Halfway Through 2021, Sill No Other Game Than Ikenfell I’d Rather Be Recommending

On some level, it was probably overdetermined that I would like Ikenfell. The basic pitch, a turn-based RPG about students at a magic university solving mysteries, is extremely my jam. I dug the art style and snippets of music I got from trailers. And there were some good indications that I would vibe with the approach, seeing as the game’s creator, Chevy Ray Johnston, is close friends and ex-roommates with Greg Lobanov and Maddie Thorson, both of whom made games that I loved and already wrote about (specifically, Wandersong and Celeste).*

*In fact, I think that one of them mentioning Ikenfell somewhere might have been where I first heard about it, while researching things for one of those earlier articles? Either way, Wandersong includes small cameos of characters from both of the other games as well, and Johnston recently announced they were working with Extremely OK Games on the team’s next game, the recently-announced Earthblade (source).

But I didn’t just like it, it more than surpassed my high expectations. Happy Ray Games’ Ikenfell is probably my favorite game of the year, at the halfway point.*

*Yes, it technically came out at the end of last year, but time is fake and I can’t always play things right away.

So let’s go back and take it from the top. Ikenfell begins with a girl named Maritte, who’s lost in the woods as she searches for the titular magic school. Her older sister, Safina, is a star pupil of the institution who has totally vanished off the face of the earth while doing off-semester research there, and Maritte is determined to figure out what’s going on. Unfortunately, Maritte is not magical, and clashes with the school’s various magical defenses to keep out Ordinaries… until she suddenly shoots a fireball, ancient magic that none of the school’s guardians even recognize. With this, she is allowed to pass with the warning that something major is afoot, and Maritte is certain that her sister’s disappearance is connected.

 

Monster Sanctuary Review: Mazes and Monsters and Min-Maxing, Oh My...

A little while ago, I began breaking down some of the video games from my 2020 Wrap-Up, offering a fuller appraisal of Phoenotopia: Awakening. Today, we’re hitting a second game from that year-end review, as I go more in depth on Moi Rai Games’ Monster Sanctuary.

For those who didn’t read the blurb for it in the Wrap-Up, the basic pitch for Monster Sanctuary is that it combines two fairly distinct game genres, something that I’ve written about here a few times. In this case, the two genres are Metroidvanias (another thing I’ve covered a lot) and Monster Taming* games (something that I haven’t covered, but which is exactly what it sounds like: think things like Pokémon, that involve collecting and/or training monsters).

*I’ve usually heard this term used, but it’s probably also worth noting that Steam uses the tag “Creature Collector” for this genre. I’m sure there are multiple other terms that people use as well, but these are the main ones that I’ll be sticking with.

This is a really novel combination, from what I can tell, which is actually kind of weird. Those two elements have always seemed like natural matches, in my mind. Growing up playing the 2D Pokémon games, they struck me in a lot of ways like the 2D Zelda games, just with HMs like Cut and Surf replacing Link’s equipment. And those 2D Zelda games and their genre-mates, at their best, seemed a lot like Metroidvanias that you controlled on a different axis. Think about it; they’d plop you down in an overworld with arbitrary obstacles, which you could overcome as you explored and found new gear and found secret branches to new areas… Pokémon quit never went that far, using its obstacles as plain roadblocks along a linear path. But they could have, if they wanted to, as could any aspiring game developer.