It’s all the fault of High Strangeness, you know. All those Kickstarted games draining your wallet and nibbling at your nostalgia. Back when Kickstarter was a little known website, this was the first video game put up on the now wildly popular crowdfunding platform, and the only thing it’s not done to type is release the game in two halves and blame you, the funders, for funding too much.
Instead, it seems to have garnered all its attention via its novel hook; HIgh Strangeness is a 12bit game. I’ll give you a second to work that out -- it lies between the 8bit and 16bit scope. It does this by taking the two eras and then sandwiching them together. Floppy-haired, badanada-adorned protagonist, Boyd, quickly gains access to a strange crystal skull that allows him to morph between worlds, each decked out in the trappings of each respective bit range. In the better defined 16bit world he has access to a combo attack and can dash short distances, feeling a lot like action RPGs of that era such as Beyond Oasis/Story of Thor. The 8bit version shares more in common with early Zelda or Ys, with basic 4-directional movement locked in and only being able to offer very basic attack patterns.
Essentially, High Strangeness has been built twice in completely different retro cloaks then sent out into the world to coexist together. No matter where you are or what you’re doing in one world, switching to the other will transport you to one that’s nearly identical. Nearly, because a lot of the game’s best puzzles come from having to switch eras to take advantage of the slight differences between the two. Paths through pits of jutting spikes might be clearer in one setting than it is in another, or platform placement might alter just enough to allow you to traverse further. Combat changes dramatically, too. It might feel like the 16bit’s access to combos and a higher tempo might be the best option to wage war in, but the 8bit enemies have to swallow the same debuffs as you, losing movement and gaining less fleshed-out attack options.
Both types of combat work off a stamina bar which probably doesn’t work as well as it could have. A few swings of your main weapon (a flashlight -- I don’t care; I still won’t believe it was a good stand-alone weapon to have in Doom 3) leaves you exhausted and unable to attack any further until it refills. This leads to oft-comical moments where you’re left hammering the attack button to no effect while cloaked phantoms eat away at your health, or you're forced to hide away in to corner in the hopes nothing notices you while it refills. The stamina bar also regulates your use of special attacks, such as flinging CDs at targets to stun them, or dropping fireworks that act as bombs and cause explosion damage to anything that wanders near them. Defeated enemies drop crystal eyes that can either refill lost chunks of health or stamina, but can also be used at temples to buy various upgrades such as studier clothes or hardier attacks or stamina boosts and, oh god, buy the stamina boost.
Credit: Barnyard Intelligence Games/Crystal Labs/Midnight CityEven with all the standing around waiting to catch your breath from all the aggressive flashlight prodding, it would be fair to say that HIgh Strangeness is a short game that you could probably see off in a decent afternoon session. As it’s two games stitched together, it’s hard to feel too let down by this, but, on the other hand, it doesn't help the game’s pacing especially when it advances a tale so haphazardly handled. While the plot is kept purposefully vague and odd in the first half of the game, dealing with dual worlds, invaders from another dimension and really smug cats, plot progression is routinely dropped on you lap by the way of long scripts of scrolling text. By the time conclusion comes along, all the twists are shot out rapid fire and, in the forced brevity of their uncovering, lose all meaning and just blur together as reasons to cave in skulls with a flashlight.
HIgh Strangeness does find most of its redemption in the cleverness of some puzzles that require different layers of lateral thinking the further you progress. Though these bite-sized levels will start blurring together as you pick up pace, they each task you with finding new ways to make use of new tools you acquire. To start with, when you only have your inexhaustible stack of CDs, you might need to find ways to ricochet your near-obsolete media around obstacles and onto switches, while later tools, like the ability to summon temporary blocks of light or to control a fleeting ghost, all need to become a part of your reasoning. The puzzles are never hard enough to cause rage-quiting but still maintain enough challenge to feel rewarding. It’s a good, if rarely realised, balance.
Credit: Barnyard Intelligence Games/Crystal Labs/Midnight CityThe shortness of the title also works well in ensuring HIgh Strangeness never wears out its welcome, and its core mechanic of switching between beloved eras of video gaming works so well I’m left surprised it’s not been used before. It’s a good balm for nostalgia, letting us enjoy a lot of things we remember fondly while, at the same time, banishing all that endless grind we like to pretend didn’t exist. If you remember those days fondly, or if you’re curious as to why the older generation keep harping on about it like it was the Mecca of game design, put an afternoon aside and lob CDs at cloaked ghosts for a spell. There’s worse ways to spend a day.
