It's easy to think of how some of your favorite video game
genres might fit together. In the space of just pure imagination, it’s
possible to completely deconstruct familiar tropes and wildly throw them
against a wall to see what sticks, challenging established norms
without consequence. It’s this sort of unhinged creativity that makes Supermash
initially hard to ignore. By making it easy to choose two genres and
mash them together with randomly determined results, Supermash seems to
promise a near endless supply of retro concoctions. But instead of
delicately blended results, the games that Supermash does spit out lack
any identity, while feeling too similar to one another when they do work
and downright frustrating when borderline broken.
The
core conceit of Supermash is the ability to create new games from
templates of genres. The genres on offer are varied, ranging from a
classic NES action adventure in the vein of The Legend of Zelda to the
sneaky steps of a Metal Gear-inspired stealth game. Each genre template
plucks a core idea from its inspirations and uses that as the core
mechanic for your eventual combinations. For example, a JRPG will lend
turn-based combat to any game it’s matched with, while a shoot-'em-up
will introduce vertically scrolling terrains to whatever other genre you
choose to pair with it.
Supermash
is incredibly easy to get going--pick two genres, decide on a desired
game length and difficulty, and use mostly single-use collectible cards
to make small cosmetic and gameplay changes to the initial result. The
rest is handled by Supermash’s procedural generation, which doesn’t
always do the best job of masking the limited templates it's clearly
working with. Within an hour, I was recognizing the same layouts in both
stealth and action adventure mashes, and even routinely seeing the same
visual palates used to dress them up in. Seeing the strings behind the
puppetry would’ve been disappointing but forgivable, though, if the
games themselves were any fun to play.
Most of the
creations lack any substantial differences between them. Whether you’re
playing a shrunken-down Zelda-like dungeon or jumping through a
Mario-inspired platformer, you’re generally doing one of three things:
finding a specific character, retrieving a specific item, or killing a
certain number of a specific enemy, all within a short timeframe. These
don’t change with the genres you’re putting together, which often makes
genres meant to be less linear pointless. Genres like JRPGs or
metroidvanias are much more than just their styles of combat or
collectible upgrades, but Supermash never gives you levels or goals that
reflect this. And even when the objectives do coalesce with the main
genre influence, they’re just unsatisfying to play. Platforming feels
floaty and imprecise, dungeon crawling becomes nothing more than a
repetitive checklist, and shoot-'em-ups never capture the exhilaration
of their inspirations.
Randomly assigned modifiers
called "glitches" can somewhat differentiate one mash from the next, but
more often than not, they result in more game-breaking issues. A glitch
can, for example, spawn a new enemy every time you attack, or
conversely heal you every time you take damage. These serve to either
eliminate any challenge or increase it to frustrating levels, regardless
of the difficulty setting you assign prior to making the game. Others
are more frustrating, though. I had a glitch that moved me in a random
direction for a few seconds after each attack, which made simple
movement a chore. It forced me to just forgo combat entirely while
navigating a dungeon, further restricting the already limited actions I
had. There’s no way to turn these randomly assigned glitches off either,
so when you’re dealt a bad hand, you just have to restart and hope for a
better result next time.
That isn’t to say there aren’t
some combinations that aren’t at least amusing. Playing a 2D stealth
game with the turn-based combat of classic Final Fantasy games doesn’t
work mechanically (having to go into an action menu to perform a stealth
kill is ridiculous), but it does remind you of how good each of the
individual parts are in other games. But Supermash’s multitude of little
games never come close to reaching the entertaining heights of the
genres they attempt to recreate, which makes it difficult to want to
test the abilities of its random generation further after your initial
attempts.
Encompassing all of this experimentation is a
thin story about three friends trying to keep their video game retail
store open, with the crew hoping to package and sell some of these new
creations to spark some interest. Story objectives set some parameters
for your next mashup, indicating what genres and modifiers to use,
without really steering you towards any great outcomes. There’s an
additional journal to work through with objectives tied to each genre
you have at your disposal, each connecting small but throwaway stories
within them.
Progressing
this journal is incredibly frustrating, though, since the items
required for completion are populated into your generated levels at
random. You’re forced to repeatedly mash together the same genres in the
hopes of finally getting one that has what you need, which only serves
to expose the repetitive nature of them even faster. Each chapter
culminates with a boss fight specific to the genre you’re completing,
and despite being some of the only handcrafted bits of retro action in
Supermash, they fail to be any more exciting than the random
contraptions you put together. Most are one-note and devoid of
challenge, only requiring repetitive attacks and simple movements to
overcome. They’re not worth the time you need to invest to unlock them.
It’ll
be rare for you to want to save any of the creations Supermash lets you
construct, which is indicative of how shallow and unsatisfying they all
are at their core. In a bid to try and do so many things right,
Supermash forgets the fundamentals of all the genres it tries to
encompass, while also overreaching by trying to make them all work in
some way together. None of Supermash’s creations feel close to
replicating the joy of their inspirations, and instead serve as
reminders that there are far more focused and polished attempts at each
individual one that will reward your time better. There’s no doubting
the imaginative idea at Supermash’s core, but it ends up choking on its
ambition.
