Just when you think you’re sick of retro-inspired platform adventures, one comes along with such personality that you end up bingeing on it like a kid in front of Saturday morning cartoons. A seven-year labour of love by creator Joakim Sandberg, Iconoclasts wears its old-school inspirations proudly. Anyone who ever owned a Sega Mega Drive will instantly recognise its detailed pixel art and cartoonish vibe. It is nostalgic without being juvenile – Iconoclasts might look like it’s straight out of the early 90s, but video games have come a long way since then.
The game’s world is a techno-dystopia where religious leaders called the One Concern control all technology, and laying hands (or worse, tools) upon it is punishable by death. You play a bright-haired mechanic, Robin, whose desire to tinker with machines puts her on the wrong side of the zealots. On the run from the Concern and its agents, you explore gradually unfolding underwater complexes, military towers and forests, solving satisfying mechanical puzzles with a wrench and shooting creatures with a blaster. The cast expands to encompass other likable misfits, and the story weaves themes of technological autocracy and humans’ relationship with machines and nature around the jumping, shooting and head-scratching. The screen-filling, visually awesome boss enemies that turn up every hour or so are a welcome dose of flashy excitement.
Iconoclasts prioritises your intelligence over your reflexes: instead of dodging bullets and pulling off precise jumps, the challenge comes from working out how to expose the engine on a giant robot so that you can shoot it, or from scouring the map to figure out how to infiltrate a closed-off room. This is a perfect weekend game: cheerful, fun, challenging but not too demanding. It successfully recreates the atmosphere and sense of adventure of the 90s 2D action-adventures that inspired it, and occasionally betters them.
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Iconoclasts is out on 23 January.
