Angeline Era

If you think this fairy drinking my blood is bad you should meet my ex-wife!

Angeline Era is a bump-combat action platformer set in the 195Xs. You play as Tets Kinoshita, a WWII vet turned adventurer, drawn to the mysterious isle of Era by Angels in his dreams. Alongside his angelic companion Arkas, he must track down the Bicones required to dispel the storm surrounding the wreckage of the angelic starship Throne and recover the lost art of Shimmering! Or something like that. I’m really not sure at this point.

For most of the gameplay, you’re running around stages as Tets, wielding a sword and a gun, dodging big round bullets, angling to bump into enemies to damage them, and occasionally using your own gun. The bump combat system is obviously inspired by much older games, like the original Ys or Hydlide series, but with relatively fluid movement and the addition of a jump button. Rather than needing to, for example, bump enemies at a slight offset, your main concern is bumping them with the front of your character, rather than making contact on your back or sides, and avoiding any damaging collision, like spiked carapaces or retaliatory shots. Some enemies cycle between modes, some explode on death, some charge forward and can temporarily disarm you, and some can only be harmed if you hop up and hit them in the head. One nuance of the combat that is pretty fun is that enemies take double damage on hits if ‘bumped’ into a nearby wall, as they are pinned down and can’t escape.

Your gun and artifacts make up the rest of the combat, and are technically [mostly] optional, generally giving you an option to take out one or two enemies that are a pain to approach in melee. The gun refills from you doing bump damage, [even against things that can’t actually be destroyed] and in a slightly bizarre twist, can ONLY be fired straight upwards, towards the top of the screen from Tets’ current position. [the sole exception is if you use the first-person view unlocked in post-game] Grenades, mines, and other, more tactical implements, are instead drawn from a shared pool of orbs, which are only occasionally recovered from enemy death drops.

The stages this all takes place in are self-contained, named levels, and you mostly access these by exploring a large, tile-based overworld. The game’s store page makes a big deal about this, as every stage is technically invisible, hidden on an arbitrary tile somewhere, and only revealed if you hold down the ‘search’ button on the correct spot. In practice, though, it’s not as demanding or interesting as it might sound. The likely locations of stages are generally pretty obvious, it doesn’t take much effort to test every remotely suspicious tile you come across, and there are only a handful of overworld locations that require something more of you than just checking every obvious spot you can reach. There’s also a very simple minigame required to unlock each stage once you find it, which, again, looks more interesting than it actually is.

Stages are primarily divided into two types – relevant and irrelevant. Okay, that’s mean. It’s more like ‘settlement’ type stages, which usually have NPCs, shops, beds to sleep in, and no objective, and more conventional levels, which end at an orb that you can smash open to gain a Scale. Stages tell you upfront whether or not they have a Scale, and you use those Scales in your dreams [after bumping and then climbing into a bed] to level up and gain stats. Obtaining a Scale also usually induces some changes in the overworld as you exit, with some blocking tiles being destroyed, some steps giving you access to higher regions, and so on.

While the game is mostly straightforward, with gauntlets of enemies, the occasional locked gate requiring a key, and Scale stages leading to more Scale stages, it also has a heavy focus on secrets. The search button works in stages just as on the overworld, and searching conspicuous spots can earn you coins, trigger invisible NPCs and treasure chests to appear, teleport you to new locations, or give you moments of quiet, religious reflection. Beyond this, there are also just regular-style secret passages to rub around and find, mild puzzles, enemy gauntlets, and hidden exits that take you to new parts of the overworld.

Most of your reward for the more thorough exploration of these elements are various side-grades, in the form of new artifacts to equip, alternate melee weapons to swap out, modifiers for your gun, and so on. Each melee weapon can be upgraded a single time, improving its damage and giving it new effects, but rarely making them that much more useful than the base sword.

The end result of all of this mashing and melding of mechanics is that the game genuinely looks and feels a lot like a game from the turn-of-the-century – the one in particular that came to mind for me was Nihon Falcom’s Gurumin: A Monstrous Adventure, both in positive and negative ways. It’s a cute setup, relatively low-stakes, and full enough of potential discoveries to give what is otherwise a fairly bland and too-easy action game a bit more appeal than it’d otherwise have. However, neither game, I would say, really hold up to a determined playthrough. There’s just a little too little to everything going on, the rewards aren’t particularly exciting, your options don’t affect the gameplay all that much, and much of it feels barely thought-out, a bit like padding, and it dilutes the impact of the more worthwhile elements.

But then, of course, the real draw isn’t so much the gameplay as it is the weirdness. Where Gurumin leaned heavily on its cutesy aesthetic and lighthearted adventuring, Angeline veers sharply and arbitrarily into complete non-sequitur bizarreness. The early game is tinged with a compelling aura of mostly unspoken oddness, with the setting presenting as an almost on-the-nose emulation of early videogame stories, hinting at layers of deeper meaning beneath. Eventually, though, the game says too much, has too many cutscenes of people quoting real Bible verses, shows an angel taking you to an alien facility to repair your mind and body, and the writing starts to feel a bit like Death Stranding.

As I alluded to at the start, the game is set on the island of Era, where Angels have crash landed their spaceship Throne. Era is also home to both humans and fae, who mostly take the form of the monstrous fauna that you spend most of the stages slaughtering, but also are sometimes just NPCs you can bump to talk to. There’s a lot of dream sequences, there’s a lot of hallucinations and time dilation and brain parasites and alien machinery, and beyond just being hard to keep track of, it’s also hard to take particularly seriously.

Some of it, especially the sudden brick wall of 1950s America the story slams into at a certain point, made me laugh out loud, but at the same time, I was about 99% sure it wasn’t being set up as a gag. It’s too long, too self-serious, too indulgent, and too much in the actual style of the game to be a joke… unless the whole thing is a joke that goes orders of magnitude too far or consistently just over my head.

It also shares a real problem of arbitrary hostility with Silksong, where certain rooms are set up as traps that just kill you outright if you do the wrong thing. Some of these seem to be actual puzzles with clues, others feel pretty arbitrary and pointless, and they’re never the highlight of the stage they’re in, even if the stage is mostly traps.

It’s a real shame, because I think with a bit of editing, a bit more player choice, and a lot better pacing, this game really could do some interesting things with the apparent themes it toys with. Instead, it just ends up being baffling and largely off-putting.

What is Angeline Era about? Is it about being gay? I doubt it, since anything implying that seems to be redirection about alien brain parasites a la Darkseed. Is it about Christianity? Sure, in the weird esoteric sense of bringing up the apocryphal Book of Enoch to strangers. Is it about being a Japanese-American? Not really at all. Is it about marrying a woman who turns out to be schizophrenic and have a taste for human blood? ...yeah, I think so. Maybe? Damn it!

I can’t even put my finger on how intentional the weirdness is, which I generally pride myself on having a good nose for, to separate authentic outsider art from false appropriation. This is as good a time as any to admit that I haven’t played most of developer Melos Han-Tani’s other games, which might give me some clues to apply here. Except for the first Anodyne, but that was like 30 years ago and I don’t remember anything about it.

I can’t strongly recommend Angeline Era purely on its gameplay, because while it has some interesting ideas and is at times surprisingly deep and fun, it still feels like it fails to make the most of its promise, and ends up seeming a bit padded and aimless. I also can’t strongly recommend Angeline Era on its narrative, because I frankly still don’t know what was going on or what it was trying to convey. I will, however, strongly recommend Angeline Era anyway, because it’s unlike much else I’ve ever played, will probably remain on my mind for a while to come, is often genuinely amusing and engaging, and because I think it would be funny to inflict this experience on more people. It’s a lot like The Lighthouse, but surprisingly less overtly gay. I think.

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Angeline Era can be purchased on Steam, GOG, and itch.io. Oh, hang on, it’s on itch? Maybe it’s gayer than I picked up on.

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