PSYCRON

I occasionally hear the word “iterative” when people describe Metroidvania games, usually in expressing that a game is too much like other Metroidvanias to provide the novel experience they are looking for. Most of the time I find little value in that accusation, because iteration is exactly how we refine or adjust ideas into something fresh, or just fresh enough that it satisfies a craving along with providing a new adventure. In Psycron’s case though, I sympathize with this type of criticism, because my experience with other Metroidvania games left me feeling slightly empty by the end of it. Part of the problem is that it pays obvious homage to Metroid Fusion, but lacks any of the backstory Fusion had with the set pieces that Psycron copies. This is entirely a narrative issue though, so if you’re one of those players who is entirely focused on the gameplay, then as a Mini-Metroidvania you may get a lot out of Pyscron. I have criticisms about the gameplay too, but by the end of the playthrough Psycron is a decently strong Metroid-like game.

Trying not to talk too much about how the narrative could help Psycron with most of its issues, maybe my biggest criticism of Psycron’s gameplay is with its progression design. Like a Metroidvania should, Psycron tempts you with a lot of dead ends that you can’t access until you get new powers. The problem with the level design is that it does very little to guide you to which pathways actually lead to progress. This means that the first area – where a good hook is the most necessary – was the time I felt the most lost. For a game that took me around 2 hours in total to complete, it feels a little off that it took me 15 minutes to find the first meaningful power-up. Compounding the issue, there are a lot of instances where an ability gate is telegraphed, but when you backtrack to check out what goodies you can find, you will only find another ability gate behind it. Or, sometimes you’ll find a dead end, or a dead end equivalent with a meaningless pallet change for your protagonist. Pointless or aesthetic collectables are a matter of taste of course, but when you’ve face-checked a few dead-ends already looking for where you need to go next, only finding a costume starts to feel a bit more like grandma gifted you some socks wrapped up in a PlayStation 5 box.

Having a lot of dead-ends with ability gates in them is a problem that resolves itself over time though, and Pscyron’s second half feels a lot stronger with the more abilities you get. It helps that the abilities themselves are a lot of fun, even if most of them are things we’ve already seen before. There is a slight twist on how familiar powers control which helps a lot. For instance, the double jump is a jetpack which you can get additional fuel for, making it a triple jump and a quadruple jump as you find more packs. The twist I like the most is with Psycron’s speed-boost analog. Instead of having to run down the hallway for an undisclosed amount of time that you sort of just have to get used to, your protagonist instead makes a short leap in the direction you’ll be running. If you have enough space to stick the landing then you’ll be running at full speed in that instance. If there’s not enough space you’ll just fail to start running – it makes Super Metroid’s most technical ability a lot more accessible, even though there’s no shinesparking to take advantage of in Psycron.

The progression design isn’t all bad either. The game is divided into four areas and each one is mostly self-contained. This thankfully prevents you from feeling like you have to go back to the main hub and check everything, because in most cases you just can’t. It also doesn’t take that long to check everything, since the game world is small. I guess what I’m saying is that if you happen to pick this game up and are feeling a little bored during the first two areas, just stick it out for a little while longer, it gets better.

What doesn’t get better though are the bosses, unfortunately. It’s like an inverse curve where the exploration is at its worst at the beginning and gets better by the end, and the first boss is the best boss, with the final boss being more of a pain than a fun challenge. I don’t think that this inverse curve is the fault of the power-ups, but more that the bosses started to focus more on thematic imposition rather than relying on solid game mechanics to convey a sense of dread. Or in other words, in the attempt to make bosses seem more dangerous, they’re given more HP and the fights are dragged out perhaps longer than they should have been for how interesting their patterns actually are. I’m basically talking only about the final boss in this criticism, because really there are only four or five bosses in the entire game, and the most memorable ones are the first and last. That first boss really is good though, and shows that the developer has some good talent when it comes to making bosses in this format. A little more focus on precise positioning and allowing the bosses to be intimidating based off of that could have gone a long way with the later encounters. I try not to make comparisons in my reviews, but Psycron is very reminiscent of Environmental Station Alpha, and taking some cues from ESA’s boss design might be helpful if a future project is going to be something similar.

The most memorable thing in Psycron is with that shadowy version of the protagonist that you may have seen in the game’s trailer, and that’s where my gut starts to cringe just a bit. The reason the dark mirror protagonist works in other games that have them is because there’s usually some kind of thematic baggage or history backing up what makes them terrifying. Psycron has very little history to work with at all – gameplay or otherwise. There is a cutscene at the beginning where a crew of four nearly identical looking spacemen crash into the Ceremos space station, but we’re not even given information for why the crew was in the vicinity of the station in the first place. There’s a suggestion that the dark spaceman is an infected member of your crew, but why isn’t our protagonist infected by that same parasite? Without a stronger narrative foundation, the horror elements of Psycron feel more like they’re just copying inspirations without any understanding of what made the inspirations great in the first place.

In general the narrative is pretty weak. At the beginning of the game the crew acts a bit bumbling, as if Psycron was going to be some kind of tongue-in-cheek comedy, and then the game just kind of shuts down for those first 15 minutes with no narrative plugs at all. Part of what made bumping into dead ends so tedious is that I had no idea why I was doing anything. There’s no stolen metroid or mysterious lord of the castle given to me to find, and when the main plot is finally revealed, its for a monster that’s killing literally faceless characters I know nothing about. There’s even a point where the game feels like it’s mocking me for even wanting more from the narrative, as there’s an achievement called “Environmental Storytelling” in a location where a bare minimum effort was taken. The irony here is that with a good narrative focus, all of the issues I had with the progression design or even the final boss could have been overlooked, because the designs could have been in service of the story. Imagine if during the 15 minutes of wandering at the beginning of the game you felt like something was chasing you the entire time – suddenly Psycron becomes a survival horror game, and that could have been great. Just changing the opening cutscene to be more relevant to what you might find on the station is all that might have been needed to accomplish this. Of course a bit of clever sound design and caking on more atmospheric elements wouldn’t hurt either.

It’s hard for me to say how much of my reaction to Psycron is because of the biases I bring into it from having played so many other Metroidvania games. A less jaded soul might be gripped by the mystery Psycron presents by itself. Trying to be as objective as possible about it, I think the gap between “Good” and “Great” for Psycron is actually smaller than my emotional reaction to it might make it seem. There’s some good boss design to be had, and the exploration really does feel pretty strong once you get enough of those critical power-ups. The first 15 minutes are pretty weak, but it does get better. It’s a fairly short game, so you should really consider it to be a “Mini-Metroidvania”, and honestly the price point reflects that offering fairly well. As Mini-Metroidvania games go it’s a fine way to spend an evening.