Game Jammin’
Another month, another promising Game Jam title getting positive recognition and a developer willing to pump more into it to become a full title. Game Jams reliably produce diamonds under the firm pressure as developers pull together neat ideas under a formulated time limit. For the Metroidvania Month 19 Game Jam, this “goat-bunny-cat lady” takes the Retro 3D Platformer reins and dives head-first into the good-schmoovin’ feels with Pseudoregalia.
I know when I’m having a particularly crummy day, I look to a nap as a reset. If your reality doesn’t bode well and you crave an escape, a dice roll on a dream could be a calming journey from your lived-in problems or a needed spark for the creativity needed in your life. What if you couldn’t wake up from that dream? Or something in that dream did not want to wash away once you woke up? Take control of Sybil, our aforementioned lady above, and travel through the sprawling outers and innards of Castle Sansa to grow strong and escape the dream you seek to wake from.
This intriguing plot hypes a very interesting prospect, but sadly the game itself does very little to explain it. I pulled all the above from the Steam store page. Sybil starts their adventure in a dilapidated dungeon with little power and even less knowledge of the area around them, then it’s off to the races. The name of the game for Pseudoregalia is movement and once the upgrades start funneling in the game really starts to strut its stuff. The allure of navigating Castle Sansa is there’s a lot to see at first, but you aren’t allowed to yet.
Movement starts slow with simple jumping and grappling edges to reach higher areas, but transitions into sliding jumps for extra range, bounce jumps for higher vantage points, to wall riding that completely opens up the traversal late-game and links together some fantastic movement puzzles. The natural progression of these pickups is tuned just right and you’ll be tinkering with the new skills just long enough for another one to show up and keep you maximizing your style.
Additional pickups are available, with health fragments scattered about for extra slots of HP, powerups that can give extra movement uses and upgrades that help you heal more as you face combat. On this topic, there’s “combat” in Pseudoregalia. Quotations needed as 95% of the enemies you face are fodder to fill a meter that doubles as your pocketed healing or your increased power. The more bars you have the better and stronger your attacks are, but the only way to heal is finding a save crystal, a rare stool to pop a squat on, or depleting your meter to regain your health. It’s a fun give-and-take but something I wish was made a harder choice as the difference between 0 and 3 bars is not worth keeping for attack purposes.
What is worth using those bars for is health as traversing the castle will take a lot of trial-and-error, which can lead to falls into pitted areas of hate, which will cost you half a circle of HP. Since collecting power-ups is your way of maximizing your ability to move, finding those power-ups is one of the big hassles of the game. Leaning hard into the 3D-Retro-Platformer-Metroidvania style it’s shooting for, exploration and subtle clues will guide you most of the way, but if you miss a powerup you’re hard locked away from a set of puzzles that need the movement you don’t have. No biggie right? Just use the map to get a general sense of where you may have been so you know to guide yourself elsewhere to grab what you need.
No. No map. No map for you. With a whopping 7 areas and many sprawling corridors with multiple height levels, it is hysterically easy to get lost in Pseudoregalia. My 6-7 hour playthrough had about 30-40% spent backtracking and fumbling around finding the movement tech needed to catch the place I kind of remember where it was in that place that’s buried 3 levels under one of the entrances of the place 2-3 doors away from where I currently am. It’s a lot if you’re missing just that one piece, but when you do find it, the dominoes all topple over and the game smoothly picks up the pace.
But while Pseudoregalia has its issues, it all felt worth piling through just to get that sweet, sweet movement down. Movement and its tech is smooth as butter when done properly and traveling areas, especially in the late game, is addictive and so so enjoyable. Combinations of unlocked tech alongside placed set pieces make some exhilarating moments that had me holding my breath until I hit the ground. Rittzler has done a fantastic job with tension building puzzles that aren’t too hard but satisfying enough to really feel the moment when you nail it. One thing I wish could’ve been done was button remapping of some kind, as I feel attaching so many moves to one input (The A Button on your XBox Controller is gonna get some work in) can lead to potential mis-hits and break a smooth movement combo. Having some other buttons get some use could really help with the flow of the game instead of slapping one button and hoping where you are in the movement is the correct function it’ll provide.
Pseudoregalia finds itself in that weird gray area between “overachieving tech demo” and “lacking full title,” but Game Jams have that weird gray area where that’s entirely okay. The name of the game is fluid movement and it does so with flying colors, but if you’re looking for much else outside of that in Pseudoregalia, you might be best to keep dreaming.
Reviews as Fair as a Die Roll 