Anodyne - One-Part Charming, One-Part Unnerving Dungeon-Crawler RPG

 Anodyne appealled to me as a pixellated RPG that I paid precisely nothing for.  It was in the "Indie Bundle for Palestinian Aid" that content makers with Itch.io did a few years ago, so I had access to it for years before I touched it.  

The whole game is played in squares.  You can only see as far as the square that you are in, and you can check what rooms you've so far been in by refering to the network of connected squares that comprise your map.  

The game starts off mysteriously, as some kind of monk makes vague references to what you have to do.  This leaves you to figure out what you have to do, exploring every region until all it's secrets have been found. 

The first regions you encounter are really quite lovely.  You get to befriend some cats, you befriend a cool woman on a motorbike, you see the seaside and the woodland and the nearby hills.

After a while, it gets weirder.  We get regions that are imaginary, one that's based on the Shining, one in a circus.  

One region was actually quite frightening.

You come across a black-and-white vignetted region, with a town reminiscent of Earthbound.  Up to this point, I had enjoyed my interactions with various characters in the game, so I was excited to see a place populated by lots of people.  Excitedly, I went up to a person to learn a bit more of Andodyne's disjointed lore.

 

Instead of talking to the person, I ended up stabbing the character, killing them in a single swipe. This was the most overt (as of this point) foray into the horror genre that Anodyne had made.  In some respects, the creepiness continued from here.

Overall, the game treads the line between cozy and unnerving.  It derives most of it's creepiness by being a lot like cozy RPGs, and then subverting this with the interractions it offers.  

The vibes are good, but there's little depth.  From looking at the trailers, Anodyne 2 looks like it builds on this a lot more.

Coziness: 4/10

Overall Rating: 6/10