Anodyne 2: Return To Dust — Review
This was an abandoned review, that I figured I would put up somewhere. Waste not, want not.
There was one aesthetic of previous generations that I was pretty sure was not going to come back into vogue and that is of the ‘barely functioning 3D’ look of the PlayStation era. It shows how little I know because there seems a whole slew of them coming out as people who grew up on the wonky pixel look are now hitting their 30s and becoming nostalgic for when controllers had, at maximum, one analogue stick.
Anodyne 2: Return to Dust is a sequel in an evolutionary sense to Anodyne. The previous installment was a 16bit tribute to Zelda with a surreal plot, its sequel leans into the look of an early 3D platforming/exploration with 2D mini dungeons. It starts with a character being presented with full-on Final Fantasy dialogue boxes and way too much text ala the mid-90s JRPG fashion.
Fortunately, the narrative gets a great deal stronger as it follows Nova, a young person, who has been tasked with using nanotechnology to go inside people and clean them of a toxic dust that both threatens the city and, conveniently, helps power it. All of the citizens either talk in goofy prompts, keeping in the mood of a Banjo Kazooie, or in cryptic monologues alluding to the darkness that haunts them due to being infected by the dust (like it is a melodramatic Xenogears game).
The variety in narratives is reflected in the game styles — a small, Zelda-like set of puzzles complements a story based around an authoritarian kingdom where the peasants are trying to bring about an anarchist state.
Another sub plot where a character is buggy and its inner thoughts are that of a workaday woman called Nora, haunted by a gargoyle is set in an isometric view.
It is even possible to use the nanotechnology to go even deeper in some levels and the game simplifies its graphics to those of the 80s.
I thought that writing was going to turn me off but there was a charm to it that reminded a little of Gregory Horror Show and recently re-released Moon.
What completely put me off was the gameplay itself and much of its presentation, the game is in love with the PSX, and this was the generation that left me empty, and I largely consider the games Anodyne 2 pays tribute to, to be bad actually™.
About halfway through the story, a bunch of meta coins appear throughout the world, this harkens to the fetch quest 3D platformers of that era that I had no time for. Each time Nova enters an area, the game does a little 3D animation screen that a lot of older games did to hide loading screens this might seem like a sweet tribute, but I didn’t like them then, and I certainly don’t like them now.
Then there is the amount of text: sometimes I would encounter a wall of text that I would get the drift of after about a sentence and then have to slowly scroll through them until I was able to dismiss it, in some cases I was required to trigger multiple of these conversations before I was allowed to progress the game, and it was torture. The game has a speedrun option in the menu that allows to cut it all out and that was a small mercy.
The graphical style also means that fans of ‘dithering’ fences, where straight lines flicker/disappear, will be really happy to go back to the day when games looked like utter dogshit. This effect was something that gave me headaches at the time, and I could feel creeping pains during Anodyne 2’s open world sections.
Finally, my version of Anodyne decided to also simulate the baffling lost progress of the PS1/PS2 era, where a beloved Memory Card would get wiped/corrupted for no reason.
After multiple uses of the Quick resume feature on Xbox Series I noticed that my sound had cut out, I saved my game and quit the app, upon reloading the app and loading my save, 3 hours of progress had just vanished.
Now, this review is going to end with me urging those coming to this and taking everything I’ve written and ask themselves if ‘Actually, all of these things are a positive’ is their response. If it is… Well.
Anodyne 2 is a painstaking recreation of a bygone era. If someone had told me that this was an unreleased, remastered PS1 cult game I would believe them, and I would probably praise it for the concessions this remaster did to modern requirements. As a modern-day game, I hated it for dwelling in so many aspects of what made the PS1/Saturn generation utterly dire. Even with the passionate disliking of this game, I feel like others will love this game for things that left me entirely cold.
Just maybe not if they hit that save data bug.
