After a busy holiday/post-holiday period I finally had the chance to try a random PC game from my backlog again and… do you ever have the experience where you can’t tell if something is surprisingly great or you are just the right person to enjoy an otherwise flawed thing? The game was Multilytheus (which I’ve been trying to pronounce in my head unsuccessfully for the past few hours) and it left me asking this very question.
Quick word of warning: I’d give the game the most severe photosensitivity warning possible. I love some of the eventually severe aesthetic flashing choices it makes but there can be a lot of it going on at once, like avoid even the trailer if this is a potential problem for you.
Multilytheus is a decade’s old first person puzzler where you basically wake up in a bed and with no explanation figure out that you gotta get yourself out of this place. To give away the initial revelation and the mechanical basis for much of the game you will come across a pillar in a glass case you can either cause to rise or fall with a press of either mouse button, which causes things in the environment to rise or fall as well. That’s actually most of what you have to do, in that way it is rather simple.
What makes it work for me is the sense of place, albeit not in the typical way one uses said term. It never feels like a real place, it is very clearly a video game locale designed for you to figure out and make one’s way through. That said while it is not a metrovania (you gain no abilities and there really isn’t any locks and keys) it has a similar thing in having a single location interconnected in various ways that you have to figure out in order to progress through it and this is what clicked for me. It is not a large space but you will be making your way through it several times and while one could complain of backtracking a) again it is fairly small, and b) you really begin to learn a lot about how this space is laid out and in fact the game demands this of you.
Despite only taking me 90 minutes this can be a very hard game, with you having to often figure out exactly how to get various sets of pillars oriented, which means figuring out how to get to the control panel for pillar type A with pillar type B down as you generally needed it up to reach said control panel. Once you figure this out you generally figure out a different way of traversing through this environment (again you gain no abilities, all you can do is jump and interact with these controls) and are presented with a different ask, which requires you to figure out what it wants, how to do it, and so forth. You will need to learn this place throughout and how it can be placed together in 3d space, at one point I had significant Tomb Raider 1 vibes in this respect and coming from me that is solid praise.
On top of this the presentation while very low budget in 2013 ways with only a few people working on it has something going for it. There are bright colors and patterns everywhere, often for functional reasons but also giving it a rather distinct look. The audio is well considered with certain actions being paired with well chosen audio cues and a background track that evolves as you figure out more of the environment, starting fairly basic but adding more instruments until by the end game there is clearly a lot more going on. Add in how the… photosensitivity-challenging elements start appearing (I’m not gonna lie, I love them even though they will certainly hurt others), you start to feel like you can almost step outside of the game world, I’m not sure any of it is 100% unique but IMO it fits together rather well here.
There is also the bits about how sometimes progress is hidden behind intentionally hard to see pathways/doors, if you miss a jump (and jumping ain’t great) you may have to take a whole long path around the place to get back to where you were, how finicky some bits can be re: pillar height, basically stuff that makes me wonder if I am being too positive towards it.
Ultimately I can only speak to my personal experience, and I expected this to be a slight thing where I’d do my typical “that part was neat/interesting… next!” bit and instead I got sucked in and even when frustrated truly enjoyed working out exactly what it was asking of me. It was a good way to kick off my 2024 gaming and a solid reminder that there are still untold number of hidden treasures hiding in the troves of random games out there.
