A Metroidvania without the vania and heavy on the 90s FPS influences
Exophobia, from Zarc Attack and PM Studios, is the game that’s been at the PM Studios booth at PAXes for, like, forever. I know I sound like I’m being mean to it, but when the review code popped across I thought to myself, “I want to see what this full game is, because I’ve seen the same five-minute chunk over and over and over and over again.” So I thought, okay, I have got to know what this full game is.
And it’s 100% a Metroidvania, but with a 90s id-style FPS tinge.
It’s clearly designed to feel like it’s straight out of that era, almost like a custom wad for DOOM or Wolfenstein 3D, in an empty hallway kind of way. But, I like that gameplay. It feels familiar, and modern versions of Boomer Shooters have done a lot of Quality of Life work to make these kinds of games feel as good as we remember them and actually better.
The added bump here is that it’s a weird Metroid Prime. Everything’s there. We’re going into a little specialty save corridor to save our game. We’re upgrading as we go along. We’re backtracking. We’re getting keys. We’re finding secrets like you would in an old id PC game, too.
But it’s all quick. It’s fast.
And I like that the gameplay is cool. It has a very simple running gun, but we also have a slide move that we can do that lets us like get our eye frame so we can boost underneath obstacles or flames. And we can also use it to de-shield enemies or knock them back for a split second to let us get some shots in.
It’s if you want a Metroid Prime style game, this is a great Metroid Prime style game — if you can get past the aesthetic, like I can. It’s got some cool designs that are really in tune with the 90s era, like monsters and an eyeball that looks like it belongs on top of the Technodrome.
And it has that color palette.
The color palette’s horrendous. But I don’t know. I mean, it’s supposed to be. I don’t know what this color palette is, but it’s crazy. And in motion I kind of dig it even more. It’s so unhinged. It’s like if Olly Moss designed a Metroidvania based on Doom in 1997. The static character designs, how the enemies move, the pixelated textures… everything fits together, whether you like the aesthetic or not. It can be a little overwhelming, but that’s sort of the charm.
It’s nice to see the full product now instead of seeing more levels, because I’m just so used to the weird, tight corridors that the developers kept demoing the game in that to actually go out into some of the bigger, more wider spaces that they have later in the game is refreshing. And the game gets complex. It gets a little rough, the deeper we get, so we have to keep upgrading, we have to find all the paths in order to really get through it. It’s a pretty steady crawl. I never hit a wall where I was thought, “what the fuck, guys?” but I also feel as though the game got a little handholdy at times.
Anyways, it’s a success at what it’s trying to be: a hallucination of a 1994 game that never existed but we keep thinking it did.
Oh, yeah, you can pet the dog, and that’s always a quick way to my heart.
This review is based on a Steam code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. The video first appeared on the July 24th, 2024 edition of The SideQuest.
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