Axiom Verge and Environmental Station Alpha are two
independent games which were each developed
primarily by a single person
and released within one month of each other.
While it's not surprising to see 
them share some similarities
considering how they were both
heavily influenced by Metroid,
what did strike me was how different their weaknesses
and strengths were despite that shared inspiration.
I think it's worth highlighting what they
did better in comparison to each other.
So in this video I'll be contrasting their approaches
to various aspects of their design,
which will hopefully give us
a better appreciation of them both.
The first immediately striking difference
between the two games will be the graphics.
Both use relatively simplistic
pixelated sprites,
but Axiom Verge has a much higher
level of detail than Station Alpha.
While Axiom Verge looks like
an overclocked snare style,
Station Alpha looks like it's caught in some
weird limbo between early console generations.
If this is your first time seeing Station Alpha
it might be pretty tough on your eyes --
the extremely low effective resolution can make it
difficult to parse even simple details at first
but it does get better once you settle
into a proper play session.
Even so, the graphics don't serve the art direction
as well as they do in Axiom Verge.
It turns out that this kind of sprite art is actually pretty
good at replicating the incomprehensible
borderline surreal nature of H.R. Giger's art
where Axiom Verge draws much of its inspiration.
There's enough detail
to show complex machinery,
but not enough to clearly
discern its purpose.
Some of the effects in Station Alpha
can be charming in their own simplicity
like the twinkling stars
in the outdoor scenes
but for the most part the visuals
are excessively low fidelity.
There would be more to be gained by increasing
the resolution than would be lost.
It seems clear which game
had more effort to put into its assets,
but when it comes to utilizing those assets
Station Alpha actually does a better job.
Take a look
at this scene here:
the cave has clearly defined walls and floors
with a solid line denoting the play area;
beyond the boundary the sprites are differed
so the walls gradually fade away.
This is a common
technique in 2D games
which simulates a sort of awareness of the environment
where only the surfaces can be seen
and the rest is inferred.
It's useful for the gameplay because
traversable areas are made clear
but it also stops the scene from
becoming to visually noisy.
Comparing with Axiom Verge and the problem here
becomes immediately apparent:
the sprites are often arranged in such a way
that the lighter ones denote the boundaries
but the outskirts
never fade away;
most rooms are also made up
entirely of 90-degree angles
which robs them
of some personality.
Name a room in Axiom Verge, and I
have a hard time picturing its layout.
Name a room in Station Alpha, and I 
get a clearer image in my mind
because it has a certain shape to it.
The whole concept of these games revolves
around exploring a large seamless space
so this can actually
have gameplay ramifications.
When individual rooms
are more memorable,
It's easier to get a feel for
the map as a whole.
Interestingly, you could make a similar comparison
between Super Metroid and Metroid 1.
Maybe that's what Thomas
Happ was going for,
but it actually looks worse than Metroid 1 in places
where different tiles are thrown in at random.
It's an understandable temptation to
want to break up the repetition,
but at times it ends up
looking like a mess.
This is especially disappointing
because the use of light and shadow on
some of the larger objects is remarkable.
Perhaps It's unfair to expect a similar
level of quality across the whole game
and you could say that this clarity serves
the art direction in a sense anyway.
Giger's style tends to overwhelm the eye with
so much detail it loses its definition,
to an extent Axiom Verge accomplishes
that so it could be worse --
it's just difficult to enjoy playing a game in
the middle of it sometimes.
A comparison between the music of
the two games is quite similar.
Axiom Verge soundtrack has more
varieties of centipede sleeve,
a longer running time and even
some distorted vocal effects.
But there's something to be said for
the simple ambient Substation Alpha.
There's an irony here because Station
Alpha has a more relaxing soundtrack
but is by far the more
challenging of the two.
Calm music paired with difficult
gameplay is a beautiful combination,
two things that
balance each other out.
It also helps that it goes
especially well
with the relatively slow paced exploration
these games tend to focus on.
That said, it's not as though
Axiom Verge music is bad -- far from it,
it has catchy eerie melodies
and it's wobbly pulsing
since captured a disturbing nature of
traces new reality quite well.
Part of this comes from the
sprites themselves
which have their animation synced to
the beat of the rhythm in each area.
It's a subtle effect, but it helps to accentuate both
the soundtrack and the environments.
Whichever visuals or music you prefer,
it's clear that Axiom Verge is a more
modern take on things,
while Station Alpha is firmly
rooted in the past.
It even uses a 4:3 viewport resulting in black bars on
the sides of widescreen displays.
Likely a result of engine limitations
but dissapointing nonetheless.
As annoying as it is to see a large portion of the screen
wasted, even this can't be considered an objective flaw
since there's no guarantee that displays will
continue to be widescreen in the future.
Maybe at some point everyone will start using perfectly
square TVs or some other new standard
where Station Alpha will actually fare better than
the widescreen games being produced today.
Stranger things have happened, but we have to
admit that looks incredibly unlikely.
It's a lot more sensible to design games with
current display standards in mind.
That's exactly the kind of axiom Axiom Verge follows
being presented in glorious widescreen
which makes the environments field
that much more expansive
and gives the player more room to scope
out and respond to threats.
By far the best enhancement, however, 
is the way it zooms out during bosses
so that even the most Gargantuan enemy
can be easily seen in their entirety.
And its most extreme, this ends up displaying about
4 times as much stuff as usual.
Not the kind of thing that could be done by a game
which is continually taxing the hardware.
This is a criminally underutilized property of
these retro inspired games
maybe because many of them
are poorly optimized.
So, I want to take a moment to
emphasize this.
It's only because Axiom Verge is usually
running with so much spare overhead
that it's able to dramatically ramp
things up when necessary.
This helps to justify the simplistic pixel art beyond
just aesthetic or budgetary concerns.
If the graphics were rich with detail, then zooming out
might make it difficult to follow the action.
To put it simply, Axiom Verge takes
advantage of Hardware advances
to present a retro inspired game with
a genuinely modern sheen.
Its polished, and it serves the gameplay really
well during boss fights.
As for the bosses themselves,
they leave something to be desired.
Most are complete pushover which mainly
consists them standing in place,
hammering away at a weak point, and occasionally
moving slightly to avoid some projectiles.
The final boss inverts this by sending out
a barrage of awkward attacks,
so that the go-to-strategy is just a tank hits
and burst it down as quickly as possible.
Station Alpha on the other hand is packed full of
challenging unique fights that always feel fair.
Yes, some attacks might catch
you off-guard the first time,
but everything is telegraphed about
as well as you could hope for.
Damage can always be avoided
and players are expected to do so as much as possible
before they'll be allowed to advance.
While some might take several
attempts to overcome,
it leads to a genuine sense of
accomplishment once they're defeated.
There's a few contributing factors why
the bosses of Station Alpha
turned out better than
the ones in Axiom Verge.
Firstly it comes down to a difference
in their health systems.
In Axiom Verge you start with 2 pips and
confined up to a maximum of 15,
a 7.5 times increase.
In Station Alpha you start with 10 and
confined up to a maximum of 13,
a 3-fold increase.
It's worth noting that
Axiom Verge
is actually relatively conservative in terms of
health upgrades, all things considered.
Super Metroid has 14 additional energy
tanks and 4 reserve tanks, and 18 times increase.
So, Axiom Verge has less
than half as many.
Station Alpha, again, has
half as few as Axiom Verge.
The first health upgrade in Station Alpha is
given for free, bringing HP up to 14,
and later tanks have diminishing returns, so the general
range of health is even smaller than 10 to 30.
In actuality It's more likely that players will
have somewhere between 14
and 27 health by the time
they finish most bosses.
All in all it can be assumed that a player
going into a Station Alpha boss
will have a pretty small health pool
which naturally leads to tighter balancing.
If there's a chance the player is going to walk
into the fight and be killed in two hits,
then you have to make sure those
hits can be reliably dodged.
Just to be clear, a restrictive health system isn't
a prerequisite for good bosses.
Super Metroid's bosses are at least as good
or better than the ones in Axiom Verge.
But a well-balanced health system is a
good way of keeping the designer honest.
Secondly, it's worth pointing out that although the
robot in Station Alpha uses it gone.
Mechanically It acts as a melee
weapon instead of arranged one.
Upgrades pushed that range out further over
the course of a playthrough
but it always forces players to put themselves in danger
whenever they want to deal damage.
Axiom Verge's vast array of
weapons offer a lot of variety:
some of them are quite imaginative, some of them
are typical defined, and some are enjoyable to use.
It seems no matter what your
preference, there's it gone for you,
but addition only goes so far --
sometimes subtraction is key.
No matter which gun you prefer, tries will
always have access to the basic blaster
which allows him to keep most enemies
and bosses at screens length.
That doesn't mean the player is
completely out of harm's way.
Naturally enough the bosses views
ranged attacks of their own
but it does mean you're unlikely to find that satisfaction of
weaving close to the enemy to deliver the final blow.
At least, not without some sort of
self-imposed challenge anyway.
Lastly, movement is another reason why
bosses in Station Alpha shine --
they capitalize more on
the acquired upgrades.
When you get the double jump, you're
expected to use it to dodge attacks.
The dash and vertical dash are put to 
similarly good use later on.
There's a gradual increase in complexity which
avoids overwhelming the player
while slowly pushing them to
do more each time.
It helps that the upgrades themselves are more
responsive than the ones in Axiom Verge.
The hookshot is present
in both games,
but the one in Station Alpha
puts the order to shame.
On the surface, the Axiom Verge
version is actually more fully featured:
you can shorten or lengthen the grapple, dangle in
place, and even swing several times before letting go.
Station Alpha's hook shock carries the
player's momentum though
and it's simple one swing limit
just makes it easier to use.
You can smoothly traverse
entire rooms with it
and even utilize your speed to carry you places that
might seem impossible at first.
A similar comparison could be made
between the dashes of both games.
The final version of Axiom Verge
technically has more uses,
but Station Alpha just
requires a single button press,
whereas Axiom Verge has a weird double tap setup,
which not only makes it awkward to use precisely,
but also means it's possible to
accidentally when you didn't want to.
This corridor of spikes, which has to be navigated
entirely by dashing, is a daunting challenge at first,
but after making it to the end I found I could repeat the
entire sequence again with surprising regularity.
A similar setup in Axiom Verge would be an unmitigated
disaster just because of the control scheme.
I had a whole diatribe here about how I thought the
controls should have been laid out
but I'll spare you since there's many 
valid answers to that problem.
The important point is that even
if you can remap buttons,
you can't improve the aiming or dashes because of
the way they're built into the game.
Station Alpha has fewer actions, but
because the controls work perfectly,
the bosses and environments are
designed to utilize them to their fullest.
That said, the upgrades you do find in
Station Alpha are mostly pretty generic.
A double jump, a hook-shot and
a dash are all well-worn material.
Axiom Verge is considerably more
imaginative in this regard.
The ability to phase through walls
is a particularly brilliant Inclusion
because it recaptures a feeling that
many games in this style have missed.
When the earlier Metroid games were released, nobody
had any idea what the upgrades would be,
so when you got the grapple beam or morph bombs
that caused you to see the world in a new way.
Areas you had previously ignored were suddenly accessible
in a way you maybe didn't quite expect.
That feeling returns in Axiom Verge,
booting it up for the first time you're not
gonna be watching out for single block walls
waiting for the moment you
can phase through them.
Instead you'll see some collectables scattered
around with no idea how to reach them,
then, after gaining the ability, it 
suddenly clicks into place.
The way you see the world changes,
those walls stick out more,
you suddenly realize how many of 
them you've obliviously walked past.
This might be Axiom
Verge's greatest strength
and it's an unfortunate rarity since other developers
often play it too safe with upgrades.
There's a sense of discovery you can't quite replicate by
giving players the same power-ups in every game.
The glitch gun is even more imaginative
with many enemies having unique and interesting
effects that can be utilized in a variety of ways.
It's only downside is that it requires a lot of
experimentation to utilize properly,
but you could say that reflects the exploratory
nature of the rest of the game.
In spite of its inventiveness,
perhaps the biggest revelation and all of
Axiom Verge is actually what it lacks.
Anytime I start playing a game like this,
 the first question on my mind is:
''When am i going to
get the double jump?''
Station alpha played exactly to my
expectations on this one,
although to its credit -- It gets the double
jump out of the way as early as possible.
Axiom Verge goes down a
different route entirely.
Instead of a double jump you
get a drone shot upgrade
which provides similar functionality
but with a lot more versatility.
It would have been so easy to
include a double-jump anyway.
Nobody would complain about
another shiny bauble to collect
so it's respectable that it wasn't just
thrown in there for the sake of it.
You can certainly levy some complaints that Axiom
Verge's identity is too closely tied to Metroid,
even the lack of a double jump
could be construed that way,
but for the most part it does a wonderful job of
creating a distinct set of power-ups
even compared to other games
in this quasi-genre.
Another strengths of Axiom Verge, partially
thanks to those unique abilities is,
is that progress tends to be gated in a
more natural and engaging way.
To be fair, Station Alpha does a good
job of this with its grappling hook too.
In both of these games you're free to try hooking
wherever you want, usually with success.
This beats the hell out of being restricted to predefined
grapple points that tell you where and when to use it.
That said, Station Alpha does fall
into that trap with its dash upgrades.
Once you get the dash move, you can
make your way past red blocks.
But there's no reason for those red blocks to be
there other than to get in your way.
And whenever you see them, you immediately know
they exist solely to be dashed past.
In a way, It's not really any different from
getting a red key card or something.
Axiom Verge doesn't display
these things so obviously.
It's up to you to keep a careful
eye on the scenery
and identify areas where you
might want to use a certain ability.
Shortly after getting the phase code for the first time
I came to this dead-end on the surface,
thought I was blocked, and actually turned around for a little while before remembering I could just go through it.
It was a moment of idiocy on my part but I'm
incredibly glad the game let me make that mistake.
Phasing through that wall was all the more cathartic
because it was up to me to connect the dots.
That gradual exploration is the central pillar of both
games which naturally results in some backtracking.
A unique appeal of Metroid style games is
eventually getting to explore those areas
that were tantalizingly out
of reach before.
Even so, it's no surprise that many similar games are
for war points in an attempt to curb tedium.
It's commendable that Axiom Verge refuses to
rely on the easy answer of teleportation,
but the massive tunnel is still a relatively
uninteresting solution to the problem.
Since there's no challenge
involved here,
It's more or less mechanically equivalent to
having a teleporter at each end anyway.
Station Alpha has a more engaging system whereby
accomplishing certain objectives
will activate additional enemies making
previous areas more dangerous.
These fresh challenges are placed in some of
the highest traffic areas,
taking much of the sting out of backtracking
while still preserving the appeal.
Unfortunately, this great implementation is undermined
a little by the inclusion of teleporters anyway.
As expected, both games reward exploration with
pickups, health upgrades, and story related items
that flesh out the history of the world.
Both games even feature multiple endings
based on how much exploring you do.
Station Alpha really sticks out here because
after the first ending opens up,
the exploration starts to change from being action
focused to more puzzle based.
It's impressive just how many areas are hidden next to
previously well explored locales,
but following a bunch of obtuse sometimes
ambiguous clues to find an ex breadcrumb
is a dramatic shift
in gameplay.
In theory there's nothing
wrong with this,
but it's the kind of thing that players just won't be expecting
because of how the rest of the game plays out.
It can be difficult to adjust your mindset when you've seen
enough to think you were basically finished already.
At times these puzzles are so difficult that it feels almost
more like a community focused challenge.
If nothing else, at least this abrupt turn makes Station
Alpha incredibly memorable because it's so unexpected.
This is the kind of thing independent
games really excel at --
taking risks some people will love at
the cost of alienating others.
There's an admirable amount of work
gone into these later sections,
epecially considering how
well hidden they are,
but It could have been
framed a lot better.
It's a sad reality that when a game has multiple endings,
we expect one of them to be the good ending
or at the very least the true ending.
Station Alpha box this trend:
once the poor little robot sets
foot on the station -- its doomed.
But there's no way to know that until you go
all the way down the rabbit hole.
When you get the first ending and realize there's
more -- you might feel as though
you haven't really beaten the game because
you haven't seen the good ending yet.
This is the problem.
The postgame content of Station Alpha was almost
certainly intended to be bonus material
just for those players who really
enjoy that sort of stuff.
But because you don't get
a good ending before it,
It feels like something that
everyone is supposed to go through.
You could say that this is more a problem with player
expectations than the game itself,
but it still feels as though Station Alpha pushes
too many boundaries at once.
The majority of players just aren't going to be willing or
able to go through all of this themselves,
so a satisfying cutoff point before it would have
let them close the book on their adventure
and be reasonably content.
To its credit, the post-game of Station
Alpha is such a descent into weirdness
that in a sense it beats
Axiom Verge at its own game.
Axiom Verge deserves praise for
crafting a world that seems truly alien
but it looks so strange right from the very start that it
struggles to find some kind of progression.
Station Alpha with it's almost cutesy take on Metroid
bloose into a false sense of security
before ratcheting up the madness.
By the end, it goes all-out
horror more than once
capturing the feeling of stumbling across some ancient
dangerous force that was better left alone.
As engrossing as this can be, the plot
itself is pretty threadbare.
A game like this doesn't necessarily
need an interesting story,
but Axiom Verge manages to have
one without feeling intrusive.
Character interactions gradually
reveal more about the situation
but are also sparse and brief enough 
not to become a nuisance.
It only has marginally more
text in Station Alpha
while managing to convey a much
more rich sense of history.
Optional logs contain conversations
between unseen characters,
oblique references
to past events
and tease subjects like quantum immortality,
a brain-in-a-vat, and technological worship.
It all seems relevant and it's enough to spark the
sort of conspiracy theories
that will keep fans talking as long as there's someone
listening or until a sequel elaborates further.
So, while Station Alpha's unexpected descent into the
unknown is more engaging moment-to-moment,
Axiom verge tends to linger
in the mind afterwards.
That about wraps things up, but
before my closing thoughts
I would like to point out that as much as these
games are great in their own ways
they have at least one
mistake in common.
Both rely on hidden areas behind
otherwise normal-looking walls.
Off course, the secret areas
should be difficult to find
but the problem is -- as soon as you
have one place like this
the player doesn't know how
many more there are,
so they're inclined to start checking
every wall that looks mildly suspicious.
Axiom Verge is the
worst of the two for this,
since the lab coat addressed disruptor and drill
could all conceivably reveal buried secrets
which makes it even more
tedious to check each one
but it remains a problem in
Station Alpha as well.
To be fair, the both designers is a
true catch-22 situation of game design.
So many games have relied on this trick,
that players are practically conditioned to
look for secret areas in this way.
So you could argue if the player is going to
waste time doing stuff like this anyway,
then you might as well
reward them for it.
Maybe it's worse to check every
wall and find nothing,
but I think for going these kinds of secrets entirely would
have a huge benefit by allowing players
to stop worrying about it on
subsequent playthroughs.
The save rooms of Axiom Verge are evidence that
this kind of knowledge can be liberating.
As far as I'm aware, there's absolutely 
nothing hidden in any of these rooms.
So, the next time you play --
keep that in mind
and notice what a relief it is not to
have to check any of those corners.
Now imagine that applied
to the whole game.
To be clear, i'm not advocating
against secrets entirely.
Just that this method of hiding behind completely
normal looking terrain leads to a lot of disruption.
At times during this comparison that almost sounded
like these two games are polar opposites.
But in reality -- they share
a lot of the same DNA...
...or whatever the game design 
equivalent of DNA is.
D- DNA is just code, so...
But I can't say 'code' because they don't
actually share the same code.
So... they showed they have a lot of
the same 'metaphorical DNA'...
...not 'actual DNA' because
they're games I know that.
Okay, so don't say that.
Anyway.
When you summarize it -- it boils down
to some simple statements.
Station Alpha is a more primitive title
but makes better use of what it's got.
Axiom Verge doesn't reach all its potential
but it's more ambitious and imaginative.
Their strengths and weaknesses
happen to overlap in so many ways,
it seems possible that some future game
could inherit the best of both.
Hopefully these developers and others can learn
from the examples both games provide for each other.
Even though they might be
flawed in different ways,
we're lucky to have them carrying
the Metroid torch so adeptly.
Both of these games show that there's still plenty of
room for this sub-genre to grow.
There's a lot of exploring still left to do.
