Psychedelic indie games have been rapidly gaining momentum lately. The amazing The Path, the unusual And Yet It Moves, the mind-blowing Axel & Pixel… It is quite understandable that various small studios are trying to repeat the success of their already popular colleagues, in turn turning to the theme of a slightly shifted phase of life.
Developers from Pixelpickle Games in general, without further ado, they chose as the subject of their creativity the vision of a girl gone crazy, locked in a mental hospital. By the way, we’ve already seen something similar: the German adventure project Edna and Harvey: The Breakout was also about a child’s escape from a mental hospital.
Union of nightmare and delirium
And I would like to say that reality is Lylian Episode One: Paranoid Friendship intertwined with the nightmares of paranoid consciousness – but it’s not true. There’s no reality there. It’s just that the degree of delirium of what is happening varies from the state of “mild schizophrenia” to “roof, delicious marmalade roof with tentacles, ahh!».
The main character, a girl mercilessly abandoned by her parents to places that are not so normal, has really gone crazy. She loves donuts, fights with nurses and tries to find out what the authorities are really hiding under the guise of an innocent madhouse.
And it all begins, as usual, with an escape from the ward. The mysterious shadow frees Lillian – opens the door and unties the straitjacket. This shirt, by the way, plays an important role in the script: our little friend uses long sleeves as a formidable weapon. And she mercilessly destroys with them nurses, rat catchers, ape-like children – in a word, everyone who prevents her from moving on.
Gradually, the child realizes that such an ordinary-looking yellow house turns out to be actually something more. Several times on Lilian’s way she comes across a strange, huge man with a pipe – the ruler of hordes of rodents. The deeper the heroine gets, the stranger the mental hospital’s outbuildings look. In the end, the girl will have to defeat the real boss, after which we will be presented with a fact: the first episode is over. Please wait for the continuation.
By the way, the game is incredibly, indecently short even for the head of the series.
A true friend may be shabby, https://dream-jackpot-casino.co.uk/ dirty and dumb, but… “I still won’t leave him, because there are no others”.
Donuts as a source of global goodness
In fact Lylian – something between arcade, horror and… action. No, seriously, the little warrior even uses combat combinations in fights. She has three types of attacks: simple sleeve sealing, sleeve sealing with bouncing, and the same thing, but on the run. Moreover, the best result is achieved by alternating all three superpowers, which in practice results in convulsive calling of opponents. In general, everything is as always.
In between battles, Lilian explores the territory of the madhouse, which turns out to be not quite a madhouse. The girl is helped by her friends – the same shadow-liberator and a wordless but faithful bear cub named Bob, once assembled from scraps and scraps of other toys. If a shadow always appears suddenly and, like God out of the machine, extricates a child from the most unexpected situations, then the functions of a bear are much simpler: it crawls into ventilation holes and opens locked doors.
The rabbit hole as imagined by the game’s authors looks something like this. Well, you know, there haven’t been any repairs for a long time, funding has been cut.
Reality turns
However, Lillian’s main strength is not in Bob’s sleeves or paws, but in her imagination. The character has two basic indicators: health and happiness. With health, everything is clear: they beat me – I got sick, I sat in the corner – my health returned to normal. Happiness is a more subtle thing. A girl becomes happier in two cases: when she eats donuts and defeats enemies. If we manage to achieve complete mental and physical well-being, we gain access to special abilities to change the world around us. With a slight movement of the hand, the trousers turn… into complete psychedelia.
In the first episode, Lilian knows how to remake a boring reality either into a sunlit clearing over which a magical red ball flies, or into some kind of analogue of an underwater world where you can “swim” in the air. Why is all this needed?? To overcome obstacles, of course. For example, it is very convenient to fly over chasms on a ball. In cases where the air unit is “in the mood” to transport us.
The game inherited from the platformer only one scene with jumping over abysses that suddenly open along the way. The task is complicated by a monster crawling on its heels, from which it is advisable to escape. True, the monster moves slowly, holes appear underfoot in the same places, so this episode can be completed literally with one or two reboots.
In general, let’s admit it: the gameplay in Lylian constantly brings surprises. Even monotonous combat elements are not too tiring: the number of fights does not exceed standards compatible with the excitement.
Donuts sometimes give you the kind of high you never dreamed of eating mushrooms. Only works on crazy little girls, really.
The nurse as the apogee of world evil
Sometimes these indie studios are so good at masking lackluster graphics under the “author’s style” that you can’t complain. Of course, it would be great if the gameplay Lylian was designed as realistic, bright and touching as the introductory video. Compared to the luxurious prologue, the deliberately modest and simple two-dimensional video sequence in the main part of the arcade looks rather poor.
At the same time, we can’t say that the game lacks atmosphere. The art is unusual, the paintings of “altered consciousness” contrast very spectacularly with the general line of dirty gray hospital interiors. It is curious that all of Lilian’s enemies are emphatically tall, with elongated, narrow figures. This is what both nurses and rat catchers look like. Perhaps the authors wanted to hint at the idea of growing up embedded in the plot?
No, it’s unlikely. There is no idea in the plot, other than pure speculation on the topic of “crazy” and “glitches”. Yes, we understand, the openly stated madness of the main character gives the widest scope for manipulation with the game world. But if in the same The Path the delusional-strange part was subordinated to the general thought and therefore was perceived very harmoniously, then Lylian – this is madness for the sake of madness. And nothing else.
Lylian Episode One: Paranoid Friendship – controversial project. In the form in which we received the game today, this is a not uninteresting creation, which, nevertheless, is designed for a very narrow audience. Specifically – for lovers of psychedelics. Perhaps the following episodes will bring us an answer to the main question: what, exactly, was all this for??
Pros: organic atmosphere; enjoyable gameplay; original graphic solution.
Cons: secondary plot; some lack of ideas.
