslagrad remake or sequel for its tenth anniversary while the developers would rather work on absolutely anything else.

Even the game's strongest point—its hand-drawn style visuals and a new Norse aesthetic that's a little closer to home for the Norwegian Rain Games than the more London-coded murky urban setting of the first Teslagrad—tend to interfere with the game by way of indiscernible hitboxes and the elaborate character animations getting cut off or interrupted in a jarring way. As for the rest of the presentation, I've already spoken about how what little narrative there is you have to go digging around for and the music has a lot of what I'd call Viking guttural grunt-singing in it that, while it certainly does its job building tension, isn't always aurally pleasant. Kinda took me back to when I was playing Senua's Saga last month, for better or worse. I will say though that the animations on the whole are very smooth and well done and I appreciated little touches like the way Lumina puts on or takes off her hood as she enters and exits exterior areas, respectively. As was the case back with Psychonauts 2 as well, a part of me hoped for something a bit more polished and revolutionary after such a long gap between entries but Teslagrad 2 does have its occasional appealing moments between just as many very not appealing ones. Still, it's an explormer, so I had to play it eventually. It's the law, or something.

Rating: 3 out of 5.