Beyond This Point Lies Only an Intriguing and Unusual Metroidvania Journey into the Void

One of my Foundational Video Games is Mazeworld, an elder Apple Macintosh first-personifier in which you explore a Carollian landscape of blue-walled darkness and rainbow-shelled snails. I was a young slip of a boy when Mazeworld released, and prone to daymares about crocodiles floating through the ceiling. Imagine my reaction to a game in which you are immediately confronted by a slathering, bodiless Cheshire Cat, its face a grinning smear that is only visible when it’s charging right at you.

I’m always looking for games that similarly hide themselves, throwing you into a chasm of occult potentiality from which anything might emerge, given the appropriate rites. Games like Nix Umbra, Death Of A Wish and now Nothing Beyond This Point, a topdown metroidvania in which you are a flaming cube surrounded by floating rods, dropped into a pixelart-scuffed void. RPS reader Mr_B recommended it in our last weekend plays thread, and I couldn’t resist trying the demo.

The aforesaid void isn’t quite a blob of bad vibes, in practice. It has structure and the suggestion of an orderly grand design. There are 16 areas divided into tacit rooms, with reassuring fixtures such as campfires. There are genre-familiar activities such as having to clear a room of foes before you can leave it, or choosing between three permanent power-ups at key junctures.

There is also a fair amount of Enigma, however. Some rooms wrap around themselves and can only be exited from a certain side. Campfires aren’t just “access points” and “save points”, they’re there to provide “a false sense of security”. There are sigils that can eventually be interacted with in the form of a doodling minigame, altering the environment. There are also three gods to find, and the rudiments of coherent places. At one point a disembodied voice started talking to me in garbled Cthulhu language, alluding to a distant obelisk.

The combat is also quite ingenious so far. Basically, you’re immortal as long as you’re surrounded by floating rods, which dissolve when you take damage and can be regenerated by holding space – which locks you in place for a fateful second or two. Rods are also spent to perform special abilities such as fireballs and AOE blasts, so battles are inherently tenser and more focussed on resource management than in a lot of vanias. Enemies consist of crawling horrors, sniper ghosts, and mallet-wielding machines.

I do get some sense that Nothing Beyond This Point will resolve eventually into a straightforward game of room clearance, levelling, and boss battles (I broke off playing the demo after I was slain by a robot-building robot) but then again, the Steam page cautions that “you’ve seen nothing yet”. Haha, I don’t see what they did there. I wonder if they have a Cheshire Cat. I wonder if they have crocodiles. Argh.