Will I be able to swing as far in combat with my tiny, feeble arms? I guess I’ll find out. Can I run as fast as the big boys? My individual footfalls appear to have significant repercussions to my movement, as I discover when I snag an upturned cart with my ankle and fold over myself like a broken Slinky. I have chosen an avatar who is a short-arse like myself, but, as I stagger upright, it occurs to me that this is possibly a non-trivial nerf in a physics simulation - just as it is in real life (excepting the field of plane travel, in which I and my burrow-dwelling kind remain distinctly advantaged). My unnamed character awakes facedown in a grim stone room, lit only by a single burning torch which lies feet from her body. What I’ve experienced feels like the bare bones, but even so, Exanima has got its hooks in me, its austere setting and formidable fighting system creating scenes of farce and fear in equal measure. Character progression is still a feature in development, along with dialogue. There is a story here, seeded in the environment, but few more elaborate interactions with the world than permitted by the capricious combat system.
I should probably spend more time there my woeful attempts at the main game haven’t seen me get much further than the selection of gloomy corridors in which my character awakes. There’s already a separate arena mode, too, in which players can hone their half-cut combat skills. There are currently three large levels to explore, according to the dev, which will eventually serve as an introduction to another much larger, more open area, as yet unreleased, containing the majority of the game’s content. (That’s figurative cock-waving, by the way, not physics-enabled - though given that the character creator is unabashed about the existence of female nipples, maybe we can hope to see windmilling in a later patch.)Īnyway, given that the game is so uncompromising, I confess that I’ve barely made a dent in it. This, combined with the fact that there is no save system whatsoever, makes for a tough game, something for which the devs are unapologetic and which has encouraged a good deal of cock-waving among early adopting Steam reviewers. In articulating this cumbersome form you feel like a puppeteer rather than a protagonist, and there are kinks and contradictions to the control scheme which can easily and abruptly end your life without much feeling of culpability in that failure. This said, it isn’t always a good a match for the player’s intent, no more than Gang Beasts’ physics-modelled brawls between jelly-baby-men is an exact martial art. I like the exact match between the observable impact of a blow and the damage that it does, and I love the circumspection that the sluggish control brings. At least, it’s about these things inasmuch as these things are even possible while piloting someone with a near-lethal blood-alcohol level.ĭon’t misunderstand - I like the combat a lot.
Every collision has a physical effect, as subtle or extreme as the speed with which it occurs, and so combat is about caution and timing, dodging incoming swings and finding the time to wind up, directing your weapon in a sweep to connect with your opponent’s most vital areas with the most momentum possible. It’s true for several reasons, but the most obvious is its fully physics-modelled combat which renders close quarters engagements as tense, tactical affairs conducted between two or more appallingly drunk people. This week he wobbles and flails in the low-fantasy RPG Exanima, a smaller standalone “prelude” to the Kickstarted open world game Sui Generis.Įxanima isn’t like other RPGs, the Steam store page tells you with some insistence. Each week Marsh Davies lurches drunkenly through the dank cloisters of Early Access and brings back any stories he can find and/or spasms like a misfiring physics object caught in a doorway.
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