I’m just podcasting my Wares.
Welcome back to NOCLIP Pocket! Today, we’re talking about Anodyne, a Zelda-like indie game from ten years ago, which, boy does that just feel like forever these days. Anodyne doesn’t so much have a shtick as it just tries to be a solid action adventure game while exploring its mechanics and themes, and realistically that’s all it needs to be. This is a decently well focused game that understands its own scope very well, and because of that it manages to hold up incredibly against the passing of time. Anodyne takes place within a dream and explores a variety of settings from apartment buildings and hotels to fantasy forests and abstract representations of “place,” which keeps each new area feeling fresh which does wonders for keeping the player engaged as they go through it. Its mechanics are mostly simple, as it doesn’t port over the item collection aspects of a Zelda game, but it does have depth in the mechanics it does have, which are both a little surprising and largely unexplained. It manages to hold a bit of mystery all while being a focused, unassuming little game, and is definitely worth playing if you haven’t already. We’re going to be talking about balancing tone in a game with so many different aesthetic elements within it, what areas we felt were most well executed and most unexpected, and we no joke read a definition out of a dictionary, so get absolutely pumped for that.
Thank you again for joining us this week! It’s been a couple months since we’ve done an entirely unthemed pocket, and Anodyne has been on our list for a while (it was relatively new when the podcast started, unbelievably), so we finally got to bring it out. If you played Anodyne, were you early enough to have played before the remaster? If not, do you think the game holds up after so many years? Let us know in the comments or over on our Discord! Next time, we’re going to be talking about Rollerdrome, and for no other reason than we wanted to. Which changes the tone of the end of these descriptions, I’m realizing. I got very used to being able to just sort of follow a formula. But it’s not “Retrovember” where we’re talking about all the games featuring 90’s trends like rollerblading or something, so this will just have to do. We hope you’ll join us then!