Systems: PC/Steam
Release Date: TBA
Publisher: Play on Worlds
Developer: Orbit Studio, Play on Worlds
Time Spent: 1.9 Hours
If I were to tell you that there was a Metroidvania game centered around Ebenezer Scrooge that where you play as Ebenezer himself whacking tortured ghosts and goons of a corrupt businessman of London with his cane as if he were Edward Hyde attacking a homeless destitute, you might not likely believe me. What if I told you that he was assisted in traversing London with the help of appreciative spirits along with an 11.75-foot vertical leap (and on a single jump too, none of this double-jump nonsense)*? Well, have I a rebuttal for you in the form of Ebenezer and the Invisible World. Or at least in the form of a demo for the game.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World is a little bit of a strange Metroidvania. The story is set in London sometime shortly after the events of "A Christmas Carol" (think the mid-1840s), although visually it is a very idealized vision of London, kind of what you might expect from The Muppets Christmas Carol with a bit of PG Blasphemous design thrown in for some of the enemy ghosts and their respective descriptions. Granted, I have never read "A Christmas Carol" by Charles Dickens and my knowledge of the depicted 1840s London stems from the aforementioned Muppets adaptation as well as Disney's adaptation, Mickey's Christmas Carol. So I cannot say for sure if Oscar Thimblestich or Wilhelm Williams Ph.D. are characters referenced or passing in Charles Dickens' work. I do appreciate and like the design of a lot of the enemy ghosts along with their character description as something out of Dante's Inferno regarding their individualized punishments.
Enemy spirits aside, there are times when they seem rather sparse, with multiple sections of the map that are void of anything but background and foreground characters populating the map. Maybe this is to help have the map make sense so that locations are not crossing over onto each other on the map screen or maybe some areas are still in development because this is only a demo. That being said, I was thankful that the areas were not overpopulated with enemies because it often felt that there was little incentive to kill the ghosts except to get by them. Sure, they would sometimes drop money (which, at least in the demo) could only be used at one vendor, while others would drop items to be used in crafting (not accessible in the demo) and there was no level progression or experience earned from killing ghosts.
Speaking of killing ghosts, spirits were not the only enemies to populate the map, as there were henchmen/goons of one Caspar Mathus who owns/operates some kind of factory situation and is attempting to quell a workers' uprising. These enemies are fully living humans, but there are some spraying green noxious gas while others are lobbing explosive-like grenades here and there. This is in downtown London, which I would think would not go unnoticed, but since this is a fictionalized video game vision of London with a protagonist leaping nearly 12ft into the air, so I guess I can suspend my disbelief in places. But the story involving Caspar Mathus seems to be the primary story here but was only partially touched on in the demo with side quests being split between living NPCs and ghosts. The spirit NPC quests I found to be pretty beneficial as they ended up granting Ebenezer either additional magic-based attacks or gave him context-specific abilities such as being able to jump on floating orbs and learning a downward-based attack.
I did experience one hiccup with the demo, which was that my progress was not always saved even after going to a Save Room. I noticed this after returning to the game for the first time and found that several map areas were now unexplored, and I had to redo an NPC quest and defeat again a mini-boss. I did read on the discussions page on the Steam Page that some people experienced having their save files erased after patches for the demo so it sounds like save files being finicky is a known issue? Maybe? Thankfully the game was fun to play for the most part and I was able to finish it the third time I played it.
Even though I technically reached the end of the demo, I know that there were a couple of areas I had finished exploring and possibly additional friendly NPCs I had not helped. There was one item from the (one) merchant that I had wanted to purchase as it was a piece of equipment. Still, I instead decided to spend the money to buy a dress for a woman who was down on her luck (there is more to it than that, but that is the short of it) and earned an attacking shield summoning spell which was pretty cool. I do not think I will go back to explore more areas of the map because I did do a fair amount of exploring right before I finished the demo and the thought of doing that all over again for some kind of completionist feeling is daunting. I do not know if that says anything about the game and my overall feelings if I do not want to jump back in to play more for the sake of being in that world, or that I just value my time and I already have a pretty good idea of what the game has to offer when it releases in the coming months.
I guess we will have to wait and see.
~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
Instrumental
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