In the southwesternmost
corner of the overworld map sits a building that houses a slot machine.
You've seen this sort of mild gambling den in any Zelda game; pull the
lever, match three heart pieces and you win. Here, though, row upon row
of slots are being played, their skeletal victims under permanent house
arrest by the one-armed bandits. The building is, in fact, a bank.
Betting on the slots requires you to purchase shares in various
enterprises, all of which are owned by the bank that is manipulating the
odds; the financial system is a casino and the capitalist always wins.
This isn't your typical Zelda clone.
Lenna's Inception
is a top-down action-adventure that is--ahem--very heavily inspired by
the Legend of Zelda. Mechanically it is extremely similar to Link's
early adventures, but thematically and through a couple of mechanical
surprises it finds its own voice. The result is a playful and inventive
homage to a classic series of games that manages to distinguish itself
from its inspirations.
The setup immediately departs
from Zelda tradition, with schoolteacher Lenna roped into saving the
world after the prophesied hero--and clear Link analogue--succumbs to an
unexpected demise in the tutorial dungeon. Elsewhere, an evil banker
has imprisoned the prince of the land, archangels are signalling the end
times, glitched-out pixels are spreading across the world, and
somewhere a mysterious fridge is on the blink. This is weird Millennial
Zelda, touched by creepypasta yet restrained enough to not go full
internet meme.
My
opening paragraph was a little misleading. In my game the bank was to
be found in the southwest corner, but in your game--or indeed my
subsequent games--it may not be. Lenna's Inception generates its maps
procedurally, shuffling the contents of its world to ensure a new route
through the quest each time you start a new game and to allow players to
share "seeds" of maps they particularly enjoyed. There's a daily
challenge seed, too, further encouraging the sense of a shared
experience.
Experiments with the map generation revealed
that it's not just the overworld being reconfigured. All but one of the
dungeons you enter are unique to your playthrough, from the overall
layout to the design of individual rooms, from the critical-path boss
dungeons to the small secret lairs you might find hidden away behind a
bush or a rock. Further still, the key items you collect along the way
are shuffled to the extent that one playthrough might hand you the bomb
item immediately while the next might make you wait for it until near
the very end.
In itself this doesn't necessarily have
any bearing on the quality of the level design, though in general the
suspicion is always that a compromise must have been made somewhere,
that a procedural level could never be as good as one that was
hand-crafted. The trade-off seems acceptable here: We forgo one
painstakingly intricate design for the prospect of near-endless
hopefully good variations. Certainly the overworld I played through
(seed “ystreath” if you want to try it yourself) felt consistent and
well-designed--no jarring sections that felt obviously untouched by a
human hand. It had a mazelike quality that demanded exploration and was
crammed with teases of just-out-of-reach areas I'd have to note to
return to later and that in any other non-procedural game I'd credit to
smart design.
Dungeon design is mostly solid, with an
emphasis on having the right item to allow you to bypass obstacles and
finding the various coloured keys to open their respective doors. Save
for the final dungeon, they all lack the light puzzle elements you would
find in a typical Zelda dungeon, and are poorer for it. The last
dungeon, however, takes full advantage of the environment-altering
ability of a late-game item to push puzzle design to the fore. Perhaps
not coincidentally, it's the only hand-crafted dungeon in the game.
Where the procedural generation truly detracts is in the little side
dungeons that throw you into a handful of random rooms, lock the doors
until you've killed all the monsters, and then reward you with a health
or weapon upgrade. They're not terrible in isolation, but they are all
essentially the same and wear out their welcome long before you've
acquired all the pick-ups they house.
As you find new
items--such as a spring that enables you to bounce over gaps or a
cigarette lighter that lets you melt ice--you can unlock new regions of
the map or return to previous areas to find secrets in classic Zelda
fashion, a facet of the genre that is as inherently compelling here as
it so often is, even if the execution is slightly off. The random order
in which items are acquired does have a tendency to flatten out the
experience. Some items have multiple uses, lending a degree of
redundancy that diminishes the impact of obtaining a new piece of gear.
Still, it's rewarding to nab a new ability and start mulling over all
the possibilities, the new places you can now explore. It's a high that
never diminishes.
Perhaps as a consequence of the
non-linear item progression, fighting regular enemies doesn't require
you to use items other than your sword. They can be damaged by several
of your items--the lighter sets things on fire and does useful damage
over time while the bow, hammer, axe and bombs can all be effective--but
there isn't a single enemy that, for example, must be staggered with
the hammer before taking damage from your sword. With little variation
it's sufficient to mash the attack button in order to survive any
non-boss encounter.
Bosses themselves are smartly
designed even if they hew closely to the Zelda archetype. The rule of
threes applies here, as each boss requires you to perform the same set
of steps three times in order to beat it. And each one demands the use
of a certain ability you've picked up, though the precise execution
tends to not be telegraphed. Quite a few of the bosses had me puzzling
things out for several attempts before the eureka moment hit and I knew
exactly what I had to do. Fortunately in such instances, death isn't a
hassle and you find yourself respawning in the chamber before the boss
room.
The
procedural aspects of Lenna's Inception lay a solid foundation upon
which to build. On top you'll find a handful of NPC quests to follow,
some of which test your lateral thinking as you chuckle along with the
mischievous sense of humour of the writing. Moments of oddness abound. I
found what the game described as a "urine potion" before cheerfully
informing me that I would have to drink it to discover what effect it
had. My first follower companion was a chicken that would relentlessly
peck enemies to death. My last was a librarian who could hurl books with
pinpoint accuracy. At one point I donned a growth tunic and ran around
as a giant Lenna until she couldn't fit through the door to escape the
dungeon. Surprises like these are scattered throughout the entire game
and are never less than a joy to discover. There's even an option to
play the entire game with either 8-bit or 32-bit graphics.
Lenna's
Inception is a lighthearted Zelda-style adventure fuelled by levity and
a taste for the bizarre. At its heart, though, it's a testament to the
powers of procedural generation. On balance it gains more than it loses,
delivering an endlessly rearrangeable, replayable quest that suffers
only slightly from the lack of a guiding human touch.
