Zeph Reviews: Astalon - Tears of the Earth
Introduction
Astalon: Tears of the Earth is a Metroidvania roguelite where three heroes are exploring a tower full of enemies, including fierce bosses known as Gorgons, in an attempt to remove poisons from their water source and save their village. However, one of the heroes seems to have an ulterior motive, and, unbeknownst to his companions, he's made a deal with the devil to see it through.
Story
The story in Astalon is... kind of underwhelming, to be honest. The premise, as noted above, is really cool! There are multiple questions that come of it - is the poisoning of the town's water supply deliberate, or a side effect of something else? Are the Gorgons truly evil, or is their existence just causing unforeseen problems? What did someone do to one of the playable characters that inspired him to trade away his soul? We get an answer to exactly ONE of those questions throughout the game, and it's not the one that you'd likely want.
Much of the additional story details are skippable/missable - they happen when you choose to rest at one of the safe points throughout the tower. The problem is that, outside of dying and respawning, or breaking one of a finite number of health restoration candles, resting is the only way you have to replenish health for much of the game, and it's limited how often you can do it. I rarely rested unless I felt I needed the healing, and so I'm sure I missed out on conversations that the characters had that may have added a bit more to the plot. But even without those additional conversations... a lot of things either go unanswered, or are answered in the more bare-bones way possible. It's also a bit weird that this is technically "Episode 2" of Astalon, when an Episode 1 just... doesn't exist.
What's here, story-wise, isn't bad, but it could have a been a lot more. Score: 2 out of 5
Graphics/Art Style
Astalon is a throwback to 8-bit classics, but the graphics are far more detailed than systems back then could ever have been. The tower is separated into different sections, and each section has its own ambiance and feel. The backgrounds of the different environments aren't something you'll pay too much attention to, but they do a good job of making the tower feel alive and menacing. Character and enemy sprites aren't incredibly detailed, but it's easy to see at a glance which enemies are visible in a room when you enter it. Some enemy sprites definitely make you go "whoa" the first time you see them, but the majority of them are kind of basic-looking. Sadly, your character sprites don't change throughout the game - items you pick up aren't really reflected in your appearance (outside of one special item you get, and modifications to characters' attacks). Boss design is... decent. Nothing amazing, nothing really bad. Everything's pretty clear and it's fairly easy to keep track of what's going on.
Solid graphics, but nothing that will blow your mind. Score: 3 out of 5
Sound/Music
Each environment of the castle has its own music track, and they do a good job of adding to the ambiance of the game. The music gets progressively more sinister as you venture further into the tower, and it does a lot to add to the growing tension of nearing your goal. Sadly... that's almost all I can say about the music - strangely enough, almost none of the tracks of the game really stood out to me as memorable. Even now, the only music I can call to mind is the music that plays upon your death, when you're choosing upgrades. That's not a great thing. Game music needs to be unobtrusive, but also catchy. Astalon's music is only half of that for me.
The sound effects in the game are... fine. Again, nothing stands out in my mind, but attacks have the appropriate sound and weight to them for the most part. Nothing wrong with it - but nothing exceptional.
I guess the best way I can describe the music and sound effects is like this: They're good and you'll enjoy them, but you likely won't love them. Score: 2 out of 5
Gameplay
Astalon is built around your party of three characters, and each of them has a unique ability that you'll need to use to traverse the tower. This effectively forces you to constantly switch between the characters that you're using to bypass obstacles, which can rarely be annoying, but is mainly offset by the intelligently placed safe zones which allow you to switch your active character. Additionally, partway through the game, you obtain an item that makes switching characters far faster and easier, which truly opens up the tower.
The heart of any good roguelite is upgrading your character to make subsequent runs easier, and this is where Astalon has both a hit and some misses. Every enemy you kill throughout the game drops orbs, the game's currency that you trade to your soulsworn demon friend to enhance your power. There are a large number of upgrades available, and most of them are immediately beneficial - for example, one of the earliest (and cheapest) upgrades you can get automatically attracts orbs to you, saving you a LOT of time from having to gather them individually. Also nice? Upgrading the health of one character upgrades the health of ALL your characters. On a related note, there are several special enemies hidden away within the tower. Killing them requires you to sacrifice some of your health, but doing so give you a stacking multipler to the orbs you receive from enemies. This can help you stockpile orbs quite quickly.
Unfortunately, that same upgrade system has what is, in my opinion, a serious flaw. Remember how I mentioned that upgrading your health upgrades it for all of the characters? That's because they share an HP pool. You can't restore health by switching characters. This wouldn't be too much of an issue except that the upgrade system forces you to upgrade the stats of your characters (besides health, obviously) individually. Getting hit a lot? Better raise your defense to absorb some of that damage! Oh, but now you're at a point where you're forced to use a different character to proceed, and if you haven't raised their stats enough, then you'll find yourself dying quickly and forced to grind out more money to raise their stats... and so on. It really feels like a mechanic being used to artificially pad the playtime of the game. There's really no reason why individual characters should have their own attack/defense/attack speed values, especially given that health ISN'T individual. I suppose you could look at it in the sense that your characters' lives are linked together... but it's far more frustrating than inspired.
What happened to me is apparently a common thing with this game - I quickly identified which of the three characters I liked playing as the most and dumped all of my upgrades into them. The other characters got scraps, and I just used my "main" character as much as I possibly could. This worked well for me to bypass a lot of frustrating grinding - however, it also made the game a bit more boring than I feel it could have been. Add into that a number of upgrades that simply don't tell you what they are until you buy them (a pet peeve of mine), and... yeah, I feel like the upgrade system in general could have used a lot more work.
The gameplay itself is fun! There are a lot of puzzles throughout the tower, most of them simple in nature, but requiring you to use different abilities. There are, however, a LOT of places where you can see something but don't have the tools to reach it - trying to keep track of those on the limited in-game map is impossible, particularly because you don't get one of the related upgrades until rather late in the game. One design choice that I don't love is that the spiked floors in this game are very unforgiving, especially when falling into a screen. Several sections have retractable spikes on a timer - however, when you enter a screen, they are up by default and stay that way for a couple seconds. This means if you fall onto them, you're taking a (relatively large) hit, and there isn't much you can do to avoid it other than memorize where the spikes are and be careful not to fall there.
All in all, the gameplay is very enjoyable, but I have to dock it for the upgrade system being so flawed. Score: 4 out of 5
Replayability
How much replayability this game offers will depend largely on how much you enjoy it. I 100%-ed the game on my first playthrough, which took me roughly 12 hours. There are three extra modes you can play - New Game+, which lets you start over, keeping your upgrade stats, but not the special relics found in the tower. The layout of the tower is shuffled, though individual rooms remain the same, and enemies hit harder and take more damage, making this more of a "hard mode" than anything. Then there are two other modes where you play as a couple enemies and ascend the tower in its vanilla layout - these enemy characters have some unique mechanics and can't buy upgrades, but otherwise the game plays out exactly the same as the original, save for some cutscenes.
The extra modes are fun, but it wasn't enough to keep me entertained after I finished the game. Score: 2 out of 5
Zeph's Verdict
I'd wanted to play Astalon for years, and I was really happy to finally do so! It was a fun 12 hours and I really enjoyed it. I'm not likely to go back to it very much, but that's okay - not every game has to have an eternal place in my lineup. Sometimes it's best just to experience games for what they are and then continue on. If you can get this for $10 or less, I highly recommend it!
Final Score: 13/25 - Recommended when it's on sale
YouTube playlist of my playthrough coming soon!