Indie Game of the Week 471: Gestalt: Steam & Cinder

All right, we've all had our fun over the past month with the great panoply of genres and subgenres that the Indie space either invented or is keeping alive; it's about time we get back to more exploraction fare. This time it's Metamorphosis Games's Gestalt: Steam & Cinder, a sweeping steampunk adventure set in and beneath the city of Canaan: the last bastion of humanity in an excoriated world. Reason being, as the game's opening crawl has it, was due to a demon invasion that required using the same fell powers of the abyss to curtail, which led to those who wielded that power falling under its sway (very Warhammer 40k so far, I have to say). After booting out all those affected after a challenging internecine civil war, and destroying the bulky armored suits that allowed them to channel said infernal energies, the world has enjoyed a precarious peace if still a somewhat grim one given the environmental devastation. Thrown into a new conspiracy happening outside of Canaan and within, mercenary "Soldner" Aletheia discovers on a routine mission that the power of the abyss might not be as contained as everyone believes, and that she herself might be uniquely positioned to take advantage of it to protect her homeland.

Any game that can make its sewer level look this attractive is dabbling in the dark arts.

Gestalt is one of those exploraction games that has taken on a fair amount of worldbuilding in addition to the usual trappings of the genre, putting it in the same conversation as an Iconoclasts or F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch when talking about games of this genre that devote a not-inconsiderable amount of screen time on dialogue cutscenes and lore dumps. I've always enjoyed this dynamic as a fan of video game narratives (when they're not too derivative, at least) but might be something of a pace-breaker for others. There's plenty of systems too, which I always like to see, including whole ass skilltrees and a bunch of combat techniques that are worth the time to master. You can unlock a hub town area, the slums of Irkhalla found on the city's underside, where you can converse with NPCs, grab quests, and trade with vendors; it largely exists as a means of getting in more plot while you prepare for the next leg of the journey. The quest system is equally elaborate, with a mix of story missions, side-quests with their own little narratives, and bounties which essentially amount to killing a bunch of enemies in the immediate area. There's always enough going on peripherally to keep you occupied while on the way to the next story milestone, and though there's a relative dearth of big, important traversal skills—the skilltree indicates five such abilities, mostly the usual double-jumps and air dashes—each provides plenty of that good, good "backtracking for stuff" juice as well as opening up new nodes on the skill tree to expand into.

The presentation of the game is excellent, with some atmospheric electric guitar music—that takes on an Middle-Eastern flair to befit the oasis-like Canaan—accompanying your travels across the city, the sewers beneath, and the ruins beneath those. The art direction, too, involves some incredible pixel work and gives both its characters and environments a sharp, detailed look and an Alucardian degree of animation frames for its protagonist and her opponents. The map tech is adequate, giving you four different marker icon types for remembering out-of-reach places and items, and I appreciated that each room has its own name to extend the game's worldbuilding even if they rarely serve any practical use. Even the spinning gears on the pause menu are kinda cute; steampunk is definitely a genre that insists upon itself, or whatever that's come to mean.

Aww yeah, that's the stuff. It's not the sphere grid but I'll take it.

In terms of negatives, I haven't really encountered any so far. The boss difficulty has been fair with a system of temporarily "breaking" the enemy for a window where you can get in a lot of damage before it recovers; ignoring this system would stretch these fights out quite a bit though, I'd imagine. I've yet to unlock a fast-travel system but save points and shortcuts have been frequent enough so far, and I find the writing to be generally decent even if we do get interrupted quite often to check in on ancillary characters like Aletheia's cop friends Renard and Cassandra or the city's leadership as they attempt to navigate a fragile peace with the descendants of the abyss-touched they exiled long ago. Like I said, though, the heavier focus on story hasn't bothered me much so far and it's not like they're throwing a dozen proper nouns at you in each scene to keep track of, as if all the areas to revisit with upgrades aren't enough to mentally keep tabs on. Though not a Soulslike game by any stretch, unlike many exploraction games being made now, you'll still see a few mechanics sneak their way in here like a stack of curatives that replenish at save points, your stock of which can be increased with very rare items; at this point, it feels the influence of that series has become inescapable.

I'm only partway through the game as of writing, so if I have any post-scripts this time I'll leave them in a comment beneath the article, but while it isn't doing anything particularly new or noteworthy I'm enjoying the solid platforming and combat fundamentals; the extra narrative flair, distinctive setting, and RPG elements providing more carrots on sticks to keep going with it, as if I needed the push. You might've surmised from the whole "dedicating what feels like a quarter of these Indie Game of the Week reviews to exploraction games" thing that I'm entirely ride-or-die with this genre and unless one of its games seriously screws something up, like makes collectibles or achievements inaccessible for the current run, I'm probably going to dig deep enough to find something about it to appreciate. It does make it a lot easier when a game's qualities are more overt like Gestalt's though.

Aletheia's character design feels part Ashe from Overwatch and part Lumisa Kosugi from La-Mulana 2. You can tell from that popped collar how serious she is.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

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