Review by Torrence Davis
Red Goddess: Inner World takes us into the world of Divine, a deity who has lost her powers and her memory. Her goal is to not only find her powers again, but to also regain her memory and save her world from an unknown evil. Red Goddess: Inner World was developed by Yanim Studio. Yanim is a Spanish developer and is known for making 3D animated films and special effects and has expanded their portfolio to making their own video games.
Red Goddess: Inner World is a platform game, not unlike many of the indie platform titles you’ve seen as of late. What Red Goddess does to set itself apart is offer a narrative and storyline not found in many platform games. The gameplay is pretty basic. As you venture off into the world, you will start to regain some memories and discover some of your lost powers. Divine can use Masks to transform into other characters with different powers. Divine, who’s the main character, has the power of telekinesis. She can move obstacles and use fireballs to possess enemies. Rage uses brute strength to melee red enemies and can destroy red colored blocks. Fear also uses melee attacks to defeat blue enemies but can destroy blue colored blocks. Fear seems to attack faster than Rage, but does less damage.
Gameplay is really simple and doesn’t offer much of a challenge in the beginning. As you find your powers, the game gets harder. RGIW is non-linear and is filled with platforms, underground caves and NPC’s. You’ll collect coins and gems throughout the levels. You can use the coins to purchase mana and health upgrades. The gems allow you to unlock access to other areas for fast travel. There are some sections of the game that require you to stand inside this giant rotating circle to get to the next section of the game. It always causes major frame hiccups and I think this is due to it loading more level into memory. This is an example of bad load management. It’s annoying but not a deal breaker.
While the narrative is actually good, it gets annoying at times. Instead of cutscenes, your character freezes for a moment so you can listen to the narrative and then move on. When I’m playing a game and getting into my groove, I don’t want to have to stop playing to listen to a narrative. Let me keep playing the game with that in the background. Also, I’d like to be able to turn the subtitles of the narrative off.
RGIW has a very high quality soundtrack for an indie game. It sounds as if they put some serious work into providing music for this game. This is a soundtrack I can listen to while relaxing or even writing other game reviews.
I was impressed with the graphics. There are way too many pixel driven games these days. I can think of about 10 indie games made with pixels that all look similar. This was built with Unreal Engine 4. It has a vibrant color palette and great animations. While the game is actually a 2D game, you can tell that the characters are actually 3D objects and not sprites. The characters and world objects are very clean looking with low detailed textures, almost as if it’s cel-shaded.
Red Goddess: Inner World is a nice little indie treat. It’s the kind of game that grows on you if you give it enough time. It’s touted as a Metroidvania game if that helps understand the aspects of the gameplay. The graphics are a fresh breath of air for indie and the soundtrack is amazing. You can find the game on Steam, PS4 and soon on Xbox One. It’s only $10 on Steam and those who absolutely love games with a good story and narrative should support this game. There is an animated short in the works for RGIW as we speak. Please check out http://www.yanim.net/WP/ for more info.
This review of Red Goddess: Inner World is based on the PC version of the game.
