PSEUDOREGALIA - Nitro Rad

[Music] I draw [Applause] [Music] red as time keeps on marching forward I find it's the Platformers that give you a lot of moves a lot of freedom that I keep coming back to the most I think that's why Mario 64 sticks with me so much the toolbox is just so big that I can throw together all sorts of different solutions to the exact same obstacles I've been jumping over since I was 6 years old I'll be 30 pretty soon and it is still just as fun I remember picking up Mario 3D All Stars when it was new and I found myself replaying these two way more than Mario Galaxy I mean hundredth playthrough of three games I all grew up with extensively each of course it should be on even playing grounds here Nostalgia wise but while sunshine and 64 felt as fresh and freeing as ever Mario Galaxy just kind of felt like I was going through the motions like there's you know there's only one way the game wants you to do the level and you know that's that's kind of it you know it's like Bing Bang Boom Mario go room still a masterpiece in its own right don't get me wrong like the sights and sounds and set pieces but I find when movement is Freer and you can approach things in a lot more ways than one every single time no matter what I find the actual game play a lot more engaging I mean it's telling when people write programs that let you just drop Mario from 64 in any environment and it is just fun no matter what this is the reason that I find Mario 64 way more replayable Rayman 2 is actually kind of the same deal to me these days like I'm going to love that thing until the day I die but it's a masterpiece in the same way as Mario Galaxy you know it's the Aesthetics it's the art it's the visuals and sound all coming together to create a world that can just reach out and grab you and you replay it again when you have the right excuse and it's like oh yeah you know doing all these same actions again yeah oh this part yeah just do this oh the combat you know fun idea projectile based and jump and Dodge but you just move left move right it's kind of playing itself at this point my muscle memories got this thing solved now dude when I replay Rayman 2 these days it's really just for the sights and sounds honestly now I do think it's great that this genre has been able to explore all sorts of different things big fascinating worlds intricate puzzle solving explosive Shen and even heartfelt stories but the ones that always stuck with me the most were the very few that had so much to the movement the ones that created so many different ways to get around the same levels forget the story forget the puzzles forget who you even are or where you even is just moving the guy in a nothing room if you can make that fun well then you got something I'm going to be coming back to no matter how much time passes now I'm not trying to say that like this is the one good way to make a platformer or that other types of Platformers aren't valid or shouldn't exist no like I do love them all it's just that as I was growing up I always found myself wanting more that leaned in that direction I wanted more Platformers that could also demand a little bit more from me as a player uh but you know we do live in a pretty exciting time because now we are finally starting to see more of these games obviously it could only ever happen with Indie Games and in recent years we've been finally seeing a lot of games that are starting to lean more and more in this direction whether it's Nuance physics that you can get a lot of results from or it's expressive movement that lets you play the levels in your way it creates the kind of game where the best solution to a level it could be something the developer didn't even know about and that is what I live for and now I have been just completely swept off my feet by this game called pseudo regalia uh the main developer I've actually followed for quite some time now and I really do think this was one of those passion in a toy box moments where they were just like trying to make movement that felt fun in in a room by itself and after winning a Metroid Vania game jam with a very well-received demo that impressed a lot of people they were like well well dog I should probably make this into a full game huh fast forward a couple of months later and it's slapped together into a cute tiny little game and thrown up on Steam for a very low price and uh oh my god with within a couple of days I probably had the most amount of messages I ever got about a game from fans in my life everybody was saying dude you have to try this platformer called PSE sudo regalia it is absolutely amazing and it was really interesting too because For the First time ever I actually already knew about it everything I've been seeing from this game over the past year has left me impressed again and again and again and I knew the moment it was out I had to get my hands on it and now it is out I have my hands on it so why don't we show you a cool freaking platformer already the title screen greets us with this Eerie ethereal wash just the silhouette of the character floating through absolute nothingness as this peaceful chime Fades past starting a new game opens with us panning down from these little goat prisoners to a mirror and from it spawns our hero syil she's This Tall rabbit character and the only thing we know about her is that she's looking for a princess that's it stop start the game and go all right some pretty basic obstacles starting off and uh yeah the jumping feels good physics feel really nice I can land wherever I want without too much trouble but it also doesn't feel like it just gives it to you it's not too floaty or or too Snappy either you got a nice grippy ledge grab it also helps that a lot oh my God you can jump out of this okay you know they know what they're doing when you can jump out of the freaking ledge grab dude it is so tight too frame one you're in that animation you can already pop out of it you don't have to wait at all it keeps the momentum going at such a good Pace oh man it feels really great pretty soon we find a sword just a simple one two3 slashes but uh doing so doesn't interrupt your movement it's like fluid as heck now you won't just be using a sword to attack enemies sometimes you'll have to slash a chain to drop a block and create a shortcut or sometimes you'll have to whack a switch with it to trigger some sort of mechanism and man I tell you this is such a small little thing but it really goes a long way for me like I would never criticize game for not doing this it's just one of those different kinds of games things but like when you press a contextual button prompt and you just watch the character do this animation that you don't really have any control over you kind of just watched them pull the switch but then you replay Majora's Mask again and you just go like I did that that was me I didn't hit a button to make my guy do that I hit a button cuz that's just what did it you know what I mean so like hey it's it's a tiny little thing here but I love that the slash is also for interacting with the environment and not just for fighting enemies uh I think it just makes it feel more like that I'm the one actually doing these things as far as the other basic actions go cble can also grab and climb poles it's really similar to how it works in Mario 64 you know you tilt the stick left and right to rotate around it and then you jump to pop out in that direction though you do have a little bit more control after the pop than Mario 64 gives you and if you climb up all the way you'll perch up at the top giving you a better vantage point for a more careful jump pressing down the shoulder button will also make civil Crouch down in place you'll need this to duck under something like once in the game but it's mostly for back flipping out of you remember how Mario 64 you jump while crouching you do that haha the back flip similar idea but there's this extra step to it uh pressing a while crouching you'll instead flip backwards about a meter not very helpful on its own but if you press the jump button again right after landing you'll then jump up and do a high jump so it's kind of like a version of that backflip that you need an extra meter of space for and once again borrowing from Mario 64 we have that classic side somersault this one's a little more similar to 64 than uh than the backflip thing was yank to stick back while moving and then jump during the ski animation now you don't like you don't throw your momentum quite as much as Mario 64 not at all actually it's really just about like getting the height than it is like an arc so uh I think this move could be a little more interesting if they figured out how to really give it that weight because like when you play Mario 64 and you figure out that you can do stuff like this only with this move it's like okay that's platformer genius right there so if there was a suit of Gia 2 this is one of the moves that I think could be like even more interesting the backflip and the side somersault both pretty much give you the same result same height and the same Arc so whichever one you use it's pretty much just down to player preference and that's good more options to achieve the same thing lets the player have more freedom in how they decide to do things and it only gets better from here because as we wander around the map we'll start finding all of these brand new mov moves first off we got a simple slide good for squeezing under tight gaps and you know also good for just going faster later on you'll also get the ability to jump out of the slide letting you really fling yourself forward at high speeds fantastic for closing those wider gaps but you can also use it for getting around fast even easier oh we got a ground pound another classic not only is this one good for breaking stuff at your feet but you can also jump out of the landing for a really solid eye jump once you have this there's pretty much know going back to these two which which is kind of cool there's a neat progression here a handful of moves do become obsolete but they were so useful for so long that they did still get to feel worthwhile it's kind of like getting a better sword in a game except you're getting a better jump you just feel stronger for the rest of it after that there is one more thing you can do with that ground pound though you can jump out of it before you drop so remember how Mario Odyssey it changed the dive uh you you had to do it out of the ground pound animation you hit the shoulder button and then you hit the face button exact same thing here except instead of diving forward you're back flipping back directly 180 away from the way you're were facing and that felt so weird at first it's like why have a version of this that I have to turn around first why do I just have to do more work to pull this thing off in this game but then I realized oh it goes backwards because you're supposed to combine it with the game's wall kick there that makes sense and oh buddy let me tell you this wall kick this wall kick right here this is actually my favorite wall jump in any video game ever made it is literally that good it is literally that good it is so fun unbelievably fun the amount you can experiment with it all the Nuance to it you have so many options so much control over this thing H holy dude jumping kicking off the wall you were going to have a ball stick The Landing Just Like Glue every movement is up to you and that's what it's all about dude I tell you you you spend years and years playing all of these Platformers that like to pretend that they have a wall jump this automatic ass magnetic ass fake ass Maly and it's finally all worth it cuz one day A Little Goat comes walking along and goes hey no this is how you make a wall jump so why don't we get into it already now it's pretty different from what we've come to expect from Mario or games with a similar wall jump where you just press the a button on contact with the wall or while sliding down the wall here you're going to press the button a second or two before hitting the wall hitting the jump button midair enters the short-lived kick animation you softly bounce up and you get a moment to steer that kick into a wall and then you'll jump off depending on the angle you hit it at and it is full on Billiards dude real angles real Nuance you have a lot of control over this thing and you can get a lot of different results just by steering the character a little bit differently now I have praised wall jumps in the past but dooh hoooo food this one takes a cake the biggest cake there is given to this game because everything about it is just immensely satisfying bouncing back and forth cobbling together a bunch of angles or climbing all over the place bridging wide gaps or even just crapping together some bouncy Boogie to get up to some dumb spot and oh there's a key up here now unlike Mario 64 you can't just keep wall kicking over and over and over that would kind of break the game since doing so also gives you a little bit more air time so yeah it makes sense you can only do it up to three times which is also cool because that incentivizes you to combine the wall kick with the other moves and that's when the game really starts to get fun when they go hey you're the chef here's the ingredients let the player cook you see a place you want to get to well you have to toss up your very own salad of Movin and groovin to get there so check it out let's do a little breakdown here uh this is easily the most amount of poses Kevin has ever had to draw for one of these Tori also did the background this this time too just so you don't have to look at my gross green blue radiant thing but I really want to show you how many movement options you do have so from standstill that's four already but going up just to a regular jump in midair you then got five you could kick you can ground pound flip wall run which you get much later into the game and slash jump which is another later ability where you can slash at enemies in order to bounce off of them sort of like Hollow Knight except when you're hitting it can be anywhere it doesn't have to be below you as long as you strike while in midair you're going to bounce up coming on over here to the wall kick well that's more Wall Kicks you can do from this obviously but at any point you can still flip you can still wall run or bounce slash all of which you can also do out of the high jump or you could begin with a dash and then Dash jump and wow still that many options starting a combo with something that gives you a lot of momentum is always really fun uh I always loved how much you can get out of the spin dash in the adventure games for that very reason homing attack is also a really good source of momentum as well honestly the way you can hit into a slope and then carry that kinetic energy upward into a jump this is what I'm talking about it's either physics or move sets and just put me in a room and I can run in circles and have fun that's why the Chow Garden works so much now this is cool because the way you combine moves changes as you get more so let's say you don't have the ability to jump out of the slide yet you can still slide off of a ledge then kick to extend your air time that's still a lot of things you can do with just that slide before you get that other move and that's not even mentioning bunny hopping you can do so much with that too and that flip move is the Perfect final ingredient the way you can easily flip backwards up into the ledge after kicking away from it just L jump L jump it's such a fun way to end the combo so uh this is all pretty brilliant I really do not know any other video game characters that are this fun just to move the guy I mean Mario obviously and uh well maybe Sonic in adventure too but you know that game's Half Baked and half good and nobody agreed on whether or not it's valid so can I use that as an example doesn't matter either way fact of the matter this is beyond impressive like I really cannot stress that enough so where are we going here what's the setting what's the goal well in true Metroid Vania fashion and yes I hate that genre name too but I don't make language and I got to say the thing that people know what I'm talking about in true Metroid Vania fashion you don't know where to go you're completely free to wander the map as you please and it's up to you to figure out what you can do and what you can't cuz you're going to find a lot of rooms where it's like you can't really do anything yet you really have to stop and think about what moves you currently have is this enough do I have what I need to get past this room and there's going to be times where you don't but you try so hard you get it anyway like the sequence breaking is absolutely a thing in this there's also all of these hidden powerups tucked away too that will improve your strength and your health so there's good reason to look into every nook and cranny and really see where your current kit can take you I mean I just wanted to look around anyway because these environments are pretty freaking cool looking actually so uh in good faithful tradition the game cracks open a simple low poly low reses N64 look obviously since the N64 was the console I spent like half my childhood with I do find it very nostalgic the uh the soft sound of the music and the slightly blurry textures and and all that stuff but I especially love how the environments are all of these they're like these nowhere Lial spaces they only make sense to the context of playing a platforming video game not really like a place it's almost for boting at times honestly and that is a reason I do replay old games especially in the original format there's something about that haziness and weirdness it just lingers at the back of my brain so you know nothing wrong at taing into that every now and then got some good old 2D low reses iron bars blocking the way oh and torches that feel straight out of Majora's Mask and that N64 hazy fog that lingers just meters away I don't know about you but I would i' rather be looking at this over like any super Graphics game that's new any day no like seriously you play 10 games that look like real life and it's like I don't care I would rather be looking at this so thank God for Indies for keeping these looks alive the music is also undeniably fantastic across the board it's this Perfect Blend of somber moods with the energy that you also want from a platforming game with all the moves you got uh you leave the castle out into the empty Bailey and you're met with this passionate piano but is paired with these energetic symbols and it just makes you want to move and then you got the theater music oh with its sporadic Jazz and Plucky strings but my favorite has to be that deep bellowing echo of the underbelly a chill runs down your spine but then a drum track kicks in and before you know it you're rocking out with ghouls and skeletons this game is like heroin dude I tell you it's you got that peaceful drone of the looping hazy textures washing by as your muscles dance the most satisfying ballet of inputs oh my God this is the good without Nostalgia though or or at least some sort of interest in this kind of look and Vibe definitely not going to hit the same way you might even think there's just kind of nothing going on in the game which yeah the environments are pretty shy of props landmarks or Furniture you know that kind of thing they even make a joke out of it at some point I suppose more props in detail could have maybe helped with navigation like being able to remember each room apart a little better maybe sure but you can't pretend there isn't something really cool about walking into this gigantic room completely empty except two big ass Thrones I don't necessarily think games have to have a lot of props to create an immersive environment just take the original Dark Souls for example that strange emptiness you get from all the areas in that game it conveys loneliness Hollow a burnt out Kingdom with nothing left there's still absolutely interesting feelings to be feeling when you're playing something that looks and feels this way so just because we now have the technology to avoid this kind of look I don't think that necessarily means this look doesn't have any value anymore I love this kind of look and besides the areas do stand out well enough with their unique visual identities and with the little props that they do have though I guess I have heard a lot of people saying that they did get lost a lot and I guess I would be lying if I didn't say that even I found myself running in circles sometimes I think a map really is the best solution here and thankfully the dev has expressed interest in making one I believe they are working on that now so hopefully by the time you play it that'll already be in there I also hope they had the ability to warp between the save points I think that would be really convenient uh just give me the Lord vessel after I get all the moves you know towards the end of things I think that would be a fair addition and one last last thing I want to mention before getting into spoilers is the character design I think it's really cool the floppy ears and all the costumes you can unlock too that's super fun and while obviously a lot of people are going to take very well to the character's uh voluptuous figure I'm certain the developer knew exactly what they were doing on that front what I find so interesting about this character is just how tall they are because usually in a platformer like this you get like this little pudgy short little character and that always just kind of made a lot of sense to me it's like trying TR to track the footing of a marble versus a pencil well the marble is going to be easier to tell where the feet are going to land from more angles you know because it's a 3D game the camera can go up and down and all around where with a pencil you know you kind of need these canned animations and magnetism to help guide the player because it's a little bit harder to tell exactly where those feet are going to land I saw this Indie developer ask about this on Twitter and I thought I had this big Bingo answer that made so much freaking sense and then pseudo regalia guy comes along they're like my plat former has a tall character and now that I'm playing this thing it's kind of really hard for me to continue believing what I just explained the readability here is perfectly clear and I could not imagine any of it being any easier if the character was any shorter I guess it's really just down to how readable the animations are made to be if you can do that then I guess the character height doesn't actually matter at all I can't believe it this whole time we've been playing as mascot characters over and over for no other reason than marketing what good I missed that I wish marketing would do that again I miss funny little guys I miss when every game was like here's a stupid squirrel that does back flips everyone would groan I want to go back please bring me back all right so now the final boss and ending are pretty cool so I do want to talk about them real quick uh skip here if you have not played the game yet unless you don't care the not skip but yeah here we go through the big final battle down here we find the one we've been looking for the whole time the prince princess and she's here to fight us the final battle ensues and honestly while I found the combat in this game like just kind of okay this fight here really squeezes out some real potential with all of these moves you've got now it's this incredible Dodge Fest of all these different types of projectile attacks and tons of other moves too and with how much he teleports around you'll have to move very quickly in order to land those hits it's actually a super fun fight and it even makes me wish they had I don't know a couple more bosses that got this much fighting out of these moves once you beat the princess to a pulp we then get this ambiguous text on a white screen not the kind of version you want to hang out with right the text continues to imply that this was all a dream maybe the princess I suppose was some individual from the real life that they once had a good relationship with oh losing people when they change feels like you lose a part of yourself it ends with the text thanking Syble saying they don't want to forget her so they'll write her down when they wake up I almost wonder if this was based on a dream the developer had or something it's kind of nice feels like whoever the text is they found the dream motivating and this is the part where I start to think about the name pseudo regalia what does that even mean well regali is like royalty isn't it yeah emblems and symbols of royalty like a crown something that tells people you're the king I know pseudo just means fake so like fake symbols of that false symbols of that I guess pretending you're more important sort of thing uh maybe this could tie into the theme of losing a friend to their own arrogance or or ego or something a friend consumed by thems until they forget how to the people they were close with I don't know that's what I took from it at least it's got to be that ballpark of feelings sort of thing it definitely would make those sber feelings throughout the game make a lot of sense and all the Lial you may niky ass areas really did make the game feel very dreamlike I have had a lot of Mario 64 dreams that look just like this game actually just replace all the textures with the textures from the castle and you're pretty much looking at something my brain Chef has actually cooked up in the world of Dreams at some point and being able to C capture of feeling like that it really is an amazing bonus on top of all this pseudo regalia is it's like a dream come true it's like a hazy cool dream that I really had one time really come to life this is the kind of thing that as a Mario 64 nut that really wants platforming games to demand more from my inputs as a player this is the exact kind of thing I've been waiting for to exist for years and years and years dude it really does feel like the sum of so many things the genre has learned they take all of these moves that we know work and they don't only just execute them really well and they function well but they also combine them with all of these like really inventive new moves and it just it creates some of the most engaging 3D platforming I have ever had the pleasure of playing and I I really I really do mean that I've already been seeing speedr Runners crack into this thing which does not surprise me one bit if you like those technical speed games that lean into that sort of freedom and movement especially if you grew up with N64 or PS1 stuff and love those kinds of Vibes this thing's going to be a dream come true and you know if you're not that precise exact demographic like myself it does still have a lot of appeal across the board it is easier to get a hang of than Mario 64 and it's also just a really great Metroid Vania all the familiar beats of gradually becoming stronger and more capable with each upgrade each ability being a key to another part of the world explorations sprinkled with decent enough combat and of course that movement getting all around it is out of this world I guess the only other bad thing I can really say about it is that it's not really all that long it is a small game that'll take you like 4 to 6 hours to beat the first time and probably two once you know what you're doing it's not exactly a big game so I hope someday we'll see a sequel to it or something that can take these moves and I don't know maybe add one or two more and really give us the amount of things to do that Mario 64 has okay well maybe even just half but I guess length does matter a little bit less when the game is this damn replayable and there is already a randomizer mod for it too so you can get a ton of replayability out of it that way oh my God think about that though isn't that just a testament to how much people really want to keep using these moves over and over a randomizer getting made in less than a month but this sort of thing really does go a long way in making game play incredibly engaging every move is something I actually had to think about something I actually had to pull off something I had to learn a quick little diddy on the controller before I was real good at it and I could haul my ass around like Superman the better and better I got I really missed that right now as of this YouTube video it's only on the computer I have no idea if it's going to come to consoles I I hope it does I think as many people as possible should be able to play this thing easily I can attest that it runs pretty good on the steam Dicky uh that was a good investment oh dude it makes recording PC games so much easier for me and to be honest with how much I hopelessly never ever touch any of the games I buy for the computer it's amazing I've been lucky enough to have something like this that makes it this convenient for me and it's crazy because otherwise I probably wouldn't have really played this played this until it hit consoles if it hit consoles and I'm shocked to know what I could have potentially missed out on all it took was a version of the computer for an idiot like me but the steam deck is pricey and so are computers I could justify the purchase for work but I don't know if everyone else can so I really think this thing should be on as many platforms as possible uh a lot of people got that switch going when I talk to my friends and they're playing in these average kind of folk they're usually playing on Nintendo switch so honestly that would probably be the best place for this if you want a lot of people to be able to play it if you do already have something that you can comfortably play this on though well then buddy I got amazing news for you you do not have to pay very much for this game at all it's only $8 Canadian what is that American like five bucks trick-or treat and sell that at recess one time you'll have enough money to buy pseudo regalia so get your ass on that pseudo regalia game I'm not asking I'm telling you it's Dirt Cheap it's Malarkey cheap it's like it's like what are you doing cheap like actually like actually I would have paid $15 for this easy because like sure it's not long it's not long but this is not a disposable piece of art this is replayable this is more replayable than 90% the new video games that get made so to me it's worth more than that throw money at this fool please throw money at this guy so they can become super rich have lots of resources and then they can make banana Elder 3 I don't know it'll it'll somehow be even better than golden eye actually a game better than golden eye would be nice because I just want a modern 007 split screen shooter I hate that the only split screen Shooters are Call of Duty these days I mean anyway I got a podcast up on patreon.com it's only $1 if you want to hear me talk about random stuff the Pikmin music is still here I didn't delete that

Channel: Nitro Rad

Views: 225,922

Keywords: nitro rad, review, pseudoregalia, indie, indie platformer, 3d platformer, metroidvania

Id: vUtxkUHcSE4

Length: 29min 6sec (1746 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 10 2023