Revealed during the Devolver Showcase, Skeleton Crew Studio's Olija is set to launch for PC and Nintendo Switch later in 2020. A demo is available now on Steam, giving you a slice of its 2D action to try ahead of its release. Before its reveal, I had the chance to dive into the game with an exclusive demo for GameSpot, learning about it's crunchy combat, ambiguous and mysterious themes, and the cursed harpoon at the center of it all.
Olija is a 2D action platformer with equal measures of fast-paced combat and small but clever puzzles. Core to both is your main weapon, a cursed harpoon that you can throw in any cardinal direction with a button press and return to your hands with another. Your harpoon can lodge itself in the guts of enemies and certain points of the environment, letting you pull off a quick and satisfying dash to its position.
It feels great to chain together throwing and recalling the harpoon as your soar through the air, and the game encourages you to get comfortable with it. Early enemy encounters are limited to just a few foes at a time, but as you progress, they become more complex ballets where you have to balance positioning and aggression in equal measure. Groups of enemies will quickly overwhelm and kill you, but using your harpoon to fling yourself to a distant enemy--both giving you space and letting you kill them off effortlessly--feels incredibly satisfying.
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