The Stack

I recently saw Environmental Station Alpha (2015) mentioned alongside the likes of Tunic and Animal Well for its secret puzzle layer. At first blush, it comes off as just a standard retro-styled metroidvania set in a deserted space station, like many others, and allegedly it can be played to a conclusion without contradicting that assumption. But I’m told that attentive players can find further depths to it. I suppose that’s really a very metroidvania thing to do. Recall that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night — the very game that the word “metroidvania” was coined to describe — does something similar, giving the player an opportunity to fight a false final boss and roll the credits without ever seeing the second half of the game. But that wasn’t exactly about puzzles, was it? At any rate, it’s by the same developer as Baba Is You, which also has hidden layer stuff going on.

Now, I knew that the title “Environmental Station Alpha” sounded familiar, and sure enough, I already had it in my Steam library, with a recorded play time of less than two minutes — just enough for me to have installed it and tried it out and decided that I wasn’t in the mood for it and then forgotten about it. I’ve played it further now, and here’s the thing: I can’t decide if I’ve played it before or not. Sometimes I’ll look at the map and think “This is way too familiar”, but sometimes I’ll think “I definitely would have remembered that if I had seen it before”. It’s possible that it looks familiar just because I’ve played so many other outer-space metroidvanias (including Metroid itself!), but I’m not convinced. Is Steam mistaken about my playtime? No, I would have more achievements if I had played it on Steam. Did I play it somewhere else, like Itch or Epic? Maybe. If I did, did I ever finish it? I don’t know. If I did, I made the mistake of not blogging about it, assuming that I’d just remember anything noteworthy about it.

At any rate, if I did play it before, I’m pretty sure I didn’t penetrate to the hidden layer. Indeed, it’s very likely that I didn’t even reach the false ending, because some of the bosses are very, very hard. I’m currently stuck combating a sort of biomechanical sea serpent, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised if this is as far as I got the first time around. I generally like the metroidvania genre and find it satisfying, but bosses are always my weak point. I remember that Castlevania: Symphony of the Night had some bosses that became very easy if approached with the right equipment. I wish more metroidvanias had picked up on that.