Indivisible

Genre: Metroidvania / Action-RPG

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Lab Zero Games

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Review:

Indivisible, released on PC, PlayStation 4, an Xbox One in 2019 and ported to Nintendo Switch in 2020, is a game that combines elements of a Metroidvania with an Action-RPG combat system that has players managing multiple party members, with the four face buttons each mapped to one of your active party members, with players combining that button with a directional input to get different kinds of attacks.

The presentation here is gorgeous, with a nice-looking, brightly-colored world depicted with 3D visuals, and well-animated hand-drawn characters that are memorable in their design. In addition, the game is backed by a lovely soundtrack with some nice acoustic and choral elements, with great songs like Ajna and Indivisible. And then there’s the game’s characters, with the characters all extremely well-written and wonderfully-voiced, and one of the most enjoyable elements of the game is listening to them interact with one another.

I should make special note of the story here, because even though the game’s characters are wonderful, the game’s story leaves something to be desired. This is because characters seem to react surprisingly casually to really shocking and unsettling events. The game pretty much starts with the death of protagonist Ajna’s father and his murderer getting trapped in Ajna’s mind due to some ability Ajna didn’t know she had. Ajna responds to the former with an oddly cheerful quest to kill the leader of the nation whose troops were sent to slaughter her village, and responds to the latter with frustration instead of, you know, the horror that she’s now stuck with her father’s murderer as a constant companion.

As Ajna continues to suck people into her cranium, this event becomes increasingly treated as a casual occurrence that is quickly accepted by all involved, even though before long you have an entire village of people trapped in Ajna’s head, some against their will. People Ajna meets can apparently see and hear these people as they jump to the forefront to talk, but show no signs of thinking this odd, despite that no one seems to actually know what’s going on. Because of stuff like this, the game’s story feels really oddly disjointed.

The Metroidvania elements of this game are a mix of good and bad. On the one hand, there feels like a good progression, with Ajna regularly gaining new abilities that make her better able to explore the environment. Unfortunately, there isn’t much exploration to be had – there’s rarely more than a few different avenues for players to pursue at any given time, and only one that will allow them to progress.

The game’s Action-RPG elements are similarly a mix of good and bad. On the one hand, the game’s combat feels great and allows you to swap back and forth between your characters’ attacks seamlessly… but this seamless combat also makes everything feel pretty chaotic, and it’s easy to get confused in the midst of everything, which can ultimately lead to everything feel like a lot like button-mashing. A part of this is because the various concepts that combat is built on are introduced so quickly that players may not have a full grasp of them all, and some elements of combat and characters’ progression doesn’t seem to have been explained at all. And yet, despite this confusion, building up your characters is exceedingly simple and doesn’t allow for any customization.

So just about every element of Indivisible seems to be a mix of good and bad. Great characters and presentation, with awkward storytelling. Fun Metroidvania elements, but poor exploration. Inventive and fun Action-RPG combat, but a lack of control afforded to the player in their party’s growth and a lack of explanation of the game’s main mechanics. On the whole, Indivisible’s positive traits still far outweigh its negative traits, and it’s well worth playing the game to enjoy those positive qualities, but it feels like this game could have been much better if a bit more time was spent on each facet of the game to ensure these flaws were addressed.

tl;dr – Indivisible is a game that combines Metroidvania and Action-RPG elements, along with a wonderful presentation and great characters. Unfortunately, the story feels odd, with characters acting unrealistically. The Metroidvania elements have limited exploration. And the Action-RPG stuff is poorly-explained and chaotic. This is still overall a good game, but not without some very rough spots.

Grade: B-

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