In keeping with current events of Black Lives Matter movement and enough people finally looking at white supremacy and corrupt law enforcement in the United States for what it was (hint: it's always been here), my workplace abruptly announced that we were to take off half of Juneteenth to educate ourselves, join the protests, or stay home in health and peace. Between that date and last time I'd gotten the platinum, a small studio game called Dandara got an update, but remained somewhere in my backlog of games to go through again. Juneteenth was the perfect experience to play a game based on liberation from oppression.
Last summer, I flipped out about this game. For starters, the character is based off an escaped Brazilian slave who fought for freedom, and emancipation permeates the game. However, the developers have abstracted everything in that you're more destroying oppression than freeing slaves, though there's some of that as well. It's more like the world you traverse, The Salt, is in a state of lockdown. Traversal itself plays around with gravity and camera angles to show that Dandara don't follow no rules for the sake of keeping order. You'll get over the disorienting feeling of jetting between walls and floors, which both plays to the feeling of freedom and is a necessary mechanic for what started started as a mobile game. Here's a Gamasutra interview with the dev team.
Going back to the update: Long Hat House overdid themselves here. The content of this FREE DLC almost doubles the size of the game and modifies the existing game to add some more context to Dandara's journey through The Salt. There are a handful of dialogue moments added to the main game to set a better context, but even then, exposition is still minimal. For the team to release this content for free on a game that you can catch on sale for $10 tells me that they had more to say and make an already great package even better.
Also, there's a new trophy added for completing the game with 2 of the 4 difficulty modifiers, which are no slouch. So, instead of having a harder difficulty, you choose your poison: I received double damage, and all enemies killed leave behind a missile that you have to dodge as well. I started over because I enjoyed the game so much last year and this made it my 4th playthrough. I finished the now-familiar original map in about 4 hours because I still remember the speed and completion runs vividly. I started to explore the new areas, but with those difficulty modifiers, I squandered about 2 hours dying and trying to recover my body (and collected Salt). Salt is the currency used to buy life and weapon energy upgrades. So, the screenshot above started from loading my old 2-hour speedrun file with almost all the upgrades and no difficulty modifier. I thought the new area would be an hour or so, and it was a whole lot more than that. The game fits squarely in the exploratory platformer/RPG genre (aka metroidvania), but the DLC makes very overt references to Metroid and Castlevania in the design of the new areas. The new enemy NPCs you meet maintain the facist element and add some gameplay challenges that are frustrating. But, struggle is necessary in this game.
Dandara: Trials of Fear is incredible, unique, challenging and fun. The soundtrack splits its time between being atmospheric and very memorable, and the hero herself is badass. And just in case you missed the trailer in my last article about this game, fear not: I got you covered.
Dandara's actions will not be forgotten!
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