New Indie Metroidvania ‘Forma.8’ Mixes the Restful with the Stressful

Talk about mixed signals. Forma.8, a new Metroidvania affair from the seven-person, Turin-based indie studio MixedBag Games, initially puts the player in a state of calm. There's the low-detail but sharp contrast artwork, all pleasing purples and oranges, of the opening moments; and the soundtrack is of the ambient variety that so successfully serves the chill-out likes of Monument Valley and Minecraft. But then things begin to get a little hectic, testing of timing, and just a tiny bit too taxing on occasions.

You control a small probe, lost on an alien planet. The story goes that you're in pursuit of a vital energy source; but the game never lays the narrative on heavily. Rather, it drops you into its quite beautiful world and just lets you get on with it, each next step of gameplay progress telegraphed neatly enough through clear visual design. There's a slot there, before what looks like a door—no doubt something around here will fit into it.

As the genre dictates, you will run into blockages, obstacles, that necessitate the acquisition or discovery of something—a new power for your probe, a shimmering electronic key, one of several handy teleportation points—to get around, or sometimes straight through. The probe picks up offensive capabilities that give it a fighting chance against the hostile indigenous creatures, all of which glow an ominous purple. Which is lucky, as there's loads of them buzzing and crawling, hopping and slithering about the caverns of this strange place, littered as it is with ancient machinery, suggestive of a society long since departed.

And sometimes, these enemies gang up in quite overpowering numbers. Forma.8's pleasant aesthetic masks a challenging little game of navigating treacherous territories as a vastly under-armed protagonist, whose smooth movement through air and water—trailing a little vapor tail, like some kind of mechanical tadpole—always feels super responsive, meaning that careful control of velocity is vital for dodging damaging fireballs and the like. MixedBag have made it so that any "unfairness", heightened at boss encounters, is but an illusion—it's on you to be a better pilot when things take a bitter turn for the burned out.

MixedBag's game before this was Futuridim EP Deluxe, a stylish shooter you may have caught when it came to PlayStation Plus in 2015. Like that, Forma.8 is a massively multi-platform project, covering PS4 (as tested), Wii U (!), iOS, PC, Vita (!) and many more. And like its predecessor, it's another instantly distinctive development from a team that evidently knows its own mind when it comes to the look and feel of its titles. It might riff on the way prior games play, from Zelda's classic dungeons to the more recent Affordable Space Adventures, but Forma.8 has individuality enough across its presentation to avoid any debilitating déjà vu.

Its release across pretty much every format out there means that many players will be able to check this out. And I recommend you do, as it's easy to lose an hour to Forma.8, even when you have pressing chores to see to (oh, hey). Take a day off and fire it up, and expect to lose several more to its spelunking exploration and explosive bouts of evasive action. It's that sort of effortless time-sink, and consistently enticing of sound and vision to boot—but come prepared to fight against its gorgeousness, on the regular.

'Forma.8' is released on February 23rd. Find more information here. 

Follow Mike on Twitter.