I've been a huge fan in the last few years of Square Enix's push on what it calls 2D-HD. This art style involves 2D sprites superimposed on 3D environments that can be much more intricate than they used to be in truly 2D pixel-based games of yore, and it's already proven that it can look pretty stunning in the right circumstances.
Until this month, all of the 2D-HD games that Square had released had been old-school RPGs with turn-based battle systems, and I've really enjoyed plenty of them. Still, its latest game in the lineup, The Adventures of Elliot, confirms that there was indeed room for a different approach.
This game is more of a traditional action-adventure game, much like the older titles in the Zelda franchise, and it really clearly demonstates that there's still so much life in the art style.
The game sees you play as Elliot, the titular adventurer and all-around good guy, as he's drawn into a fairly classic RPG plot. His local king has a dastardly advisor with his own eye on power, and when he uncovers a way to get it involving time travel, he kicks off the plot in a big way. That plot sees you following him through sort of wormholes to explore the world in multiple different eras.
You travel from pre-history all the way through to the future, seeing how the world grows and decays, and how the place of magic within its society waxes and wanes, too. It's a really fun idea, although it's fair to say that there's a lot more dialogue than I expected from the genre, and some of it can get a tiny bit dull and predictable.
What's much more reliable rewarding, though, is the game's visual style, which really does make the most of its retro aesthetic to propose a way forward for ambitious RPGs. Rather than games that need to cost hundreds of millions to make over the course of half a decade, this game looks beautiful and artistic with a much more limited approach.
Its environments are sweeping and evocative, but they're also not always that high-resolution, and while the game runs really smoothly on the Switch 2, that might well be partly because it's not actually that graphically demanding. I intend this as praise, to be clear – it's really clever management.
The gameplay is also nice and fun, with a very old-school approach to actual movement and combat, but a faster pace thanks to more movement speed. It also remixes things by giving you what are effectively unlockable perks for the various weapons you collect.
These perks can change how you use a weapon quite substantially, for example making it way more profitable to use slower power attacks than quick ones, or vice-versa. They're a fun way of keeping you on your toes and changing up your play-style in small but meaningful ways.
I'm about five hours into the game, so I can't pretend to know exactly how its story will play out, and I'm looking forward to it hopefully throwing me some curveballs (although reviewers have maybe indicated that won't happen much). What I know, though, is that the strong visual presentation of The Adventures of Elliot offer a map of how we could more well-made, well-presented games from big studios, rather than them all chasing photorealism.
Sometimes the old ways can be blended with the new, and 2D-HD certainly proves that retro gaming is as relevant as ever right now.
