Scratching That Itch: Visual Out

This is the two hundred twenty-fifth entry in the Scratching That Itch series, wherein I randomly select and write about one of the 1741 games and game-related things included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. The Bundle raised $8,149,829.66 split evenly between the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and Community Bail Fund, but don’t worry if you missed it. There are plenty of ways you can help support the vital cause of racial justice; try here for a start. Lastly, as always, you may click on images to view larger versions.

Our two hundred twenty-fifth random selection from the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality has manifested from some sort of operating system glitch. It’s Visual Out, by madameberry (AKA Madame Berry Games), and its tagline in the bundle reads:

Broken. Abandoned. Replaced.

This one is all about dusty digital entities.

Visual Out is a Metroidvania, as was our 218th random selection (and first for year 6 of Scratching That Itch), Aerannis. And while both use the traditional 2D platformer format, they are otherwise rather different. Where Aerannis is more of a story-driven affair, sending players to specific places within its futuristic version of the city of Plovdiv at appropriate times, Visual Out is very much about free exploration of an intricate world. It has a map consisting of square and rectangular rooms connected to each other with doors, immediately recognizable from genre classics such as Super Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Players control a vaguely humanoid figure as they explore a digital environment within a computer, and contend with a mysterious, self-aware adversary.

Even disregarding the plastic frame of a CRT monitor around the edges of the screen, the computerized world that Visual Out depicts is clear. The screen is grainy and indistinct, each explorable area largely monochrome. Neutral and hostile entities wander these places, but they don’t resemble anything from our physical world. There are wireframe spheres, damaging to touch. Floating… flowers? … surrounded by rings and sector arcs. Some sort of constellation of points, which fires energy orbs at the player. Only a few appear to be digital replicas of something real, like the semi-dragonflies that move around dropping tiny damage spheres, or the jellyfish-like creatures that can serve as platforms. The environments, however, are a mixture of digital and mechanical. Backgrounds might feature vector graphics or flickering symbols and pixels, but the walls and floors are often metallic, and there are doors that swish and slide open, cameras that pan and track the player, wires dangling from the ceiling, lasers that electrify the floor. All of these details — plus an excellent original synthy soundtrack from Abstraction — set the scene wonderfully.

In true Metroidvania fashion, players will explore and acquire new abilities, each of which can be upgraded once later on. Most of these aid in traversal, letting players take new paths that weren’t possible before. Visual Out’s world is not that large, but it is very dense, packed with things to find and obstacles to overcome. Players who enjoy exploring and slowly understanding and mastering virtual spaces will enjoy the world design on display here. Unfortunately, my explorations were marred by several issues that hold Visual Out back from a wholehearted recommendation.

First, the controls feel a bit clunky, a problem that Visual Out shares with Aerannis. The humanoid protagonist moves and stops instantly, without any momentum or weight to its motions. Locations often have lots of uneven, blocky terrain that forces constant jumping in order to get anywhere. Players will eventually collect six different special abilities, but only three can be used at any given time, assigned to one of three action keys from the menu/map screen. Since some abilities are used more often than others, I found myself keeping those equipped and constantly swapping out just one or two buttons for different abilities, and then forgetting which ones I had assigned and activating the wrong things at the wrong times. Worse, many of those abilities consume a charge when used, and until players have found a few upgrades to their maximum charge capacity, it takes ages to regenerate a charge to use the ability again.

Even assigning the keyboard controls in the first place is awkward: Visual Out’s options menu includes control bindings, but I thought I would use the arrow keys to navigate those bindings and select which one I wanted to change. Not so. It expects players to go through every single control in sequence, pressing the key they wish to use for it. Trying to use the arrow keys to navigate the list just assigned the arrow keys to other things, and could easily have made the entire game unresponsive. Fortunately I caught this and didn’t confirm the rebindings, but it seems at least one other player ran afoul of this and was left unable to navigate the menus to fix the problem. Oh, and while we’re discussing the options menu, I had to adjust the text speed option immediately, because the default setting sees the antagonist’s taunts fly by much faster than anyone could be expected to read them. In short, much of Visual Out feels poorly optimized for a smooth player experience.

On top of that, the world design can feel punishingly obtuse. Players can check the map at any time, but they can’t see their current location. That is only shown when visiting one of the save rooms. I’m guessing that Madame Berry Games were trying to make exploration more challenging, and encourage players to make their own mental maps. But it just annoyed me. Even if I could see my current location on the map, it wouldn’t help that much, because one-way paths and progress-gating doors abound, none of which are indicated on the map. There are even occasional power switches that toggle power to certain things across the entire world. This can change which paths are open, turning them from two-way paths to one-way paths or even blocking (or opening) them completely. Sometimes, just getting somewhere that looks like it’s a few rooms away on the map requires a convoluted path to a power switch before circling back from a different direction.

At one point, I was convinced that I’d trapped myself and would be unable to finish the game. I had returned to an earlier area to look for clues and other secrets, but then realized I couldn’t exit the way I came in because it was a one-way path. And I couldn’t leave the way I did the first time, because that went through the boss area, and the boss doors would no longer open now that I’d defeated it. I even reached out to Madame Berry Games about it, concerned I’d found a bug, but then I managed to find a secret passage that let me out. I might have had more confidence in the design if I hadn’t encountered a bunch of crashes as well, typically — maddeningly — when entering a new area. These were sometimes reproducible, but not consistently enough to prevent me from progressing. Still, I wondered if they might be caused by going somewhere I wasn’t supposed to be able to reach yet. I don’t think they were, now. But Visual Out is tricky enough to navigate that I wondered if it might suffer from some unrecoverable sequence breaking.

In short, I was often annoyed as I wandered Visual Out’s world, trying to find where to go next. But as I stubbornly persevered I came to respect its design. I was never truly stuck; there was always another way around whatever obstacles seemed to block my path, and I did eventually learn the quirks of navigating through different locales. What impressed me most was the way Visual out handles retreading familiar ground. The same places I traversed early in the game yielded entirely different late-game paths, twisting around each other in unexpected ways. I’m used to going back to nab previously-unreachable power-ups in Metroidvania games, but here I felt I was rewarded for visiting places a third or even fourth time. Reaching the ending is no simple affair either, challenging players with a lot of experimentation and lateral thinking. For a while, I was making progress by taking the only paths available. Late in the game, it seemed there were no paths available, until I realized that in fact there were quite a few. Visual Out asked me to learn, understand and master its world in a way that few Metroidvanias do.

For that, I was willing to forgive a lot of its frustrating elements. But others’ levels of patience may vary. Some will find a game with a strong theme and a devious world that reveals itself like layers of an onion. Others will chafe at clunky controls, poor feedback, and unclear objectives that can send them running in (long, convoluted) circles as they try to find where to go. Or, perhaps most likely, players might experience a bit of both. If you enjoy poking and prodding at a game to see what happens, and don’t mind wandering through obtuse and often unforgiving environments, then I recommend giving Visual Out a try. If you missed it in the bundle, it’s sold for a minimum price of $9.99.

That’s 225 down, and only 1516 to go!