This series is intended to highlight some of the free games that I enjoy and would recommend. Specifically, the focus will be on games that are permanently free (not free-to-play with microtransactions and not temporarily free) and that are available through the likes of Steam, Itch.io, GOG, or Epic Games. Any recommendations of such games are welcome as well!
Game: All Our Asias
Platform: Steam, Itch.io
Release Date: February 7, 2018
Developer: Melos Han Tani
Genre: Exploration/Adventure
Length: ~ 2 hours
Trailer:
In 2013, Melos Han Tani and Marina Kittaka of Analgesic Productions released Anodyne, a surreal and deeply strange 16-bit Zelda-like focusing on the adventures of Young, a broom-wielding young man who finds himself marooned in a dreamlike land. Six years later the duo released a sequel called Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. Outside of some cameos and references to the first game, Anodyne 2 was very much more of a spiritual sequel than a direct sequel to Anodyne. Taking place on an island entirely separate from the world of the first game, Anodyne 2 is a 3D PS1-style platformer (with some 2D sections) centered around Nova, a newly created being tasked with healing people from the mind- and body-altering effects of a substance called Dust. I played both games for the first time late last year and came away from each of them with quite different opinions. While I appreciated the ambition of Anodyne, I found the game merely okay – the narrative was so vague that it frequently felt like the game was being weird simply for the sake of being weird and Young’s simplistic control scheme didn’t lend itself to enough mechanical variety to keep a game of its length interesting. On the other hand, I unabashedly loved Anodyne 2. Its story and themes were significantly more cohesive, the PS1-level graphics helped lend the game a strange beauty, and the mechanics felt better integrated and more varied.
How is all this relevant to today’s topic of discussion? Between the release of Anodyne and Anodyne 2: Return to Dust, Analgesic Productions published two more games. One was Even the Ocean, a 2D platformer that I have not had the chance to play yet. The other was All Our Asias, a free and deeply personal project created by Melos Han Tani. With its surreal tone, heavy themes, sense of ambiguity, PS1-style 3D graphics, and simplistic gameplay, it really does feel like a transition from the style of Anodyne to Anodyne 2 and a prototype for some of the elements of the latter. And yet, despite that, All Our Asias has an identity all its own.
So what kind of game is All Our Asias? It’s hard to classify – part adventure game, part exploration game, part visual novel, part 3D platformer, there’s no genre it really sits easily in. The game follows Yuito, a 30-something second-generation Japanese-American hedge fund analyst in Chicago who is notified that his father, who had abandoned his wife and son shortly after Yuito’s birth, is comatose and close to death. Having virtually no knowledge about his father, and seeking answers to his questions – What kind of person was he? Why did he leave his family and never come back? – Yuito decides to undergo an experimental procedure that will allow him to enter his father’s mind. Ensconced in a kind of observation pod (a clever way to get around creating a 3D model for Yuito), he traverses his father’s Memory Worlds searching for answers, with (sometimes lengthy) detours along the way.
At the center of All Our Asias are a number of thorny questions and themes. Some are more general – for example, when someone has done both some very bad and very good things in their lives, how do you weigh those deeds against each other? Some are more specific to the experiences of immigrants and the children of immigrants. There’s one particular sequence early on where Yuito finds himself in a Japanese train station and becomes frustrated to realize that he doesn’t understand anything that the other occupants are saying to him. It’s an understated moment, but one that effectively evokes the feeling of gradually losing connections to the culture of one’s ancestors. And there is another question, one that is posed at the very beginning of the game and is reiterated at least a couple times throughout (even in the game’s title): If Asia is such a populated and diverse continent, with roughly 60% of the world’s people spread across a vast multitude of countries, cultures, and geographies, is it even possible for there to exist a single unified ‘Asian’ identity? And if so, what would that identity entail? The game knows there are no easy answers to any of these questions, and I appreciate its more personal approach to exploring them.
Outside of the story, the biggest focus of the game seems to be on its aesthetics. From that standpoint, there is much here to love. As I’ve been playing more and more indie games with Nintendo 64/PS1-era graphics over the past year, I’ve grown fond of the style and the way its relative simplicity can be used to heighten a sense of mystery or eeriness. Both Anodyne 2 and All Our Asias make excellent use of their polygonal textures and frequently pastel colors to create a surreal vibe that is often quite beautiful. There was a forest area in the early part of the game that particularly blew me away with how good it looked – the looming trees, the fog, the glowing green particles, it was all so pretty and enigmatic. Han Tani composed the music himself for both Anodyne games as well as All Our Asias, and his ethereal and typically calming style fits very well with this game’s visuals to create a unique and introspective atmosphere.
The trade-off of having a larger emphasis on story and visual style is, at least in this case, the gameplay. The controls are very simple – you can move, jump, and interact with objects. That is it. There’s not much complexity to how the game actually plays, with both platforming and puzzle-solving being minimal. Such a gameplay style could easily become boring. I didn’t feel that way during my playthrough, in part because the game’s short length works in its favor on this subject, but I could see that happening to other players. And despite the fact that the game managed to keep my interest even with the simple gameplay, I did find myself wondering at times whether opportunities were missed to mix things up a bit more.
All Our Asias is a game that I loved but would somewhat hesitate to say is for everyone. It is very text-heavy, the pace is often quite leisurely, and there were some backtracking sections in the last of the half of the game that made me wish for an equivalent to a run button. But at the same time there’s something almost magnetic about the game and the way it explores its themes. If it seems like something that might be up your alley, I definitely recommend giving it a shot.
On a side note, if you want to know more about Melos Han Tani’s background and his thoughts on game design and representation in the industry, you can check out this interview from 2020.
Images courtesy of Polygon and the game’s Steam and Itch.io pages