The Stack

I recently saw Environmental Station Alpha (2015) mentioned alongside the likes of Tunic and Animal Well for its secret puzzle layer. At first blush, it comes off as just a standard retro-styled metroidvania set in a deserted space station, like many others, and allegedly it can be played to a conclusion without contradicting that assumption. But I’m told that attentive players can find further depths to it. I suppose that’s really a very metroidvania thing to do. Recall that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — the very game that the word “metroidvania” was coined to describe — does something similar, giving the player an opportunity to fight a false final boss and roll the credits without ever seeing the second half of the game. But that wasn’t exactly about puzzles, was it? At any rate, it’s by the same developer as Baba Is You, which also has hidden layer stuff going on.

Now, I knew that the title “Environmental Station Alpha” sounded familiar, and sure enough, I already had it in my Steam library, with a recorded play time of less than two minutes — just enough for me to have installed it and tried it out and decided that I wasn’t in the mood for it and then forgotten about it. I’ve played it further now, and here’s the thing: I can’t decide if I’ve played it before or not. Sometimes I’ll look at the map and think “This is way too familiar”, but sometimes I’ll think “I definitely would have remembered that if I had seen it before”. It’s possible that it looks familiar just because I’ve played so many other outer-space metroidvanias (including Metroid itself!), but I’m not convinced. Is Steam mistaken about my playtime? No, I would have more achievements if I had played it on Steam. Did I play it somewhere else, like Itch or Epic? Maybe. If I did, did I ever finish it? I don’t know. If I did, I made the mistake of not blogging about it, assuming that I’d just remember anything noteworthy about it.

At any rate, if I did play it before, I’m pretty sure I didn’t penetrate to the hidden layer. Indeed, it’s very likely that I didn’t even reach the false ending, because some of the bosses are very, very hard. I’m currently stuck combating a sort of biomechanical sea serpent, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is as far as I got the first time around. I generally like the metroidvania genre and find it satisfying, but bosses are always my weak point. I remember that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had some bosses that became very easy if approached with the right equipment. I wish more metroidvanias had picked up on that.

The first mission (of fifteen) in Cryo’s Ubik is taken from the novel, more or less. That is, it’s about going to a kibbutz in Topeka and recruiting a powerful psychic named Pat Conley to work for Runciter Associates (the protagonist’s employer) before the Hollis Corporation, Runciter’s rival, gets to her. But the bit where Conley demonstrates alarming reality-warping powers is left out, and in its place is a series of firefights against Hollis agents. Well, it’s the tutorial level, after all. It has to demonstrate all the mechanics.

Mission 2 is, as far as I can tell, wholly original to the game. Where mission 1 used Hollis agents as obstacles to your goal, in mission 2, they simply are the goal. They’ve taken over a factory by force, and the police, ill-equipped to handle psychic powers, have requested Runciter’s help. It’s worth noting here that the game goes to a lot more effort to paint Hollis as unambiguous bad guys than the novel does: they’re blatantly criminal, they’re only allowed to operate because they’ve got government officials in their pockets, they force their employees to get cybernetic implants that render them virtually inhuman. Presumably it’s all to help justify the way you kill them in droves.

I had been hoping to finish the mission before writing this post, but it turns out to take a sharp upturn in difficulty. Mission 1, you can get through without entirely knowing what you’re doing. Mission 2 might actually require me to read the manual. In addition, every time you fail, you have to reload the mission, which is discouraging, because loading a mission can take as long as two minutes on my system. If I have to wait that long, I’m more inclined to just shut off the game and do something else for a while.

I wonder what it’s doing during those two minutes? My first thought was that it must be the latency of my CD-ROM drive, but, through the magic of DXWnd, I’m playing entirely from virtual discs on my SSD now, and it hasn’t made a difference. Maybe it’s to do with memory. I’ve got about a thousand times more RAM than a typical 1998 machine, so it could be taking a thousand times longer to do something with it. Alternately, the memory size could be overflowing some variable and leaving the game thinking I have a lot less memory than I do, causing it to free caches and reload them more than necessary. Experimentation is required.