Alruna And The Necro-Industrialists opens with quotes from TS Eliot’s The Wasteland and Mad Max: Fury Road – a mishmash of influences that’ll get you kicked out of the Creative Writing Club for being simultaneously too flashy and too obvious, but beyond the epigraph the game looks pretty stylish.
“A compact, high-density Metroidvania focused on break-the-sequence and playing things in order.” It uses a square aspect ratio calibrated to make Game Boy fans shudder, and consists of 200 single-screen rooms that “fit into the larger puzzle box of the world.” You also play a thorn witch who looks like a 1950s Tinkerbell with a touch of Betty Boop. Here's a trailer.
Watch on YouTube
And here is a brief summary:
Alruna is a dryad in a dying world – a living spirit in the realm of the dead. The world has withered. There is only The Sprawl. Poor, wretched skeleton men dot the Necro-Industrialist Wasteland, swept back and forth in a torturous procession of life. But are they the true enemy? Or do the skeletons suffer as much as the dryads under the Necro-Industrialists' rule?
And salvation? Is it possible? Dead men long for Paradise. But the dead can only dig…
I've just tried out the Steam demo, and it's a very solid build. You get a charged jump, a run move, and a slide move by default, plus a selection of weapons and items plucked from the cracks of a world that contains four temples (plus a possible fifth “secret” temple, which isn't so secret, according to its Steam page).
The music is stylish, and there are familiar puzzle setups, like flipping switches to make some platforms dematerialize while others become solid. Power-ups include exploding mushrooms, magic vines, and electro-plants. There's a lot to it, but the square-view room-based format keeps things feeling pretty organised.
Alongside the platform-puzzle gambits, we can expect stealth minigames, a “star-crossed enemies-turned-lovers romance with a rival adventurer,” and a few story endings. Without being didactic (so far), there's some pretty straight-forward anti-capitalist stuff. A friendly character you meet complains about “infinite progress and endless growth.” There's definitely room for more Wasteland quotes here, but I hope they hold their own.
The full game is out on September 26. Developers Neckbolt are also working on October Panic, a pocket-sized candy platformer. They’ve already made past releases like Yono And The Celestial Elephants, which Alec (RPS in Peace) describes as “an almost absurdly wholesome Zelda-like”; the slightly less wholesome corpse-girl adventure Belladona; and Molly Medusa: Queen Of Spit, where you can walk on walls and turn objects to stone. It’s probably a studio to keep an eye on.
If you like the aesthetics and ambiance here but can't get enough of the fight scenes, I'd recommend trying out Everdeep Aurora or Void Stranger.