La Mulana

5 Diviner Sensation
It’s easy to watch a Let’s Play of La Mulana and make fun of how obscure and merciless the puzzles are (specially if you don’t read the manual beforehand). But that is not the main drive of the game when you play it.

The real drive comes from how the game, inspired by the MSX classic Maze of Galious, unfolds at you – first it appears to have but a half dozen screens, then a maze of catacombs reveals itself, and that maze leads to three other worlds with different themes, and before you know it you’re trying to untangle the connections between ten discrete levels, each with its own graphics, enemies and music – and then the game reveals another ten levels at you.

The sheer vastness and variety of the game bring out the sense of wonder of the great classics more than any 16-color palette could.

5 It's cruel, and you like it
La Mulana is really an extraordinary game. It’s not perfect, and as already mentioned, it is cruel, sometimes maybe too cruel, but let me summarize what makes it such a great game in my eyes: 1) It’s atmospheric, 2) the sense of exploration permeates everything, 3) the riddles/puzzles forces you to really think outside the box and 4) it’s challenging through clean and responsive game mechanics.

La Mulana is probably the most “true” Metroidvania out there. By that, I mean that it really is non-linear. You can virtually go anywhere when the game starts, you have to turn every stone to find the abilities required to make progress, and THEN you have to figure out where and how you should use these abilities. This lack of hand holding is what sometimes makes the game frustrating beyond belief, but it’s also what gives it that real sense of exploration and progress, and the uplifting feeling of accomplishment when you figure something out and reach a previously unexplored area. What makes La Mulana really awesome is that every aspect of the game work along these lines. The riddles literally span every possible level of abstraction. They require logical thinking, looking up things (Google even helped me once, and I don’t mean a walkthrough), experimentation, etc. The game does rely heavily on breakable walls, more or less requiring exhaustive search, but the more sophisticated riddles make up for it by far, and the beauty is that if you’re stuck at one place, you can go someplace else for another challenge, due to the non-linear structure of the game. Finally, an action game isn’t good without fun core gameplay, and La Mulana delivers. The game mechanics are clean, responsive, and requires the player to master the different abilities/moves one at a time if he/she wishes to complete the game. First time I played the game, I sometimes couldn’t survive to reach the ruins entrance. Now I’m traversing the ruins like a breeze. Easy to get into, hard to master.

To anyone who likes a game that challenges both mind and dexterity, I recommend playing La Mulana with as little help from walkthroughs as possible. While I did refer to a walkthrough on two weak occasions, everything else I figured out for myself. It took me months to beat it, and sometimes consecutive hours of frustration, but what a ride it was, and I’m glad I took it!

Five stars to one of the best indies ever.

PS. Did I mention it is huge?