iji - An Under Appreciated Online Classic

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squirrelly-sama
Posts: 611
Joined: Thu Oct 11, 2018 2:07 am

iji - An Under Appreciated Online Classic

Post by squirrelly-sama »

http://www.remar.se/daniel/iji.php
Trailer

An online platform shooter from Remar Games. Despite the simple graphics the game itself is incredibly deep in terms of story and fun to play. It was released in 2008, making it 10 years old, but has recieved patches over that time the last being in 2017, and the creator still seems interested in the work and released some information about the game's creation process on youtube recently.

The game itself follows Iji, the daughter of a scientist visiting a lab with her family, only for the planet to be bombarded in an alien invasion. She wakes up an unknown amount of time later, having been experimented on by the last surviving scientists of the facility in order to give her access to the alien's own technology to stand any hope of combating them and even then is only as powerful as the lowest grunt. Her family is dead, most of humanity is dead, and the only other survivor is her brother Dan who guides her through the intercoms. She has to make her way through the facility to find a way to stop the invading aliens and prevent the extinction of the human race. There are a number of secret scenes and branching narratives based on various actions the player can perform, the most notable being the use of force where the Player can go the full game killing no one at all or hunting down every single alien (and many are located so far off the course to require a lot backtracking to do so), as well as performing certain other tasks to affect how the story plays out. The game is aware of certain unintuitive by-passes and sequence breaks that can be done and one is actually required in order to get a true pacifist run (a log found at in the final area of the game actually references the fate of the boss that was bypassed and how it changed due to never meeting you).

Gameplay is rather fun, the areas you explore are fairly large, for platformers, with there being multiple ways to reach objectives as well as hidden secrets that can usually only be accessed by how you built your character. There's a leveling system in the game, where most of the XP is gained through killing but not all of it, allowing you to level certain traits from weapons, to health, to hacking (allowing access to more lore and non-lethal take downs). It's rather fast paced for a platformer, something that's rather common for the developer, it's not uncommon for there to be a ton of challenge due to dodging half a dozen fast moving projectiles at once.

I just wanted to spread knowledge about this game around since it seems to be rather unknown despite how good it is.
Jabroniville
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Joined: Fri Nov 04, 2016 8:05 pm

Re: iji - An Under Appreciated Online Classic

Post by Jabroniville »

The thing I find most interesting is actually the smooth walking & piloting animations, especially the neat way that Jetbike turns :).
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KorokoMystia
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Joined: Fri Nov 11, 2016 8:42 pm

Re: iji - An Under Appreciated Online Classic

Post by KorokoMystia »

Jabroniville wrote: Tue Dec 18, 2018 2:43 pm The thing I find most interesting is actually the smooth walking & piloting animations, especially the neat way that Jetbike turns :).
It looks rotoscoped to me, reminding me a lot of games like Out Of This World and Flashback.

I remember really enjoying the game when I played it so many years ago, and it's had extra content and quality of life changes added over time.
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