Indie Game of the Week 426: Axiom Verge 2

Happy United States Independence Day! And what's more American than... getting lost in Antarctica, bashing up robot scorpions. We're here with one of the very few high-profile Indie explormers—or an exploraction game if you will, might give that a spin for a while to see if it gets more (explor)traction—that I haven't covered yet. That is to say, we're playing Thomas Happ's Axiom Verge 2 this week: the sequel to one of the big early successes operating in this space, Axiom Verge, which found a novel concept in "hacking" the world in a meta twist by changing values around to afford progress rather than simply a double-jump or an air-dash (though I want to say it had those too). Axiom Verge 2 appears to loosely follow, or otherwise present a tale simultaneously happening elsewhere, that first game by presenting a determined CEO (so already the sympathy level is strong) as she investigates the Antarctic base that her business rival infamously disappeared from after she receives a cryptic email about her missing daughter. Naturally, alternative dimensions and some unusually fragile spacetime factor into things, along with nanomachine entities that latch onto her body (after replacing it with something more survivable) wherever she goes.

Axiom Verge 2 is definitely the sort of game where progress is meant to be painstaking and rules are there to be broken, or at least rewritten to your advantage. The former is best represented by the somewhat harsh limitations you're put under, at least at first, so that you have some manner of chains to break away from once the hacking aspect of the game takes more of a role. Hacking typically involves changing the behavior of enemies—you can slow them down, change their allegiance, cause their power supply to spontaneously explode, etc.—though the more advantageous the new parameter the more it'll cost you in hacking juice. When you're not gathering hacking juice to make your life easier, there's the usual traversal aspects of the genre to incorporate into your repertoire along with a selection of tools such as a melee axe, a ranged boomerang, some items like restoratives or a short-range explosive, and the ability to send yourself out into the world as an itty-bitty robot. This robot not only lets you slip through narrow gaps, effectively turning it into a remote-control Morph Ball, but is also capable of entering "breaches": frail areas of subspace where the pixel count takes a nosedive but can often link to other parts of the world in unexpected ways, as well as contain items and challenges of its own.

The story's been equally unkeen on the idea of spoonfeeding the player. You're chasing Dr. Elizabeth Hammond (presumably unrelated to the dinosaur guy) who vanished in this part of Antarctica which, turns out, is linked to another universe and still has some of her staff eking out an existence despite the ubiquitous presence of hostile synthetic life roaming around, but beyond that and the protagonist's true motivations there's a lot still to discover. The game does have lore items dispensed around the place for useful tidbits and some background lore but I'm no closer to piecing any of it together. There's enough of a breadcrumb trail to let you know where you ought to be heading next without necessarily laying out a series of signposts on how to get there—I took a huge detour on the way to the next location to explore an underwater area (your new body simultaneously made it impossible to drown while also increasing your density to make floating equally futile), only to find the game's equivalent of the Gravity Suit which then allowed me to traverse to where I found the exploding power-up I mentioned above, which then allowed me to destroy some damaged walls in the way to the actual objective I was supposed to be following. That kind of thing is par for the course for any good exploraction game though; let the player think they're heading "as the crow flies" only to zag on 'em.

For the most part, Axiom Verge 2 looks good and controls well. There's not really enough of a distinction between the wintry base you start in and the more temperate quasi-Mesopotamian alternative world; one thing I loved about the original Axiom Verge was the sci-fi Gothic (practically Gigeresque) imagery and this sequel's mostly normal-looking outdoor environments have been relatively anodyne in comparison (granted, I'm perhaps not far enough in to see the truly odd structures yet). The default sound and music settings are weirdly loud for some reason but that's nothing a quick delve into the menus can't fix. Worse is the achievement set, which I'm sort of done hand-waving away as an inessential development step. The achievement set for your game should ideally represent what you feel makes your game stand out, so whenever I see a half-assed group of goals to optionally chase after it feels like a missed opportunity. In this case, there's about five mutually exclusive achievements regarding full playthroughs; some could be combined, like a speedrun and a low-item percentage run, but for the most part the implication is that someone would want to play a game where exploration and discovery is a major factor (and very rarely a replicable quality in NG+) more than three times. It's pretty weak and a game like this deserves better.

The hacking does offer a game a great deal of versatility when it comes to problem solving, as well as greatly ameliorate an initially intimidating challenge curve, so I certainly appreciate that aspect of the game's progression philosophy. The presentation has its issues, previously outlined, but are otherwise in the "above average" rating for pixel throwback Indie exploraction games. Its narrative mysteries and exploration loop are both compelling enough to want me to dig further into the game even if I'm slightly demotivated thanks to that lousy achievement set, and ultimately I think Axiom Verge 2 will stand as a perfectly competent sequel that maybe lacks the original game's innovative spark and becomes less memorable as a result. Sort of like what happened with the second Ori game, which despite feeling like it was an improvement over the first nonetheless spends less time in my thoughts. I wonder if it's in the nature of sequels to daring games that their comparative "safety" doesn't resonate as much but from what I've played so far I'd struggle to call Axiom Verge 2 a disappointment by any stretch. Elements of it, perhaps, but certainly not the whole.

Rating: 4 out of 5.