Before the review, I want to briefly touch on the fact that I hate the term Metroidvania as a genre. It's meant to help categorize games easier for players to understand. It is a deservedly high honor for Metroid games to be the keystone of that definition. Unfortunately for all other games, being compared to Metroid is a death sentence. Super Metroid was the greatest video game ever created until Metroid Dread was released. To classify yourself in a genre that is known for perfection is a tall order. Furthermore, every game that comes out in this genre seems like it was made by someone who played Metroid a decade prior and is trying to make a game like it from memory. Perhaps they never played Metroid at all. I have not played a single game that I felt warranted being compared to this game in any other way than "side scroller with interconnected levels and ability-led progression." Genres should be broad. From now on I will refer to all games in this category as "Exploration/Progression" games. You will, too.
A major fault of games copying Metroid and Castlevania is they have nothing else to offer. A game will have the classic upgrades, classic secrets, stolen everything, with nothing of their own. Everything has been done before. Every once in a while, a new game will come along, like Hollow Knight, which stands apart from the rest, and thus becomes the new copycat game.
The very best thing about The Mobius Machine is it has such a wonderfully unique identity. From the start, it sets the tone with its colorful and interesting art style. The 2D/3D is a welcome change, and it pops onto the screen with a gleeful punch. It's smooth, clean, and digital, while also being goofy, floaty, and fake. Fake in the sense that it's not realistic, even slightly cartoonish in the design. The world is alien, with a whole host of bulbous, squishy, platforms, interchanged with spiky hazards and man-made concrete buildings. A major departure from Castlevania's gothic, hand-drawn/painted look, and the sloppy, flash-animation style of many other indies. There's not too much detail, but everything is still stylized to the point of being memorable. What first drew me to the game was the cover art above. A toothy alien with tendrils, in a freeze frame battle with the astronaut hero shooting a gun. That's just cool as hell.
The game has a decent story. I don't care if Exploration/Progression games have a story at all. It is the most unadulterated genre of pure gameplay. I enjoy that they care enough to tie a bit of depth, and adding a good story gives you another reason to care about the characters. You are a spaceman that is delivering cargo, when your ship's robot picks up an emergency beacon and you are bound by law to investigate. They add enough intrigue and interesting story bits without it getting in the way of me actually playing. Once you are down on the island, you go through a simple tutorial where you learn to use your laser gun. Recently, many games in this genre focus on melee, Castlevania and Hollow Knight being staples, and I can't think of any that go the Metroid route of getting to shoot an energy weapon with infinite ammo. The Mummy Demastered is another lesser-known prize of the genre, which I love, and it uses guns, albeit with ammo. Something that is interesting about using a gun is the difficulty can be much greater. You have to aim well to succeed, but also worry about your placement in comparison to the enemies. They can do greater damage, and the overall difficulty can be increased because you are not meant to get hit. You have a distance weapon, so not letting enemies get close is as much a part of the gameplay as fighting them. The first unique mechanic of the game is that your aim stays where you last held it. For example, if you aim straight up in the air, then release the control stick, you can move your character while keeping the shoot button held and he will continue to shoot directly into the air. This adds a fun dimension where part of the aiming isn't being hyper-accurate but finding the correct angle, and maintaining it while also dodging the enemy fire.
You traverse the world for a little, coming across interesting and diverse, yet hostile, alien life forms. You dispatch them with your laser gun and out pops energy and materials. Energy has two main uses in the game. When your health gets low, you can use energy to replenish it. You must stand still while a transparent bar of health fills back up. Then the transparent bar of health fills back up with an opaque bar, and your health is refilled. If you take damage while the transparent bar is refilling, you lose the health again, and you don't regain the energy used to begin the restoration. This is an interesting process because you are vulnerable while healing and also afterwards. This adds a fun dimension where you don't get access to a ton of health bars, and instead must balance your energy usage with simply not getting hit. This adds an enjoyable level of difficulty while not being too punishing. The other use for energy, is a damage booster to your shots. Here you can decide to be cautious and heal, or expend your limited energy to do more damage to enemies quickly. Simple, straightforward, yet rewarding and stimulating.
Eventually you come to an abandoned workshop. It seems there used to be a group of scientists on this planet, but they are no longer around, and the lab is vacant. You come across a workbench, which gives you access to yet another of their interesting design choices. Part of the progression is finding blueprints, and using the materials the enemies drop to craft them. Each blueprint takes three components of the same type to make a craftable blueprint. For example, the first upgrade I found was a secondary fire for your main weapon called the scatter module. Once I found three scatter module fragments I was able to go back to the workbench and craft the scatter module, which was then usable at any time. Two interesting things happen here. You can have two weapon modules equipped at any time, one on right trigger and one on left. Later, when you get more gun modules, you simply tap left on the D-pad to swap through the different left trigger weapon types on the fly. No messing around in menus, and you can pick each one situationally very quickly. The other interesting thing is that I then found another scatter module fragment. Once you find three more, you can craft an upgrade to that module. This was a novel and inventive solution to the "collection and progression" part of the genre. All ten blueprint collectible upgrades are in threes. This gives you another reason to explore, as you are almost always finding something useful, and additionally, it can tease you with new upgrades. I was wondering when I would get a new gun and then found a sniper module. I was wondering if I got more power and then found an energy module. It encouraged me to explore, which made me find interesting and new areas, and also gave hints to my new upgrades and finding pieces for old ones. You also find upgrades all over the place because of this, so the pacing feels like you're finding something constantly. There were no real droughts in finding progression.
This worked really well with the map design. My desire to explore was significantly boosted by how painless and quick the levels were to traverse. There was a decent deal of backtracking, but the levels felt like they were meant to be played each way, backwards and forwards, and the developers thought of this. Being attacked going from top-left to bottom-right while entering a sector feels slightly different going back in the opposite direction. Additionally, they had a slew of shortcuts baked in that are as rewarding to find as a blueprint or a piece of gear. You do a lot of traveling from the outdoors in open space to inside of a building. While you are outside the building, you see the outside wall, but when you are inside, the outer wall disappears to show your location. The fascinating thing about this, is that the entirety of the building is revealed. This leads to situations where you can see a shortcut that needs to be unlocked in a part of the building you can't reach yet. This lets you know that traveling all over will be worth your while, because you won't have to try as hard on the next walkthrough as you are rewarded with a simpler and more direct path. The mixed-platform maps are also interesting and thematically appropriate. You will jump from a window of a laboratory building onto a platform made of fleshy alien matter. These blocks of alien growth are color coordinated, so you know if they are sturdy, will break after a moment, are indestructible entirely, or will break so fast that you can't get across. You get around the "learn as you fail" aspect that most games force on you with these unintuitive things, by putting them all in the empty research lab, with another small tutorial that has computer readouts explaining the different types of platforms in small, explorable sections. A clever way to get around the exposition without putting a large block of explanatory text that takes you away from gameplay.
Then you come upon the titular Mobius Machine.
This is by no means a pre-requisite, but I absolutely love when a game ties in a utility thematically. They have already done this in a few ways, but then you jump on the machine and start running on it like a treadmill, which spins it up and then after a few seconds it teleports you elsewhere. Your character remarks that the scientists on this planet were playing around with machines that alter time and space. To the player, it's simply a fast travel location. A wonderful combination of gameplay and exposition that gives this game a lot of heart, and you can tell the developers cared about making a good game.
The other progression items you find are pieces of gear. These are instant upgrades that add a tool to your arsenal and are usually rewarded after fighting a boss. These shine as examples of how to build your movement accessories tailored to your game's spirit. You first get booster jets on your back, which let you move faster over straight stretches, but also allow you to move over those blocks that would normally break the moment you step on them. There are also large sections of the game that have interesting combinations of ladders to progress, such as jumping from one to the next in a long line, or by moving through a building vertically and unlocking more segments of ladders to progress. Then you get an upgrade that lets you use your booster pack on ladders. The appeal of this is if you boost off of the top of a ladder, you fly high into the air, sometimes being able to access new areas by landing in a new spot, or by launching yourself to a new ladder. This is remarkable because it is so central to this game. No other game has a "ladder booster pack" that lets you do this. It fits within their world, is a unique exploration tool that has not been done before, and has interesting and distinct applications within the game, from the start, and in conjunction with later abilities. I absolutely fell in love with the fact there is no double jump, there is no "morph ball" function, or crouch tunnels, or bomb. All of the gear upgrades feel tailored specifically for this game, and they work in their own systems. It's creative, and specific. I felt like I was treading ground in a game that had never been accessed before, and it was because the developers had a strong vision for their game world, and they executed it.
The world is honestly massive, and at first I was a bit put off with having to travel through all these different areas as I kept exploring and it was continually growing. This was assuaged quickly by how fun simply traveling around while fighting was, and then by how efficiently the shortcuts and fast travels had been designed. All of the different sectors of the map have their own environment. Some are simply different looking, while others add a different playstyle along with the map. As you are traveling, you come across a few sections where you cross a pool of water. One or two of them hint that you will be able to travel underwater at some point because you initially only float. When you get your first piece of underwater equipment, you can only sink, and they drop you into a gigantic underwater area that you cannot get out from. This almost made me snap out at the thought, because underwater sections are usually a nightmare to traverse. Then you very quickly unlock the underwater booster, and the travel becomes seriously interesting. There is different flora and fauna, and the booster gives you quick and mobile travel. The underwater areas suddenly were fun and challenging section disparate from all the others, where underwater sections are notorious for being awful.
This game has flaws. The pacing wasn't perfect. With a completion time of over 10 hours at around 85% completion, I was ready to be done with the game an hour or more prior. It wore out its welcome at the end and could definitely use some trimming or streamlining of extraneous segments. They typically do a good job of designing rooms, but some were direct copy and pastes of others that you can tell they liked the layout. The enemies at the end are strong to the point of tedium, and not as engaging to fight after the first few times. Their patterns become trivial, and their defeat becomes rote. The upgrades and powerups are fun and varied but ultimately stagnate. The flaws don't really matter, because the developers clearly had a vision, and they pursued it with diligence. I can forgive nearly any flaw if it is outshined by something greater, and The Mobius Machine has that in spades. There are so many segments of the game filled with things I had not seen attempted in previous entries in the genre. Segments filled with unkillable, stationary enemies, that are meant only for dodging as you rush through an area. Shades of bullet hells, as you shoot and dodge shots at the same time, in a more dynamic environment. A ladder booster upgrade that is practical and exclusive. It has heart, it has grit, it has a wonderfully solitary identity, and that is its most illustrious attribute.
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