Iconoclasts

Iconoclasts. This one is a metroidvania and a good one, not perfect but good. I liked the main character, the side characters, the world, the music, the gameplay. I liked nearly everything about this game. Few bosses made me slightly mad. I would prefer this game to have more features that I love about metroidvanias such as drop items from the enemies, the bestiary but whatever.

The plot. So we play a young girl named Robin. She’s a mechanic/engineer in a world ruled by religious cult of Mother, Him and Starworm. They call themselves “The One Concern”. They love to forbid everything to the regular folks. Every job must be approved by them especially jobs involving machinery and ivory oil. The ivory oil is like our world’s oil and this world nearly out of it. Our girl Robin of course does the illegal engineering. Her brother Elro, a blessed Chemist, doesn’t approve of this since their father and mother got the penance not too long ago. The punishment for heresy is whirling spinner that will destroy your house and your entire family. Well it isn’t punishment exactly it’s penance meaning that peasants willingly sit in their house and wait to be killed. 

So we doing our illegal side hustle and we get busted by the special agents of The One Concern. And because we are not a submissive sheep we fight back. That’s how our live went to shitter. We get caught and tossed into a slammer. There we meet a pirate girl Mina. Combining our powers be break out and escape the prison. We get separated for a while. And while we roam the desert in search of Mina we find a tall pale person. We then attacked by a weird robot, but we manage to destroy it. So pale white haired man invites us into his camp. He thought that we are a blessed mechanic (one that have approve of The Mother). Turns out pale dude is some very high ranking Concern dude and he lead us into the hornet nest. But as he sees that Robin is a wanted criminal he helps us escape and escapes himself too.

We finally find Mina and she invites us into her home which is a big underwater colony. Mina is a pirate and pirates do not like The One Concern. We talk with local pirates, they seem like a chill bunch and they just want to be left alone in peace. We also learn about “the seeds” from Mina, I don’t remember for sure their purpose apart from killing transcended agents. Yeah… we find that out fighting one of the special agents when The One Concern attacks the pirate’s colony. The death of a special agent looks very grotesque. Since the special agents get their blood replaced by ivory oil they bleed white goo instead of regular red blood. The ivory oil makes human very durable and gives them strong regenerative powers along with other special powers and extended life span. Right, when we fought agent White of Concern, Mina shoved some of her seeds into agent’s wounds. That action made the agent explode and sprout a grotesque white tree from his body. Why Mina decided to shove seeds into the wound? Because that’s how she used to break Concern’s special doors since most of things on this planet works on ivory energy. So shoving a seed into such device would either break the device or it would sprout a tree.

Right, after we fought off the Concern we found out that Sambo, she’s Mina sister or something, got kidnaped. One of the pirates saw her being taken into the Shocked Woods, that’s where one of the Concern’s towers is. So we moved out to save her. And I think Elro tagged along on the way. But once again we got caught and tossed into a prison cell. In that tower The One Concern indoctrinates the young ones into their religion. Robin finds a way out and busts Mina and Elro out. Then we got to the top of the tower where we found Sambo. She was interrogated by Agent Black. She a former Agent White partner and she saw us turning him into a white goo tree. Agent Black was very angry, in fact she’s been angry for 187 years. All because the transcendence got botched and she got a killing migraine as a side effect. Can you even imagine having a constant migraine for nearly 200 years? One evening feels like forever torture, I’m surprised she kept her sanity intact. We manage to bust Sambo out but Elro decided to play a hero and confronted agent Black. She… she trashed him like a plush toy and she ripped his arm off. We didn’t save Elro so he got imprisoned and now we once again must follow The One Concern.                                                                               

Our way was through a snowy mountain which is sacred place for the One Concern. So the entrance for regular folk is forbidden. Going through the mountain we find why concern doesn’t want anyone snoop around. A lot of acts that would be considered a heresy happened here. Oh right all that time Royal was with us. I forgot to mention that he’s not just a high ranking Concern dude he’s next ruler. So his faith got tested and cracked a little but then a lot. In fact from other concern grunts we learn that The Mother hates him. But Royal doesn’t believe them and wants to hear that from The Mother herself. So we moved toward the capital city of Concern. 

We find a way in and we find the Mother. Royal said it was weird that she was rolling on her parade platform during a regular day. But that is not what we are here for. Royal asked The Mother and got the answer. She hates him because he messed up. The mess is so bad that I ruined everything. Well that how she said it. But to be honest situation is so bad that the One Concern planned to escape the planet via space ship. But The Mother want fly on that ship because we turned her into a goo tree. That’s where General Chrome comes in. Yeah we saw him through the game several times and through it we saw him turned into heretic by preaching his own mind. Basically he overthrows the current government and tries to lead his men to the space ship to escape. General Chrome did not succeed because Elro injected him with an ivory poison. That’s another way to kill transcended agent. How Elro managed to do it? Because general got to cocky, you see there was already an assassination attempt. Since General separated himself and his men from The One Concern, elite soldiers send an agent to assassinate him with Elro’s poison. Even though Chrome got injected with the poison he did not explode into purple mist like Agent Gray, the first Elro’s victim. But this time Elro must’ve improved his formula and it worked on Chrome, so he exploded too.

So now that the Concern is beheaded only one thing left to do. Royal wants to take Robin on the space shop so we could talk to the Starworm. Elro is heavily against it. It nearly turns into a tragedy because Mina shoots him because he didn’t want to press the two men system switch. But somehow Elro survives but that’s not important right now. On our way to the ship we dealt with agent Black for the final time releasing her of her migraine. We are now on the moon base, we go through several doors that only unlocks for Royal. When we finally managed to get the attention of the Starworm we couldn’t communicate. That was the last straw for Royal. He snaps and attacks the Starworm, Starworm retaliates with psychic beam of depression and he also shatters the glass of the moon base. We tried to save him but due to fact that one of the movement sensors got separated too far away from the door. So we had to leave Royal near the sensor and flee on an emergency capsule. When we got back we landed near our house. We found Elro alive, he knows that planet is doomed and he wants us to sit with him and just wait till the end. But we won’t just wait for our end. Robin moves into direction of the Starworm crash, yes he tackled the planet. We confront him and after worm fails to demoralize us with his beam the fight begins. We break his face and a big bird that looked like Tzeentch’s avatar jumped out. We could not communicate since Robin’s a mute and bird was just making angry bird noises. But we know the bird was angry because ivory oil level was too low since bird visualized it for us. So we fought once more and whooped his butt.  Robin then inserted remaining seed into the starworm which made the planed sprout trees all over the globe. I guess the world is saved. Guess we can go back home and rest… the end I guess.

Gameplay. It’s a classic metroidvania so we run around, do platforming, collect power ups etc. One main way to attack is our stun gun. It shoots small short ranged blast of energy. We can also use our wrench to attack but mainly we use to progress through the game by wrenching nuts to open doors or lower or raise some platforms.  We can also reflect some projectiles with our wrench. We know that we can deflect a projectile by a green leaf flash that telegraphs for us that we can deflect this attack. And since we talking about our wrench let’s just say all that we can do with it. We can grab air nuts to hang with it. We can grab on nut rails with it and we can even ride it when we get galvanization upgrade for it. We can also spin our wrench it’s needed to interact with gear switches. We can also electrify us with an upgrade. While charged we can interact with charge switches, we can charge electric crates and our bomb gun will shoot electrified bombs. 

Okay now to our stun gun upgrades. We will have a charge shot upgrade. Bomb upgrade and switch beam upgrade. Regular charged stun shot can break white rocks. Bombs have more uses than just exploding an enemy. We can break black rocks with it. We can press switches with it and interact with charge switches with electric bombs. Charged bomb shot will shoot out a micro rocket. Switch beam (charged shot) trades places with an object or enemy that we shoot with it. 

We also have tweaks, those are slight upgrades to our several abilities. We create them by using ChemCo table. ChemCo is an organization inside of The One Concern that tries to ease life or regular peasants by doing unorthodox things to help them. But we need three types of consumables to craft them. Those are electric metal, improvium metal and ivory oil. So tweaks that we have. Iron heart, will give us one free damage hit. Lung make Robin hold her breath for longer, those for underwater and smoked sections. Fleet foot will increase our movement speed. Longer charges will increase out time being charged with electricity. Dodge, pressing down+wrench will make Robin perform a dodge roll. Remote explosion , by pressing up+wrench will let us detonate our bomb prematurely.  We also can do ground pound by jumping and pressing down+jump. We need to use to down a manhole cover or to defeat certain enemies. 

Okay… You will utilize all of your abilities and you will do it a lot so better remember what you can do. I got stuck couple of times, but it wasn’t too bad. Couple of bosses made me mad but it was good kind of mad. So I definitely recommend this game. But as I already said couple of classic metroidvania features would perfect this game.