I was planning on writing this game up for my Puzzle Pavilion topic, but it was a tad bit too action-heavy for it, so instead this goes here.
This week I played through a puzzle platformer by the name of Trials of Azra. Its main gimmick is that you can possess any dead enemy (or non-enemy to be fair) and use their abilities to your advantage. If any of you happened to have played Space Station Silicon Valley it is a bit like that, except a bit more puzzle heavy and lacking the whole third dimension.
I’m not sure if this qualifies as programmer art, but it is pretty close.
So let’s get the negative bit out of the way first: the combat half of the game is very simplistic. You have a magic ball you can shoot at enemies for reasons and a few powered up shots that use up a mana meter, but overall it is about as basic as it could be. The boss battles are a bit better and have a neat deal where if you can use the environment to stun the boss your shots temporarily cause much more damage.
The real reason to play is the puzzle half of things, and this part is fairly well done. It features a bunch of standard elements such as switches to be flipped, pressure plates that need something to stand on them, lowered ceilings only smaller beings can get through and the like. That said the use of various different deceased creatures spices it up a good deal. To give a specific example, at one point I had to possess a corpse and lead it into an acid pit in order to dissolve it into a skeleton. That skeleton could then toss its bones upwards to take out a little flying devil with a bow, which could then be possessed in order to shoot an arrow across a large gap and break a crystal which resulted in the door forward opening. Some of the appeal there is technically just window dressing, but it works.
You can alternate between controlling yourself or your possessed minion with the press of a button (and if you have two controllers you can co-op play and have one player control the main guy while the other controls whatever is possessed). While one being is possessed the player character can choose to possess a second (which frees the first), and a possessed character can pass its possession on to a second dead being. This requires some care as it is possible to strand a body someplace where nothing else can reach it, forcing the player to restart the room. Also if a creature is killed while possessed its body respawns where it was first killed in order to avoid being too harsh, the balance being that the player character absorbs a similar amount of damage to its health bar when that occurs.
The thing that keeps the game from crossing over from “neat” into “very good” is the fact that the puzzle designs never get too puzzling. I think there were only one or two occasions when I was legit stuck for a bit trying to figure out what to do, most of the time it was generally at least fairly clear what the next move to make was. Still, neat is neat and I think at least a few people here would get a kick out of it. During Steam sales it seems to drop as low as 99 cents, and at that price if it sounds interesting I can’t think of a reason not to give it a try.
