Teslagrad

I got Teslagrad from the Kickstarter for Girl Genius — Adventures in Castle Heterodyne, together with World to the West, set in the same universe (as Teslagrad, not as the Girl Genius game).

When I finally received the (virtual) package from the campaign, I decided to play these “new” (for me) games in chronological order, starting from Teslagrad, looking forward to the steampunk setting and puzzle platformer gameplay.

The plus

I've spent on the game around 20 hours, across two playthroughs (one by myself, one with the kids) The story is fascinating, and hints to a rich world with a complex history, narrated —the epitome of “show, don't tell”— without a single written word, through in-game theatrical representations, posters and graffitis on walls and trees, and “scroll pills” scattered throughout the game field, the collection of which also influences the ending.

The game is absolutely gorgeous.

(Update: it is indeed possible to replay the game in a sort of “Game Plus” mode, at least after the “perfect” win, with some due changes1, but I still won't be posting screenshots (yet), for reasons I'll discuss elsewhere.)

The environment is depicted through a masterful combination of hand-painted backdrops and multi-layered parallax sporadically augmented by actual three-dimensional perspective for the background. The art, music, and story(telling) are without any doubts some of the strongest selling point for this game.

The minus

What I didn't like about the game is that it was … too much of a platformer, and not enough of a puzzle.

I'm not saying this is a bad thing, the sweet spot for the balance between the two gameplay aspects is a profoundly personal matter of taste. And for me, the mark was missed. This could be a matter of expectations (it's possible that I expected the game to be more puzzle-y), or maybe I'm just too old to get sufficiently invested into refining my precise timing skills to be able to pass through a maze of electrified fences fast enough to catch the infamous “Protective Father“ scroll (#30), or even just to beat bosses for whose defeat relies on a perversion of the Rule of Threes that sounds more like “Do the same thing three times” than “Do three different things” —without getting bored.

So yes, I cheated. I did try several times to catch Scroll #30 and even to beat the final boss, but in the end I just looked for non-official ways to achieve the same result, discovering the beneficial effects of the Extended Blink Hitbox exploit used by speedrunners.

I don't particularly care about speedrunning, but avoiding frustration allows me to better enjoy the game. And yes, there's a greater satisfaction in actually overcoming the challenges set forth by the developers, but unless you're playing Bennett Foddy's masterpieces intentionally designed for frustration, having an “out” that allows you to meet the developers in the middle is good —even if it's not an officially endorsed aspect of the original game design.

I know I'm not alone in this. The Teslagrad General Discussion Forum on Steam has multiple comments to a similar effect (an example), and while I can't seem to find the link now, I'm pretty sure one of the developers made a comment implying that they would have liked to add more puzzle-y elements to the boss fights, but it was too late in the game development.

Overall

Telsagrad threads a fine line between game genres, and it's likely to disappoint anyone coming to it with the wrong expectations. It's more linear than your typical Metroidvania, although it has some backtracking elements (especially to achieve the “perfect” ending only available if all scrolls have been collected), and the puzzle elements may be too much for those expecting a classic platformer, but may not be enough of a challenge for those that have played games like The Swapper, to which Teslagrad is sometimes compared to.

(By the way, I haven't written a review for The Swapper yet, but that game managed to be frustrating at the puzzle level —I had to drop it at some point because it wasn't playable without a proper mouse & keyboard setup, which I don't normally have as I play on my laptop. But that's a story for another time.)

My overall opinion of the game is distinctly positive —as much as it counts for someone who “cheated” his way to the perfect ending. If anything, the fact that I could do that helped (as unintentionally as it might have been) to strike a better balance between challenge and enjoyment that I would have had otherwise.

TL;DR, possible scoring on your typical star systems:

• 3/5
• 5/7
• 7/10