Hey team, we're back with another explormer on Indie Explormer of the Week, but wait! Put down those rotten fruit, dear sirs and madams, as there's a significant change-up this time: this explormer's a 3D explormer! Quite the novel shift to the staid formula around here, right? Pseudoregalia kinda feels like... if the Klonoa team at Namco played Team Ico's Ico, was inspired to whip up a platformer—fully 3D this time, rather than the hybrid style from before—with the same saturnine tone (connecting it thematically to the downer ending of the first Klonoa) and then whipped up a quick proof of concept PS2 tech demo before Namco nixed the whole thing, and this is that long-lost demo that someone uploaded to the internet decades after the fact. The protagonist is some kind of Toriel goat-woman (whose actual name we learn at the very end of the game) who finds herself summoned to a dark area full of cages, collects a few power-ups to escape the dungeon, and finds a whole castle connected to a bunch of other areas like a bailey, a keep, a theater, and a library and continues making her way through the place to figure out where it is she needs to go and for what purpose. The game is very light on story, though there's the occasional bits and pieces of inscrutable lore, and heavy instead on exploration and platforming. Specifically, some remarkably challenging 3D platforming where you continue to acquire various Mario 64-esque techniques to increase your horizontal and vertical distance. And also maybe a little bit of combat thrown in there just for flavor. union

The combat's definitely the lesser part of the equation so I'll cover that first. The heroine collects a cross-shaped club weapon (vaguely tonfa-esque) relatively early and can use it to bash enemies. Doing so allows her to collect mana which can be spent towards a heal, a similar system to that in Hollow Knight, with eventual upgrades to increase the damage dealt, the mana generation on each hit, and the heal amount respectively. The game doesn't really tell you that you have a lock-on or anything about healing before you're faced with the first (and, turns out, penultimate) boss fight shortly after starting the game which is something of a trial by fire, and an early indication of the mostly hands-off approach the game has to instructing or directing you beyond what is absolutely necessary, which for many is a pivotal quality of an explorer that wants to focus on the exploration side. After that tough encounter though, barring a few tougher enemies like the maids or the persistent ranged attacks of the big hands, the enemies mostly serve to break up the platforming sequences which are much more prevalent. If anything, they're a welcome source of mana and healing if one sequence in particular has been causing you to fall off the world (which thankfully just respawns you near the exit with less health) over and over.

The game truly shines during those times where they've set up a room of obstacles and platforms, some of which feel very out of reach, and tasks you with figuring out your way over to them. Of course, a lot of the time the solution is "I clearly need an upgrade I don't have yet" but once you've intuited the obscure order of destinations to visit to acquire said upgrades, the game becomes that much more engrossing. This is a natural progression of any explormer of course, especially where the traversal upgrades aren't just the key to overcoming specific roadblocks but increase your ability to get around just in general. The game's high jump, long jump, wall-running and other equivalents all contribute to an easier means of getting around quickly and dexterously and there's always that wonderful feeling where, due to the upgrades combined with all the training you've had up until this point, that you're performing platforming feats that would seem remarkable to a version of you from several hours ago. The apex of this particular feeling of platforming supremacy come from the optional challenges you can initiate by hitting a purple crystal in certain rooms: this generates a bunch of orbs for you to collect, either in a specific order or in any order you wish, and usually grants a cosmetic item if you're able to finish the course under a time limit. They're inessential, because they tend to be murderously tough even compared to the rest of the game, but it's where you can enjoy the game's platforming controls at their peak efficiency.

Initially I was a little put off by Pseudoregalia's "tech demo" aesthetic—which I'd describe less in the sense that it feels unfinished but more in the sense of how Super Mario 64 or Bubsy 3D (which really represent the full quality spectrum of early 3D platformers) kinda didn't have any idea what they were doing with regards to a consistent art style or visual language—but it won me over once I realized what the game was attempting with it. That is, an homage to the loosey-goosey feeling of those early PS1/N64 platformers combined with a dreamlike illogical sensibility that turned out to be more germane to the game's plot than I first realized (and yet another reason why I immediately thought of Klonoa, beyond just having Klonoa on the brain recently). It's true that Indie 3D platformers tend to look a bit archaic due to the relative expense of creating games in 3D even to this day, especially when there's more important considerations to get right like the platforming controls and constructing an explormer map that has a natural (if not naturally obvious) intended progression path, but all but a few like Pseudoregalia are too risk-averse to make their games appear experimentally strange the way the earliest 3D platformers could be. What matters is that the simplicity (and occasional obfuscation) of Pseudoregalia's blocky environs don't distract from the exceptional platforming core that powers the game.

I've played a few Indie 3D platformers, and fewer still those with an explormer focus, but what makes Pseudoregalia memorable isn't so much that genre rarity but the total package of its dreamy if rudimentary-looking aesthetic and how that belies a carefully-designed and occasionally-intimidating set of platforming challenges, with all sorts of the usual power-ups and traversal abilities to find and acquire. I won't say that it didn't frustrate me occasionally, especially when you're not quite sure if you need a new upgrade or if you're fine as you are and are just missing something (one sequence where you move around in the dark had me believing that you needed some kind of torch power-up until I realized that your sword glows whenever you throw it away, explaining why that mechanic exists at all), but finally conquering the game and its many challenges made it all worth it. If you want a 3D platformer that can move and feel the same slick way many explormers do towards their endgame, Pseudoregalia's one of the precious few outside of a Nintendo product that can pull it off, provided you can get past its look (or, ideally, are as equally entranced by it as you are the gameplay).

Rating: 5 out of 5.