Go! Go! GOTY! 2022: Infernax

• Game: Berzerk Studio's Infernax.
• Release Month: February.
• Quick Look: N/A.
• Started: 24/12.
• Completed: 25/12.

To me, nothing is more Christmassy than Satanic cults and copious bloodshed. Infernax, a 8-bit throwback explormer that seeks to locate the exact mid-point between Castlevania II: Simon's Quest and Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, is here to deliver what that jolly dude in the flying sleigh cannot. Infernax has you returning home from the Crusades only to find that your dukedom has been corrupted by some nefarious cult activity, causing the countryside to become filled with demons and the undead. The player can choose to play this Duke protagonist however they wish though: either a staunchly pious man ready to quash heresy wherever it rears its ugly head, or one so thoroughly broken by the Crusades that they've become as much of a monster as the demons they butcher. In other words, the game has a morality system that makes itself known in various overt and less overt ways—an example of the former is when the game pauses to give you a big choice, such as choosing to accept a brigand's bribe to look the other way or take him down, while the latter might include taking what you need from the alms box at the local church—and these not only determine the ending but the entire route the game's story takes.

To circle back around to wanting to emulate the two least popular games in their respective franchises, Infernax is functionally an explormer—there's a map, there's traversal upgrades, there's power-ups everywhere you turn though most need to be purchased—but there's so many structural similarities to those NES games that it gets exhausting after a while. There's no mistaking the Castlevania influence right off the bat given the gory visuals (boy howdy does this game love its viscera) and theme, and while you never pick up a whip there's familiar features like how, after spending enough time on the overworld, a little cutscene plays and it switches from day to night or vice versa. Nighttime also carries with it far stronger monsters, requiring you to either tough it out, return to a town to rest at the inn to cycle back again, or use the Time Warp spell if you have it. You also have multiple towns to visit with its cryptic NPCs giving you side-quests to do but very little direction in how to complete them, as well as a game-wide objective to visit dungeons at terminal points of the map, defeat their masters, and destroy an artifact that weakens the seal on your final destination. The Zelda II stuff is a little more subtle but only a little; tougher enemies require a bit more of a dance to land solid hits on them, shielding their attacks while applying pressure in turn, and you slowly accrue XP which can be spent on one of three stats: attack power, HP, and MP. The spells start with a familiar Shield spell that lessens damage incurred, a very useful Heal, the aforementioned Time Warp, and a much-appreciated fast travel.

Infernax is another game that revels in its 8-bit roots, which specifically in this case means its sometimes absurd "Nintendo Hard" difficulty. What's odd is that this difficulty in no way applies to the bosses, due to the overly generous way the game doles out healing opportunities. Towards the end of the game I had potions that could restore mana and HP to full (like, say, the green potions of Zelda) and enough MP to cast three healing spells, which always heals you to full: added together, I could max my HP bar twenty times over if necessary. The game also starts selling "extra lives": however, given everything is Souls these days, you can restock your maximum lives count every time you hit a checkpoint along with HP and MP. As such, the game's difficulty curve resembles more of a bell curve than a consistent upward slope: the hardest dungeon for me by far was the water one, Stormheim, because of the copious amounts of water hazards. It does the Castlevania thing of having mermen jump out the water while you're trying to platform across spinning water wheels too, making it that much easier to lose your footing and fall into the drink. To reiterate: the game is beholden to the genre trappings of old, so dropping in a body of any liquid is always fatal and you have a very limited stock of lives to rely on throughout the game. I could tank hits like nothing due to all that healing, but falling into the water twice was enough to hit a game over. If you're playing on the recommended Classic setting, this meant being kicked back to the save point with all progress gone—no corpse runs or anything of the sort here—which meant I would regularly get far enough into the dungeon to get a key, for example, and then just bail and save so I wouldn't have to find it again. And then you get to the boss and you can either easily out-internecine the thing with your stock of heals or, as was more often the case, just defeat it in one attempt without needing to heal at all. So far as much as the game styles itself as a boss run type of thing—and the bosses are definitely impressively gross to look at, and have these cool little animated intros too—its the NES-style platforming and brutally restrictive limitations that are going to be the roadblocks here if you're not sufficiently inured to retro-gaming's less accessible quirks.

I have to say, the whole morality thing also seems kind of goofy. We're deep in the territory of "pet the puppy or murder it" territory when it comes to a lot of these choices, with the evil route not so much depicting a ruthless lord who tramples the weak in an "ends justify the means" approach to clearing your domain of these Hellish interlopers, but essentially becoming worse than they are by opting for wanton destruction and chaos over all other options. The game actually has five endings as far as I can tell: one each for generally being good or evil, another one each for an "ultimate" good or evil route that requires you make every correct decision and complete all the good/evil faction-based side-quests, and a special one that requires you have done both the ultimates at least once. (Annoyingly, I did the Ultimate Good route on my first attempt with the game and didn't get the achievement for the regular good ending, which almost made me dock it a star in its rating then and there.) That, plus the weird difficulty curve, gives Infernax a sort of style-over-substance vibe where it feels like the developers wanted to immerse players in a Doom-like world of heavy metal bloodshed murdering demons in the most grisly ways imaginable and spent less time on figuring out how this little Castlevania/Zelda II hybrid was going to work out.

That said, at its core I do think it's an excellent and responsive platformer that thankfully didn't carry over the stiffness that those early Castlevanias had and has some equally good combat: enemies are smart, for one thing, which means you can't underestimate even regular mooks and your traversal upgrades all have combat applications too, such as a rising attack that is equally handy for reaching higher platforms as it is for swatting annoying aerial foes. That it's generous in some ways and less so in others creates an odd dichotomy but I'm thankful for its small mercies regardless, and if the Classic difficulty is ever too irksome for you there's a Casual one that removes the progress-eliminating aspect of a game over and adds more mid-dungeon checkpoints besides (otherwise there are none whatsoever). If you're into these tough, old-school, metal-as-all-heck, 8-bit/16-bit style exercises, such as maybe Steel Mantis's Valfaris or JoyMasher's Oniken, Infernax should be right up your alley.

Current GOTY

1. Elden Ring
2. Tinykin
3. Hardspace: Shipbreaker
4. Tunic
5. Signalis
6. Return to Monkey Island
7. HoloCure
8. Ghost Song
9. Infernax
10. Immortality

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