The most interesting thing in Sundered is your giant gun. You hit the button to fire it, and there’s a slight delay as your tiny, cloaked character pulls this impossibly-large anime gun out out of nowhere. The character hoists it onto its shoulder, and a flaming ball of blue energy slowly rockets across the level. That sounds silly and fun and ridiculous, but it gets even better: the recoil from the giant ball of energy being expelled from the gun rockets your character backward into a dodge roll. It’s weird design, but it showcases the developer’s personality and illustrates what makes this game a unique experience that could have only been made by the people at Thunder Lotus.
It makes me sad to say that the gun-and-recoil interaction is the only thing of that kind that I saw in the forty or so minutes that I spent with the pre-alpha build of Sundered. The developer post that Thunder Lotus put up over on the official PlayStation blog describes the game as “close to Rogue Legacy and Super Metroid” in terms of how it plays and what a player should expect from it. For the most part, it’s an accurate assessment, and I believe that relying on those two design pillars might ultimately be robbing Sundered of its own unique spirit.
To be clear, the game has a lot going for it in a few different ways. The art features a beautiful, fluid style that looks wonderful in motion, and the entire thing has a very Jack Vance or Gene Wolfe dying earth feel to it. Your character is a white-robed swordwielder, and the combat animations pair nicely with a light-on-your-feet dodging and slashing suite of mechanics. For the first few minutes, at least, it feels great to slash apart these jumping, biting, and slashing nightmare monsters out of Little Nemo. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention the “setpiece” background art of the game as well. While most of the rooms you enter have drab-yet-appropriate backgrounds, there are large and open areas that suggest massive, cyclopean spaces of statues and shrines left behind by some dead godlike beings. It’s wonderfully evocative of something beyond what we’ve been given (or at least what we’ve been given as far as the pre-alpha goes).
As I wrote above, the Sundered devs signal their influences, and it would be easy to see them even if they didn’t. The word “Metroidvania” is thrown around a lot, but as far as I can tell there’s not a single iota of Castlevania in this game. It’s all Metroid, and at risk of violence to myself and my person, I just don’t care for it. There is nothing I find less engaging in contemporary gaming than struggling through room after room of faceless enemies with zero narrative, only to find out that there’s a locked door in the way and, surprise, you have to go somewhere else in the world to find that key. It is surely “classic gaming,” but at this point I don’t think that kind of game design delivers anything other than the warm and fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. It’s played out.
The Rogue Legacy DNA that’s present in Sundered is less than you might think. Where the former game constructed its entire play area around randomized connected rooms every time you re-entered the castle, Sundered seems to generate most of the level at the start of the game and then adds sections of different wings upon death. At least, that’s what I think was happening, because I don’t think that the generative algorithm is all there yet. There isn’t enough differentiation between objects and “types” of rooms yet to really understand how it can all come together in an interesting play experience, so my entire playtime was spent killing the same few enemy types and avoiding the same prickly green bush (it hurts you!) across a big chunk of map.
We have a while before Sundered is released, and I feel like most of my major issues with the game will get augmented between now and then. What the devs have released so far is a fascinating start, but I worry that it is more a sum of its time-tested references than it is the product of a design and development team’s vision. I want to see more unique ideas. I want to see more things that make me think “whoa, Thunder Lotus are really doing the damn thing.” The basic concept of Sundered along with that gun make me think that there’s definitely something in that team waiting to get out, but the game needs to break out of its tried-and-true game design safety net if it’s going to shine on full release.
Cameron Kunzelman tweets at @ckunzelman and writes about games at thiscageisworms.com. His latest game, Epanalepsis, was released last year. It’s available on Steam.