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Fashion is cyclical, circling in dependable 20-year loops that enable clothes-makers to sell styles back to us that, not so long ago, they insisted were outmoded. This freshening cycle may yet be replicated in video games: NES-era pixel-art has enjoyed a long and profitable revival, particularly within indie games, where the aesthetic has provided other, technical advantages to the semi-professional game-maker. Astebreed, a lavish indie game from the Japanese studio Edelweiss, is one of the first to suggest a new dawn in indie-game fashion: a return to the coarse polygons of the 32-bit era, when Sega's Saturn and Sony's PlayStation boldly explored the potential of 3D art. This shoot-'em-up rejects the frantic bullet-dodging ballet of Cave's niche-dominating output and instead draws inspiration from Squaresoft's Einhander and Treasure's Radiant Silvergun: games defined by dramatically tilting camera angles, a cinematic journey through distinct levels and intricate scoring systems. Astebreed bears all of these hallmarks. Its six stages offer a cacophony of visual noise and spectacle tempered by a scoring system that encourages thoughtful, considered play.
In presentational terms, the game draws more heavily from the anime tradition than its video game inspirations: you pilot a flying mecha, known as an Xbreed, equipped with a bullet-eating plasma sword and orbited by a cluster of bullet-firing lights, known as Lucis. The game's stages build in scale and drama like the most ostentatious space anime. You begin flying over a sunlit coastline, shooting down swarms of flitting foes while the camera wheels and twists in exciting ways. By the end of the game, the action has escalated absurdly: you're in the galaxy attempting to slice hulking spacecraft in two with your quivering sword.
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