DOUBLE HEADER REVIEW: FAXANADIRBIES
Gato Roboto and Iconoclasts are both games with interconnected maps and necessary upgrades
I spend a lot of time playing 2D platform games with relatively large, interconnected maps. We all know that Hollow Knight, that snarling rabid weasel of a difficult game*, is the darling of the bunch now, but there are so many others of late. My introduction to the genre was actually Faxanadu, a weird and annoyingly tough NES game my father had lying around when me and my brother were small. Perhaps I would play it now and it would be easy, but back then we could barely kill the spiky pudding enemies and brain monsters that littered the side scrolling landscape. Much later, my mind was blown in college when I played Cave Story, a game that is similar to these Faxanadirby games, but really its own thing. The same year that Cave Story came out gave us Kirby and the Amazing Mirror; a one off large-interconnected-map in a famous franchise of discrete levels, and the game that gave us the other half of the genre’s name. Other famous examples of the Faxanadirby genre include Nintendo’s Metroid series and Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. These past weeks found me finally getting around to playing two of the many recent iterations of this genre.
UNFORTUNATELY, SOME GAMES REQUIRE MORE THAN NINE LIVES
Because there have been so many of these games in recent years, there are also many different types of Faxanadirbies. Some feature massive maps and RPG-like progression and play style choice, like the much hallowed Hollow Knight. Others feature tight, relatively small maps, claustrophobic space stations, and the upgrades you need to progress further that are the hallmark of many of these games. Gato Roboto falls into the second category, a game about a kitty in a mech suit that is stripped of everything but pure awesomeness.
It took my slow, incapable ass about five hours to finish Gato Roboto, and every minute was a joy. According to How Long to Beat this was on the long side, but I took my time running around and finding cartridges that can change the game’s color scheme. When you start Gato Roboto it looks like a PC game from 1970-something, pure contrast in black and white. It stays in that two-tone lane, but if you look hard enough you can find fourteen old school tape cartridges that allow you to change the two tones. Want the game look like a lo fi cup of matcha tea? Do it. My favourite was the Virtual Boy option, which I’m sure is what hell looks like for whoever decided to force Immortals: Fenyx Rising players to sign up for Ubisoft Connect. There should be a speed run category for Gato Roboto in Virtual Boy mode.
As I was saying, Gato Roboto is short. Very short. The average player takes about three hours to finish it. But does a long game make a good Faxanadirby? The aforementioned Hollow Knight takes dozens of hours to play through and eventually beat, and fills those dozens of hours with beautiful hand-drawn art and upgrades and all kinds of other goodies. Gato Roboto is like the anti-Hollow Knight, though, short, simple, and with graphics that are the polar opposite of hand-drawn art.
The gameplay in Gato Roboto is pretty close to perfect. The controls are tight and responsive and the game never cheats you. Some of the bosses are fucking difficult, like the underwater mechanical squid monster that randomly turns the game into a bullet hell shooter. The only problem I can think of in Gato Roboto’s gameplay is a tendency not to bother to tell you how to control things. The underwater boss fight was incredibly daunting until I realised that I could hold down the Y button to shoot incessantly in my submarine, something I couldn’t do in my normal mech. But this tendency isn’t unique to Gato Roboto, and seems to show up in a lot of games with smaller development teams.
Like the gameplay, the map in Gato Roboto is stellar. Small, for sure, but full of hidden cartridges and health and weapons upgrades. There’s an argument floating somewhere out in the ether that there isn’t the right amount of choice in Gato Roboto for a Faxanadirby game, and that one of the defining characteristics of these games is the ability to do at least some things in a random order of your choice. I’ve only played Gato Roboto once through, but it seems like everything has to be done in order in absence of bugs or other exploits. I did not at all find this to be an issue. So what if there’s barely any element of choice in terms of the order that you do things? You can always go back to older areas to find cartridges that you missed.
And the vibe. What a vibe! The black and white ancient PC graphics fit together perfectly with sound design like warped tape and music that alternates between pure atmosphere and oontz-oontz techno.
Gato Roboto is worth picking up at the MSRP even though at most (AT MOST) it’s a five or six hour game. Those five or six hours are just that good if you are into Faxanadirby games. I’m honestly excited to play this one again in a few months without constant note-taking and a better idea of how to massacre the often-difficult bosses.
LET’S THROW A WRENCH IN THE PROCEEDINGS
Joakim Sandberg’s Iconoclasts seems tailor made for me. It’s a Faxanadirby. It has lusciously detailed pixel art. It’s a One Dev Wonder. It even has a winding, text-heavy story like the 100 hour JRPG black holes I’ve been known to waste away my time with. And yet I bought this game months ago and I’ve been lingering somewhere around the half-to-two thirds way point for the majority of those months. So what gives? Why is it so easy for me to pick up and beat Gato Roboto in two days but so difficult for me to finish Iconoclasts?
Let’s start with the good. The pixel art truly is lusciously detailed. With the exceptions of Fez and Hyper Light Drifter I am hard pressed to think of a game in this retro-mode that looks quite this beautiful. But Fez and Hyper Light Drifter were going for some kind of neon vapourware aesthetic and Iconoclasts is pure Genesis-era simple, natural colour palettes. The bosses are often massive mechanical abominations, built beautifully from the ground up pixel by pixel. They look exactly how you want giant bosses to look in a game like this; sticking out in highly detailed environments while also seeming like an integral part of them. And the character sprites are wonderfully expressive, showing real sadness or anger as the situation requires.
What about the gameplay? Totally fluid. You play as the rebel mechanic Robin in a world reminiscent of the film Brazil where only the government is allowed to make repairs. In a world where wrenches are outlawed, only outlaws have wrenches. You use your wrench to smack enemies, to turn screws that allow you through doors, and to spider-man your way around the large, interconnected map, as well as some other abilities that you pick up along the course of the adventure. In addition to a wrench you have a blaster gun and infinite bombs. There are parts that you can pick up around the world that allow you to equip “tweaks” (read: stat upgrades) giving longer amounts of time underwater without breathing or increasing your movement speed or whatever thing you’ve decided will make your time with Iconoclasts just that much easier.
While not excruciatingly difficult, Iconoclasts has the occasional annoying boss that you’ll have to figure out how to beat. Which brings us to the moment that I stopped playing for a few months prior to picking it back up for this double-hitter Faxanadirby review. I needed the help of some other, more organised rebels (more on this in a moment), and found myself in a misty purple lightning forest. A man in a large coat appeared out of nowhere, gave a long winded speech of purple prose, and then proceeded to play a game of hide-n-seek with me. I had no clue how to do this. No idea how to hide. No idea how to tell where he was. No idea! This was so annoying to me that I quit the game for a while, or at least allowed it to float towards the bottom of my backlog as I discovered other things to play. So I looked it up on youtube for the purpose of this review, and it turns out that beating this boss, while obscure, is extremely easy. As noted earlier, the same thing happened to me in Gato Roboto. But Gato Roboto so effectively needled its way into my life that I NEEDED to beat it; Iconoclasts did not, and thus left me kind of annoyed.
Iconoclasts looks great, plays great, and sounds great. So Iconoclasts is pretty great, right? Hold on for a moment. I spoke earlier of a man in a large coat giving a long winded speech of purple prose. Every character does this. Constantly. I usually love this kind of thing in a game; I’m a huge fan of JRPGs that are essentially talking simulators. But Iconoclasts is too much. The story is inscrutable, throwing jargon about “One Concern”s and “Mother”s and “Ivory”s and who knows what elses around and expecting you to understand it. The dialogue is stilted af, sitting on a white picket fence with contrived to one side, cliched on the other, and one of the pickets firmly up its ass. A character unironically says that they are being made to feel as though “a hundred snakes are feasting on [their] innards” and another says that “[they] don’t feel halfway to divinity… [they] feel halfway to the grave.” These quotes come within ten minutes of each other and barely stand out from the rest of the dialogue… like any two random snakes of the hundred currently feasting on my innards.
Iconoclasts is not a terrible game by any means. I would go so far as to say that it is in fact a very, very good game by a single developer who would probably do well to bring another person onboard next time to help spitball the storyline and punch up the dialogue. Like I said, it looks great, plays great, and sounds great. It’s also a pretty lengthy adventure and you can hit the + button on your switch to skip through a fair amount of the lengthy cutscenes. It is also the polar opposite of Gato Roboto, which both provides pretty hilarious dialogue and doles it out piecemeal. Gato is also streamlined in a way that Iconoclasts clearly isn’t meant to be. What a wonderful world we live in where so many developers are putting their time and energy into making Faxanadirbies of all shapes and sizes!
*I write this with nothing but love