I stopped by the Cat Nigiri booth to test drive the game Necrosphere for the Nintendo Switch. Necrosphere is a Metroidvania style game where you play as Agent Terry Cooper, who gets shot in the line of duty protecting his partners, and gets sent to the Necrosphere. The Necrosphere could be describe as a heaven/hell type place where people go when they die regardless of if they did good things or bad during their life-span.
During gameplay you have two buttons on the Switch controller to choose from, the Lr and Rr. These are the only controls you have for your journey back to the living world/out of limbo. You will use a combination of these controls to jump through fire, bounce off bubbles, semi-wall jump and do all kinds of other commands. You will find upgrades like a pink leotard that allows you to jump and gloves that allow you do break bricks during your adventure but use them wisely. After you locate these upgrades, you will head back to what appears to be the start of the maze-like Necrosphere as you need the upgrades you find to traverse further in the maze.
While exploring, you will be able to find DVD’s hidden (20) throughout the Necrosphere and these are like trophies in the game. What I mean by that is the DVDs are really tough to get and it will feel like a major accomplishment if you get your hands on just one because you might not get another. Some of the jumps in the game are simple and then some of the maneuvers require precision timing. You wouldn’t think that would be the case for a game that relies on a two-button control system but it’s good to see since the game is challenging but not unreasonable. There are checkpoints during gameplay and you will be thankful for them at times since I mentioned that some of the jumps require pinpoint timing and with the checkpoint, you won’t have to go back too far in the level.
Another challenging feature is that there are little clones/demons of you at certain points in the level and you have to figure out how to get rid of them. That could range from running past them to having them run into balls of fire. More often, I found myself burning them with fire to get rid of them because I was too slow and I needed to make a certain move that the clone was catching up to me on.
The leotard for upgraded jumping was something I wasn’t expecting and I like surprises like that in games like this. During the demo, I found myself not wanting to stop playing and wanting to get to that next checkpoint and that’s a good sign. As I mentioned before Necrosphere in my opinion is challenging but not unfair. Usually in Metroidvania type games, it could feel like the game has it out to get the player but I didn’t feel that in Necrosphere and I wanted to help Terry Cooper get back to the Normalsphere, the world of the living!