Having beaten the game, I'm ready to give Angeline Era a Strong Recommend, but at the same time I'm still left feeling confused about a lot of aspects about it. Some of my confusion is likely intentional (the game's story leaves a lot up to the player's interpretation of events, and many characters seem to be lying a ton of the time), but some I'm more unsure of. If you liked the Anodyne games, you will almost definitely like AE too. If you've never played any of Analgesic's games and are unsure of this one's price tag, I would recommend trying the Anodyne series (or at least Anodyne 2) first.

First off, I'll get into some of the unqualified pros:

-General vibes, soundtrack specifically: Analgesic Production's games feel like poems to me. Even when it may be a bit unclear exactly what's going on, they experiment with game design, aesthetics, and music to create vibes I find unique and I will always appreciate them for that. All of that is in play in Angeline Era, and I would particularly note the soundtrack as a standout. The game is set in a strange version of our "real" world that's been heavily touched by mysterious otherworldly forces, and the music in particular just nails that atmosphere. At times the story goes to surprisingly dark places and the music excellently steers the tone when needed.

-overworld exploration: the mechanic of searching overworld squares for new locations feels great. Combine that with the scale mechanics (the overworld around a location will further develop after you acquire that area's scale item) and you get an extremely satisfying world map.

-boss fights: the game's boss fights are great and show off its combat perfectly. There are a lot of bosses and most that I can recall are well-designed both aesthetically and mechanically.


Now for some nitpicks:

-money/artifacts/food... basically the item system in general: I unfortunately did not feel super engaged by the food or artifact systems. Food is used to give temporary health boosts within a zone; you will discover many types of food throughout the game, and while they are given a lot of "flavor" text (pun intended), ultimately they all simply give varying amounts of HP. I wish the food had more special combat buffs to give different foods unique impact. as it stands, I found the food useful but was never particularly excited to find food as a reward. Similarly, the artifacts were useful but mostly I did not find myself thrilled by their effects. With these item types being the primary use of money in the game, after a few hours I basically stopped having a reason to spend money. This then made exploring locations feel a bit frustrating when I realized I was mostly going to find items that I did not feel were going to significantly change my game experience.

-some particulars of bump combat: overall the combat works well to me, but in some areas (particularly ones with tons of enemies) it can feel unfun to navigate the way damage works. Generally you just bump into enemies to slash them, but many enemies have either shielded parts of their bodies or are invulnerable during specific attacks. When too many enemies are on screen, the simple visuals of the game started to feel genuinely limiting. I'm sure god gamers can master every enemy type, but I just felt annoyed by enemy spam when it felt too easy to get bounced around by enemy attacks while trying to parse their animations in a mass of low poly blobs. I was playing on Hard Mode for almost the entire game, and the difficulty of rooms with enemy spam just feels lightyears away from any of the bosses. There's also an artifact that lets you heal by taking damage for a short time (after paying a slight upfront health cost), and this led to a lot of particular frustration. During the activation period it was often extremely unclear why I was unable to keep healing from certain sources. Invulnerability after taking damage felt inconsistent, and it seems like this artifact was kind of hobbled in order to stop it from completely breaking the game's difficulty.


And now the stuff I'm more unsure about:

I found myself surprised by having reached the ending of the game and am still unsure how much I've missed. I'm ok with stories lacking closure; my confusion here is more on the mechanical side than a criticism of the overall story. I think my main issue here is that, aside from areas telling you when you've collected their main scale (with at least one zone I recall having a secret second scale), there's very little indication of when you've missed anything meaningful in a particular location or a larger overworld zone.

Whereas many games will have signposts in some form constantly hinting players towards some next development, Angeline Era tends towards adding flavor. After the very introductory areas, NPCs are almost never there to help you, instead simply setting the tone of the area and giving you some more sense of what fae and angels are really like.

None of this is inherently bad, but I wish there was a bit more hinting in the post-game. I have no idea how much more there is to explore, and I'm probably going to check some guides soon to see what I missed. Until this point I've very much enjoyed it being the kind of game where I discover everything on my own, so I feel a bit surprised how lost I am now.


In conclusion, Game Good

In a package like this you'd normally expect a ton of chaff to sort through... but it's shocking just how many of the games in UFO 50 are surprisingly well-designed and way more interesting than they needed to be.

So far this is easily my GOTY; to be fair I didn't even know it was being developed, so seeing what had been released felt like Christmas to me.

There are many things I like about the game, but when the last message you get from the devs is essentially a big "screw you," it's hard not to have a bitter taste. So I'm gonna focus on that part:

The One Life difficulty in this game is poorly designed to a ridiculous extent, just because of one new mechanic: Wisps. When playing on One Life mode, if you die, your save file remains, allowing you to immediately start over from the beginning, still on One Life mode. If you do restart this way (rather than deleting your save file), you'll find a "wisp" at the last place you died; touching it will grant a bunch of ability points.

Now, the first problem: picking up these wisps causes Ori to stop and do a pick-up animation. Considering that these wisps will be hanging out IN PLACES YOU DIED, that frequently means that if you accidentally pick them up, you'll end up getting hit in the face by a laser or something stupid because you were forced to stop at an obviously dangerous spot.

The second, even stupider problem: apparently, beating this game on One Life mode will only grant the Unhinged achievement if you beat it on a file that has never had a wisp; i.e., you never died and restarted on the same save file. There's no good reason for this; you still have to have played through the entire game on One Life, gaining only the benefit of some extra ability points from your wisp.

It's likely that this is an unintended result, but it's been known for years and the devs have apparently made no response nor fix (and an easy fix it should be).

This combination of stupid design and lack of response to a simple yet seriously fun-ruining bug gives the impression that the devs included One Life mode as a complete afterthought and did not care at all about the experience of the players attempting it. It comes off as disrespectful to the very players who are actually delving the deepest into the full experience of the game. No matter what else the devs accomplished with Ori, I can't recommend a game that disrespects the player in that way.