SuperEpic Review

SuperEpicurean.

In the near-future society of RegnantCorp, you find yourself using your grandma’s favourite umbrella to fend off large anthropomorphic, suit-clad animals while riding on the back of a llama. That’s one way to set the scene of an Orwellian tech company controlling the world and its citizens through addition to free games, and SuperEpic is not the type to stray too far from its comedic premise.

Using the design principles of retro classics such as Super Metroid, Castlevania and Mega Man, the game wears its inspirations on its sleeve as it takes any opportunity to reference the oldies and even model entire stages after them. As in any Metroidvania, there’s a large world of interconnected rooms and hallways that accommodate dangerous enemies and concealed secrets.

You fill in the map screen one area at a time and use visual landmarks to find your way around, and to make things much easier, use an elevator to zip back and forth between each chapter. With each new stage comes several generous options for exploration, and while it isn’t a massively complicated maze, there are still many hidden ways that only the more perceptive player will discover. 

With each new stage comes new challenges, thus requiring the constant need to be increasing your strength. Therefore, exploration is also encouraged to find the different merchants located around the game. SuperEpic uses an RPG system where you earn money for killing enemies and can spend it to upgrade your character. Your somewhat unconventional weapons take the form of random everyday objects, with stop signs, old brooms and even toilet plungers making up the roster of your arsenal. 

There are some huge pacing issues, mind you, which occur a couple of hours into the story. Once you get to around the halfway mark, the difficulty spikes and you need to stay on top of your upgrades lest you spend the next hour grinding for currency to top up your stats. Keeping in line with SuperEpic’s retro pastiche, there’s an entire section parodying Capcom’s Ghosts ‘n Goblins from the NES, complete with maddening enemy and health placement.

The thing about parody, is it still needs to feel like you’ve taken a step forward. You can recreate outdated design principles as accurately as possible, but it’s still an outdated design principle and there’s a reason we moved past it decades ago. It doesn’t feel like it improves the game as much as it makes it a whole lot more frustrating.

Every so often you find vending machines that require you to scan a QR code on your mobile smartphone and play an online minigame in your browser. Again, these are essentially clones of popular casual games like Flappy Bird, Crossy Road or Clicker Heroes which in turn allow you to unlock shortcuts or earn a bit of extra cash on the side. This feels unique in the sense it incorporates real-world devices that affect your playthrough, but it does mean content is sealed behind the assumption you’re able to access this in the first place. If your internet’s down, the site domain expires or you don’t have a smartphone, that’s a big chunk of the game completely locked off to you.

In what may be a perfect metaphor for the games industry, there are dozens of toilets dotted around RegnantCorp that allow you to save and load from. Think of them as like the benches in Hollow Knight, except with more sewage. Dying isn’t a complete game over, though. Should you perish to a troublesome enemy, you’re able to cheat the system and quickly revive at the cost of half your remaining cash.

It becomes a question of whether you’d prefer to load your last save or carry on with a small punishment. Be warned, it can only be done for one time only until you find the next toilet, so it’s best not to abuse it when you can avoid to.

As an additional bonus, there’s an unlockable rogue-lite mode that switches out SuperEpic’s hand-crafted campaign for a procedurally generated one with randomly-placed rooms, enemies and upgrades. It’s here that you can let your hair down without the pressure of following a strictly specific route or defeating a tough boss. Although not as deep or innovative as other rogue-lites, it functions well enough as a worthy bonus for you to flex the skills you picked up during the regular five-six hour story.

While its visuals have a retro flair, the story is a clear riff on the modern video game environment with its abundance of monetisation and live services – but this is never used to the fullest potential. Are we really tackling the problems the games industry has? How bad is addiction and exploitation in the current atmosphere? The metaphors are obvious, yet it doesn’t engage with them below the surface level. Ultimately, SuperEpic is set in a world that feels like it should be saying something, but instead says nothing.

Even if SuperEpic isn’t the most coherent game, the whole package still works well. With so many different challenges, puzzles and secrets to discover, it’s a worthy evolution of the Metroidvania formula. Using your smartphone is a clever addition, provided you want to use it, while the exploration and combat feels fluid and responsive to where you’re itching to see what awaits you in the next room.

[Reviewed on Switch]