Guacamelee (

2013

)

With video games, as with all things in life, it's important to keep a sense of perspective. Games are seldom a matter of life or death, or even of great significance. Even the most politically charged, the most culturally significant, and the most emotionally poignant examples of the media can only hope to reach the level of great art. For the most part, though, games offer a much-needed source of escapism, providing a distraction from the stresses and worries of life and perhaps a window into a better world. I fear that Guacamelee's lead designer, Augusto Quijano, despite turning out a game that is very much a light and fluffy piece of escapist entertainment, does not realize that. As, in an essay on why he created Guacamelee he sights the lack of Hispanic representation in games and says, “How can we stop putting migrant children in cages if we don’t believe they deserve heroic roles in video games?” This is an absurd claim in more ways than one, for starters, he's arguing against a straw-man as nobody of any significance to either society at large or the world of video games, in particular, has ever said that there should be no Hispanic video game heroes. Moreover, there is plenty of evidence to suggest that the representation of Latinos in video games is nowhere near as bad as he suggests, even if we just confine ourselves to the big budget AAA titles. There might be fewer Latino protagonists in relation to the number of European and Asian game protagonists, but I suspect this is just a byproduct of there being fewer Latino game developers or development studios based in majority Latino countries.

Yet these are only the most obvious way in which Quiano is mistaken, the more serious issue here is the weight he gives his creation. Here, he speaks of it as if his goofy game about luchadors learning wrestling moves from talking goats is going to right every wrong in the world and come up with a solution to the problem of borders and nations, an issue that has been with mankind since the time of agriculture. When in reality, the best it could hope to do would be to contribute, in some small way and years down the road, to people feeling less threatened by foreign cultures and influences. The sentiment expressed in his essay is so far from what Guacamelee is, and what its virtues are that it left me momentarily confused when I read it, as if I must have mixed this up with some other game and some other designer. There are two possibilities with Quijano's essay: either he is one of those people who have been so distressed by the election of President Trump, that he feels required to retroactively convert his previous work into a political protest, or he is a charlatan out for a quick buck. I suspect the later, because as a Canadian Quijano really isn't impacted in a significant way by Trump's immigration policy, and the ideas expressed in his essay are so rote and boilerplate that they seem to be not so much written from the heart as transcribed from the interchangeable late-night comedy shows. He touches on each of the most cited points, the separation of illegal immigrant children from their parents, Trumps awkwardly worded speech that from a grammatical point suggested all Mexicans were rapists (though in context its pretty obvious that he's only referring to a subset, as the next words out of his mouth refer to the notion that some are good people). The ideas in his essay are just so ham-fisted and idiotic that they only really make sense as a cynical attempt to drum up sales for a half-decade old game and its more recently released sequel. However, whether Quijano is cynically exploiting current politics to drum up sales or if he genuinely believes that Guacamelee will solve all the world problems is irrelevant, because the game is just a silly little Metroidvania with a nice art style and a lot of cool platforming challenges. It's not bad at all, but talking about it in the same breath as imprisoned immigrant children is just a stupid way to represent the game's charms.

The story follows an agave farmer named Juan, who after his prospective girlfriend is kidnapped by an undead bullfighter named Calca, finds a magical Luchador mask that gives him the power to save her. It's a concentration of stereotypes so dense, that until I read the lead designer's explanation for why he created Guacamelee, I assumed there was no way anyone who'd been in Mexico for more than a week was involved in the project. The game feels like going to a Mexican restaurant in Sheboygan WI, where all the decorations and waiters outfits are done up in as stereotypical a manner as possible in a vain attempt to distract from the fact that everyone who works there immigrated from South East Asia. It's such an over-the-top stab at authenticity that it comes back around the other way and begins to look fake. Add to this an art style rich meant to evoke the decorations and costumes of Día de Muertos and you have a game that is desperately afraid of having a single moment look “un-Mexican.” This is not necessarily a bad thing, particularly if you're not the sort who recoils in in instinctive horror from stereotypes, provided they are all done in good fun and not out of hatred. Sure, it may be a touch awkward at times, but the art is bright and distinctive, the characters are exciting and heroic, and luchadors are awesome.

The game follows the usual Metroidvania progression, with a focus on unlocking new abilities that will allow you to access previously inaccessible regions. There's the usual double jump, wall jump, and small form (here a transformation into a chicken taking the place of Samus' morph ball), but in addition to that all your offensive moves also somehow increase your mobility. The first move, a flying uppercut basically acts as a defacto double jump (later triple jump when you unlock the regular double jump) to your arsenal. The Flying dash kick is also useful for extending your jump a crucial couple of inches to reach a new platform. Less impressive is the fact that each special move can be used to shatter a specific type of colored block, which is the baseline level for all Metroidvania progression and seems downright lazy when compared to the elegant way you can use the increases in mobility granted by each new move to access new areas and items. The system works wonderfully for the platforming challenges, and the controls are so tight that the game can crank up the difficulty for some optional areas without becoming frustrating. Indeed some of the late-game optional platform areas are giving off Super Meat Boy [2011] vibes with their plethora of hazards and infuriating challenges. It was tough but never unfair, and for veteran fans of platformers, there is a certain thrill of making your way through such a grueling gauntlet of challenges. The difficulty of the required platforming sections scales well (unless you intentionally seek out the hardest optional zones as quickly as you can), with the jumps, dodges, and dashes getting progressively more difficult as you make your way through the game. Most of the time, failing a platforming challenge will just pop you right back to the start ready to try again, but in a couple of annoying moments, the game will kill you outright and kick you back to your last save. This happens infrequently, but when it does its a real pain and makes you wonder why some platforming segments are treated so differently from the others. Personally, I suspect it was a design oversight, though I'm surprised that such a bug would persist not only through the Gold Edition version of the game but into the Super Turbo Championship release.

The controls are tight and precise in the platforming segments, but since all your moves are designed to help you traverse difficult jumps and tricky platforms, they are often less useful when it comes to the game's actual combat. Baring a few precise challenges that require some careful dodges and rapid-fire attacks, combat is generally a mess, being more akin to the dust-cloud fistfights in the old Warner Brothers cartoons than a comprehensible fight. I often found myself losing track of my character in the fray and taking a few hits as a result, not that it counted for much as for the most part the combat was fairly trivial. Most enemies have slow attacks, are individually weak, and grant a not inconsiderable life-bonus upon defeating them. The hard mode might offer more of a challenge but since its the kind of hard mode you have to beat the game on regular first to unlock I doubt anyone playing it will have much trouble dealing with it except in a few rare circumstances. Indeed, the only battle that was memorable for its difficulty was the final boss, who took me numerous tries to beat and even when I finally cleared it I was left with a life-bar that would compare favorably to a needle. Indeed, the combat is so unremarkable and the platforming so exquisite that I'm surprised Guacamelee focuses about equally on both elements, surely it would be a better idea to front-load onto the platforming challenges.

There's also a bit of dual world game-play where your character phases into an out of the world of the dead, which is mostly used to add another layer of difficulty to the platform and combat sections (IE certain enemies can only be hit in the world of the dead and the world of the living respectively). In this goal, it succeeds, but there's a minor problem with this mechanic, both the world of the living and the world of the dead are a mess of neon colors and day of the dead inspired characters. Consequently, after shifting between the two worlds four or five times to get to the top of a difficult area, I honestly had no idea which world I was in. The two worlds stand out better in the towns, but only because the NPCs are regular people in the world of the living and skeletons in the world of the dead. For this mechanic to really work as intended, a whole different art style would have to be used in the world of the dead, something that would be instantly distinguishable from the regular game.

The game spends an awful amount of effort trying to be funny, unfortunately, it is employing the uniquely unfunny Canadian school of humor I have come to despise after run-ins with it during Celeste [2018]. How bad is it? Well, the game seems to think that chickens are funny for some reason and has them sprinkled everywhere as comic relief as if we're supposed to burst into laughter at the sight of the feathered bipeds. It's same the insipid “random” humor of the early 2000s, the kind I've been hoping fervently since middle school would just quietly go away. One recurring gag is a great example of the problem with Guacamelee's humor: Throughout the game, your character will encounter statues, built to resemble the upgrade statues in Super Metroid [1994]. When I first saw one, I thought 'oh that's a nice reference, better smash the orb and grab whatever upgrade is here', only to see my character destroy the entire statue with a single punch. At which point, an old man appeared and admonished me for breaking his statue before inexplicably offering to teach me a new wrestling move. This gag is supposed to be funny because it subverts my expectations of a Metroidvania game, but it doesn't really do that. I expected to get an upgrade from the statue, and I did, the only part I didn't plan for the was the old geezer lecturing me in the middle. Still, if this had happened only once it would have perhaps been a mildly amusing joke. However, this same gag is repeated almost word for word for every upgrade or wrestling move in the game, and after the first time, the effective humor value of seeing my expectations subverted is effectively nil. Repeated attempts to subvert expectations only establish new kinds of expectations, and consequently each time the same joke is used the humor gets less and less effective (not that we were dealing with Airplane! (1980) to start with here). A better approach would have been to cast a wider net and have each upgrade be a reference to the great Metroidvanias of the past, while the humor value would be nothing special it would at least give us an amusing reference to be on the lookout for.

The game was certainly worth what I paid for it, but then again I got it for free as a Steam giveaway. Obviously, it is outclassed in every conceivable way by Hollow Knight [2017], from the challenge to the art, to the word-design, to the humor (Hollow Knight [2017] seldom attempts being funny but when it does the jokes actually land, see the chatting bugs in the sauna who get shy when you approach for a great example of this), to the story and characters. But if that is something that is going to stop you from getting a game, there probably isn't a Metroidvania on the market that would satisfy you, at least until Silksong comes out. The game is on the short side for its genre, but I found that works to its advantage, as were it much longer it probably would have devolved into a repetitive slog (the humor was grating at 8 hours in, I can't imagine how unbearable it would be at 40). I didn't 100% the game, but I did go out of my way to backtrack and find as many of the collectibles and upgrades that I could without resorting to a using a guide. If you find yourself craving a Metroidvania then you could do a lot worse than Guacamelee.