https://noahsbarks.com/reviews/pseudoregalia/
I recommend reading this review at my site, linked above, for proper formatting and images.
I recently finished this game for the first time, so here are my thoughts. For the uninitiated, Pseudoregalia is an independently developed 3D explorative platformer. Players are tasked to find multiple keys hidden throughout the game’s areas, which are all linked together in one open world. The game is almost entirely non-linear, and progression will depend largely on what movement upgrades a player finds and in what order, as well as their own ingenuity in applying them. There are thus multiple “routes” through the game, though all end with the same final act.
Pseudoreglia appears largely inspired by and in deference to the high skill ceilings of other 3D platformers such as Super Mario 64 (SM64) and its successors. Many 3D Mario receive timeless dedication from players thanks to their fluid controls, intuitive physics, and precise skill expression. Mario games don’t often require the full depth of these mechanics to be beaten, hence their broad appeal, but speedrunning competitors have no choice but to push the game’s systems to their limits to cut corners and clear missions as fast as possible.
As Super Mario 64 in particular became further entrenched in hardcore gaming circles over the decades, it’s only natural that members of that audience would grow up to become video game developers themselves and apply what they found valuable about those experiences to their own games. Pseudoregalia then distinguishes itself as a game made for that highly-skilled audience, a heavy contrast to Super Mario 64‘s core experience being created for a wider audience of varying familiarity with platformers.
The first praise I’d like to give Pseudoregalia is that it acknowledges that high level of skill without strictly requiring it. Many games aimed at hardcore gaming audiences such as the speedrunning community have a high skill floor that demands players be familiar with brutal difficulty and potentially grinding out hours of attempts at even the smallest of challenges. It’s fine for those games to exist, of course, but I believe it took a certain level of intelligence and awareness from developer rittzier to realize Pseudoregalia‘s audience would take the game’s difficulty into their own hands, if needed.
After all, Super Mario 64 needed no intrinsic motivations to have a wide audience create one of the most interpersonally competitive environments in gaming. When movement mechanics are so advanced that they can allow for extrinsic motivation in gameplay, players will supersede the game’s original difficulty by attempting to save as much time as possible. Even if you’re not a speedrunner, you don’t want to waste your time. If you can get something done faster and you have the skill to potentially not sacrifice quality of execution, why not? We only have so much time on this godforsaken planet.
All this is to say that you don’t need to be an expert to complete Pseudoregalia. If you’ve ever used long jumps or wall kicks to circumvent intended paths in a Mario game, you’re likely ready for Pseudoregalia. The game’s difficulty might be seen as a sort of elevated tutorial or class on how to best apply similar basic mechanics. In SM64, you could often utilize Mario’s moves well simply by remembering they exist in scenarios where they’re not strictly relevant. You can eventually memorize how much vertical and horizontal movement you can gain from these actions and know when they’ll allow you to bound around obstacles or challenges entirely. That level of familiarity with your movement kit is still essential to Pseudoregalia, but you’re quickly encouraged to think of how your moves can chain together as well. This throws many more variables into any equation you need to solve to progress through each room’s unique layout and obstacles.
The open world concept feeds into this perfectly. With so much freedom, one could potentially get so overwhelmed by the number of approaches to a problem that they blank out and become frustrated by their lack of progress. In Pseudoregalia, you always have multiple challenges available to you at once. If a path forward isn’t intuitive, you only have to look at different rooms until you find one that is. As you narrow down the rooms you have to complete, you’ll come across more movement techniques and the potential for any one of them to be the obvious solution to a previous room that puzzled you. This is a game with countless “eureka” moments, and it’s an excellent complement to the otherwise strong emphasis on your motor skills governing your reaction time and precision with the analog stick and buttons.
Let’s talk about aesthetics for a bit. If Pseudoregalia‘s influences weren’t obvious enough already, it also engages with the low-poly trend seen in many indie games. Basically, the idea is to recreate the visuals and overall vibe of an early 3D game, such as those of the Nintendo 64 and original PlayStation. I love the visuals of many of those games, so I support this approach that recognizes their merits. The level of dedication and/or success at this recreations varies just as much, if not moreso, than the accuracy of pixel-based games to genuine 8 and 16-bit consoles.
Fortunately, I would say Pseudoregalia is one of the better attempts I’ve seen at the style. One of the easiest ways developers can slip up with regards to authenticity is resolution. 3D models are relatively simple. You can often be good just by constructing them out of angular shapes as opposed to curved ones and applying solid color textures. What’s less intuitive are environmental textures, as these tend to be more complicated and as a result scale more poorly at higher resolutions. You can see this for yourself by playing any Nintendo 64 game on a monitor with a resolution higher than the console’s native resolution. Things that need to load quickly and have their own behaviors, such as character and enemy models, tend to have relatively basic textures which can often be one solid color. When those textures are blown up to higher resolutions they can appear perfectly pristine because the higher number of pixels being displayed are simply taking the same color as the rest of the texture. There’s no room for misinterpretation, in a sense. But look at a texture with multiple colors, especially those that can change subtly from pixel to pixel, and they can appear as a smeared, muddy mess because the original texture doesn’t have the pixels necessary to properly depict a color changing shade across a texture.
Many people find that loss of image clarity to be a repulsive element of early 3D graphics. Perhaps that’s why it’s often forgone in homages, or maybe it’s difficult to draw textures when considering the final product is intended to look different from what you see as you’re drawing it. I’m sure it varies depending on the developer. In any case, Pseudoregalia‘s textures look authentically low-resolution without compromising too much in the way of fidelity. I don’t recall ever being confused as to what I was looking at in the context of the environment, and each “world” felt aesthetically consistent yet distinct from each other.
That sensation is particularly important, as atmosphere is one of Pseudoregalia‘s strongest points. One might not expect it given the pressure high-intensity platforming can provide, but Pseudoregalia‘s environments pervade with an enchanting, ethereal mist that evokes equal parts mystery and reverence. These are environments that were lived-in, had a history, were once great. This is complemented by the game’s excellent music, constantly alternating between beautiful, somber melodies and frenetic beats that remain true to the sense of action in the gameplay. True to form, Pseudoregalia even sounds appropriate to the era it is recreating, with electronic dance music genres such as drum-and-bass being a frequent presence.
The art direction also deserves credit for melding what appears to be several disparate influences. Your main character Sybil is an anthropomorphized goat-like creature, which brings to mind the many mascot platformers of old. Yet her design is more humanoid than the typical Tex Avery fare, preventing it from undercutting the game’s tone. The dreamlike, fantastical areas and creatures you encounter bring to mind the Klonoa series’ more melancholy moments, but the more self-serious and foreboding veneers of the game’s narrative and implied background lore feel reminiscent of the Dark Souls franchise. It’s all rather enrapturing and mystical, and it provides breadth to the times when you need patience while attempting a difficult platforming challenge.
Halting the compliments for a while, I would like to criticize the game’s writing. I’m no stranger to minimalist, vague, or even abstract narratives — in fact, I often prefer them. But I found too much of Pseudoregalia‘s implied story to be too inscrutable to become invested in. I played through the game alongside a friend who had beaten it before, and we were both uncertain of our character’s motivations and the meaning of what little text exists in the story. It’s frustrating because I can’t help but feel I was being led to believe certain moments had narrative significance, but I never felt the weight of them because I could never empathize with any element. It was all too loosely defined. Too little information to fill in the blanks, and not enough detail to be motivated to do it in the first place.
It’s fortunate that the visuals and audio are so excellent at depicting compelling emotional landscapes in lieu of the text, as it’s still enough to inspire curiosity in seeing the adventure reach its conclusion. In that sense, Pseudoregalia may not reach its full potential, but it’s not necessarily worse off for simply trying. I can’t say the same, however, for some other elements. The game’s flavor text provided by the occasional NPC or examined object often dips into humor, and it can be anything from trite fourth-wall breaking to simple unexpected eccentricity. What it never is, however, is funny.
Going for humor contradicts the general gravitas most of the game carries and is ill-advised to begin with, but failing to do it successfully reeks of diffidence in the game’s own world and demotivates any belief that unpacking its story is worthwhile. I have no idea what motivated the decision to inject humor into a game where the player is rarely put into a mood where they’d be susceptible to laughter. Did the writer actually find these stale jokes funny? Did they think tonal consistency was of that little consequence? Then why are the visuals and soundtrack so dedicated to it? It’s difficult to otherwise get the impression that the narrative was something the developer didn’t care about, so why was the opportunity missed to instead have all this text provide further background on the world and characters — something it so desperately needed? If I had to make any guess, the writer might have overestimated how much the player would be able to read into their own head as to the story’s intentions, and that lack of consideration for the player’s perspective is what prevented the reflection needed to realize humor wouldn’t go over well.
Now that I’m on the warpath, I may as well tackle my biggest problem with the game: the map. Apparently, the map was a post-launch inclusion. It stands to reason that many players would take umbrage with no map in a game featuring heavy exploration. I respect the developer for addressing player feedback and adding a map. I don’t respect any effort beyond that. In no uncertain terms, Pseudoregalia‘s map is of the quality I would expect from someone who has never coded a map for a video game before. It might be the worst I’ve ever seen. Well, Mega Man ZX‘s was pretty fucking bad…
The bright side of a map is that the functionality of one is so simple that it’s hard to make it completely useless, and Pseudoregalia‘s certainly isn’t. But it’s horribly inconvenient in a manner that it’s easy to go the wrong direction while following it, which is kind of the opposite thing a map is supposed to do. We’re spoiled by electronic maps, sure, but that also suggests just how basic of a request this is. Pseudoregalia‘s map is completely static and independent of your position or perspective, and its almost incapable of even displaying your own position, instead opting to highlight the entire room you’re in. Because Pseudoregalia‘s rooms are often quite large, you’re expected to always remember which entrance of a room you’re coming from and rotate the map in your mind to match the geometry of what’s on screen. This is easy to slip up when the map lacks any details, and you have only general size and the shape of a room’s sides to differentiate them.
Matters of convenience aside, the damn thing often doesn’t even work properly. Text meant to tell the player when a room connects to another area or “world” is frequently cut off and partially illegible. For me, one of these world names never changed from being displayed as “???”, which is supposed to be replaced with the area’s actual name upon entering it. Other than that, I sometimes had the map highlight rooms as me being in them when I wasn’t. In a game structure where you often have to return to previous areas to progress with newly obtained powers, not being able to mark what rooms those even were is pretty frustrating. See a little switch you can’t reach in one of the game’s rooms? You better remember that, and good luck doing so when many rooms lack distinguishing landmarks due being constructed of similar geometrical assets. Simply getting around the world is no small feat, even, as you naturally have to repeat some difficult platforming sections in the process of checking dead ends.
Ah, well. It’s nothing game-ruining. Overall, if you’ve ever enjoyed long jumping over a huge chasm or wall kicking to an area you weren’t “supposed” to go to in a 3D platformer, Pseudoregalia is worth your time. It’s a rather modest experience that I imagine would take most players 6-8 hours to reach the end, and for those looking for replay value there’s plenty of variety due to the game’s non-linearity. Greater levels of challenge create themselves as discussed earlier, but there also exist time trial courses that reward you with various cosmetics. While Pseudoregalia lacked a little heft somewhere to become a favorite of mine, I’m very interested in seeing where developer rittzler goes next.
And yes, I noticed Sybil has a huge ass.
