What’s more, if you sandwich an enemy between two of your heroes, you will double up your attack. Combat is turn-based, which heightens the general sense of scheming, and, in a sublime touch, you’re guaranteed a critical hit if you strike a foe from behind (with even greater damage if you are on higher ground). And there is a particular Thronesian thrill in the mechanics. Between battles, we’re shown a map of the world, laid out like a board game, with kingdoms clicking into place, like that show’s intricate title sequence. I was reminded of Game of Thrones, while playing Project Triangle Strategy. Against this fine-grained detail, the characters are crude and smudged, as though they were struggling for definition amidst the haze of history. The top-down viewpoint has the pleasing effect of blending background details into the fore I spent one battle, on a bridge, swinging the camera around to catch the glitter on the water below, as it rose and rang through the air. The lighting is crisp, and the edges of the screen are darkened with a smoky brown gloom, like a bonfire on an autumn day. What is that atmosphere? Like its spiritual predecessor, Octopath Traveler (which, in a similarly slippery lack of commitment, went by “ Project Octopath Traveler,” before release), the new game favours isometric 3-D environments. “However, we encourage you to enjoy the atmosphere of the game world.” “You may find it difficult to fully grasp the events happening around you,” a message at the beginning of the demo warns.
Rarely do acts of savagery border on the cute. This was an odd sight: 2-D sprites bobbing on a royal balcony, in front of a baying crowd a blurry flash of sword and a screen bathed in red and fading to black. Their saltiness springs, as far as I could tell, from the closure of a mine, and concludes with a pixelated beheading. The invaders, led by a man called-I kid you not-Gustadolph, are seizing the kingdom in the name of Aesfrost (which sounds like a prestige air conditioning brand). “What mummery is this!?” he asks, breaching a throne room in mid-usurp. The demo begins in chapter six, by which time the tale has thoroughly tangled itself around Serenoa, lord and heir of House Wolffort, a stripling with a mop of chestnut hair and a touchingly archaic choice of words. Unfortunately, as the first ten minutes make clear, noble aims often go astray-or, worse still, they can stale and curdle into malice. Over the weekend, I went into the demo with a noble aim: to bestow the rightful designation on Square Enix’s RPG. Could Nintendo be trying to feather the game with the same quirkiness as that of Untitled Goose Game, whose name alone practically ensured it top billing in 2019? Perhaps Nintendo hopes that the “Project TRIANGLE STRATEGY™” name will angle its way acutely into our hearts, and, by the time release day looms, it will drop the brackets, ditch the trademark sign, and stick an exclamation mark on the end for good measure.
Or, as it appears there, “Project TRIANGLE STRATEGY™ (working title) Debut Demo.” Worthy of note are: (1) the trademark symbol, suggesting that what is there is worth litigiously protecting, (2) the capital letters, as if greatness had been stumbled upon and needed shouting from the rooftops, (3) undercutting all that, the admission, whispered in brackets and lacking the conviction of a single capital letter, that the title is subject to change-the ink of its potency still wet-and (4) the notion of a “debut demo,” which is either a tautology (given that demos are, traditionally speaking, a debut by definition) or an implication, that there will be more demos to come.Īs befits the plot, the title is like a land-grabbing monarch, hogging half my laptop screen, and I wondered, when I first loaded it up, if it wasn’t an attempted coup. If you wish to survey a rich panorama of the many problems that await the namers of games, check out the Nintendo eShop listing for Project Triangle Strategy.
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