it really is. cozy and intimate. I recommend headphones if you’re playing in portable mode though.
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Good idea, as the Switch external audio blows 
I honestly think it’s decent for the size of device. it doesn’t sound overly compressed or overly bright, which is my usual complaint for mobile device audio. just doesn’t have a lot of low end.
but the music in anodyne 2 is so good you don’t want to miss a single note
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me too! i like the bad ending a lot!
and the whole game. my favorite part is that you climb the crooked spire to find palisade and find a beautiful fruit and nova is immediately convinced she has to get it and then a ragged dust mongrel shows up and eats it, and then that is the vessel for the little faux-ritual space (which itself is, yeah, probably an all-timer as far as vidcon narrative moments imo)
i also very strongly dislike the little developer commentary nodes and to some degree the director-voice-inserty stuff in general; i especially hate when you go into the “postgame” zone and it’s like “the following is not canon” in what read to me as a very straight-faced tone. that the commentary bits are tied to the metastore kind of tempers it a bit at least
overall though i mean yeah this is so great. there’s nothing wrong with the 2d sections at all but all the 3d space is just so, so gorgeous, and every character out in the world is like holy shit fantastic
ok though i have a question about something i couldn’t figure out that i don’t want to look up-- does anybody know how to climb up higher in the hub town area? there’s some platforms you can see and even a little exclamation point on the map, next to the skeletal excavation construction section, but i can’t figure out how to get started (or maybe you can’t and i’m just missing something!)
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This is very good. I’m surprised no one has mentioned the distorted field of view, which is an unusual aspect of early 3D games I had entirely forgotten about.
It’s also exacerbated by the 16:9 aspect ratio and has given me a mega headache after two hours. (It can fortunately be tweaked in the settings!)
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I like the graphic style of this game a lot. But… call me a monster, but as soon as the sense of amazement wears off, isn’t the gameplay a bit repetitive and simplistic?
It makes more sense to think of this as an adventure game; the gameplay illustrates themes but is most concerned with pacing and getting out of the way of the narrative. They pushed the Zelda dungeons harder in the first game but they were never that tight and they wisely pulled back a bit in the sequel (they’re still too numerous).
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I don’t want to come off like a hater, but this game really doesn’t resonate with me. I don’t like the tone, either. It’s kind of… emo. It takes itself weirdly seriously, in a way that seems artificial and not really spontaneous.
Re-reading this thread, it seems I am the only one having such strong opinions against it.
… And BustedAstromech, perhaps, not loving the writing.
I can definitely appreciate the fact that it’s been put together by just two people!
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looking back a few years I’d say I love it as a whole and what I dislike is self-recognition
I love the dreamy tone and the surrealism swirling around the point but I prick on the uneven dialogue the way I cringe when showing somebody my work. That’s too forward, too clumsy! too bare
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for me i think it’s just that the tone is challenged/complicated by all the abrupt shifts and twists the game takes. it’s less about whether i can personally relate to it or not and more about that i like the way it kind of becomes a commentary on like the… false comforting effects of games as a whole. i will say that the game was extremely contentious (compared to the average game) and there were several people who vocally really didn’t like it when it came up for festival judging though.
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That’s somewhat the commentary. I appreciate more of what it was doing now than when I played it.
I mean it is a game about
being in a constrictive “safe” “loving” environment that turns on and expells you the second you question it’s beliefs or your role in it.
A lot of it is wrapped up in the oppression of specifically American Christianity. I did not grow up in that environment but I did end up being a white middle class cis-male so I followed the path. It really does follow everyone around you calling for love and family but the second you are any way queer they try to either deny that you are queer, ignore you are queer, scream at you, and ultimately expell you while continuing to shout “love” and “family” and “why are YOU doing this!”
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Gonna agree with Tony. I wouldn’t call it emo but it is a painfully self-obsessed game and very few of the NPCs do anything for me.
If the writing could’ve gone through a few more levels of polish, I’d feel more affection for it, but as it is, it feels like an outline of an emotional arc that just tells me how I should feel moment to moment instead of making me feel anything. Twee indie works tend to feel painfully lacking in subtext, and Anodyne 2 is no exception: the themes are all superliminal, bellowed at maximum volume.
As much as the visuals hearken to the PSX and Saturn libraries, Anodyne 2 is more like Psychonauts than anything else.
I’ll credit that there were a few moments where I was totally on board with the game. That isometric point-and-click was a wonderful surprise.
Bottomline: Anodyne 2 clasped my hand with its sweaty palms and said, “This is uncomfortable, right?” When I said yes, the grip only tightened.
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Except all the themes it’s talking about are complex and interesting and the game explores them in dozens of ways with complex variations, while constantly exploring and recontextualizing everything with it’s game mechanics.
There’s a lot of subtlety in this game too, and a lot of really wonderful touches even when it’s in your face.
God I gotta replay this and write that thesis I threatened to send to @Rudie for publishing.
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Yeah like it didn’t land with me but I absolutely respect what it is doing.
And you turn into a car gosh dang it!
Also let’s not talk about how it constantly givea you “upgrades and freedom” of things you could already do and wants you to be thankful because We Could Take This Away.
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Wow I would definitely have a different point of view replaying this after becoming a parent!
it landed hard with me because I felt like, on top of all the very good and evocative and well-observed peripheral videogame set dressing, the story of self discovery had as much to do with feeling useless and disappointed and bored by the possibility space that was created for you as it did with self-acceptance and self-expression, and I personally find that the foremost of those is usually overlooked by people who want to tell coming of age stories, especially queer coming of age stories! I found it a lot more relatable and heartening than I tend to find other work in the Stephen Universe-adjacent space. they were reaching pretty far for a lot of those emotional beats and I thought they were able to keep the script at just enough of a remove that it suited their purposes perfectly – the meta-commentary is obviously a little sloppier and certainly if you want your work to stand on its own it’s a little presumptuous to not edit that out but I trusted them as far as they wanted to share their process by that point, in part because their aesthetic judgment was also very careful, that nostalgia is very easy to cheapen.
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but it’s also a huge novelty for me to feel like a partisan for a game that @AutomaticTiger also really likes because we don’t intuitively agree on anything
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Likewise, I feel the same way @Felix
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Y’all certainly got me curious now