So I just finished this neat little indie game and I want to shake out some thoughts on it while they're fresh.
I've been thinking about nostalgia in terms of how it's interpreted both in usage and how it guides the creation of retro-styled art, and this game puts into form an approach to it that I wish I saw more of. Pseudoregalia has the other expected components of nostalgia in its geometry and texture work evocative of the PSX era and the soundscape to match, but it's most important aspect is in how it's designed to be played.
Capturing the feeling of playing 90s games as a kid is something tricky. You can get the games of ye olden memories, recover one of the few surviving CRT televisions to still exist and maybe even be able to recreate the setup your parents had at their home back then. You'll get the experience as you remember it looking and sounding, but it's not going to be enough. Your old neurons that remember how to navigate each level will shake off their dust and deny you the feeling that is core to this chase.
Pseudoregalia's strongest component is how it recreates the intellectual fugue of a child's brain attempting to understand and conquer these abstracted spaces for the first time. The layout of Castle Sansa is completely nonsensical, the rooms and connections between them rebelling against any proper thought of architecture. Only a handful of rooms have clear functions based on their shape or the rare few furniture assets in the games, the NPCs that feel as stranded as Sybil talk in nonsense that only has a small chance of being relevant to her quest in the broadest of senses, the bookshelves do nothing to ground you or provide navigation. Even with genre familiarity you can only make vague guesses at what kind of traversal upgrade will allow you to reach the paths that initially seem impossible.
The act of navigating this bewildering space is both the challenge and the reason to be here. To be completely unsure of what the next room will look like while trying to make sense of the ifs/hows of navigating your current room. The combat is simple because all thoughts of mastery must be put towards platforming and developing a system of finding your way back to paths made available by your most recently discovered method of movement. The story exists in only a few simple components, used gracefully to serve the whole experience.
While a short experience, four hours for my first run through, it's a potent one that I'll probably remember more than longer games that feel the need to pad themselves out to justify their existence. I wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone who has any tug of interest towards playing it.