Idosra: The Electric Renaissance
Kickin' ass on the campaign trail
Idosra is a platformer that takes place in North Carolina in the 70th century. You play as a young[ish] woman, Marika, who lives in a rural city-state on the outskirts of the expansionist Vallas Empire. After a bizarre encounter, she is thrust against her will into a vast technological conspiracy, flagged as a terrorist agent, and worst of all, wrapped up in electoral politics! To defend her name, her life, and her apolitical bona fides, she’ll track down and kick every able-bodied man in the state, right in the chin! Wha-pow!
The core gameplay of Idosra is the run’n’jump platforming, and while it’s a bit unconventional in its details, it grows on you with time. You can grab and hoist yourself up onto any ledge you slam into, lower yourself down to reduce the [initially quite dramatic] fall damage, and you have a bit of momentum to your running, but it’s not a full on ‘cinematic platformer.’ You get a good bit of air control, combat picks up pretty quickly, and the game becomes progressively less strict about things like fall height as you get further along.
Along the way, you’ll have to dispatch countless foes, mostly consisting of human guards, all basically of the same build but identified by their colored accents, and automated turrets. Guards actually represent a wide range of threat levels, from the early clueless, unarmed mook who shuffles forward until he gets shoved to the ground, to cybernetically enhanced elites who hurl homing incendiary grenades the instant they see you. Turrets also come in many flavors, but are generally tied to a nearby destructible camera lens, and are destroyed if their ‘eye’ is smashed. Usually, you’ll be doing so with a throwing knife, or an axe, which is thrown via a Yoshi’s Island style auto-rising designator.
Guards mostly patrol their little patch of ground until making direct eye contact with Marika, then start throwing whatever projectile they have on hand as you dodge, throw your own, or close the gap for a scrap. Early on, you’re limited to a kind of wimpy shove and an overly dramatic, and amusingly high, front kick, but they’re plenty for the hapless goons in the first few stages. Later on, as encounters get more dangerous, you get more complex and useful options – a roll and a separate dive maneuver to avoid attacks, a charged punch that can be switched into a knock-out uppercut, defensive spinning kicks, and my favorite, a flying jump kick that launches enemies back several feet like they took on the wrong role in a JCVD movie. Hilariously, if you hold the kick button too long, you’ll botch your landing, falling in a heap in front of the enemies who then take the opportunity to grab Marika and hurl her away.
As your skills improve, you’ll have real reasons to use each move, and the game progresses through phases, where your preferred offensive strategy changes. Early on, you’ll lean on throwing weapons pretty heavily, bursting down troublesome foes or picking off cameras with careful shots. At one point, I was jump kicking almost everyone I could, sparing myself the need to deplete their health by just punting them off a nearby ledge. Later, when ledges were less abundant, enemy health grew higher, there was too much danger in pushing them deeper into the level, or I just wanted their drops, I started fighting more tactically, drawing them in while hanging off a ledge, then hoisting up and pummeling them in a straight melee.
Mixing things up is a little bit of environmental detail, letting you surprise enemies and turrets with careful movement and foresight. Most interiors are illuminated primarily with gas lanterns, and their glass casings are destructible, the flaming debris splashing down and leaving the area dark – dark enough to partially conceal you from ranged guards and turret cameras. Guards can still hear you, though, based on your movements, and will display their alertness via a little thought bubble. I wouldn’t call it a stealth game at all, but you are encouraged at least occasionally to slow down and manage your movement carefully without it feeling totally artificially imposed. You eventually even get armor that improves your stealthiness. There’s actually a variety of gear pieces to collect, usually as your reward for finding secret caches, and they can give you extra health or stamina, boost certain attacks, or even more unique effects.
You get score bonuses for killing enemies, discovering secrets, and collecting items, but a lot of your score comes from collecting gem chains. All around the stages, there are floating, color coded gems, and not only are they worth score individually, you get a big bonus if you collect all of them in a ‘set’ within a short span of time, usually generous enough to not force you to be frame perfect, but enough to nudge you into smooth movement and aggressive combat. If you pull it off, you’ll earn your ‘Cool!’ bonus, and if you manage to get every possible ‘Cool!’ bonus on a stage, not only will you feel pretty cool, you’ll get another massive bonus at the end tally screen, along with possible bonuses for not getting hit, beating the stage quickly, a dozen other minor rewards – it’s like Rise of the Triad over here. Getting a high enough score contributes to your overall ranking on that stage, from D up to S and P, with higher ranks giving you more reputation and eventually unlocking more optional stages.
The reason score is so important has to do with your main form of progression: reading. Throughout the stages, there are books to collect, [with a whiff of edutainment] most of which can be read by Marika to unlock new skills, perks, or permanent stat bonuses. The catch is that to read those books, she has to pay some experience points – which is equivalent to your total max score across all stages. It gets more convoluted than that, though, since she also has to be intelligent enough to understand the book, a stat which is raised, as you might expect, by reading easier books. Since your XP is based on your total max score, you can, and probably must, revisit stages to try for a better completion, but you can’t simply grind for XP. If you want more XP, you actually have to do better, or finish a new stage.
Thankfully, revisiting stages is a big part of the game, and is genuinely a lot of fun. From the start of Chapter 2 on, you’ll be acquiring more and more movement abilities that wind up unlocking inaccessible sections of the earlier stages, and most of the large stages in the game actually branch, with the bonus areas being considered their own stage ‘exits’ and therefore their own rankings and max scores, to say nothing of some of the more interesting things you’ll sometimes find on a revisit. Plus, as you become more powerful in general, you’ll be able to tear through early game content, eventually sprinting through levels punting guards into the stratosphere with ease. There are even some achievements tied to beating levels in unconventional ways, with massive XP payouts for obtaining them.
But the reason the levels are that fun to revisit is also because they’re genuinely well designed. Buttons and switches litter the halls, turrets are placed in defensive positions, secrets are tucked away cleverly, and you’ll find yourself using the ability to peer in each direction more and more as the rooms get more dangerous. Proximity sensors screech out as you approach, drawing in automated drones, gouts of flame erupt from ruptured gas lines, you can often find a clever way to drop down, skip a section, get behind a guard, hurl a grenade so the fragments land on an out-of-reach camera. There’s enough going on to trip you up, but it never feels so oppressive or overdone as to make getting through them tedious.
Rounding all that out is the excellent visual and audio design of the game. The sprites and animations are clear and readable, and the stages, even the ones taking place entirely in underground bunkers or dank caverns, are surprisingly rich with detail and visual flair. The sound effects are distinct, rarely abrasive, and lend the action a good amount of impact. But most of all, the music is fantastic. There’s a good variety of tense infiltration tracks, thumping action scores, and the occasional, like, house music mix. The songs are always perfectly fitting for the stage or scene, and are also of a relatively coherent sound, very electronic, very chiptune, very 80’s and 90’s PC platformer.
Idosra reminds me a lot of Crusader: No Remorse, the Origin Systems isometric shooter based on the Ultima VIII engine – infiltrating and exploring a complex, functional space, with switches and guards and alarms, each area a puzzle for you to unravel with equal parts violence and very careful movement. The initially clunky controls and stiff-looking combat somehow make you look and feel slick once you’re familiar enough to string a bunch of operations together properly. There are even times when you can trick enemies into blowing themselves up or taking each other out – I’ll never forget the moment in Crusader where I ducked between two guards and watched them blast each other in the chest. Even the plot and characters feel like they could have, in another world, been delivered with low-resolution FMV popups.
Speaking of which, the story is reasonably well-done, despite mostly coming down to a lot of dialogue boxes next to digitized photos of not particularly attractive folks. Basically, Marika has discovered information that would lead to the arrest of a prominent politician, putting her life in danger. But not particularly imminent danger, since she’s only really pursued and attacked when she opts to invade the archaeological digs and industrial sites of the VaSec corporation. Being the bright, unemployed twenty-something she is, she decides she has to track down even more VaSec operations to find out why they want her to stop sprinting in and jump-kicking everyone. Eventually, it’s revealed that the strange events all revolve around the global water levels falling, revealing more and more ruins of an ancient civilization, and relics making use of a mysterious power once known as ‘electricity.’
There are a few odd inclusions, like the mention that children in Marika’s society are raised in communal creches, with all of them apparently emerging poorly socialized and somehow lacking even words for ‘friendship’ and other relationships, compared to the more typically modern big-city folks across the river in the Vallas Empire. There’s some attempt at worldbuilding, but it doesn’t really go anywhere or stand out as anything but mildly unsettling.
Really, the game makes you run back and forth a bit too much in general, talking to NPCs after every major level, then getting a tipoff from one of them to go to the next major level, and so on. You don’t get any kind of input on the story or how it progresses other than moving it forward, which is kind of a bummer considering the variety of interlocking mechanics in the rest of the game. I guess that’s probably a blessing in disguise, as figuring out the proper way to progress is sometimes tricky anyway, and there were a few times I got stuck because I didn’t realize I’d missed a skill book I was absolutely supposed to have. Near the endgame, you are supposed to backtrack to most of the major levels to locate very powerful new abilities, and there’s not much guidance aside from a count of missed secrets per level to figure out which ones.
I had a few other problems besides the pacing and progression. Stats and scores are a bit confusing, and most of the armor feels like a terrible tradeoff until you get enough stamina and encumbrance reduction skills to reliably jumpkick while wearing them without getting exhausted… and then they just feel interchangable. Similarly, the potions you can find hidden throughout the levels are special in that they give you both a tiny permanent bonus and a strong temporary effect, but can ONLY be found in levels, and once used, are gone forever. I have a bad case of pack-rat syndrome, so I found myself hoarding them and winding up with dozens in my inventory by endgame, still refusing to use them unless I absolutely could not find any other solution.
Some areas are just very frustrating, with a bunch of jumps over instant death pits and guys throwing knives into your face as you attempt them, or turrets that fire so fast that if you get hit once, you get stuck unable to move to safety as you’re slowly blasted to bits. Late game enemies have health pools that make them tedious to kill if you aren’t aware of how strong combining certain moves are - and I had no idea for the longest time, since one of the early game books I’d missed was the one that reveals enemy health and damage values. There were one or two doorways that are so hard to see they might as well be invisible, and they’re not ones you should be missing, either – in fact, I got stuck in one stage because I couldn’t see the exit on my monitor.
The digitized portraits are kind of charming in their own way, but Marika herself is represented by a weird, oval-headed CG model, which makes her stand out, and not in a good way. Although I have to admit her weird side-eye smirk is pretty funny. I really wish there was more going on to visually differentiate the guard types – even though the coloration is technically enough, I feel like the game’s got enough style and effort to at least have glammed up elite troopers a bit more. Give the guys some shoulder pads at least! As I alluded to before, the game’s controls take a fair bit of getting used to, and even once you’re comfortable, it’s sometimes just too imprecise to reliably step to a ledge for a climb down, hop over an item or gap, or land a long throw. But all of that gets compounded if the system you’re running it on [say, for the sake of argument, a Steam Deck also recording with OBS] starts hiccuping, because the game unfortunately drops ‘held’ inputs when the game gets interrupted like that, however briefly, and a lot of the game’s trickiest moments involve you holding inputs.
On release, the game had some pretty major, I would say almost game-breaking issues, particularly with a handful of bosses, which made them far too difficult, or outright impossible, to kill. Thankfully, when I pointed them out, along with a few other balancing issues, the developer themselves responded, noted the problem, and then quickly pushed out patches fixing at least the immediate problems, even using beta releases just so I could press on and beat the game without waiting for a full stable update. The game is absolutely completable now, but there remain a handful of insidious bugs, like spots where you can clip out of the terrain, and I’m not entirely confident all of those will get ironed out.
But for all its flaws, Idosra is indisputably a unique, outstanding game. I can forgive its control quirks and bugginess, I can forgive enemy item drops clipping into the terrain out of reach, I can even forgive it namedropping Elon Musk like that one shitty Star Trek show. It’s a rare ‘retro’ game that genuinely recalls the most brilliant promises of the era it’s emulating, and then uses modern technology and conveniences to make it even better. Idosra is a game unlike any you’re likely to have experienced lately, and is a must-play at any price.
Idosra: The Electric Renaissance can be purchased on Steam.