Axiom Verge and the Beauty of a Formula
Fun fact, I actually only played Super Metroid for the first time last year. I never owned an SNES and didn’t get around to playing it even in the age of emulators and virtual consoles until just last year. It’s a masterpiece, and I could see exactly how it became such a cornerstone of game design and helped spawn the entire genre of Metroidvanias in the great Indie Game explosion of the ’00s and ’10s. (And I should probably confess, I haven’t played any of the older Castlevania games, so all of this review will be coming from a Metroid-y background)
Axiom Verge is part of that explosion. Released in 2015 on pretty much every platform with indie publishing, Axiom Verge sees you playing as Trace, a nerdy research assistant/postdoc who finds himself in another world after an explosion in a lab. You wander a 2D grid with a giant blaster and find power-ups that increase both your firepower and your mobility, allowing you to progress through an increasingly dangerous world.
But you knew that already. The Metroidvania formula is very well established, to the point where when I say “2D platformer with open exploration” you probably immediately think about ledges slightly too high for you to jump to, and small holes that your standing character can’t fit into, and blocks that require a specific weapon to break. You think of powerups in hidden rooms that increase your health capacity, or your ammo, more important for the challenge that finding them provides than the 5 extra missiles. In some ways this kind of game is “easy” to make, because it’s as simple as finding an interesting art style or a single interesting mechanic to build the rest of these elements around. It’s not, but a game like Shadow Complex or Metroid Fusion can feel exactly like that as you start to play more and more of the genre.
And in a lot of ways, Axiom Verge is exactly like that. There’s a higher jump upgrade, healthpacks, even a mildly interesting “reality distortion” mechanic where you glitch out enemies to make them easier (or sometimes harder) to defeat, or solve some puzzles. But there’s no morph ball. Or rather, there is a morph ball, but it’s actually a tiny remote-controlled drone that can’t use all of your abilities, but does have some of its own. And to deploy it you actually shoot it out of your gun, leading to some neat situations where you jump across a gap you can’t make but fire the drone out just before you fall away to get it to the other side. And eventually you get an upgrade that lets you shoot it even farther. It’s a smart twist on such a well-established mechanic, with rooms that only your drone can access and eventually puzzles that force you to go through a section as a drone and then teleport to the drone to complete the rest of it as Trace.
Axiom Verge is filled with these twists on well established mechanics, and total breaks of convention. There was a point early in the game (see above) where I ran over a powerup in a completely boxed off room: no door, no obvious destroyable blocks, and maybe 5 tiles with impassible scenery blocks on the left, the kind that I’d been trained to see as indestructible and impassible. Up until this point the game had done very little to prove to me that it was more than a run of the mill Metroidvania, so when I saw this room I assumed it just needed this game’s equivalent of the power-bomb to break some hidden blocks and get into it. But there’s a gap in between those left-blocks, and just a little past this area I found an upgrade that allowed me to phase through 1-tile-wide walls. This room is very deliberately designed and placed to make you see it and then immediately break your expectations when you realize it’s actually super simple to get with your new toy. The setup is exactly the same as any Metroidvania:
- See puzzle that is impossible to solve as you are
- Find upgrade nearby
- Immediately trivialize previous puzzle with upgrade
But what made this moment special for me was how Axiom Verge completely blew my expectation of what that upgrade would be out of the water. This room forced me to look at the entire game differently, because now every small gap in the scenery (completely decorative in other games) might just lead to an upgrade, or an entire secret path to explore.
One of the things I enjoy most in media are those little moments where a film or book or whatever manages to surprise you by twisting genre conventions. It feels like an intimate moment between you and the creator, an in-joke that only makes sense because you’ve both seen this trope hundreds of times before in your favorite movies. All of Axiom Verge feels like that.
The power-ups end up being clever and interesting takes on all of these genre conventions. The most traditional methods of movement, the core of any puzzle platformer, are either twisted, like the morphball, or removed entirely as unnecessary, like the double jump. Getting higher in Axiom Verge can involve mixing and chaining all of your various movement abilities, your high jump into your teleport into your grappling hook into another teleport (which just came off cooldown), all to get into position to fire your drone up to a ledge you couldn’t possibly get to otherwise. Movement can sometimes be awkward; each ability has its own separate control scheme and they needed to cram everything onto a controller, resulting in questionable decisions like putting your teleport on a double-tap of the control stick. But the end result is that even simple puzzles feel like they have multiple solutions, and you develop your own style of jumping and weaving abilities throughout the game that I haven’t seen in any other platformer.
I have other thoughts on it, like how the game is perfectly content to let you find your way through it, subtly pushing you towards your goals without putting an annoying marker on your map, but Mark Brown actually has a really good video about that, so check that out if you want to hear more about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZGWHxQ2WcBE There are some points towards the end where you have the whole map available and no clear idea of where to go, where better signposting would absolutely have helped things out, but overall I really like how the game is willing to let you set your own pace and sort of just roll into objectives as you get to them.
All in all, Axiom Verge is a fantastic game that feels like one of your favorite genre directors making a passion project movie, and I’m really happy to see so many loving and interesting new touches even in genres that feel so well-trodden.
