VALFARIS - The Mixtape Game

His birthplace overrun with monsters, mutations, and mutiny, galactic barbarian Therion crashes his ship into the space fortress Valfaris and gets ready to Conan his way across a hateful but vividly colorful landscape. However, for every thing that feels great about this game there's something which seems under considered and vague. Valfaris is a frantic and exciting action game with the inevitable meandering that nostalgia-burdened indie titles seem inescapable. At the risk of presenting an insincere incredulity: I am bemused and willing to look inward for the answer. Am I missing something here or am I just clueless?

Valfaris makes me feel like I don't know what I'm doing. There’s a tight and mandatory learning experience for every boss (you know, like a video game). The best kind of Valfaris boss is an evolutionary experience. You enter the boss chamber and almost instantly die, then you learn to move about a little bit to survive, then you start seeing the boss’s health meter is at about half when you die and eventually you hit one precious lucky run and make it through. This cycle remains consistent to almost every challenge in Valfaris. However, it’s the moments when I feel like I’ve discovered my own way to conquer anything that feel underpinned by the random behavior of enemies and the scatter of projectiles. As often as I feel my skill with the game has improved I feel like I just got lucky. Did I just beat this boss, or did I hit a good run of R.N.G.? This feeling makes the overall experience feel a little bit like work, the way pulling on a slot machine lever feels like work.

Yet, it’s easy to stick with it. Valfaris is loyal to its own music, for better or worse. There’s this up tempo energy to killing weaker enemies where you use your minor sidearm ( which has infinite ammo) your shield to block (which has a limited supply of power) your heavy weapon that draws from the same pool as your shield, and your melee attack which refills the shield pool. It’s great, actually. Unfortunately, that same dance that makes the bulk of play and travel so snappy is constantly jangling against prescribed and choreographed enemies. These precision enemies are usually of the Wait To Act variety, which is to say I must stay still until an opening appears and hit what feels like a frame perfect moment in order to deal any damage. Then it’s back to the spin and boogie of attacking the corridors with their corridor baddies. Despite these syncopations, it’s genuinely fun to slide through the levels and read the intentionality and architecture of the space, all profoundly leaden with aesthetic, mechanical, and textual allusion.

Here’s a short list of games I thought about while playing Valfaris: Metroid Fusion, Doom (2016), not Dark Souls, Super Castlevania IV, Shovelknight, Another World, not Dark Souls, Celeste, Splatterhouse, and definitely not Dark Souls.



This is exactly what makes the Bigtime Meta Conversation that is the indie game scene so valuable to some and so tedious to others. I don’t blame anyone who looks at what's on the market and sees nothing but games which seem to only echo and iterate on themselves and the games the developers loved in their youth. Consider: a game as a playlist. Hits from the 80s, 90s and now. It doesn’t feel like it’s going to lead me anywhere, because it’s not an album. With Valfaris in particular I could go through trying to pinpoint each allusion or reference and have a decent little list to show you at the end. What makes this game work is not the metal aesthetic, the myriad elements iterated on from other titles, or the flashy gore. Rather, it’s the spaces where it does feel like it’s doing its own thing. It’s in the way most of the plot is expressed through dialog between Therion and his AI companion, who play off each other with some fair comedic competence. It’s also in the blast of bright powerful colors that fill every world of the game, every pixel of this game feels placed with precision and the delicate touch of the finest stage dresser. It’s these things that are truly what invite us into the world of Valfaris. The bizarre machines and rituals which combine necromancy and chunky metallic space tech. Every square inch of this world expresses the curse of Valfaris.



But even this pristine expression of place slowly loses my attention as I fumble with the overabundance of weapons, the absolute indulgent pander of imagined 80s metal (Therion actually head bangs and plays air guitar whenever you get a new weapon), and the galling difficulty. I came to this planet for revenge, but after being here for so long, I wonder if it’s worth maybe just moving on.