Every now and then we publish a round-up of game or demo recommendations, and all you regular readers dutifully fill the comments with recommendations of your own. FOOLS. Our round-ups are, of course, a devious trap for your curiosity and connoisseurship, designed to save us the labour of discovering good games for ourselves. You know in Batman Forever when Jim Carrey uses Riddler TV to steal everybody’s IQs? Well picture me doing that, except that I am not wearing tight green pyjamas (unless you want to picture me that way – no offence taken) and I am actually filling my skull with everything you ever knew about, in Moadra’s case, manky Super Metroid clones.
Batman Forever is the wrong analogy for this news piece. Let’s get back on track. I learned about Moadra from a comment by Galactic Man on our latest Steam Fest demo round-up, Developed by Gloomsoft, it casts you as a dinkier species of Predator, scouring inky catacombs of corpseflesh for a missing alien princess.
That’s the plan, anyway, until you find the princess and she rips your gun-arm off. Fortunately, a fugitive boffin soon hooks you up with a new arm comprised of evolving primordial muck. Thanks to this timely injection of locally grown biomatter, you gain access to an upgrades tree with unlockable appendages such as Morrigan-style vampire wings. Then you set off afresh to find that pesky princess and, I imagine, rip her arms off. I think Moadra has the right attitude toward monarchy so far.
The Steam demo plays a lot like the more recent iterations of Metroid, with a fast, nimble protagonist who can crawl into chutes (no Samusball functionality, alas) and charge up projectiles that bounce from certain surfaces. The backdrop is straight out of Scorn, however. Everything looks like the inside of a sickly lung. Such technology as may be found is busted and unclean.
A smaller point of differentiation: you shoot doors to open them, as in Metroid, but in Moadra – oh, I’m just picking up on the fact that “Moadra” sounds like “Metroid” through the Predator’s voicebox! – you shoot them to activate short-ranged teleporters that flense you apart and put you back together in the next room. To ask the age-old question regarding teleporters, am I dying every time I use one, with my atoms and memories then forming a brand new being?
Honestly, if that’s the worst thing that happens in Moadra I’ll be thankful. There’s a bossfight that basically traps you inside a cybernetic stomach with a brace of turrets and the head of a bellowing rat ogre. There’s also some scanner functionality care of a flying drone pal that naturally harkens forward to Metroid’s first 3D incarnation, Metroid Prime. Perhaps a cloaking device as well, Gloomsoft?
Will Moadra stand apart from Metroid in hindsight or will it prove to be just the same old metroidvania fittings coated in squirming filth, like a Samus figurine retrieved from the toilet? I’m not sure, but I look forward to finding out. There’s no release date yet. Thanks again, Galactic Man.