Illumine's Metaphors Run Mechanics-Deep - [INDIEGAMING]

To be a stranger in a strange land is to walk down paths that seem familiar until they're not; to try to reach out to people only to have people either stare at your hand as though it were covered in slime or slap it away; to find that it's the little differences more than the big ones that bother you. Dejima is a one-person studio consisting of a French developer who lives and works in Japan, and it was his experiences as a foreigner there which led to the creation of Illumine, a roguelite in which the player is a strange symbol wandering through an impossible maze in search of knowledge and companionship.

Illumine's primary focus is on discovery rather than strategy or combat skills. The player carves away at the blackness of the walls to reveal rooms that could contain friendly letters of the alphabet, unfriendly ones, or books. Those books are what the player seeks. By gathering the knowledge contained therein, the player levels up, the color of the floor changes, and the things that spawn in the room change.

As someone who's lived abroad for a significant amount of time and even as someone who was an outcast in my youth, the metaphors behind the game's design come through very strongly for me. It's very easy to see the fact that most of the game's NPCs, hostile or or friendly, are roman alphabet letters while the player is Japanese, Greek, an @, or something else as a representation of the player character feeling alike, but not alike. The changes in background color and the corresponding increases in difficulty correlate well with growing more comfortable with a strange culture only to stumble over some new intricacy that you didn't even notice before because you were so wrapped up in getting past the initial obstacles.

It's a better fit of genre and subject matter than I expected. In hindsight, it seems like it should be obvious. One of the hallmarks of roguelikes and roguelites alike is the depth of systems that players must uncover and learn through repetition, and figuring out how to navigate a foreign society has a similar learning curve. No matter how much you read up on it beforehand, it's not the same as being there in the moment, trying things, learning from failures and successes, and trying again.

The sound in Illumine is procedurally generated. There's an underlying beat to everything, but things you need to be aware of make noise, and the more there is to pay attention to, the more dangers and books are present, the more intense the sound gets. Care was taken to make everything visually apparent, too, though. Anything that generates a sound also generates some kind of pattern on the floor, emanating from them and visible even through walls sometimes to warn the player of their presence.

As a piece of artistic expression about the nature of feeling alone in a strange place, Illumine is top-notch. As a roguelite, Illumine breaks the mold, doing both room generation and NPC interaction differently from most.

You can get Illumine on Steam (Windows, Linux) for 10% off its regular price of $5.99.

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