East and West have combined to create a action platformer clinging to the golden years of game design. Along with all your favorite nostalgic nuances, Exile’s End brings its fair share of quirks best left in the past.
Developer: Magnetic Realms
Price: $6.99
Platform: PC
MonsterVine was supplied with a PC copy for review
Exile’s End is a collaborative project between Tokyo-based independent developer Matt Fielding and Japanese publishers Marvelous. A remake of Fielding’s first independent release “Inescapable”, Exile’s End expands and improves with more content, cutscenes and music created by Japanese industry veterans. Fielding argues that his inspiration lies with retro adventure gaming from the West with games like Out of this World, aka Another World for our European readers. On Exile’s End’s Steam store page they make a strong point of stating that this is not in any way a “Metroidvania” style game. It’s very odd to define yourself as something you are not and we will be touching on this again.
Exile’s End starts with you and your squad embarking on a mission to investigate a mining facility that has lost communication and has the unfortunate luck of being located on a distant planet full of aggressive native flora and fauna. The cheap capsules your corporate buddies provided you weren’t up to the task of landing your party safely and you are the only one left alive.
This is when you start to see the inspiration of Out of this World. You begin by carefully making your way through a number of different screens to encounter gaping chasms and terrifying creatures, well mostly just snakes at the beginning. Basic platforming and throwing rocks are your only means of survival for the first area of the game. This is also the only section with fall damage, so I found it to be a tedious start. Once you’ve successfully traversed the forest and found your way to the mining facility, you are given a weapon and the action starts to heat up. Unfortunately the first weapon is hidden and can easily be missed. Using my amazing platforming skills, I avoided all nastiness only to then realise that I was very under-prepared for what the game was throwing at me.
To deal with my predicament, I had to make my way back to the previous area with much difficulty. The reason for the difficulty comes from the checkpoint/save system. Every time you cross into a new screen the game saves with the current amount of health. Enemies drop a plentiful amount of ammunition and healing items drastically reducing the difficulty, unfortunately I didn’t have a weapon and had only a sliver of health at my disposal. It’s the responsibility of the developer to make sure you have the tools at your disposal when you are faced with a challenge.
For a game that actively denies its “Metroidvania” style, Exile’s End certainly contains a lot of the qualifiers; action-based platforming, multiple screens with significant backtracking; weapon upgrades and suit power-ups that allow you to access new areas. For example, you unlock your suit’s double-jump ability in order to progress and once you have access to grenades, blowing up certain walls provides passage to the next level of screens.
Exile’s End touts its involvement of Japanese veterans of game art and music alike, particularly Keiji Yamagishi who composed the soundtrack to Ninja Gaiden (NES). While the art is certainly channeling a nice mix of retro Japanese PS1 titles like Castlevania and the foreboding creature design of Out of this World, the music falls flat. Industrial grinding mixed with alien warbles and singular thumping guitar chords makes for an impressive wall of sound. Instead of being an awe inspiring cacophony it is instead repetitive to the point of madness. It feels like 4 bars of music repeating over and over. This only accentuates the moments of backtracking and points when you are stuck and desperately looking for the way forward.
The controls are hit and miss. I started playing using the keyboard and found it needlessly complicated and unintuitive. Z and X being jump and item use respectively while A and S are the keys to move through the item list left and right. The confusion arises from weapons being in the list alongside rocks and med-kits. Changing weapons while under duress and not accidentally using a health item or fruitlessly tossing stones at my enemies was impossible for me to wrap my head around.
Also, are we not at the point in game design where when you die you don’t have to go back the game’s main menu? Every single time you meet your demise, which can be often, the game will boot you out. Every time it happens you simply hit continue and are loaded to the exact screen in the game where you died. A perfect example of archaic design mentality that is completely unnecessary and makes you wonder why it exists in the first place.
The Final Word
Exile’s End is a homage to games of yesteryear. Along with the retro-art comes a deluge of annoyances with the gameplay. An intriguing story and satisfying platforming combat can’t make up for the constant backtracking and frustrating design choices.
– MonsterVine Rating: 2 out of 5 – Poor
