Many reviewers mentioned the sense of isolation in Axiom Verge 2. The enemies are also much more alien: crabs with detachable claws, plants that spit a sticky substance making it impossible to attack, coral that shoot a poisonous dust into the air. Accessed through one of many glitchy portals, the Breach features more organic enemies than the robotic antagonists of the overworld. The 8-bit world of the Breach is much less detailed than the Kengir overworld.
Yet I also encountered Lamassu as one of many blue “terminals” looking something like the Monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey. I eventually encountered a character named the Lamassu, who looks like the Mesopotamian god of lore with a human head, a bull’s body, and wings. Like many metroidvanias, Axiom Verge 2 features sections that are not passable until a particular power-up is acquired. These open up to ancient Sumerian architecture, ruined underwater civilizations, and desert pyramids. The corporate office buildings of the first few minutes of the game quickly change to rolling grasslands populated by murderous robots. Just who exactly is Indra: the human billionaire who died early in the game, the nanite body possessed by Amashilama and who subsequently dies in the middle of the game, or the robotic body that is constantly destroyed and reconstructed every time we change forms? During the end-sequence, Indra reveals that even she isn’t sure who she is anymore.Īs the game progresses, the world around Indra also becomes stranger and stranger. Even though Indra eventually gains the ability to revert to a vaguely-resembling humanoid form by collecting another power-up, this new body is much more robotic than her previous one. Yet soon, her nanite body is also stolen by the antagonist Amashilama, leaving Indra trapped as a drone. She’s given the ability to transfer her consciousness to a small robotic drone while her nanite body slumps over, lifeless. She’s resurrected in a nanite body that has no need to breathe and can explode itself to remove obstacles.Īs the game moves on, Indra’s power-ups make her seem less and less human. Fairly early on in the game, however, Indra drowns. She arrives in a helicopter, searches arctic habitats, and operates computers to find traces of her lost scientist colleagues.
Indra Chaudhari begins the game as a billionaire in a world that looks much like ours. Meanwhile, my own mortality was all too obvious. The Axiom Verge 2 wiki points out that the second game takes place both before and after the events of the first, lending more than a few timey-whimey elements to the game. Ancient alien species battle one another over scales of time that are almost incomprehensible. Everything changes, everything is impermanent and in flux. These improvements are part of the delight Axiom Verge 2 takes in exploration, and the changes that go along with it.
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