Alpha Wave’s Euclidean is malevolent. Before you even start playing the actual game, it’s already messing with you. Instead of a traditional title screen, you find yourself standing atop an icy peak in front of a telescope trained at the moon and a painting of the view. The telescope is actually your options menu. An engraved stela beside you is your stage selection menu. To quit, you can choose the rope at your feet, and presumably climb back down the mountain. The menus glitch periodically as you peruse them. You might notice that the only difficulty levels available are Hard, Nightmarish, and Impossible. You probably will also notice that there is no obvious Start button anywhere.
The painting is a hint, but it’s still not obvious how to start playing. This is probably easier to stumble upon while wearing a headset and looking around, as one does in VR spaces, but to enter the selected stage, you must gaze at the moon. As you stare at it, a darkness emerges, envelops you, and whisks you away (you can also just use the stage select menu).
You are teleported to an inky void, where you are slowly descending, as if immersed in a thick fluid. Perhaps you are—I don’t know about the properties of matter in this dimension. I’m not sure what’s keeping you breathing, but it must be related to whatever uncanny magic transported you here. Oxygen is not your problem.
Gravity is not your enemy, either, for you fall too slowly to die from it, and to complete a stage you must descend to a glowing target location, so gravity’s really your friend. What you have to worry about is everything between you and there.
As you sink (or fall, whichever it is), you have to navigate the megalithic columns, alien towers, and gargantuan staircases while avoid the otherworldly entities that lurk there. Each gorgeous, murky stage is a different abyss with its own theme, palette, and set of dangers. You’ll die many times while trying to catch a glimpse of your goal. Sometimes you’ll see death coming, like the lazy swipe of an impossibly big tentacle; other times, it’ll be a complete surprise, like a centipede-thing jumping on your back. For your edification, the game lets you know what killed you with an simple image of the culprit.
The denizens of these depths are easy to identify (if you can get a clear view of them through the murk), because they are all composed of basic geometric shapes. The effect is incredibly eerie. It suggests that we are seeing mere projections of higher-dimensional beings strolling through our reality, like how a pyramid would appear as a triangle to someone viewing it on a 2-dimensional plane through which it passed.
You can control the direction of you drift, but you move like you’re treading viscous liquid, so you have to plan your routes and make adjustments along the way. It’s nearly impossible to avoid something at the last second, so you have the ability to phase right through things. You can’t rely on this, since it only lasts for an instant before you regain solidity and have to retrigger it. And a second of tangibility can be quite deadly in Euclidean.
The gameplay itself is tense and engaging, but it basically boils down to falling and dodging stuff. It’s the environments, the creatures, the atmosphere that make this game truly something special. I almost wish there was a “tourist” mode where you could just take in the wondrous, unsettling sights without worrying about dying.
The game has a very Lovecraftian feel, despite not being explicitly about the Cthulhu mythos. Still, if you’ve enjoyed those stories, I bet you can’t help but feel that this is the closest thing to drifting through the kind of “dreams” that were had in the Witch House.
Euclidean is not for the faint of heart nor the easily frustrated. I imagine that playing it while strapped into a VR headset would decrease the frustration levels while increasing the fear factor, but I have no such device. Fortunately, the game works swimmingly with a keyboard/mouse/monitor setup. I’d also recommend a good set of speakers, because the 3D audio is integral to the experience.
I actually don’t know if I’d be able to play Euclidean wearing a Rift or a Vive because my stomach does flip-flops when I feel like I’m falling (this rules out most carnival rides for me), and falling is what you do in this game.
One practical tip: Go to the options menu and hide your body so you don’t have to stare down at your dangling legs, distracting you and obscuring your already clouded view. And you don’t want to miss a thing in this luscious nightmare.
Euclidean (for Windows) is 3.99 on Steam.
2 comments