The Girl Genius webcomic series has been ongoing for over two decades. It’s a fairly obscure cartoon from Norway set in a steampunkish fantasy world where bumbling wizards rule. Most Americans probably won’t be familiar with it, but it’s considered essential young adult material in Europe.
The Teslagrad games are also essential Norge-core, and it was only natural that their developer, Rain Games, take up the challenge of adapting Girl Genius. Their past efforts were mostly 2D, with two simplistic 3D titles that featured distant camera angles. Girl Genius would push the envelope for them and aim for something like a 3D Zelda game.
After a successful Kickstarter campaign, Rain Games got to work, and the results may surprise naysayers. You’d think an obscure Scandinavian web-comic would result in something lame, but can Rain Games’ pedigree shine through? Find out in our Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne review!
Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne
Developer: Rain Games
Publisher: Rain Games
Platforms: Windows PC, Linux, Macintosh, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, (reviewed)
Release Date: September 5, 2024
Price: $29.99
Castle Heterodyne is a mechanical beast, and its halls brim with spiky death traps, bottomless pits, and a corrupted AI with a penchant for sadistic pranks. Souls of the dead power this labyrinth of madness, and at the heart of this tale is Agatha Heterodyne. She’s the long-lost heir to the House of Heterodyne, a lineage as revered as it is feared for its history of terrorizing Europa with Jägermonsters and super science.
The story begins with Agatha storming into this deathtrap of a home, tasked with proving she’s the heir and sets to tame the castle’s rogue AI, fending off power-hungry foes like the Wulfenbach Empire. It’s a lot to take in if you’ve never read a single Girl Genius comic, but the game does its best to convey what it can without overloading players with exposition.
As someone who has never read a single Girl Genius comic in his entire life and had only learned about its existence from this game, I was able to pick up on context clues and understand what was going on. Despite the narrative being digestible, the story and dialogue veer on being long-winded and over-explanatory. It would probably matter to fans of the comic, but anyone else will be itching to start exploring the castle.
When Adventures In Castle Heterodyne finally set me loose, I was overwhelmed by flashbacks of early 2000s platformers like Ratchet & Clank or Jak & Daxter, blending exploration, combat, and puzzle-solving in a Metroidvania-style structure. Agatha wields tools like the Grapple Gun and Wrencherang, crafted at workbenches, to navigate the castle’s trap-laden halls and uncover secrets.
Agatha’s Dingbot adds variety by accessing tight spaces and solving lock puzzles, fostering exploration. She can switch to controlling this little droid whenever and switch back. Many of the more lateral-thinking puzzles will push gamers to contend with elaborate puzzles that demand players switch back and forth while hitting levers that activate some esoteric mechanism elsewhere in the castle.
Combat is functional yet disappointing due to the poor kinesthetic feedback. Agatha’s swipes and controls feel very stiff. Even her dodge rolling feels off due to the rigidness of the input and lack of i-frames. Most of the time, it feels like she takes cheap shots. The targeting system also feels like it could use finesse, as it has a bit of a delay when switching targets.
Agatha feels like a half-assed Ocarina of Time when she’s in a scrap. The z-targeting and circle strafing around foes is at its barest here since she has fewer moves than Link, and her wrench feels weaker. She can’t jump, and dodge rolling is slow and floaty.
Some of the shortcomings of the combat are addressed with the upgrade system, but at that point, it makes me realize that the gameplay could have always been good. It’s like the combat was made sloppy on purpose to justify a tacked-on progression system that was never needed.
You are better off playing on the easiest mode just to circumvent engaging with combat in any meaningful capacity. There will still be fighting, but the lack of challenge downplays the awkwardness of dealing with its mechanics.
Adventures In Castle Heterodyne is at its best when Agatha is exploring and puzzle-solving. The setting is like one massive super dungeon where areas loop back around into themselves, chock-full of mysterious areas you’ll want to return to once you have the right tool for the job.
The aforementioned lack of jumping is mostly felt while exploring than it is in combat. Agatha may be built like a fertile Viking woman, but she has the knees of an old man. She won’t hop down ledges naturally unless she is positioned in a way where the contextual prompt appears. This is trickier than it needed to be since the window to trigger the prompt is very narrow.
The castle is festooned with invisible walls that limit where you think you can go. Other times, the invisible walls are safety nets designed to prevent Agatha or the Dingbot from falling off ledges. It’s excessive enough that it came off as infantilizing, and the developer didn’t trust players.
For an indie game, Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne looks great and captures the look and feel of PlayStation 2 games. If this were released in the 2000s, it probably would have become a cult classic like Kya: Dark Lineage or Beyond Good and Evil. It’s a refreshingly wholesome game that has bouts of comic mischief and Agatha’s shapely rack and cleavage. It’s a substantial adventure too, lasting about 15 hours.
The in-game graphics look polished and smooth, but the character art and portraits will take some getting used to. These illustrations are just like how they appear in the web comic, which has a very rubbery and lumpy art style. It doesn’t always have the most flattering or appealing drawings, but after a while, I found myself warming up to it.
The art style is unique and more personal than anything else out there in the market, which copies whatever is popular. There are no lazy bean-mouth drawings here or generic Westernized anime art. Even though Girl Genius‘s art is a bit weird and maybe amateurish, I’m grateful it is true to itself.
Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne comes close to greatness but falls short due to its finicky combat and rigid mobility. When Agatha is left to explore the impressively atmospheric castle and tinker with its mechanisms, it’s firing on all cylinders.
Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne was reviewed on PlayStation 5 using a code provided by Rain Games. Additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy is here. Girl Genius: Adventures In Castle Heterodyne is now available for Windows PC (via STEAM), Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
