Resolutiion, an upcoming action-adventure game that’s destined to be the bane of spellchecks and typing muscle memory everywhere, was recently announced at the Golden Joystik Awards. I only barely know what those awards are because the whole “award show” thing makes me want to start headbutting random people, but Resolutiion looks interesting regardless, and it’ll be published by Deck13 (an old favorite company of mine back in the Ankh and Venetica days before they started to get big and suddenly didn’t have enough review keys lying around).

At a glance, Resolutiion looks like the lovechild of Hyper Light Drifter and Lucah: Born of a Dream, which raises questions about this line in its press release: “Proudly standing out as an action-adventure, it is a reminiscence, a true homage to the classics of the SNES era.” I own a Super Nintendo, I’ve played many of the games for it, and you, sir, are no Super Nintendo homage. The most similar games I can think of are action RPGs like Secret of Mana and Illusion of Gaia, with most of the pure action games back then being 2D sidescrollers. Somehow, I don’t think they’re thinking of Demon’s Crest when they’re talking about influences. I don’t know why they can’t just come out and say that they were inspired by other indies. The closest game of this type back in those days would probably be either Ys IV: Mask of the Sun or Lagoon, but neither are even remotely close to what Resolutiion‘s gameplay looks like. This might seem like a minor thing to become annoyed by, but it really bothers me when PR is outright BS.

That’s doubly true given that Resolutiion looks legitimately interesting on its own merits. You play as Valor, a killer who’s escorting an AI to infiltrate a terrorist network in a cyberpunk world, and the trailer suggests that there’ll be some absurdist humor balancing out the game’s potential darkness. There’s some moral ambiguity implied, as well, and the gameplay looks fast and fluid (as to be expected given its actual influences). Resolutiion is a game that I’ll be watching, then, mostly out of interest but also in case it randomly decides it’s a Katamari Damacy homage.

Resolutiion is a homage to SNES games that don’t actually exist first appeared on Killa Penguin