For some reason, Odium to the Core has the “to” part of its title capitalized despite that being one of the words generally left lowercase. I’ll be using a lowercase “to,” though in the game’s defense, title capitalization standards are a weird thing that none of us have any obvious reason for adhering to. Now, I should probably disclose that I’m writing this after being stuck on a single part of a single level for something like 45 minutes despite previous full levels requiring several times less than that. After politely arguing with the screen about what constitutes “fair physics” and what’s a ridiculous circus sideshow of unfairness, I may be slightly less inclined to give Odium the benefit of the doubt. That having been said, my mind is nowhere near made up about its quality; there are some design decisions that irritate the living hell out of me, but I’ll have to push further in to determine whether the sudden difficulty spike I hit was a one-off occurrence or a sign that sadism is the new normal.

Some early levels

I generally default to recording at 30 frames per second to speed up video uploading, but this is a game that’s best watched at 60 FPS to understand the sensory overload that the game eventually becomes. These first two videos are the only ones that I’ll include from the short time I was recording at 30 FPS, and the one above consists of me trying to figure out how to play. The short version is that Odium is a game in the vein of Badland (basically, a polished combination of Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet and Flappy Bird), and the primary goal is to make it to the end without crashing into anything. There are also secondary goals of collecting a certain number of the little bubble things, obtaining all of the hidden gears that are found behind false walls, and beating a certain score (which you do by grabbing the bubbles and pressing the lift button as little as possible). I’m not sure if these secondary goals unlock something or if they’re merely there for the achievements.

Right off the bat, let’s get some complaints out of the way. Red is immediately established to be non-harmful, and this is important because touching red switches is occasionally required to open the path forward. So far, so good, but an issue arises when you’re dealing with fake walls. You can see where these Secret areas are by looking for a red line denoting the entrance (10:57), but only a small portion of this red line is visible at a time. The obvious issue here is that it’s difficult to tell how large this secret area is at a glance, making it frustratingly easy to smash into the ceiling or floor. Even if you manage to make it inside, though, it can still screw you over because of my second complaint, that being the fact that you can’t see how this secret area bends and twists until you enter it. The physics here are more gradual than you might expect, which means you can forget about last-second evasive maneuvers. It’s not uncommon to enter a secret area too high or low and have no chance of making it to the exit without hitting something, and it always feels unfair.

Another thing that kind of bugs me is the “tap to start” prompt at the beginning of levels, which I’m assuming is a holdover from the game’s mobile roots. Finally, there are the menus, which are insanely buggy with a controller. Starting the game and selecting a level goes fine, but going into the cutscenes menu or trying to change the playable character’s skin often causes menus on top of menus. The only way around this is to use the mouse to manually hit the back button. That’s pretty ridiculous.

Onto the 60 FPS videos

Something I want you to keep in mind while watching the next three videos is that these are back-to-back-to-back. The difficulty spike in the last video is that sudden. The video above, on the other hand, is the typical difficulty of stages around this point in the game, which is to say that it’s hard, but only takes 5-15 minutes to complete regardless. That’s the kind of difficulty that can keep a player wanting to come back to do better. That said, you can really start to see here how the secret areas can be a hassle, and another problem starts to become apparent around this point: random speed changes. Moving at a certain speed means pressing a button and having a general idea of where you’ll end up as the result of that button press, but sometimes the game slows you down out of nowhere during small segments of the song. This most obvious example of this happening is during the section that starts at 5:22, and you can see how it yanks control of the situation away from you.

Speed changes are a constant hazard, and the slowness of the controls means that you’re rarely able to deal with the cheapest examples of this. Take 6:50 in the video above, for instance. The game suddenly hits the gas, sending me careening into a wall. Fortunately, this happened right after a checkpoint, so almost no progress was actually lost. Well-placed checkpoints can make all the difference in the world.

And that brings us to the second boss encounter, a level which is challenging (but fair!) until the last section, where it tasks you with navigating an absurdly narrow area with tons of moving objects that screw with your muscle memory—usually you swerve away from moving objects, not at them—and you have to finish all of this without a single checkpoint. This adds tons of tedium; the section in question starts at 5:51 and lasts until the end of the video, as I managed to repeatedly slam into things for almost a full hour. Before long, frustration at the controls set in and made things even harder. Here’s the biggest problem, though: despite this supposedly being a Music-centric game, the music is a hindrance. Whenever I was doing well in the video, it was because I had thrown my headphones off of my head in rage and played a bit in total silence. I kept switching back and forth between listening to the music and not wearing headphones, and it was remarkable how much easier things were (relatively speaking) without the music. Part of that is an all-too-human tendency to interpret beats as inputs, but that doesn’t always work as well as you’d think. In most cases, you’re best served focusing on grabbing the red bubble things rather than trying to work out a pattern to the music. You had one job, music.

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