Sometimes I find myself pining for something that recreates the magic of the PlayStation games I grew up with. I can’t help it! My memories of gaming in the late ’90s are filled with experiences unlike anything I get today. I have a vision of mystifying games filled with secrets, ones that weren’t afraid to be obtuse and allow me to get lost. Every game felt so different from the one I played before, inventing completely new ideas that I’d discover and master. There was nothing like it.
But the older I get, the more I’ve come to realize that my picture of the past isn’t totally reliable. I was a dumb kid with no easy access to walkthroughs. Of course everything seemed confusing and secretive. And all these one-of-a-kind games? I just hadn’t played much outside of the few games I’d get to rent from Blockbuster every once and a while. The reality is that while PS1 games were indeed different due to the limitations of the tech and developers pioneering genres in real time, some of those games I love aren’t all that different from some I play today. How can a modern game really capture something that might be a false memory?
Angeline Era posits that you can only accomplish that by getting creative. The latest game from Anodyne developer Analgesic Productions, Angeline Era doesn’t just look like a long-lost PS1 game: It feels like one. It’s a wildly inventive puzzle-RPG-adventure hybrid that takes notes from classic RPGs without trying too hard to recreate them. The result is a rare “retro” game that actually plays the way I remember old games feeling, even though it’s nothing like them at all.
Filled with blocky polygons and religious overtones, Angeline Era vaguely sounds like something you might have played in the ‘90s. You play a hero named Tets who comes to a continent on a mission to collect crystal-like MacGuffins (Bicorns) and save the world. If you look at a few screenshots, you’ll probably assume you have a good idea of how it all plays, what with its Final Fantasy-esque RPG overworld — but you would be very wrong.
Angeline Era isn’t a turn-based RPG, but rather a non-linear adventure game that makes you do the navigation work. As soon as I dock onto the continent, I learn that no dungeons or destinations are marked on the overworld. I have to seek them out myself by walking over to suspicious tiles and holding the search button. If I do so in the right spot, I discover the entrance to an area, which I can only access after completing a quick first-person obstacle course that looks like it was pulled from an old-school PC game. I won’t get very far until I can learn to observe the world, look for telegraphed search spots, and begin to internalize the game’s visual language.
Once I’m inside an area, I’ve got another twist to learn: bumpslashing. To attack enemies, I simply need to bump into them to land a hit. I have a gun I can use too, but it only ever shoots up and has limited ammo that will only be refilled by bumping. Each area requires me to perfect that dynamic if I’m going to survive a maze of rooms and grab a scale at the end, which I need to level up.
Searching and bumping come together to create something that plays like nothing else, but still somehow feels exactly like an old PlayStation game. Part of that is the aesthetic, sure. Angeline Era is committed to blurry textures and Casio brass in order to create something that feels authentically of the era. (That makes any modern touches, like its DeviantArtcore character portraits that pop up during dialogue, feel jarringly out of place.) It feels like a close cousin to Crow Country, another PS1 throwback that reveres the quirks that defined the console.
But it’s not those elements that bring me back to the games I played as a kid. Instead, it’s the discovery of it all. When I first pick it up, I have no idea what I’m doing at all. How am I supposed to get around? Why are these boss fights so hard? What am I even doing? It’s up to me to seek out the answers to that question, poking and prodding everything I can — quite literally. It’s a game about making physical contact with a digital world, deconstructing every tile and jabbing everything that can be hit just to see what happens. In that way, it feels more like Final Fantasy than Final Fantasy, despite bearing no resemblance to it on closer inspection.
I’m still working my way through Angeline Era. Like the games I played growing up, I want to take my time with it. I don’t want to look up any search locations to help me speed up the grind or bookmark a handy map that shows me where all the Bicorns are. I’m just happy to put my faith in a game that has the same amount of faith in me. Angeline Era trusts that I can save the day without its help. I won’t let it down.
