PAX South Spotlight: Infernax
I had a chance to play Infernax from Berzerk Studio, and oh man am I excited! In short it's an action platformer with minor character progression elements and an open map to explore. The game is heavily inspired by Zelda 2, as you buy upgrades in a town, and speak to villagers in-between dungeon diving.
Before continuing, note that the game is still in active development, and far from release. Things I mention in this article might change by release (more so than usual with these spotlight articles).
As far as the story goes, you play an exhausted crusader returning home after doing some bad things. Unfortunately, some evil force has defiled your home, causing the dead to walk and other evil things. Thus you set out to cleanse the land.
Visually the game is horrifically grotesque and beautiful at the same time. The game is presented in a loving 8-bit art style, reminiscent of old school NES games. You'll eventually run into a cut scene of sorts, with highly detailed artwork, as seen below.
The main game loop involves running around and smacking foes with your mace. Enemies drop experience and gold. Experience is used to level up, improving one of your traits: maximum health, maximum mana (used for spells you acquire), or weapon damage. You'll use gold to purchase other upgrades as you progress.
Combat is intuitive and responsive. Pressing the attack button doesn't result in any delay before the attack actually occurs, and there is very little downtime between attacks, allowing you to spam the button. Your character moves at a fairly quick pace, and your opponents generally move in predictable ways. If you take your time and observe your foes, you can generally get the drop on them easily. Overall, combat felt great!
Until you see a huge monster, then all that confidence goes out the door.
Infernax is a love letter to the 8-bit era and 80's metal album covers (seriously, this game just looks "metal"). As mentioned earlier, the game is still in active development at this time, so we're going to being waiting a bit. Regardless you can wishlist the game on Steam now, although you should expect a Switch release as well.