Indie Game of the Week 457: Exophobia

It's exploraction o'clock once again on IGotW, defying all expectations as per usual, and on this occasion we see another one of these strange chimeras so beloved of Indie developers looking to see what can merge with what like they were matchmaking their demon followers in a Shin Megami Tensei game. Now, that said, Zarc Attack's Exophobia does some have precedent with its combination of the exploraction format with a FPS—the Metroid Prime series, which recently added a new entry—but that was more of a (then-)modern FPS experience while the pixel style and fixed perspective of Exophobia is definitely more in the early '90s "boomer shooter" mold. It's an elegant fusion, given Doom typically had you sweeping the stage you just cleared for secret areas with items and weapons you could bring with you on your future demon hunts, and as was the case with a similar Indie experiment of this composition (And All Would Cry Beware, which I reviewed here) having the ever more ludicrously powerful weapons that were the heart of these old-school FPS games also double as the traversal upgrades is an inspired move.

In Exophobia, you are the apparent sole survivor of a series of unfortunate events when a human interstellar spaceship crash lands on a red alien planet and is attacked by the locals. Equipping a suit of power armor and eventually finding one of the alien's guns, capable of modular expansion, the protagonist then goes about clearing all four decks of the ship of its alien invaders while working towards finding a way to escape. The ship has three elevators that connect all four decks but the path is rarely so straightforward: more often you're taking circuitous routes that the story insists upon until future upgrades make it easier to get around. Along with new weapon mods, there's also collectibles, health upgrades, and temporary power-ups that disappear upon death like a handy drone that shoots any enemy that gets close. Each deck of the ship is built for a specific purpose, giving you unique goals to pursue (like turning on the reactor) and a distinct visual style: the first floor where you begin is for storage, for example, with plenty of battles in dark, wide-open cargo bays and hangars, while the second floor is reserved for white, gleaming laboratories where much of the hostile alien fauna the crew brought onboard for study has broken loose. Though the pixel style is crude it's enough to give these locations a firm sense of their purpose through their designs along with making it clear what in the environment can be interacted with, what might be interactive later with the right upgrades, and which walls seem suspicious enough that there could be something useful (or maybe just a cute dog to pet) hiding behind them. I mentioned Doom earlier but Exophobia's really closer in graphical fidelity to its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D, and its fondness for hidden walls certainly strengthens that connection further.

Just admiring my handiwork. "Indication of latent psychopathy"? Sure, whatever you say Freud.

However, the combat is a bit more advanced than what can be found in the genre's early champions, owing in a large part to a charge move you have access to from the jump. This charge is capable of briefly stunning most enemies (and, in some cases, is an essential means of getting past their defenses for a fleeting moment) and can also be used while exploring, where it tends to come in clutch for reflexes-based puzzles like timer switches that open doors elsewhere. One of the temporary power-ups I mentioned earlier is a jetpack that lets you charge around endlessly, which is an exceptional way to stay out of danger in any of the game's many arenas (and why it sucks that you lose it upon death). Battles tend to involve the usual amount of strafing you'd expect from a game built in this style, all the while charging around to avoid projectiles of a homing nature and prioritizing the more dangerously aggressive enemies to leave the more defensive types for later. All the weapon upgrades expand your options in battle further, rather than just being limited-ammo alternatives to your core weapon, and you'll eventually reach the point where you're hitting enemies with paralyzing shocks while teleporting around the arena to avoid their explosive area-of-effect attacks. The bosses in particular are showcases for what all your tech can do, and are suitably challenging as a result if you haven't quite mastered your newest acquisitions.

While the game has plenty of retro FPS charm and engaging combat and exploration in general, there's more than a few issues I have with the way it comports itself. I'm sure you've all read one of my rants before now about user-antagonistic design, not in the sense that you're deliberately punishing your players with traps and trolls (something harder games take great relish in doling out, and its masochistic players take equal relish in receiving) but in the sense that you feel like no-one who decided on these design choices ever considered the human who'd be subjected to them on the other end. As a short list: Losing those power-ups upon dying can really twist the knife if you were already struggling with a boss while you still had them (the classic shoot 'em up paradox—you might as well start over if you respawn at the boss door in Gradius and only have your starting peashooter); the map is too zoomed in to be all that useful for planning courses and can actually run out of batteries if you look at it too often (though you can switch this feature off in the menu if it's really annoying you—given they knew it would be unpopular, though, why include it?); everything from the enemies to their projectiles have 2D sprites that don't quite have the floating hitboxes to match; the achievement set is godawful due to some stringent insta-fail requirements like zero deaths (in an auto-saving game!) and some mutually exclusive challenges that would merit at least two or three full playthroughs (yes, achievements matter consarnit; if nothing else, it's an indication of rushed development); there's alternative palette swaps as well-hidden collectibles that automatically activate upon collection and are, almost invariably, eye-searing monstrosities that you're stuck with until you stop whatever it is you're doing and go into the main menu's graphics settings to mercifully undo them; and the circuitous level design with far too many one-way doors becomes a nightmare to navigate when you're returning to earlier areas with new upgrades to track down what you missed. It all combines together in a concerted effort to do its darndest to make you dislike playing the game, for as inventive and satisfying as it can often be moment to moment.

Feel free to stare at this for as long as you can stand. My record is 18 seconds.

Some exploraction games are destined to become all-timers that rise above the heap while most others are too derivative to make much of a lasting impact beyond being a fun few hours to wile away the time with some familiar thrills, but then you have others still that have some big ideas and ambitions but are consigned to the "not quite it, chief" bargain bin of also-rans for their failures, and I'm sad to report that Exophobia falls into the third category courtesy of many of its less considerate design choices that, outside the acceptable core thrust of running around gunning down aliens and solving environmental puzzles, makes the game far more of an ordeal than it strictly needs to be. I have reached the point in the playthrough where only the final boss remains and I'm staring at a whole lot of optional map clean-up before I take my chances with whatever that last encounter has to throw my way and my enthusiasm has already bottomed out after several hours of dealing with this game's inimical rigmarole. You never want to assume a game was coded this malevolently on purpose but, well, sometimes evidence to the contrary fails to materialize. The map runs out of battery while you look at it? C'mon now. Have none of its developers played games in this genre before? We'd have that shit open at all times if they let us.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

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