Gauging the points of influence for media can often be very difficult if not downright impossible. We make sweeping statements about where the inspirational foundations of works lie and those parallels we draw are often vague and generalized to the point of meaninglessness, subject to our own personal working contexts and biases prone to misattributions and mischaracterizations. With acknowledgement of these universal failings, I can't with certainty claim to know what brought Astalon: Tears of the Earth into being as it is now, and maybe that's by design: it carries with it a sort of urtextual quality that rejects sourcing to any individually formative scripture, instead evoking a congealed hodgepodge of picked-through vintage touchstones for its own personal sense of crafted unhistory. The derivation is so carefully practiced and applied that the sum total of the work actually lands on a certain point of novelty not all too often seen in retraux works like it--a fake authenticity to something daydreamed rather than cited, quoted and repurposed.
From the earth rose up a tower, and from the desert arrived three wanderers to challenge its depths and heights. Astalon maintains a directness to its narrative that is absent of much in the medium today, and especially in the fantasy subset in what has become the predominant styling to adopt, amidst the reams of intrigue-building notations that aren't so much interested in leaving material undiscussed as they are in obfuscating the delivery methods of such writing. Astalon does not belabour, and it lacks the self-involved drive that ensures the building of such worlds; it lives in the moment--so much so that there's a palpable sense of stepping into a middle chapter of some larger tale, in a way the game does make explicit where its intent lies. Not that it needed to, as in all the interactions between the protagonists and the circumstances they're caught up in there runs an undercurrent of long-established dynamics and personal histories, of which this is just a transitory, singular chapter in, or could be. The reality of it is that I don't know for sure whether the existence of a larger mythology beyond the game's scope is somewhere out there--perhaps in an earlier work by the developers--and for the game's purposes I lack the need or desire to know. Inference of a larger context than the game wallows on works to its benefit in the story it tells; the uncomplicated but tonally and structurally confident framing device that it settles into. It strikes a median where plainness might actually be a virtue, in possessing a strict dramatic rigour by default which is mediated by the odd dash of levity; never too self-consciously grim or wacky in either direction, leaving nothing more and nothing less than a portrait of straightforward high adventure.
What better place to practice those adventurer's instincts than the interior of a massive tower complex, then. Video games have a longstanding love affair with towers as settings, and I fully reciprocate: notable powerhouses that make the most of their cylindrical premises include as diverse works as the best of the Ys games, Devil May Cry 3 or The Dark Spire. It's a topographical and architectural framework that's always challenging to portray with conviction in the medium, with horizontal breadth more immediate and readily applicable to player movement and environmental layout considerations. That's why the tower is so alluring as a concept for games of exploration and locomotion; it seemingly restricts and rejects both by its very geometric and spatial nature. Limitations have a way of focusing what's present though, and Astalon brings with it plenty to amplify its particular strengths. These aren't corridors of wasted space and unthinking mileage, but interweaving, overlapping labyrinths of brick and stone, always working toward an involved sense of navigation of a complex but not convoluted space, charted inch by inch in its staggering verticality. The artificiality of a tower, the constructed nature of it, may invite suspicion of whether environmental diversity can maintain itself across so vast a game world held in its thrall, especially in a wider genre that's often defined by more natural, organic spaces. In this too, Astalon knows its own nature and swings that potential issue into a highlight, as the macro scale and shape of the map coheres all the distinct locations into a unified whole where connections between the districts segue in and out gracefully and in multitudes, while also allowing the individual rooms along the way to establish their own landmarks to navigate and impress themselves by. The proportional scale of the protagonists contrasted with the grand halls and shafts they uncover works in unison with the atmospheric effect of encountering a screen-filling majestic edifice of the Gorgons to whose power the tower serves as testament and tribute to: you are rendered very small by the totemic reminders of just what you're up against, and consequently have a mind to take the environment itself more seriously in turn.
That is an opportune mindset to adopt, as for all the connections to be drawn between the game and its towering allies, there is one that may be more relevant than others in the spirit of kinship so established between them: The Tower of Druaga extends its deceptively far-reaching grasp from the pages of history and informs yet another game next to all the billion billion others its genealogy is indubitably part of. There are no receipts to be cited here, only steadfast conjecture, but it's an alluring bridge to the past that may help illustrate the illusory past of the present. Druaga melted minds in its time both for the unprecedented amount of pre-meditated secrets hidden within it but the obscure functions of uncovering them and their utter necessity to continue interacting with the game as it went on. It's a harsh outlook when removed of its original social context that gave it form and resonance, and so the games that carry that spirit in the now do not usually translate its language literally: they instead strive to localize. Astalon's secrets and the manner in which it guards and hides them aren't something one has to rally their entire social circle toward pouring hours into collectively solving, but they're uniformly present as little environmental riddles to keep in mind and the navigational mirages that compound in its level design; the walls you see often aren't walls at all, and mirages more befuddling besides. The end result that manifests from this emphasis on the hidden world beyond one's gaze has ramifications on the large-scale sense of play the game possesses, too, in having reached the conditions for the end boss and concluding the game at about 50% map coverage, a full half of the potential space left entirely up to the player's whims to discover outside of the mandated paths. Many games of this ilk present a false or bad end that might as well signal its premature, stopgap nature, offering no real satisfactory sign-off despite pretenses of such; Astalon for its part does not leave its scope unclear, but structures itself with such compelling density that half of its full power may sate the appetite of even the hardiest of explorers.
Extended scoping out of one's surroundings may well be warranted for the company one gets to keep throughout the process, though. Astalon is so certain and comfortable in its archetypical genre framing that its central trio of playable characters--Arias, Kyuli and Algus--all subscribe to their respective RPG character classes that define them in the fighter, rogue and wizard persuasions. The novel wrinkle on it is that it's the wizard who's most focal and involved in the narrative thrust of the tale, even in presence of the classical hero figure. Because these archetypes that cross genres and entire mediums are so universal, they become great material for interpreting in the context of a platformer: what is the kinetic differentiator between a fighter and wizard, or rogue and fighter? The answers provided are shared in the binding fundamentals of overarching jump arcs and physics, but mutually exclusive in every other instance: the navigational abilities, rhythms and possibilities remain distinct for the entirety of the game, ensuring no character can eclipse and render irrelevant another. It's the game's central concept for the initial third of it or so, where campfires serve as places of respite, rest and character shift; many environments cannot be explored without the right pair of hands and feet to work through their obstacles, and so the labyrinthine twists gain another dimension in not just how you navigate them, but with whom. The game wisely does not lean on required characters per section too often--just to underline those individual aptitudes--and allows one to choose their avatar in many instances according to preference. When this initial dynamic seems to have run its course, the ability to swap characters on the fly instead of at checkpoints upturns the entire exploratory dynamic so far established, further transforming previously and to-be charted space into spaces of more exacting, dynamic traversal. I have a place in my heart for video games that seek to evoke in cross-genre and intersectional ways the feeling of traveling and acting as a group, within the guise of a traditional tabletop RPG party or not, and Astalon provides two distinct modes of that treasured sensation that strongly characterize its earlier and later segments to their lasting contrasting benefit. Whether solitary or unified, the party always reconvene at camp, further creating a sensation of a small group gradually traversing the great tower through their own skill or by relying on one another, impressing a camaraderie that textual writing on its own could not have achieved.
There is much in Astalon that I would preserve and little that I would wish altered; the criticisms that spring to mind are insignificant to the point of not justifying their outlining. So many games that are built to support the kind of play experience shared between them in this genre they occupy usually flub it in some way or another along the way: bloated lengths, uninspired aesthetics, half-baked exploratory concepts, over-reliance on combat segregated from its environmental context, uninteresting or objectionable storytelling, plodding scores... there is usually one or several aspects a little askew or amiss, throwing off the balance strived for by the rest. Astalon is the kind of rarity that feels daring and restrained in the same breath, engaged in the mindful hyperdensity of its environmental design with the same care it affords all the rest of its components. It's stock and elevated by that fact rather than held down by it, through the sheer confidence in itself that permeates the whole.
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I underestimated or did not anticipate how much I would like the game, so no particular resource of screenshots to share here. I want to stress again how fantastic many of the sights in the game are, and so maybe I wouldn't even want to share them outside of their context, with the game being as relatively new as it is. Play it for yourself to find out! It's out on everything, I'm sure.
