Ageism in Games: Stop Calling Old Games Outdated: A Self-Review of Anodyne

A plea. A self-review of my game Anodyne (2013) .

Anodyne (2013) - “a reminder that those sorts of indie games age poorly” (Backloggd critic)

(Originally posted on Backloggd, but revised)

Any kind of self-review has a tendency to slip into defensiveness, but more than anything I want this review to be taken as a Plea to stop looking at games as some march of progress/improvement.

First, some context.

Ageism in Games

Part of this started because I saw some discussions online about old games being worse or whatever. Then, like a thunderbolt, I read a Backloggd review of Anodyne that made me scream, a type of review I’ve never read before (and I have read every type of review of Anodyne). It historicizes the work indies made in 2012/3 as amateurish/sloppy derivatives of Nintendo games, in particular categorizing Anodyne as something trying but failing to be Zelda (because clearly only AAA games existed back then, and every indie just wanted to be Nintendo!) and IT IS KILLING ME.

In other words, for the first time one of my games received the “Old games were worse lol” treatment.

Games have an ageism problem: look at any ‘best games of all time’ list and I 100% guarantee you it will always be weighted towards the past few years. Really old games are often viewed as “not for everyone!!“ or “the devs were really dumb back then!!” rather that things people DID engage with and enjoy and resonate with, things that were deliberately designed. All it does is reinforce an ecosystem where we - players, devs, critics - are ALL weaker as a result, because there’s little collective ability to engage with the past on one’s own.

The wild thing is that I’m certain Backloggd users skew younger than me (teens/20s), so put another way, the whole ‘ageism in games’ thing isn’t something that’s really aging out as time goes on. The conservatism of some vocal gamers continues to be a time-honored tradition…

A Self-Review of Anodyne

A steam page screen shot of Young jumping over water. lol. i learned that screenshots with movement are more eye catching while making angeline era

Something bizarre that people who play games say is that if a game shares even one system from a popular game, then the influenced game is a rip-off or imitator. This makes about as much sense as eating a donut and saying it’s a ripoff of pizza because it uses flour. It doesn’t make any sense and all this line of criticism shows is that someone has a strange fixation on pizza. If we apply this to games, it reveals that people have a very strange fixation and almost religious-fandom around companies like Nintendo or Sony or whoever.

This line of reasoning kind of just leads to viewing game designers as neanderthals banging together different things for no reason, while the only people capable of creating good design are corporations and games that sold over 1,000,000 copies.

The Zelda mechanics in Anodyne are here because we didn't (and still don't) really like item progression in Zelda and wanted to explore more minimal takes on it. The Zelda ideas in Anodyne (using keys to open locked doors, the dungeon format, the screen size) were always more about adding just enough sense of dungeon-like-mechanics to pace out what would otherwise be directionless exploration.

Thus I don't see the point of critiquing Anodyne from the angle of not being exactly like Link's Awakening (GB, 90s) or Link to the Past (SNES, 90s) or whatever. Anodyne does draw on those games but it's Not for the point of emulating those games.

What I did like about Zelda games was always in a more holistic sense - the general vibe or atmosphere of Link’s Awakening or Ocarina of Time, how all the weird moments add up into something more, even against their tedious dungeoning/combat/puzzle gameplay. The sheer amount of bizarre decisions bouncing off of each other just add up to a strange experience that makes me more curious about my world.

A very formal analysis of Anodyne would show that it takes some of the mechanical skeleton of Game Boy Zeldas, the visual framing of game boy games and their square-screens, the meandering and loose exploration of Yume Nikki, and the 'Personal Atmosphere' of many contemporaneous (2010-2013) indie games.

On Anodyne’s Janky Combat

I generally agree that the combat and puzzles are not strong in a traditional sense, but I do think they work quite well overall! And I still think the boss and enemy variety is good and easy to understand.

Consider that the game has a high clear rate even among people who don’t really play action games. Generally when an action game becomes ‘better,’ it usually gains complexity either through number-itis (adding lots of customization, number-fiddling), or through actual difficulty (Angeline Era… Mega Man, etc is pretty hard and there’s not much way around it unless you lower the difficulty or practice).

I think another valid choice is that the action in game is mostly serviceable, but that it serves the function to glue together the atmosphere. It’s true you can just meat-shield your way through a lot of Anodyne’s combat, and nowadays I’d definitely tweak hitboxes or boss movements, but like… basically Anodyne’s combat works for what it needs to do. Look at Ocarina of Time. Is that game’s combat of holding ‘defend’ until the sword man puts the shield down ‘really good’? Absolutely not, but it does what it needs to in context with the whole game.

And I also think that in Anodyne, the function of a dungeon is to give a maze with a certain kind of atmosphere and texture: thus the combat/puzzles just need to be good enough to provide a sense of pacing, a sense of tension as you work towards unlocking deeper reaches of the dream world. I don't think the windmill scene would have been as affecting to so many players if there wasn't the light challenge and time-investment of the dungeons' mazes.

Imagine if the game had 'good' combat or 'really hard' puzzles. It would throw off the pacing of the game. If Anodyne had a dodge roll or parries (or whatever counts as Good Combat today) it would have been jarringly hilarious more than anything.

When I think about game atmosphere, I think about whether a certain application of game mechanic is helping or hurting that. I think there’s a range of challenge in Anodyne’s puzzles and combat (as simple as they are!) but to push them to more extreme ranges would be working against the game as a whole. Good games simply aren’t just a collection of modular parts, polished to some standard, without awareness of the whole.

Collecting Cards???

Mitra has a hint for every card

The exploration/card collecting comes up as a pain point, but…

The Nexus and Nexus-gate-gem markers (which indicate if you have cards to find) don't make finding the cards much more time-consuming than some 'find 30 yummy berries to craft a +10 speed potion' in an AAA game. I still don't think finding all 36 cards is that unreasonable of an ask. Just go find them!

(Suddenly, I remember: We added minimaps the last minute because people got lost. I actually would like to make a ‘director’s cut’ of Anodyne without minimaps OR treasure markers or nexus gems. Or even a Nexus. Ha ha ha!!! You heard it here… to play ‘true anodyne’, hide the minimap, and don’t use the Nexus once. Would the game be better with these choices? Perhaps for me personally, but maybe I wouldn’t have a career right now…)

To have designed Anodyne to really make it easy to narrow down where everything is would (again!) have conflicted with the game's atmosphere. The friction and tedium of looking for those last cards is a necessary part of the package of Anodyne. I’m glad to see ‘friction’ coming into the conversation as an important part of games, it’s a tool we need to use more often…

If anything it the card collecting plays into the narrative as well.

Anodyne’s Very Complex Story

I know the narrative doesn't just spell out something straightforwardly, but I also don't think it's that hard to come up with an okay interpretation. Especially when far more complex lore-heavy games are so popular??? Anodyne’s set in a subconscious (admittedly the game never says this, but if you die you wake up in a bedroom, so idk… there’s some puzzle pieces to put together), so the characters are necessarily something related to this character's waking reality. Who are the three major characters?

Sage, Mitra, and Briar.

- Sage wants you to save the world, but they're also conflicted and try to stop you right before the end.
- Mitra encourages you throughout your quest or gives card hints.
- Mitra and sage get into a conflict at the end.
- Briar and Young had some issue but make up in the end.

I think that points to a character, Young, who has some kind of inner conflict they are scared to deal with. While it's not explained what that is, I think that also makes it more potentially powerful. Look, this game would be 100x worse if it ended with “And so, Young wakes up - having gotten over his anxiety of eating spinach (Briar) on his sandwiches! You did it! Young is happy now.”

You can interpret the 36 cards as a distraction - some kind of inner conflict within Young, a means of wasting time before having to commit to doing something scary. Sage being the aspect of the mind protecting yourself from harm through the time investment of game-like aspects. This is accented even more by the postgame and the 'pointlessness' of finding the extra cards. The postgame is a memorable moment for people not just because it's surprising (and understated!), but because the postgame also emphasizes some of the inward, obsessive aspects of Young's character. I think it’s engaging because it feels like you’re trying to understand more aspects of Young, but through the game mechanics.

The cards are very game-like, but they're also absolutely necessary to the structure and pacing of the game as a whole.

Anodyne doesn’t have a traditional story: it has the frame of a story, and it expects you to collaborate with it.

Ahistoricalness

It drives me CRAZY that people play this game in 2024 and all they can see is a Zelda rip-off. Some people want games to be art but they aren’t willing to actually engage with any of it. All they can do is see nostalgia or a rip-off…

If an analysis of Anodyne wanted to be more historical, it ought to look at other indie and flash games in the period leading up to this - Dustforce, Knytt, An Untitled Story, Cave Story, Seiklus, Iji, FEZ, Hero Core, Snailiad, RPG Maker Games, Newgrounds flash games, etc...

I - like many other kids at the time, and probably like kids now - was losing interest in AAA games around the time of college apps, going to college. I remember asking myself "why?" playing Mario Galaxy 2 (2010) at 18, i remember being kind of eh at Zelda Skyward Sword (2011) at 19. Sure, some other indies at the time probably were aspiring to be like Nintendo, but to conclude the same for Anodyne is, actually, personally offensive as someone who, despite being inspired by some of their work, has no desire to emulate their work which is much more family-friendly/safe (side note: after visiting the museum, this feels like a historical correction to Nintendo nuclear-family-oriented history, and some of the interesting work of the 80s-early 00s feels like a miracle more than anything)

Generally, when making Anodyne, I was becoming an adult, and wanting something different out of games. Anodyne tries to get all these 'traditional game like elements' to work beyond their constituent parts and make something that's personal, atmospherically potent. Indie games were already doing this, and it's THAT conversation that I wanted to take part in. I’m not making games to be stuck in some eternal childhood, I’m making them because I genuinely think it’s an exciting and active medium full of so many talented artists doing all sorts of work and I would rather see those scenes GROW rather than just letting The Game Awards-type media write the historical narratives.

I don't need everybody to love and give 5 star reviews to Anodyne, or to be into it, but I do need people to stop critiquing it from the mind-numbingly unproductive angle of being a bad Zelda-like! And stop doing the same to other games too!

AGH!!!