Nefarious - Part 1 - A Real Crime

Channel:

Overhazard

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37,300

Published on October 27, 2019 9:30:00 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2fc_j2KScqw

Game:

Nefarious (2017)

Duration: 17:52

599 views

15

Welp, I'm stuck on Earthlock. (You shouldn't do wordplay riddles in a language you're not fluent in.) So that game is going on indefinite hiatus until further notice, so I've moved on to this one, Nefarious! A passion project of Josh Hano, Nefarious is a 2-D platformer in which you play as the video game villain, and you must defeat heroes. The protagonist for this game is Crow, mad scientist and a minor villain of Macro City (but big enough that most other villains know of him). He kidnaps Princess Mayapple, and Mack, the hero, comes to rescue her. Our story begins with another of these kidnappings, and this stage takes him from when he gets off the truck and to the death ray he's prepared for Mack. Mack's reaction, however, turns out a little different than either Crow or Mayapple expected, which becomes the inciting incident.

Hano, to my knowledge, is a new face in video games. So new that this was a crowdfunded game, making it the fourth one I've covered, after Mighty No. 9, Freedom Planet, and Earthlock. The supplemental artwork and characters in the text boxes are drawn by Gashi-Gashi, which I believe is the second completed game project he's worked on, the first being the aforementioned Freedom Planet. He's very good at lending manic energy to his artwork. Character designs were done by Andrew Dickman, a name I've seen here and there but don't exactly remember where. The majority of the music was done by Matt and Sarah Taranto, who previously worked on Brawl in the Family, with the remainder by Princess Cleffy.

Considering Crow is the player character, he's more of a hands-on villain than most, frequently going from place to place by himself without the use of big machines and using his airship the Sovereign, solely for long-distance travel. Though he'll use those big machines to fight heroes, he prefers to meet up with everyone else face-to-face.

That being said, he's not completely helpless--at all times, he wears a suit of power armor with a prosthetic hand that lets him punch with a lot of force. (Canonically, it's his right hand that's prosthetic, possibly a reference to one of the most famous villains of all time, Darth Vader, but the sprites are mirrored when they turn around, so it'll look like his left hand os prosthetic when facing left.) He can also launch grenades. What they do depends on what sort of grenades he brings. The default is can-shaped grenades Crow throws. They'll explode after a short time, and as his armor is calibrated to the shock of these grenades, he can use them to propel himself upward a farther distance than just jumping by being on top of the grenade when it detonates. His power suit also generates these grenades, so he doesn't have to pick them up. It'll make more as he expends them, though his carrying capacity and the speed at which they're generated can be improved over the course of the game.

That's about it for controls: walk/run, jump, punch, throw grenades. It's best to keep it simple, though as you'll see later on (and possibly even here), they're not the tightest controls. Crow's jumps are kind of floaty and make it difficult to judge where he'll land, and the game isn't entirely responsive to what you do, especially consecutive grenade jumps. You'll see grenade jump panels in this stage; they look like purple circles, and they allow Crow to do mid-air jumps when he passes over them. Problem is that they have a slight delay after activation and don't necessarily respond consistently, but more on that later.

This was my first-time run through this game. I got the basic gist of the story and what to do, but aside from that, I had never played this game prior to what you see in this video. As a result, I missed a lot of stuff and got easily confused as to what to do. Most obvious is me having no idea you could throw grenades in other directions, making me stuck at one point. Another is my failure to grab the record, which unlocks songs in this game's sound test, though I did figure out the solution later. More on that later too.

After each stage, Crow returns to the Sovereign, which is the hub. It contains the sound test, stage select, upgrades, and reminders of where to go next. NPCs also wind up here, whose dialogue changes as the story progresses, and that's how I'll close each video.

Note that I'm trying something a little different. I've recorded the entire game from start to finish and have already divided them up into videos, provided thumbnails, wrote the descriptions, and edited them down, and from here until I finish my coverage, I'll put up one Nefarious video per day, using the upload scheduler to put them up at the same time each day. I observe Daylight Savings though, so there will be a 25-hour difference between November 2nd and 3rd. If you have any questions, please ask in the comments.