Pseudoregalia is an indie gaming winner that’s absolutely gorgeous—in its own way
With a throwback visual aesthetic dating back to the mid-'90s, and shockingly solid running and jumping gameplay, Pseudoregalia is a short, sweet gaming treat
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Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off our weekly open thread for the discussion of gaming plans and recent gaming glories, but of course, the real action is down in the comments, where we invite you to answer our eternal question: What Are You Playing This Weekend?
There’s a tweet that kicks around on the more games-focused bits of the internet every once in a while, dating all the way back to the ancient, positively hoary days of mid-2020: Written by Jordan Mallory, it declares, simply, “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.”
As far as statements go, it’s hard to fault: The games industry is absolutely notorious for chewing up developers en masse, and the increasing graphical horsepower “demanded” by modern gaming is a big part of that crunch and churn. We all like to “ooh” and “ahh” at a massive world or an expansive “technical marvel,” but we also know, deep down, that it’s typically being powered by the blood, sweat, and tears of hundreds of people—only some of whom probably even made it to the end of the project to get their names on the finished product. And from a strictly player-focused point of view, gaming’s endless obsession with delivering the biggest, longest, most detailed worlds imaginable can often feel, frankly, exhausting. (If you’ve never opened up the map in a Far Cry game, or something of its ilk, and felt a sudden rush of despair of how much is there, you’re a less tired person than me.)
It’s in that spirit that I’m contemplating Pseudoregalia this week, a 3D platformer that crept up from the depths of the indie game dev scene over on online marketplace itch.io to absolutely colonize my brain. Looking like the coolest game to never appear on the Sega Saturn or Sony PlayStation, Pseudoregalia feels like it captures a big part of what Mallory was driving at with their tweet. (I’m pretty sure the game’s sole developer, known online as rittzler, worked considerable hours to put this thing together, though.) It’s a huge reminder that “graphics” matter much less, in the long run, than having a well-defined aesthetic; that “length” is only a selling point when you’re not trying to deliver more than your core game idea can actually support; and that, in a medium that lives and dies in the hands, having satisfying gameplay can overcome almost any other issues.
You’ll notice almost immediately that Pseudoregalia is aggressively light on plot; you play as a rabbit-goat woman named Sybil who finds herself, when the game starts, trapped in a very blocky and polygonal dungeon that we’re told is located somewhere in the realm of dreams. Literally from the jump, though, you’ll start to encounter the game’s biggest selling point: A fluid and ever-expanding approach to traversal and movement that only builds as Sybil finds more power-ups across the game’s small, but exceptionally action-rich world. It’s the sort of game where a massive gap between two platforms isn’t an immutable obstacle, but the start of a series of pleasant mental calculations: “If I slide-jump from there, hit that bubble, boost off it to there… I can just about make this sucker.” Featuring light but serviceable combat, the game puts its primary focus on the joy of moving, sliding, leaping, and more. It knows the secret of a great 3D platformer: Bodies in space don’t have to look great—they just have to move great.
It’s also admittedly—and for many of the reasons outlined above—a hard game to sell via screenshots. So if your curiosity is piqued, do yourself a favor and check out the above trailer to see the movement in action. (And, yes, in case you were concerned: There’s a very welcome option to give the poor woman some pants.) The game is currently available on Steam, where it’s garnered a massive number of “Overwhelmingly Positive” reviews in its scant three weeks of availability, and where you can pick it up for a song. If you’re up for a night or two of incredibly solid and inventive running, jumping, and thwacking stuff—and you don’t mind a lack of a map to smooth out some of the rougher edges of exploration—then it’s a hard game not to recommend.
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I love a big map. Then again, I’m not a 100 percenter, more of a 90ish percenter which takes some of the pressure off. It’s pretty easy for me to skip or do the minimum of the stuff I don’t like. Loved the huge AC Odyssey map. There are dozens of us!
I like a big map as well, but it has to have some kind of character aside from pure vastness.Witcher III/Elden Ring > Far Cry/Immortals: Fenyx Rising, basically. That kind of thing. I want to be awed by what I’m discovering, and not just keep stumbling across variations of the same puzzles in different spots.
Yeah, the execution is everything, big or small. I love maps that have new things, stories, or easter eggs tucked in the corners as little bonuses. I am very much an explorer not a fighter.
Unsurprisingly, it’s all just been a ton of Tears of the Kingdom for me over the past week.I feel like I’m likely to finish the game this weekend and then pick at what’s left of the side content over the course of several months. I’ve got my Master Sword, I’ve got a couple main quests that don’t feel like they’re throwing me directly into a final showdown with Ganon, and I finally just last night upgraded my maximum possible armor rating to 44, over the previous 24. It’s not a very intentional outfit, combining weak abilities from three different sets, but I tried it out in combat, and I feel extremely resilient all of a sudden. I have a sword from a pretty substantial quest that I’ve been saving for the final showdown for like 50 hours of gameplay now, and with just a little bit of lynel hunting and weapon fusion for safety, I should have enough of an arsenal to keep me armed through any reasonable-length final conflict.Once I’ve wrapped the game up, I’ll have a nice round 10 games I’ve purchased and not gotten around to, down from like 90 several years back, and most impressively I’ll have finished every game I’ve purchased in the past 2 1/2 years. I’m not sure whether I’m going to jump directly from Zelda to another huge time commitment, like Tales of Zesteria or Persona 4 Golden or Final Fantasy 15 or Dragon Warrior 11 or Xenoblade Chronicles 1 or Gloomhaven or Monster Hunter World, or if I’m going to pick up one of the games gathering dust on my Steam wishlist for a quick playthrough (Bomb Rush Cyperfunk just released!), or if I’m just gonna dive back into board games for a bit and fall in love with the 8 new spirits from Spirit Island: Nature Incarnate. The latter I’m certainly going to start on tonight when I have company over for board games. As usual, there’s no limit to good entertainment vying for my attention, but unlike any time from the past 7 years or so, I’ll be able to count the games in my backlog on my fingers, with plenty of games I’ve taken off my list that are still in regular rotation, even though I’ve certainly already gotten my money’s worth out of them. It’ll be even nicer when six of those fingers aren’t incredibly dense RPGs, but… baby steps.
And from a strictly player-focused point of view, gaming’s endless obsession with delivering the biggest, longest, most detailed worlds imaginable can often feel, frankly, exhausting. Amen. It seems the common AAA wisdom seems to be that people exclusively want games stuffed with STUFF, so much that the player is never at a loss (even if some of that stuff is not all that engaging or interesting in isolation*), a veritable Playskool Busy Box of video games. And, sure, if you’re going to put down 60 or 70 bucks for a game, it can be a pleasing value proposition to get a lot for your money. However, I feel too often quality suffers when you prioritze quantity; I can’t be the only one who reaches a point in the middle of one of these overstuffed monstrosities where I wonder to myself “Am I still engaged? Am I having fun?” *(Who is demanding all those damn lockpicking mini-games, Bethseda?)As to the push for bleeding-edge graphics, the tech industry are surely pushing it, but does your average Joe (or Jane) Q. Gamer really care that much? I’m old enough to remember the beginnings of the video game industry—my family had a console that only played Pong!—so it doesn’t take too much to wow me. Whenever I see some hubbub online about some slight frame-drop or some other suboptimal experience, I squint my eyes and…I guess, maybe I can see it, though if no-one had brought it up, I probably wouldn’t have. In my view, aesthetic quality should always go before graphic fidelity.Mind you, this is also the year that at least two sizable AAA games released—The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Baldur’s Gate 3—to almost exclusively-positive acclaim, so what do I know? I suspect these might just be outliers; Nintendo has always been a little different and BG3 has been in development for at least 4 years. I suppose my larger thesis would then be “Large AAA games are fine, as long as your intentions remain pure”?!?YMMV…feel free to disagree with me in the replies.
While Tears is AAA, it’s also not bleeding-edge graphics, and doesn’t need to be, since it makes up for that with a nice visual style.
Addendum to my previous post: With the PS1/Fifth Generation aesthetic being the new hot retro look in the indie scene, I wonder how hard it was to develop for those systems compared to the current generation. I would imagine the teams were smaller back then and they didn’t have quite the suite of middleware that we have now, but then again, the hair on the character didn’t need its own physics since it was just one object.I do remember reading an interview with a programmer way back (I wish I could recall who it was) talking about how easy it was to develop for PS1 because it was all C++. I suppose he could have been just being nice to keep Papa Sony happy.
It’s been a lot of RPGs for me recently. I’ve been diving back into Knights of the Old Republic, just got past the Vulkar base (which is kinda drawn out as dungeons go, especially since healing’s so limited at this point.) I never actually finished this game previously, but I’ve got a better grip on the combat now so who knows.I’m also replaying Mass Effect via the big remastered collection. Still a fun mess, I’d say its major flaw is just Bioware’s insistence on binary choices.And I’m also playing through Phantasy Star on the Switch. The early grind is heavy but I’m past the worst of that, now it’s just a question of figuring out where to go next. Still such a lovely game.
Should I even bother replying?