Oh how I love it when games play to my demonic side.
Corruption is a 2D that I found to be kind of reminiscent of Yoshi's Island, except the roles are reversed. Instead of playing as a lovable green dinosaur protecting the world from the forces of evil, you play as a hideous creature of the night, slowly engulfing the world in the tendrils of darkness and despair. The enemies are cute little fluffballs whose free will you warp by eating them, digesting them, and excreting them.
This is gonna be fun.
the basic mechanics of the game are thus: you eat the fluffballs, thus turning them to your side. Once you have a sizable army of minions, you can turn them into bombs, rainclouds, or anything else you need to progress through the levels. If the fluffballs manage to whittle down your health to 0, you will turn into an adorable little creature with big ol' eyes. The charm of this game is nigh insurmountable. At the end of each level, there is a golden gate that you have to stand inert at for a while until the entire gate is corrupted and your conquest of the level is complete.
Let's don our shiny anime eyes and get the good stuff out of the way first so I have enough time to complain later: The aesthetic is wonderful. The word of the day is juxtaposition (which also happens to be my favorite word in the entirety of the English language). The soundtrack changes as you go through the level, turning from a pleasant little tune to a harsh romp as you continue to corrupt the world. This, I will admit, gets less and less cute as the game goes on, but never really steps into the realm of annoying. The platforming works well and the hitboxes are fairly sized. Another thing I liked was that the game tells you boldfacedly through the accursed medium of background signpost everything you need to know in order to complete the game, but not everything that the game has to offer. For instance, if you get to a ledge that is too high to jump to, the game will tell you that you can turn one of your minions into a block to stand on, giving you the boost you need to clear it. However, planting a bomb underneath your feet and rocketing skyward is an equally efficient strategy that the game never tells you about. This gives the rather short game a lot of replay value. Even as I write this I have the urge to fire it up again and see how creative I can be when traversing the levels.
Now that that's over with, what were the parts of the game that made me want to pluck my evilly triangular, single-shade eyes out? First off, your ground speed when you aren't in the eating stance is just too fast. It gets almost Sonic the Hedgehog-esque at times when you jolt through flat areas so fast that you can't possibly see the pink dog charging toward you until it already has you in its sinister, loving grasp. Also, using the mousewheel to control what thing your minions turn into is a pain for many reasons, but you can just use the 1,2, and 3 buttons to avoid this problem. I just wish the game would have told me that. See, there's a key difference between hiding the things like bomb-jumping that I mentioned earlier and hiding alternate ways of accessing the menus. I as a player don't gain anything from figuring out that the 1,2 and 3 buttons work that I wouldn't have gained if I was just told it. I don't feel like I've outsmarted the game or anything like that.
In conclusion, I like this game for 2 reasons: It's fun and it offers some insight into the medium. I think this is one of those games that future designers should play for study. There's a lot to learn from this game, some of which I've mentioned here but much of which I'm sure has eluded me. On top of that, this game is just fun to play. I do wish it had a save feature, but the game is less than half an hour long and the music stops when you pause it, so even if there is some pressing thing that you need to attend to in the middle of the game, you can alt+tab out without hindrance. This game gets my seal of approval.
Links
kill all the cute: https://www.digipen.edu/?id=1170&proj=18528
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