Anodyne 2: Return to Dust review - Zelda and Psychonauts combine in a bewitching formal experiment

This is industry history defined not as the heedless march of technological progress, but as the rings of a tree - hardware constraints, design conventions and aesthetics traditions wrapped around one another. Except that's far too static a metaphor: Anodyne 2's achievement lies with how it goes beyond even the brilliance of its generation-switching conceit to embrace a universe of shortform experiments. In the process, it also creates scepticism for the ethic of symmetry and authorial control represented by the Center, as Nova learns to perceive the Dust in a less fearful light. The game's overarching fable is quite straightforward, for all the mildly terrifying theoretical flair and self-reflexivity of its writing. It is a coming-of-age tale, about learning to live with life's ugliness and uncertainty for the sake of life's beauty and surprise.

From these bare beginnings, Anodyne 2 finds its way to some ingenious and startling places. There's a vast spectrum of tones and genre precedents in play: one moment you're roving a vaguely solarpunk apartment complex, fetching commissions for a fashion designer, the next you're adrift on a sugar-pink purgatorial ocean redolent of both Dark Souls 2's Majula and Spirited Away. Some dungeons hinge on a particular puzzle gimmick: a mad science lab, for example, in which another character mirrors your movements in a neighbouring room. Other setups are more grandiose: there's a medieval fantasy kingdom with a delightful faux-Beethoven score (the game's soundtrack in general is sublime), where you'll quest for pieces of magic armour to un-petrify a prince.

Above all, though, there are countless jokes about videogames, including gags about 2D staircase tiles and the convention of darkening the screen during an inner monologue. Many of these send-ups are throwaway, but some of them have a larger purpose. There's an unlock later on, for example, which parodies corporate cults of innovation by subverting the classic mid-campaign gambit of adding collectibles to restore interest in a well-travelled world. The whimsy can be exhausting, but I never found it gratuitous - partly thanks to the sheer imaginativeness and often celebratory quality of the jokes, and partly because there is a poignancy to everything that cuts through Anodyne 2's cynicism.

The value of indie period recreations like Anodyne 2 is partly how they resist the chronology of obsolescence laid down by videogame hardware manufacturers. They might harken back, but they don't do so out of mere nostalgia. They are assertions of the validity of aesthetics and methods of structuring and interacting with a world we have been trained to perceive as outmoded - save, of course, for when we're being asked to pay through the nose for a remaster. Anodyne 2 suggests an artform coming into the fullness of its own expression, free to adopt techniques as needed to say something worth saying, without worrying about whether it looks "new enough" or conforms to genre expectations. It harkens back in order to look forward, sideways and within.
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