Antro

’The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’, Gil Scott-Heron’s infamously misquoted poem about Black liberation in the United States, remains anthemic for decades, and its core message is applicable to many causes built against oppression. I’m familiar with the version of the poem set to funk music, which makes for a hip-hop earworm and while playing through Antro, I was reminded time and time again of the poem and how its core principles of activism show up in fresh paint in other cultural contexts. 

Gatera Studio resides in Barcelona, Catalonia, a region that in this decade has dealt with much political suppression. While playing Antro, I recalled my own visit to Barcelona in 2019, shortly after the Spanish federal government had arrested prominent independence leaders and left street posts plastered with the leaders’ faces. Antro’s subtle nods in its environment point toward this history which created a grounded setting for its story to tackle themes similar to those found in “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

I made steady progress in Antro in my play sessions and while the storytelling and plot did not really land for me, it was a difficult game to put down. I found myself constantly chasing the next song but sadly, after completing the second section of the game and with only the final part remaining, the game would no longer boot up and I was stuck on an infinite loading screen. I was not able to resolve this technical issue before the game review was due so despite not being able to complete the game, I am looking forward to doing so after patches have hopefully been implemented and I still recommend the game to interested players.

Antro is a 2.5D rhythm platformer in which you play as Nittch, a seemingly run-of-the-mill courier who works in a dimly lit underground society. The late-stage capitalist, post-apocalyptic dystopian setting will be familiar to anyone who has been introduced to it before. 

The game provides just enough to ground you in its story, but the way Antro fictionalises this scenario feels a bit tired. The story is serviceable, allowing the player to minimally understand and empathise with Nittch’s plight as an underpaid worker. There’s a nice flashback to a core memory made with Nittch’s mother, who instructs him to always run forward and never look back, which is simultaneously the best advice to beat the game’s challenges. The atmosphere of Antro is defined by tropic environmental details; projector screens cycle aggressive propaganda throughout the subterranean world, where its on-the-nose look highlights the world’s social stratification.

Like many stories before and surely many after, it recalls 1984 in the most direct ways. You’ll eventually meet the revolutionary group, Los Discordantes, and join forces to enact change. It’s all fine, but it needed an extra injection somewhere to make it properly stand out.

Like many dystopian stories, Antro focuses on class distinction over all else and emphasises class solidarity and multiculturalism as counters to wealth disparity. This is represented in the voice acting, but I’m not sure if it lands. It doesn’t quite feel like a multicultural setting, despite there being plenty of text in Spanish or Catalan, but then different accents in English. It comes across as difficult to pinpoint where this might take place versus disparate cultures being put into one location without any organic meshing.

Antro’s gameplay is what sets it apart. There are two distinct gameplay scenarios. The first feels like a side-scrolling walking sim, with some simple stealth sections peppered in. There are some collectibles where if you platform away from the main path, you’ll get bits and bobs that are accompanied by information on the world and, usually, an achievement. Here, the game’s narrative will develop, usually through messages that various members of Los Discordantes or others transmit to you that largely explain where you are headed and why.

The second is the game’s bread and butter. When a song kicks in, the game will shift gears and Nittch will automatically begin running. You can rest your thumb and focus on ducking, punching, and leaping your way forward. These moments were the highlight of Antro, and alternating the walking sections with the running sections created an excellent pace that made Antro hard to put down. 

There are plenty of hazards to avoid while running, and there would be clear indicators to hit an enemy or parry a laser, but timing some things, particularly jumping over burning trash or other sources of fire, was tougher to time intuitively.

If you get hit by anything, you’ll be sent back to the latest checkpoint. In the first act of the game, checkpoints were extremely generous. But as you transition to the next act, checkpoints were greatly more distanced. While you never lost too much progress, the change was abrupt and required quick adaptation to the new rhythm. 

The hip-hop tracks that accompany each rhythm section inject a heaping dose of adrenaline and determination into the gameplay. Featuring local hip-hop artists, the tracks included in this game are phenomenal. As the songs start, the title track and rappers involved flash on the screen, and I do recommend having pen and paper handy to jot down that information or to look it up in the credits. I was reminded of Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield and We Never Yield, two companion rhythm games that feature hip-hop music and tell similar stories.

Antro feels slick to play. The ludonarrative harmony between the need to keep running and keep pressing onwards, being reflected in the running sections, ultimately served as the game’s greatest strength. As its marketing material states, music is your ally. It heightens your senses, locks you in to the game’s literal rhythm, and drives the core of the Antro’s message. Like Gil Scott-Heron’s poem emphatically declares, “the revolution is not achieved passively, at home, watching, but with your feet hitting the ground running.”