Analgesic Productions has been quietly putting out the best games you probably haven’t played for over a decade now. I’ve been beating this drum since 2019 with the release of Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, their first 3-D, low-polygon game, and one that genuinely changed how I engage with and view video games; the way Anodyne 2 was able to connect its story themes into its gameplay mechanics and deliver it in an offbeat tone with an actual voice and personality felt like a once-in-a-generation rarity to me. Finding out it was created by a two-person team (Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka) that was putting out work of that quality every few years seemed impossible, and yet Even the Ocean and Sephonie are just as exceptional, if not more so. Sephonie in particular, with its unique blend of 3-D platforming, block puzzles, environmentalism, and musings on literal and metaphorical boundaries, is one of the most significant and wholly human pieces of media that I’ve experienced this decade and should be considered required reading.
I give all of this preamble not just because I want to shout about Analgesic Productions and their entire body of work into the largest megaphone that I have access to, but also to underline my excitement going into their latest game, Angeline Era. The latest game from my favourite independent developer, with cited inspirations from the older Ys games and early Fromsoft’s output, was basically a dream game I didn’t know that I wanted. And in just about every way, Angeline Era didn’t disappoint.
The main difference between Angeline Era and Analgesic’s previous games is that it’s much more gameplay-focused. Simply put, Angeline Era is straight up an action RPG through and through, which I imagine is going to surprise people familiar with the developer pedigree. There are different equippable weapons and subweapons to find, levels and stats to be gained, and both the overworld and actual stages are full of secrets to discover, many of which are devilishly hidden. While the Ys inspiration is clear as day when it comes to the (delightfully named) bumpslash combat, the aforementioned Fromsoft DNA and the dialogue those games are able to create with the player through tricks and traps are just as prevalent and even more important to the story themes of Angeline Era.
But I’m getting ahead of myself: we really should talk about the bumpslash combat. The player character, Tets, wields both a sword and gun, but neither work in the way they do in any other game. And by that I mean, there is no button to actually swing or slash your sword here; instead, you need to manoeuvre Tets over to an enemy and bump into them, at which point he’ll automatically attack. It sounds simple on paper, but this minimalist approach to player input allows the game to make up for it by throwing a bigger variety of enemies, bullets, and verticality in the player’s way on every combat screen. Since successful navigation and platforming is the heart of the combat challenge as opposed to being just another wrinkle, what would be overwhelming with any other game protagonist’s skillset ends up becoming second nature in Angeline Era.
The gun, meanwhile, can only shoot directly up and has limited ammo that’s restored by attacking enemies with the sword. And while only being able to shoot directly up might sound stilted and contrived on paper, it’s the perfect counterbalance to the melee combat achieved with the sword while continuing to underline the importance of the player’s spacing in relation to enemies. It’s frankly shocking that a combat system like this hasn’t been implemented in a contemporary game until now, given how fun it is; despite the minimalist design approach, the combat never got old in my 17+ hours with the game, and it feels slightly surreal (in a good way!) to write this extensively about combat design and mechanics in an Analgesic Productions game.
Outside of the standard combat- and puzzle-centric levels, Angeline Era also has an overworld to explore. The vast majority of levels and towns have to be discovered by using a search function on the overworld at specific spots, some of which are a lot more obvious than others, and completing levels tends to make new pathways open up to explore in the overworld itself. This search function is available at all times, and there are secrets hidden absolutely everywhere, some of which might do nothing but drop extra money or fertiliser for you, some of which might teleport you to otherwise inaccessible pathways, and still others might just lead you to an instant death. Much like King’s Field or Dark Souls, the game delights in pulling the rug out from under you while never making you the butt of the joke.
With this very specific sense of humour, low-poly visual style, and specific design language and secret tells, at times it feels like you’re playing a lost PC game from 2003. Add in yet another all-timer soundtrack from Melos Han-Tani, this time one that runs the gamut from sounding at times like a video game scored by The Cure and at other times like it was pulled from the sonically busiest moments of Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure, and most of the pieces that make another Analgesic Productions banger are fully in place.
Unfortunately, the thing I enjoy talking about the most with games from Analgesic is their stories and themes, but I’d be remiss to spoil anything specific here. Ultimately it’s a game about lies – specifically, it’s most interested in spending time at the point where lies that comfort you and hurt other people intersect. Games from this duo have always made me self-reflective, but Angeline Era had me extending these contemplations outwards to people I’ve met throughout my life more than ever.
I thought about the bemused, understanding pity on the lady’s face at the DMV when I shaved a full 30 pounds off my weight when getting my driver’s license as a teenager, absolutely sure no one would notice. I thought about the blood-sucking, racist leeches currently running the federal government in America (the ones even more racist than usual) because nearly half the country has decided they’d rather be wilfully lied to at the expense of other people’s happiness and their own than be confronted with anything slightly resembling truth. I thought about the morality of telling your kids that Santa Claus is real and the complete self-own of giving credit to a made-up being for no reason other than hopefully giving your kids a sense of whimsy at the risk of some steep therapy bills a few decades down the road. And I thought multiple times about that episode of Hey Arnold! In which Arnold convinces his coach to lose a game of air hockey to his wife to save their marriage.
I’m not sure anything can better sum up my thoughts on a game from Analgesic Productions.
