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PaperclipPerfector
4d ago
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I recently finished the game Endacopia, which I have been waiting on for a long time. Trailer here. It's by a single indie developer who goes by the moniker ANDY LAND, and it released recently after over four years of development, accompanied by this bizarre video. It's a point-and-click puzzle adventure game with a style that borrows heavily from the 90s, featuring a charming but surreal and inexplicably ominous vibe from the outset.
It's hard not to get attached to the character you play as, who's a kid called Mellow. He comments on everything he sees in extremely endearing fashion, and you can check on his emotions every now and then to see how he's doing. The world is rendered with the utmost care and sincerity, bright and colourful and animated, filled to the brim with a cornucopia of interactables which provide you flavour text or interesting interactions, ranging from cute little bouncy animations to fully-voiced bangers of songs. It's the complete opposite of a content desert, and rewards exploration heavily with many little pieces of dialogue or events hidden just out of sight of the player. The design of the game is also surprisingly nonlinear, with a variety of main areas (The Office, Misery Town, Timesville) that you can finish in any order and return to at any time. You can spend a bit of your time fucking around in one "world", leave when you're tired of it or when you don't know what to do, and return when you feel like it. Getting stuck is also pretty difficult, thanks to a character built into the very world of the game named Tip whose sole raison-d'etre is to push you in the right direction, but who's so integrated into the game as a deuteragonist that it doesn't feel cheap to ask him for advice.
Each main area has its own unique little gimmick. The Office involves you doing jobs and accumulating cash to buy items that allow you to progress, and in order to make it to the top of the corporate hierarchy you have to do interviews that see you being assigned to different workplaces throughout the course of the level. Misery Town is a carnival-themed level which sees your character playing QTE-based carnival games which you have to complete in order to progress through the world. Timesville is a level set in a sleepy and innocent little town, with the main gimmick of this area based around a day-night cycle that impacts what you can do at any given point by changing which characters are out, what events are happening, which shops and buildings and pathways are open, and so on. Nothing in this game feels overly repetitive or outstays its welcome, and that owes to both the short runtime of the game and these attempts at keeping things fresh. The addition of Punch-Out!!-like combat also adds another dimension to the game, which is used sparingly but impactfully.
This game, of course, is not as innocent as it presents itself as. Vibe-wise the game toes the line between "charming 90s adventure game" and "abstract horror" very well, fusing the two together in a masterful way where they pair naturally and you never really know what the game's going to do next. The game will literally switch from funny little bouncy characters into genuinely disturbing surreal horror and back in the span of five minutes of gameplay and they come off as two different sides of the same offbeat world, no part of it ever feels out of place. You are never fully capable of feeling comfortable in the world of the game; there's always an underlying menace that pervades the atmosphere of the world with serious teeth to it, and at the same time it never leans into the horror aspects for such an extended period of time where it would really compromise the sense of warmth and nostalgia that the game exudes. It's such a distinct atmosphere I don't think I've been able to get from any other game, and it scratches an itch that has just been latent in my brain for a long time. This hole was well and truly made for me.
I seriously have no notes. If any of this sounds good to you, go play it.
EDIT: The music is fucking amazing as well and complements the atmosphere of the game beautifully, here, here, here and here are some examples.
I liked Endacopia but less than I thought I would. Harsh but important criticism: I think it suffers from performative weird (likewise ENA, which Andy alluded he wants to be different from, and mostly is except this aspect):
I believe in two different kinds of weird. "Performative weird" is basically random: doing anything except what's normal and expected. There's no soul or deep meaning behind it, it's just weird to be labeled weird, performative. Then there's "true weird", where the artist genuinely tries to express themselves, not being weird on purpose, but not censoring themselves to conform to norms or expectations. The best art is true weird, I think (because) it's often more normal than society; in the sense that, society has lots of taboos that exist because of peer pressure, but don't fit reality or our internal values/emotions (yes, I'm talking about this site), and true weird lets the audience see through them. Even if I don't hold the same opinions as a true weirdo (which is almost always the case), it still illuminates reality and my values/emotions, by showing me novel ideas, letting me mix and match to form better ideas of those.
...anyways, I did overall like Endacopia, I do think there are parts that are true weird, and maybe I call the other parts performative only because they don't resonate. For example, I think the characters aren't very interesting or endearing (with exceptions, most notably Mellow). But I really liked Andy's signature, the pixelated warm but uncanny classroom aesthetic (for example, the blue room with the red floor and clock).
I also highly recommend its evil twin, Perfect Tides: Station to Station
It's weird you say this because I felt as if the game was exceedingly sincere, and something I specifically liked was that it never really came off as performative (I think this was true for ENA: Dream BBQ, but not for Endacopia). I also don't think it was doing anything particularly unexpected or weird in context, and this is largely because the 90s adventure game genre that Endacopia is trying to emulate is actually just that strange and fever dream-like, for the most part, and features stuff that I would say makes Endacopia look very normal. See The Neverhood as an example of a game from the time period that's just bizarre.
Really, in comparison to many of the exemplars I can point to, Endacopia is a lot more coherent than I expected it to be. It has its fair share of non-sequiturs, but so did many of the type examples of the genre it's trying to emulate, and much of the weird diversions like the random little songs throughout the game just felt like it was meant to be fun, not particularly high-brow or seeking out a specific label.
I do think the selling point of something like Endacopia very much hinges on whether you resonate with the vibe and approach or not, and if it doesn't there's not really an argument one can make to convince one otherwise.
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