What if Umihara Kawase was a steampunk Metroidvania??
When Studio Saizensen announced their next project after Umihara Kawase Bazooka, I was a little taken aback. Here’s a game with a familiar stretchy wire grappling hook, but it seemingly has a whole new grittier setting completely divorced from the growing Kawase universe. After getting some more info and my hands on the game, I came to realise that there’s so much Kawase DNA in here that it’s effectively a spinoff of Fresh just like Bazooka was.
Myastere is running in the Umihara Kawase Fresh engine, with tweaked Fresh mechanics. Like Fresh it has a big open world, although it’s more spelunkish and with a free-roaming structure plus progressive movement upgrades. Curly Brace had a gun in Fresh, which has been expanded into Aaurae Mawkish—part of the royal archaeological society or something—being a walking arsenal. The enemy types are broadly similar, some seeming like they’d be right at home in Kawase’s abstract, more cartoony world while others are creepypasta material. Even the basic premise of a corrupting substance seeping from an evil presence underground is in common between both games.
What sets Myastere apart is the focus of the gameplay. This isn’t a precision puzzle platformer; the grapple is faster, snappier, and expandable, more a satisfyingly zippy means of getting around than a tool the mastery of which the entire game is built around. The default setting for the grapple is similar to Bazooka’s auto-retracting beginner setting, but it can be changed to a more traditional scheme. You get a default double jump early and even a triple jump later! Combat is also much more prominent, with an array of ammo types and throwable bombs for different enemies. So it’s more searching (exploration to progress the story and find hidden secrets and shortcuts) and action (fighting, platforming, etc.). If only there was a term for that.
Quite honestly it struggles to compete in this now crowded genre, however. The shooting is a bit sticky and the expansions to your moveset only slight or incremental. There’s no fast travel system, the world is quite static and barren of NPCs and interaction, and the map didn’t even show where you had been until a post-launch update gave it Metroid Dread-style colouring in. There’s collectible coins to be found but good luck hunting for them if you miss any (finding them all unlocks a new skin for Aaurae sans cloak and goggles, while getting all relics gives her... a schoolgirl outfit...). For English language players, the localisation is frankly embarrassing, with an amateurish, unnatural, machine-translated-feeling English script; actually a machine might even be better as it would more consistently spell words like “wepon”[sic] correctly. Fresh’s PC version and all Bazooka versions were like this too and it’s getting really old. The fact that it has full Japanese voice acting is impressive and makes the lack of effort for the translation more glaring.
[Spoilers in this paragraph] The poor localisation affected my appreciation of the story as well, as it just makes it harder to understand the world and characters. I got the gist of it but in a more story-driven game that wants to be taken seriously this kind of thing is a real barrier. The general idea is this is some kind of alternate modern world where mystical relics have great significance. Aaurae is some kind of steampunk relic cop working for the monarchical government who encounters a band of Deazniff (tomb raiders, given an incomprehensible proper noun for no reason at all?) in a ruin, which leads to more sinister discoveries: monsters mutated by Myastere (evil magic radiation?), an ancient society of exiled undead Paladins from the 14th century, and eventually, the giant reanimated corpse of King Solomon(!!) and a cosmic struggle for the ark of the covenant. The script oddly skirts around naming the Hebrew people/nation directly, but the in-game collectibles have a lot of fun references to real-life historical artefacts and oddities.
So, the plot goes some fun places, but that’s not necessarily enough. The real selling point that helps this game stand out from other Metroidvanias is the integration of Kawase’s “wire action” traversal. It’s certainly a cool direction for the overall Umihara Kawase series to take as an evolution of Fresh, even if the Metroidy elements have been mixed in a little clumsily. It’s a good time, and not too long. I really enjoyed the turbo grappling mechanics, scooting around flooding my pockets with stacks of bombs I’d never use, snooping around corners and crannies while mowing down critters and nasties. I just hope they get a native English speaker to look at the script sometime. Heck, I’ll give it a crack why not!
Digimerce has announced Metroidvania-style “spring wire action game” Myastere: Ruins of Deazniff for Switch. It will launch via the Nintendo Shop in spring 2021.
Myastere: Ruins of Deazniff is set in a steampunk world and follows the protagonist, a research team member, as she evades formidable foes in an ancient ruin to unravel a mystery.
