So I am once again, same as always same as it ever was, plagued by fascination with something roughly 50 people know about and have experienced, so I want to talk about it and see if that bumps the number up by (1)
In Burggeist, you play as Ignace, a mathematician-mage, amputee and veteran of the war over the land of Aliscans. His wife Lucille has been afflicted with an unknowable coma, and the only lead he has on her ever waking up again is correspondence with an invisible entity he and his daughter Étoile have named Axiom.
Axiom claims that if Ignace builds a tower 5000n high into the heavens, his wife will return to normal. Ignace grafts his daughter's left arm to the stump of his own to share in her telepathic powers, and returns to Aliscans, which has become an uninhabitable no-man's land following the war. Bizarre geological structures have burst from the land, and creatures called Abhorers will emerge to destroy anything new being built here.
Naturally, for clandestine activities like Ignace's, this is the perfect place to build a heretical tower into the sky. Armed with his own magics and unlocking more over the course of the game, and accompanied by an odd creature called the Burggeist that started following him around a construction site one day that serves as his mobile bombardment machine, Ignace will explore the warped country and encounter several enigmatic strangers along the way.
That's the back of the box summary for you, at any rate. The feel of this game is if an early ps3 cult classic was a Team Ico project wandered outside and came back three weeks later pregnant by a wild Yoko Taro work and then the baby was a tower defense game.
The truly enormous map was a constant source of surprise and genuine awe for me as I sprinted around, thinking 'surely this hill is the boundary - oh, nope, now there's spirals, okay.' Luckily Ignace sprints very VERY fast, so going from one corner of the map to the other never takes that long... if you aren't being distracted picking up currency or doing platforming challenges, for enrichment.
For me, it brings back memories of just fucking around in the overworld maps in the Sonic Adventure games back in the day. Look at all the wonderful toys the devs put in this sand box!
Of course fucking about is only part of the gameplay loop. There are staked out locations marked by a pillar of light around the map where Ignace can begin to construct his tower to heaven. The moment you step away as that process starts, a wave of enemies will spawn in the vicinity and begin to advance. You'll need to position Burggeist in such a way it can keep the enemy from your tower, and provide support with your own spells where possible.
At the beginning of the game, you are about guaranteed to fail your first attempts. With each failure however, you'll earn experience to spend on upgrades, as well as the game's currency, Heretic Lime, a mineral that manifests only in Aliscans following the war. Don't get discouraged! Get stronger, try again, improve your strategy. The towers are built in stages, and the attacks will become more intense with each subsequent level. For that reason, you'll want to bounce from tower to tower instead of focusing your efforts on just one.
There's another reason to progress in multiple locations, and that is reaching certain levels in different towers will unlock interactions with npcs! They're a bunch of weirdos across the board, and bring intrigue, levity and humanity to the narrative you otherwise miss out on sprinting at sonic speeds across the lands alone with only your four-titted demon thing for company. The tone set by these interactions is perhaps what sets the story apart from the works I compare it to the most; there's a lot of bittersweet optimism to be found there.
I could sing the praises about this game for ages. Music? Killer. Visuals? Killer. It's fun too, which to be fair is sort of a secondary consideration for me in a game but it doesn't hurt. It's also fully voice acted, either in Japanese or in a conlang designed for this game called Cargrish.
As of the time of this post it's on sale on Steam, but it's ordinarily only about 12 dollars anyway.
Honest Abe reigns in the unruly city of Yharnam. My twitch (recorded most of this on stream): http://www.twitch.tv/iron_pineapple Twitter (in which I trash t...
“Four score and seven years ago, I stopped giving a fuck.” - Abraham Lincoln.
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