What makes a good platformer? Christ, I don’t know. Why would you open an article with that. Calling Kandria a platformer feels a little reductive, so there’s a need to clarify why it works. You play as an android revived several decades after an apocalypse, by a tiny camp of survivors who inevitably need your help. A lot of this help involves, well, platforming. To the point of having nonsensical areas of pure platforming in between you and a destination or secret area. You’ll climb, jump, do the little dash thing that recharges when you touch the ground or pick up a hovering lamp thingy. You’ll land on a lot of thorny instakill spikes.
So yeh, lots of the old platforming, but it feels more like an exploration and scavenging game, with a side order of light-light-heavy-dodge combat too. And a plot with varied dialogue options and mysteries about the world and its history. It’s immediately and consistently fun, but I’m not sure exactly how to recommend it. Hmm.
Of all things, the game that kept coming to mind was A Valley Without Wind, which was not exactly a good platformer, and far more haphazard in design and aesthetics. Both games are about exploring a vast ruined world, hoovering up miscellaneous supplies to support a somewhat helpless settlement back home while experiencing a strange undercurrent of melancholy about the desolation around you.
The music in Kandria is particularly effective here, especially in the areas where it fades to silence as you clamber around abandoned homes and huge underground offices (soilscrapers, I think one person called them), and shifts into a slower tempo when you open your inventory. The steady thumping of your footsteps, which increase in pace the longer you run without interruption, and the pretty, understated artwork and the way the light levels shift as your robo-eyes adjust when moving between shafts of sunlight and shadow, and the camera sometimes zooms super far out to contextualise the biggest areas.
You’re tacitly encouraged to wander and explore even early on, which is always tempting, but the likeable characters, and curiosity about what their deal is, and particularly why some of them are wary to hostile about you and their neighbours, also make following the plot and their directions just as appealing. It is, once more, time to break out the “vibes game” defence, but even typifying Kandria as this unfairly implies that its constituent parts are lacking. It’s not the biggest, but its way of periodically giving you another little path to mentally note and go back to later makes it a compelling but undemanding exploration game.
The platforming gets surprisingly demanding quite soon, which I’d count as a mark against it, but it also has a very comprehensive set of cheats, including sliders to control the game speed, damage taken, and so on. To be honest, this saved the whole game when I got through a difficult section only to find I’d have to do it again in reverse to get back out.
But I can’t really hold that against Kandria. The fact that it gave me the tool to force that solution underlines to me that it’s a game that simply wants to be enjoyed, and on that basis it’s definitely a success.
