Axiom Verge was announced last year in June for the Playstation 4 and Vita, and has since been making steady progress.
Thomas Happ, the game’s creator, programmer, and everything else, announced on the Playstation blog that it now has a Speedrun Mode.
This is how he describes the game:
In Axiom Verge, you play as Trace, a scientist who wakes up after a lab accident in a strange, alien world. Similar to classic games like Super Metroid, Master Blaster, Bionic Commando, and Contra, the game involves a mix of exploration, new weapons and powerups, new enemies to battle and epic boss fights. As you make your way through the world, you also encounter a number of secret areas that are randomly generated each game—both the location of these secret areas and the actual layout are procedurally generated so no two playthroughs will be entirely the same. In addition, some creatures in the world behave erratically and randomly.
The procedural generation, of course, poses a problem for speedrunners. Happ solved this problem by creating
a separate mode for speedrunners where all of the random elements are based off of the same seed number every time you play [… E]very enemy is in its place, and there are no secret areas to serve as a distraction from the main game.
Another feature that is important for speedrunners is being able to bypass dialog quickly. For regular players, there is an interesting storyline that falls into place as Trace makes his way through the alien world. Not everything is always as it seems, and I don’t want to spoil anything beyond that. But speedrunners will have seen all of that already. They don’t want to keep tapping the X button repeatedly just to skip past the dialog—they just want to keep going, so I’ve set it up so Speedrun Mode works that way.
The Speedrun Mode also has a timer based on how many frames are elapsed, and players will be able to see how long it took them to reach each of the bosses.
Have a look at the rest of the screenshots below.
Axiom Verge should release some time this Spring on Playstation 4, Playstation Vita, and Windows PCs.
