Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
Price: +- $4.99 USD (at the time of writing)
Blurb: “Explore the depths below a remote mountain town in this procedurally-generated Adventure Platformer. Taking inspiration from hack 'n slash dungeon crawlers and Metroidvania-style platformers, Chasm will immerse you in a fantasy world full of exciting treasure, deadly enemies, and abundant secrets.“
Chasm has an “intro” song titled “The adventure begins”, that starts off like some grand epic. When I hear it, I have Hobbit thoughts, and I want to go to Hoggsback. A song or two later, we have “Road to Karthas” and I’m having “The good, the bad and the ugly” vibes. Then a couple of tracks later again, we have “Wheel of fate”, which has that carnival sound, but it ends quickly, unlike the wheel of time, which goes on and on and on. The soundtrack is an absolute roller-coaster ride. Naturally, I had to check the game out. For those of you wondering, you can listen to it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TigjBcqiuI
That said, you have the option to switch the music from “original” to chiptunes in the settings. This made me happy – though it has to be said, it is more of a Pokey-type sound than a SID chip sound.
To be honest, from the description and the intro graphics, I was expecting Spelunky. When you start a game, you have a seed number, meaning the world is procedurally generated. Before I lay into the game, know that this is a console game and when I say that, I mean Sega Genisis or Super NES console (thankfully, without the Engrish). It is not heavy on resources at all. My laptop temperature went up by 1 degree whilst playing the game.
The story is nothing to write home about and leans heavily into old console game tropes. (The game lets you enter a name, and then you start with “Wake up <name>” ala Zelda. You are a knight in training, sent on your first mission – to clear a nearby mine of monsters. So you head off to this one horse town (no really!!) to do your duty.
The town has a blacksmith, lodgings, and a site office with a horse on one end and a deflated hot-air balloon on the other. The game looks gorgeous, there was a lot of effort put in, working within the 8-bit low-res constraints. That said, pixel art needn’t be 16×16 or 32×32 (just sayin’). I will add a picture or the horse, but notice the backdrop.
The game actually starts in the dungeon, erm, sorrry, the mine. You explore the mine in search of treasure, no wait, you are searching for townsfolk – that you happen to steal all the treasure is a side effect :) You will first encounter grey goblins (apparently they are Trolls, but I will call them Goblins as they are nowhere near as scary as Trolls), that are easily dispatched with one swing. Then you loot their corpses for gold! Erm, no, you are a knight-in-training, so you liberate the stolen gold… Yes, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. There are poison gas pits, and exploding worms on a string. In the beginning, the damage is light, and you can recover by eating fruit the goblins drop. I dunno man, if a Goblin’s dirty paws have been all over the fruit, I’d want to wash it first…
The game also has a levelling mechanic, you level you, but it is automatic and I honestly did not notice a difference. Between level one and two, the Goblins still went down with one hit, things that were out of reach jumping, are still out of reach jumping, and walking in the green mist still did three points of damage, so I digress.
What I did like is that game objects were intractable. You can jump up and smack a lantern and it will break, spilling a bit of oil and flame. Not nearly as much flame as slicing and dicing Goblins.
The game is played with a controller, or the arrow keys and z,x,c,v. Z is jump, X and C are attacks from your left and right hands respectively, and V is dodge backwards. The game has MP (magic points) too, so you should be able to cast spells further down the line. You have inventory slots, meaning there is armour and items to be had. You also go around vandalising books, ripping out pages and adding them to your journal for some flavour text. I don’t know about you, but I intensely dislike people who rip pages out of books – it is right up there with idiots who throw trash out of the car window.
The map is simple, but serviceable, lacking things like being able to mark chests that you cannot reach, or blocked tunnels and the like, on the map. You have a simple “set marker” and “remove marker” only.
I have yet to find a secret; it has been half an hour and I am only 30 rooms in. I have been slicing walls, and trying to jump to places, and slicing the air, looking. I mean the game bills itself as taking inspiration from Metroid-vanias’s.
The game is fun and there are definitely worse ways to spend a fiver. The things I did not like were as follows: • killing an enemy, and walking or jumping out of a screen and falling back; the enemy will be back there waiting for you. • The animations felt a bit stiff, like an 8-bit console – I mean, we are in 2023, the “at rest/idle” animations could have more than two frames. • Idle characters look like they are pushing a putty. Prince of Persia created a storm 20 years ago because it broke the stiff animation mold. • On the chiptune side, it would have been nice to have more tunes; it feels like the same four tunes play over and over. • It would have been nice to control your levelling, say putting my skill points into constitution and getting more health.
If some mindless hack ‘n slash mixed with nostalgia is what you are looking for, you have come to the right place. You can turn off and play without having to think about much. The game runs like a dream on Linux. I actually doubt it touched my dedicated Nvidia card as that shows it is running at minimal everything.