She's pretty Mega, man.
While I do tend to enjoy the odd roguelike, or roguelite for that matter, there is a part of me that feels like it is a genre some developers rely on to have a limited range of content to repeat as you make incremental advances to improve your character and further the story. That said, there is something to be said about combining the roguelite genre and a game that borrows the approach of something like Mega Man X. Would that style of play mesh well with roguelite mechanics? Well, Elsie is here to provide that answer.
Elsie takes place on the planet Ekis. As Elsie, you are a next-generation android tasked with tracking down a group called the Guardians. These seven androids were created before you by Dr. Grey and tasked with preventing natural disasters. However, while they were away performing their required assignments, the entire group mysteriously went dark and shut off their comms. It is then that Dr. Grey created Elsie to find them and your mission is to track down the Guardians and attempt to understand how and why they went missing.
First, the story itself is simply a primer to have you entering into its stages and tracking the Guardians down, beating them senseless as you bring them to your side. You’ll get bits and pieces of the greater plan upon each recruitment of the Guardians, but it’s not until much later, practically near the end, that you’ll start to really understand just what happened. While the Mega Man influences are certainly here, even in its story, the narrative idea itself is fine, if largely unoriginal. Still, I only found the dynamics between Elsie and the Guardians to be where I really paid attention.
Your hub location that you’ll retreat back to between runs has a decent amount of characters that you’ll find as you push through your initial few excursions. That said, you’ll have them all in no time and then work to build their various workshops. Unlike something like Hades; however, the dialogue they have is sparse and barely there in most scenarios. Generally, these characters only serve to be shopkeepers as they don’t really have much else going on; they are unfortunately forgettable.
While you’ll start your first run with a basic tutorial, the only way to actually progress to learn all of the game’s mechanics is to die. This is because some tutorials are on additional runs. I often found things present in the game that I had no idea what they were since the tutorial zone I was meant to learn about them was in the next zone I would have explored, had I died. Why the initial area couldn’t have taught me most of this is beyond me. And, should you die in these, before some of the tutorial areas are finished, you’ll miss them entirely. I also found some of the wording for certain prompts, like the parry, for example, to not be worded well enough to teach me the mechanic, I had to go to Google to fully understand what it wanted from me.
Being a roguelite, you'll engage in several runs across multiple biomes; however, you'll always start via the Skyport. The other biomes are generally themed, providing lava, ice, and plant aesthetics, each standing out pretty well from one another. As you complete one biome, you’ll then be given the chance to pick between two others for your next destination. Each biome has a series of sub-bosses that need to be found and defeated before the Guardians show up, and that is if you end up coming across them at all. Unlike something like Mega Man, each Guardian isn't a stage of its own. In fact, It took several dead ends and failed runs before I would even encounter the sub-bosses to beat to even unlock the chance at finding the other Guardians. Unfortunately, the game doesn't do a good job of funneling you toward them or even providing hints as to how to trigger the next sub-boss. I do like that when you are on a run that has the Guardian at its conclusion, you’ll have a series of silhouetted conversations that start happening that tease them, indicating that they are present during that run.
The roguelite elements present in Elsie can lead to a lot of unfortunate repetition. You’ll encounter the same sub-bosses dozens upon dozens of times, and even the Guardian battles repeat as well, even if the game casually depicts them as “copies” of the originals. If you make it to the end of a run and you hit a dead end, you’ll report that mission as an overall failure and return back to the hub location, often with no new dialogue or story bits to add to the narrative. Sure, you’ll have new unlocks to purchase, but this causes most runs to be nothing more than a resource hunt. It’s a shame that more story wasn’t injected into just returning back home, despite the failure. Children of Morta was a game that did this, making me excited even at the prospect of death. With such a great cast of Guardians, I wish there were more moments to engage with them, as there just aren’t unless you have found another one to recruit, thus triggering a new conversation. Even having them wander around the hub base would have been ideal.
Each run has a pretty limited level design for each biome. It isn't uncommon to see the same empty transition rooms three or four times per run. While there is a procedural element to certain aspects, there are static rooms that do not change whatsoever. Had the game included a few alternative empty hallways to join the three or four that are here, that would have helped a lot. And while the combat rooms are procedural in some ways, the game feels more built to support a random collection of pre-made tilesets than any actual randomness in its design. This in turn causes the repetition to really sink in when you start to see the same rooms appear over and over again. I personally love the level design when something fresh is revealed, but traversing the same layouts time and time again is where it starts to really get old.
You'll run and gun through each area and some encounters will lock the room until you have defeated every enemy accounted for, often revealed in waves. You’ll be rewarded with some coins and a chest once the room is cleared. Yellow chests are freely able to be opened while purple chests require keys and often have abilities that you’ll add to your growing list. If you are intent on just flying through a level to find the next Guardian, or procure more keys, you can simply bypass nearly all threats until you find these locked rooms or sub-bosses. That said, you’ll want to kill everything you come across in favor of earning more currency, but also to work towards leveling up Elsie to unlock more abilities that may be crucial to that run, such as additional health, armor, or reducing your cooldowns. Now, this leveling is strictly for that run, making Elsie a blank slate the next time you head out.
Each run has you earning various currencies to spend at the shops you’ll build in the hub world for the NPCs you encounter. From your key abilities, weapons, and spells, like shooting fire or having a series of drones follow you, these become essential in breaking up the repetition of combat. Buying new weapons, abilities, or spells, provides you with that new addition for the next run as a trial. After that, you’ll have to find them during a run, meaning that the more you unlock, the less likely it is to actually stumble upon them. That said, the more you unlock, the less likely it is to have the same build in back-to-back runs. If you see that as a positive or a negative, well that is up to you. You’ll also unlock stations that appear during your run, allowing you to increase your health, armor, or energy, or upgrade the various augment skills that allow you to have things like fireflies or drones, the former being a series of red sprites that attack whatever gets close to you. These stations allow you to choose which skill to upgrade and this can be as simple as increasing the effectiveness of a skill to how much of something appears, such as your dones.
While Elsie can jump, wall jump, ground pound, or attack through her dash, your main method of attack is a rapid-fire gun, and the abilities you’ll find that can add to her arsenal during that run. Your default ability replenishes your energy, which is needed to fire your gun. Sadly, this means you can't just hold down the gun to keep blasting as you'll run low on energy very quickly and it will fire considerably slower as a result, leaving you extremely vulnerable. Some guns will fire differently, and use different amounts of energy, and those can be bought through stations found throughout your run after you have unlocked them, using a pretty easy-to-come-by currency. You’ll find various abilities and stat increases as you continue to push through as well. If I had to knock the shooting whatsoever, since it is rather good, I do wish you could shoot up, given the verticality of the level design and that flying enemies are everywhere. While there is a ability that swaps out your default energy spell to do so, it's simply not enough as you'd have to find that while out and about first.
One of Elsie’s secondary methods of attack, or rather defense, is her parry. Where this becomes an attack is using it to bypass the red shields of enemies so you can then attack them freely. While this is a good way to avoid taking damage, it doesn't feel good or tactile to use. As you hold down the parry button, a green circle fills up, if you press the button again while it is green, it will defuse their shield. The issue is the response, sound, and feel of this ability doesn't alert you to it working well. Elsie has a special ability that simply allows you to tap the button to defuse their shield, and I ended up just relying on that instead, even if the whole mechanic seems a bit off to use.
Performance wise, the game runs fairly well on the Switch, especially as the action can get pretty intense. There are some occasional bouts of slow down while playing portable, but this really only occurred when I had a ton of enemies on screen and my abilities kept giving me drones that would also fire their own rounds of bullets. That said, I’ve had the game crash on me about four times and once was during a Guardian battle, meaning I lost all progress of that run. I do wish the game allowed you to jump back in, or even manually save as it only saves once you have completed a run.
Visually, Elsie looks great and the artwork for the characters and the models especially, are solid. The game is vibrant, and its use of colors really helps the different environments stand out. While pixel artwork games are a dime a dozen on the Switch, Elsie is certainly up there as one of the better looking ones, especially with some pretty charming animations for both Elsie and the Guardians. While I would have liked a few more biomes to reduce the repetition, having a few more would have increased the variety here as well, especially since they all look very impressive.
The voice cast is also damn good with a lesser reliance on notable names across the industry and instead turns to the other side of the games industry for much of its cast. Elsie herself is charming enough, with Elsie Lovelock voicing her and being her namesake as well. Since she has dialogue with every single character, it is important that they cast someone who brings a fun voice to the character but also commanding as she needs to be when dealing with the Guardians. Lucy James from Gamespot and Giant Bomb voices the first Guardian you’ll encounter, Celestia, with others such as former G4TV hosts Gina Darling and Olivee May voicing a pair of the Guardians themselves. Some of the other voice talents include Shelby (Girlfriend Reviews), Tamoor Hussain (Gamespot/Giant Bomb), and Fiona Nova (Formerly of Rooster Teeth).
Elsie features some accessibility features to help those who may struggle with parts of its combat and survivability. From simply turning Elsie invulnerable, you can blast through a few runs to track down the Guardians, to widening the parry window a bit to make it easier to pull off. Other options include color-blind settings, the backgrounds being visible or turned off, to player and enemy outlines to stand out more or not at all. While activating these settings is fine enough, I will point out that the UI itself for the menus seems more place-holder than final version.
While a few aspects of Elsie don’t quite succeed, the Mega Man X influenced gameplay certainly does. The combat loop of improving your stats and swapping out abilities in a run does a lot to shake up one run from the next. However, the limited scope of its environmental layouts needs work. The biomes are colorful and vibrant, and all look incredible, but the repeated tilesets and transition zones appear far too frequent causing extreme repetition to play out, especially as it can take a while to start to unlock more of the story and see more of what the game is capable of. Elsie has an interesting hook, taking the pixel platformer down the roguelite road; however, with few stops on the way that makes it memorable, or even original, it’s one journey that can unfortunately run out of gas far too soon.
Developer - Knight Shift Games.
Publisher - Playtonic Games. Released - September 10th, 2024. Available On - Nintendo Switch, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC. Rated - (E) - Mild Fantasy Violence. Platform Reviewed - Nintendo Switch. Review Access - A review code was provided by the publisher for the purpose of this review.
Jeff is the original founder of Analog Stick Gaming. His favorite games include The Witcher III, the Mass Effect Trilogy, Hi-Fi Rush, Stellar Blade, Hellbade: Senua’s Sacrifice, and the Legend of Heroes series, especially Trails of Cold Steel III & IV.