Well, this was a pleasant surprise.

I like watching speedruns, but I generally have little interest in learning any of their “tech.” It’s been almost 30 years since I first played Super Mario 64, and I still have trouble consistently pulling off its wall jumps, so I’ve always assumed my reflexes just wouldn’t be up to snuff.

So when I first started playing Pseudoregalia, it felt a little intimidating! You start out with so few moves, and you realize quickly that it isn’t going to hold your hand or present you with a happy path. I genuinely considered quitting after my first play session.

But then something funny happened: I got better.

This cycle repeated throughout my playthrough: I’d unlock a new ability. I’d struggle to use that new ability to its fullest. I’d take a break. I’d return and find myself traversing whole new sections in whole new ways. By the time I found the last major collectible to access the final boss, I was performing all sorts of wild acrobatics with ease.

I still have some complaints:

• I appreciate the map (apparently this was added in an update), but I wish it indicated which direction your character faced.
• A lot of areas look and feel a bit too similar, making navigation a challenge.
• I like that the game isn’t combat-heavy, but the combat itself doesn’t feel nearly as good as the platforming.
• I didn’t really like the soundtrack. I ended up turning the music down in the settings.
• I was almost scared off by the game’s key art, where the player character is far more voluptuous than any in-game model. It’s a fine drawing, but it gave me the impression that this could be one of those very fan-servicey sorts of Steam games (which it isn’t at all).

Overall, a very fun retro platforming playground to explore.

Steam Curator

Don’t let the goofy name and deviant-key-art fool you… Pseudoregalia is a game that sings when you touch the controller. It’s of retro style no doubt, it will proudly tell you that it’s based on the N64 and PS1 generation of gaming…an inspiration seen plainly in its art style, low-resolution textures, and wide polygonal rooms.

But unlike many other yesteryear throwbacks, it’s not a particular game it’s seeking to emulate but instead a design ethos. You may see Mario 64’s DNA in its platforming but that’s probably owed to shared inspiration: that old Miyamoto quote about how they designed Mario’s movement for months in a barren room to ensure it was fun in a vacuum comes to mind.

Because before it’s anything else, Pseudoregalia is smooth and ultra-technical platforming. It’s a speedrunners paradise, where mastery over the specifics of its movement system affords both speed and sequence breaks.

And the beauty of that focus is how it pulls you in even if speedrunning isn’t your thing: because my usual reluctance to engage with speedrunner tech and non-intended-super-precise wall jumps is the fact that I’m usually focused on the game running parallel to those techniques.

But when those techniques ARE the game, that dynamic changes…and the result is a title whose platforming skills are a powerful and fun toolbox regardless of whether or not you care what an “Any% run” is.

Oh, it’s also a Metroidvania. You wouldn’t suspect it from its art style but it’s only a minute into gameplay before you get your first complete cycle of “huh, wonder how I get past that?” to “oh, that’s how I get past that.”

The genre's usual bent towards action-platforming is reversed into platforming-action. There’s like two dedicated combat sequences bookending the entire game, every opponent in between can be glided past if you know what you’re doing…and I’m convinced that the only reason the “attack” button is here is to give you something to press while you’re running and some sexy key poses to look at.

It’s in a Metroidvanias’ decision-making when pathing where Psuedoregalia thrives: because even after beating the game I have no idea what the critical path was, or even if there was one. It kind of begs the question of if you really can “sequence break” in a game with such a nebulous relationship to ‘sequence’ in the first place.

I thought I cheesed my way into getting the wall run far earlier than I was supposed to, only to watch some other folks’ playthroughs to find myself almost comically late in acquiring it.

It’s funny: in a genre that worships double jumping, Pseudoregalia simultaneously doesn’t have one but also has like half a dozen.

With combat at the periphery, almost all of the power-ups you collect on your adventure are some marginal increase to your platforming ability. Any single power is less impressive than your usual ‘double jump’ but together they coalesce into something greater.

Your wall jump is a precision-demanding forward kick that bounces you at an angle off of a wall, but that kick can also be used as a slight range extender to any of your horizontal leaps. Your high jump starts as a downward pogo-smash that you can parley into a backward flip when you’re at its apex. And my favorite, no doubt evidenced by all my footage, is a high-speed slide that not only lets you skirt under small gaps but also cancel into long jumps with no cooldown.

The flexibility within that listed moveset (among others) are doing the lion's share of the work in pseudo regalia, and help distract from the fact that there’s little else to it.

The nagging downside isn’t the lack of a map but the lack of identifiable landmarks that ditching a map would normally call for. The majority of the game takes place indoors, and that can occasionally make it hard to establish a frame of reference for where everything is— distinct named districts of the castle have their own look, feel, and sounds…but where they exist in relation to each other was a demanding mental challenge on a first playthrough.

But it’s hard to complain when navigating it is this enjoyable.

Psuedoregalia may not be anything more than a slick set of movement tools and a simple world to apply them in, but its narrow focus has ensured those tools are as fun as they are flexible. Every challenge in the game is a negotiation between your skills, your characters skills, and gaps between simple geometry…that’s as pure a throwback as I can imagine.

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.

Pseudoregalia is a delicious vertical slice of something with great potential. Combining a sandbox of platforming challenges with an intentionally vague sense of exploration results in some of the most satisfying emergent gameplay and sequence breaks I've seen in this genre.

Trapped in a dream realm, a goat-like creature named Sybil must jump, flip and whack enemies with a strange weapon in order to find her way out. To dig too deep into the sparse story would spoil it, but it's window dressing for a gorgeously detailed and forlorn realm with plenty of secrets and very high walls.

The movement for Sybil starts off fairly simple - jump, backflip, with some advanced tech if the player jumps just right out of that flip. Adding slides, air kicks, slide jumps, wall clings, and other such abilities throughout the game results in a truly unique arsenal that, while not totally user-friendly has a wide room for experimentation. Need to flip in the air to brake your slide rush? Need to wall cling repeatedly to climb a tall area? Slide backflip jumping to get some BIG air? This can also result in a very non-linear exploration of the game fairly quickly, which can be very difficult at times but very rewarding to "go your own way" instead of follow an intended path. Combat is fairly simple with hits, charge attacks, and some projectiles connected to puzzles but with a handy heal ability the player is rarely screwed over by a nasty combat segment and has plenty of room to focus on the tricky movement that this game demands for its secrets.

The visuals will immediately remind someone of a Super Mario 64-style game, with low-poly graphics, a similar looking cage box texture, and a sleepy, almost King's Field-esque emptiness. This is somewhat at odds with the "sexy anime goat" main character but Sybil is animated quite well, whether she's balanced on the top of a pole or deftly flipping in the air. The music is a bit of a hodgepodge between melancholy and lo-fi with some tracks that break that mix into something more jazzy (theater, anyone?) or even something with the chaotic feel of a Pathologic game (Underbelly).

Pseudoregalia is a very short game, but one that begs to be savored. With a world that can be explored many different ways and a rich dream atmosphere to take in, it's a gold standard for Metroidvania gameplay and emergent design.