Review | Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet

I would have liked to begin this review with a brief, illustrative attention-grabber. Something like: “The pulp saucer weaved between the writhing appendages of the enormous anemone.” But really. Who knows the true size-scale of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet? Who’s to say that as you navigate a spinning-top through a cartoonish 2-dimensional maze you aren’t avoiding normal, earth sized flat-worms? My favourite way to think about the game is that i’m microscopic, on planet earth, and exploring the microcosm of dynamic, wriggling, bursting life stuck between a few loose dirt clods. As I subtly splash into a stagnant pool, a starkly different underwater world that arrests the momentum of my sporadic bullets beautifully, i’m really just embedded in the surface tension of a rain-drop.

Stylistically, the game uses exactly the kind of elegant vagueness that I love. It looks, (if I might unhelpfully call upon a pair of titles with artistry designed to generate polar opposite emotional reactions), like a cross between Limbo and World of Goo. Shadowy blurred backgrounds head far back behind the plane of gameplay and make the world feel vast. Don’t expect to explore more than (in my personal interpretation) a square of foot of this strange alien planet. Very occasionally you will glimpse a bizarre creature in the background. A distant tuberous worm might scuttle left and right on chitinous legs. Later in the game you might come across it. Perhaps one of its siblings. Or you might not.

The explorative gameplay is similarly subtle and inference based too. You begin with a scanning unit that folds out from under the flying-saucer’s belly, and its dish can be directed around the world to inform the player about objects. Instead of using text, a wheel will appear showing you which item can be used to interact with the component. Or you might be directed to a new area on the map. At this point it’s up to you to work out how exactly each tool you find, such as your articulated claw, circular saw blade, or independently controlled torpedo, can be used to proceed. You might pick up a rock and heat it in a geyser until attracts a swarm of insects or, my favorite, transport a sponge that threatens to explode if it isn’t regularly soaked in water.

Do you like the word “Metroidvania”? Do you like games that conform to the loose collection of design decisions that leads them to being labeled Metroidvanias by some? Because Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is a Metroidvania. And your feelings about the game will be intimately died to your feelings about the conventions pioneered by Metroid and Casltevania.

In those games, and in ITSP, you spend a long while trotting around an enchantingly stylised world collecting a variety of weapons or tools that supply new methods to dispatch foes. Enemies that were once threatening often become deliciously trivial. The added benefit is that your brand new implements often have an alternative use, allowing you to open certain kinds of doors. Blast away frustrating rock-falls or hit a new kind of switch. It feels great to return to the golden annex with the two red pillars near the beginning of a Metroidvania, and finally discover what was on the other side of the fireplace.

The trouble is that it’s up to you to remember, and catalogue within your mind’s anxious little unfulfilled library, all the locations you haven’t been able to squeeze the last bit of content out of. And then, even worse, you’ve got to make your way all the way back there under your own steam. In the same way that making on omelet requires the breaking of eggs and then you get annoying eggshells in your breakfast, Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, necessitates backtracking as a matter of course. Even though ITSP is a short game, at around four hours, there are still moments when I came close to switching off the game at the mere thought of making my steady way across the entire map. On the other hand, people fall in love with Metroidvanias. And even I, who hasn’t, still loathe the idea that I might have missed out some of ITSP’s greater visual feats.

At first I thought of the combat as being quite clumsy. Actually, I still do. That is how it feels. But I no longer consider that a negative. It’s a much slower paced Geometry Wars; one stick controls the direction of a stream of projectiles and the other controls your movement. Your laser cannon sticks out the bottom of the ship, and fires quite anemically all around you. It’s not powerful, but I think that’s why I like it. ITSP’s moment to moment gameplay isn’t about destroying everything. It’s not about stripping away all the flora and fauna of the planet. Making your way through the maze is the goal. You aren’t that powerful, but you are quite mobile. And the game constantly asks you to decide how many enemies to disintegrate, and how many to acrobatically dodge around. You feel much more like the Millennium Falcon than a Star Destroyer.

The worry whenever you have a game as pretty as Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet is that it will be just that. Pretty. But at the expense of gameplay that’s enjoyable on its own terms. It’s a particularly acute anxiety for ITSP, since the game seems very proud of the fact that it was developed in part by an animation studio. In Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet that fear is unfounded. Sure, the game doesn’t turn out have puzzles with the mind crushing, relentless cleverness of Braid or World of Goo. But the solutions to puzzles are varied and charming, the enemies all play as differently as they look and the soundtrack rocks. [8]