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Fun Club some absolute madman is turning the classic novel "A Christmas Carol" into a METROIDVANIA. “Ebenezer and The Invisible World”
- Thread starter Krvavi Abadas
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I for one welcome dark video game adaptations of classic childhood tales
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I watched this during the pc gaming show and it didn't even process it was a Christmas Carol lol. Game looked good.
D
Deleted member 887
Guest
i mean what genre would you make it?
TheQuietone
The Dread Captain
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Not sure how I feel about this. Guess I need to see who the enemies are and the story. If they can nail those two things then it might be fun.
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Saw this at the PC Gaming show. Easily one of the few highlights of it 
It's just one of those totally bonkers ideas I can't help but admire and root for.
It's just one of those totally bonkers ideas I can't help but admire and root for.
To be fair, the source material of Pinocchio is pretty gruesome. Still takes some drugs to turn it into Bloodborne though, admittedly.
Stilt Village
GBA
I played the demo for a bit. Was absurdly big for a 2D game demo, like 4GB, but it ran okay on my shitty laptop. Maybe not perfectly smooth, but not chugging in any case.
The premise is actually kind of cool! The game starts with Scrooge saving a protestor from police brutality with his cane fighting skills. That should go so hard, but unfortunately the execution of everything consistently left me cold. The writing wasn't exactly Dickens, it's very simple and flat, with basic sentences. You have a little bit of flavor to go with the setting, but to be honest it could just be unnaturally stiff writing as easily as it could be intentional. Look at the bit of dialogue from Tiny Tim in one of the Steam screenshots for what I mean. They open with a quote from the book, and it's blatantly not anything like their own writing style. The ghosts are the main attraction, and they basically say "I'm Ghost, and I need you to help someone!" It isn't much more complicated than that. The ideas behind them all appear solid enough, varied at least, and feel faithful to my vague memories of how the ghosts in A Christmas Carol worked and were depicted. But I feel like if you're making a game based on a famous book you should in some way seek to live up to that? They clearly made writing much more of a focus than usual, including lots of NPCs and giving unique backstories to each ghost whether enemy or friend, so it's a shame the prose is so poor. I like all of their ideas!
It's pretty much Symphony of the Night with quests and (I think) rudimentary upgrade crafting added on. I personally think that the best Igavanias rely on gamefeel and presentation as their backbone, and this doesn't quite deliver there. It controls fine enough and has nice art, but spaces feel large and empty in a way I can't put my finger on (perhaps the camera is abnormally zoomed out?), and the animations (especially NPCs) and movement have a bit of stiffness to them. Like for instance the backdash travels a set distance and completely locks you into the move with no possibility of canceling out of it, which I'm fairly sure was never the case in Castlevania. It feeling slow and tame compared to its inspiration could also be chalked up to this being the start of the game, but it still looks the part in all the clips shown on the Steam page. At least part of that is probably down to a lack of satisfying feedback on hits. You get a white flash and a weak thud, and defeated foes kind of just fall over, and fade away if they're ghosts. I adore the feeling of attacking things in Aria of Sorrow. Strikes are swift and agile, the sounds are harsh and penetrating, enemies and objects disintegrate messily in flames or crumble apart with a clatter when destroyed, and every hit is punctuated by a meaty smack. This is a million miles away from that.
The friendly ghosts you meet seem to work quite similar to the souls from the Sorrow games, as they can add new traversal moves or provide interchangeable special attacks. If they're all unique characters though, I suspect there will be far far less of them. As for the level design, I can say that it's definitely not just paying lip service to the genre, as right from the start it lets you go off and encounter a lot of different dead ends. But a bustling Christmastime London doesn't make a lot of sense as a sidescrolling Metroidvania map, because obstacles should be easily passable by just going around them or taking a different street. People like, live here, y'know? And I have no idea how they're going to handle the verticality. There's a reason the genre overwhelmingly takes place in enclosed spaces, even Ori & the Blind Forest felt pretty weird the way it was laid out with similar outdoor environments "on top of" each other. I'm also a bit iffy on how much effort was put into fitting the genre trappings into the Christmas Carol universe (is that... is that a thing?) in general. I've seen much less serious games than this go to far greater lengths to justify their save systems, so it's kind of jarring when this one actively draws attention to the concept of Save Rooms in-character, but makes absolutely no attempt to justify or contextualize them in-universe when doing so.
Overall it seemed passable I guess, but the thing is, there have got to be so many better indie metroidvanias than this. I think as far as ones I've played the demo for this year, this is better than A Sister's Journey, probably a bit worse than Afterimage, and way behind Gestalt: Steam & Cinder. I had no idea what to make of Teslagrad 2, but I didn't like it.
The premise is actually kind of cool! The game starts with Scrooge saving a protestor from police brutality with his cane fighting skills. That should go so hard, but unfortunately the execution of everything consistently left me cold. The writing wasn't exactly Dickens, it's very simple and flat, with basic sentences. You have a little bit of flavor to go with the setting, but to be honest it could just be unnaturally stiff writing as easily as it could be intentional. Look at the bit of dialogue from Tiny Tim in one of the Steam screenshots for what I mean. They open with a quote from the book, and it's blatantly not anything like their own writing style. The ghosts are the main attraction, and they basically say "I'm Ghost, and I need you to help someone!" It isn't much more complicated than that. The ideas behind them all appear solid enough, varied at least, and feel faithful to my vague memories of how the ghosts in A Christmas Carol worked and were depicted. But I feel like if you're making a game based on a famous book you should in some way seek to live up to that? They clearly made writing much more of a focus than usual, including lots of NPCs and giving unique backstories to each ghost whether enemy or friend, so it's a shame the prose is so poor. I like all of their ideas!
It's pretty much Symphony of the Night with quests and (I think) rudimentary upgrade crafting added on. I personally think that the best Igavanias rely on gamefeel and presentation as their backbone, and this doesn't quite deliver there. It controls fine enough and has nice art, but spaces feel large and empty in a way I can't put my finger on (perhaps the camera is abnormally zoomed out?), and the animations (especially NPCs) and movement have a bit of stiffness to them. Like for instance the backdash travels a set distance and completely locks you into the move with no possibility of canceling out of it, which I'm fairly sure was never the case in Castlevania. It feeling slow and tame compared to its inspiration could also be chalked up to this being the start of the game, but it still looks the part in all the clips shown on the Steam page. At least part of that is probably down to a lack of satisfying feedback on hits. You get a white flash and a weak thud, and defeated foes kind of just fall over, and fade away if they're ghosts. I adore the feeling of attacking things in Aria of Sorrow. Strikes are swift and agile, the sounds are harsh and penetrating, enemies and objects disintegrate messily in flames or crumble apart with a clatter when destroyed, and every hit is punctuated by a meaty smack. This is a million miles away from that.
The friendly ghosts you meet seem to work quite similar to the souls from the Sorrow games, as they can add new traversal moves or provide interchangeable special attacks. If they're all unique characters though, I suspect there will be far far less of them. As for the level design, I can say that it's definitely not just paying lip service to the genre, as right from the start it lets you go off and encounter a lot of different dead ends. But a bustling Christmastime London doesn't make a lot of sense as a sidescrolling Metroidvania map, because obstacles should be easily passable by just going around them or taking a different street. People like, live here, y'know? And I have no idea how they're going to handle the verticality. There's a reason the genre overwhelmingly takes place in enclosed spaces, even Ori & the Blind Forest felt pretty weird the way it was laid out with similar outdoor environments "on top of" each other. I'm also a bit iffy on how much effort was put into fitting the genre trappings into the Christmas Carol universe (is that... is that a thing?) in general. I've seen much less serious games than this go to far greater lengths to justify their save systems, so it's kind of jarring when this one actively draws attention to the concept of Save Rooms in-character, but makes absolutely no attempt to justify or contextualize them in-universe when doing so.
Overall it seemed passable I guess, but the thing is, there have got to be so many better indie metroidvanias than this. I think as far as ones I've played the demo for this year, this is better than A Sister's Journey, probably a bit worse than Afterimage, and way behind Gestalt: Steam & Cinder. I had no idea what to make of Teslagrad 2, but I didn't like it.
PixelKnight
Observing the process
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Added the game name to the thread title so people can find it down the line.
fourfourfun
Moblin
I'll wait for the muppets DLC.
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first-person shooter
Apopheniac
Monolith Soft action game truther
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Stilt Village
GBA
Ebenezer Prime
I kept waiting for Ebenezer to break out the ol' cane-bounce.Technically this already happened via DuckTales
I agree with Stilt that the action, the movements and attacks, seems to lack a bit of "oomph".
Luv the premise tho!
launching November 3rd
OP
OP
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still eagerly awaiting what classic novel + game genre releases are coming next.
Of Mice and Men reimagined as a modern day Turn Based Strategy game? Tom Sawyer reimagined as a futuristic First Person Shooter?
Giancarlo
Nintendo connoiseur
will the ghost of the Past, Present and Future been a boss battle?
