Setup: iPhone 11 Pro
Developer: Wildboy Studios
Version: 1.0.7
Released: 9/19/2019
I don’t know why, but for a period between March and September 2015 I became obsessed with mobile rhythm games, like GrooveCoaster and the TapTap series. Maybe I was searching for a game that could scratch Guitar Hero‘s itch, a void left behind that few games can fill. I loved being able to use my personal music library to play, and I’m sure now this moment corresponded with my growing appreciation of electronic music like chiptune and synthwave.
I did eventually drop off the bandwagon, and soon the muscle memory you build up when playing rhythm games was gone. Truth be told, I started to avoid any game which had a rhythm component to it, because the drop-off I experienced was particularly steep.
Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree is not specifically a rhythm game aside from its core battle mechanic. There’s a lot more weight given to in-game choices and dialogue options than whether you win or lose a fight (in fact, I think aside from the tutorial mission, losing a fight just takes you back to your last checkpoint). But all the same, it took me by surprise. At first I almost reflexively gave up due to this aversion I’d been building up, but the whole point of Down at the Arcade, a new recurring feature here on No Escape, is to cover every Apple Arcade game, so I had to think outside my comfort zone.
Battles in Atone do not take place randomly, or often. There’s no leveling system aside from earning points of “odal” energy in three stats: intellect, vitality and chaos. You gain more hit points by eating epli – blessed apples – ever so often. So how do you get better? Rather than getting frustrated at Atone, I decided to take a break from it and played some contemporary mobile rhythm games, like Cytus II.
Was this necessary? Maybe not. But my work paid off. I’ve successfully completed two runs through the game, and my second run felt much closer to the “good” ending than the first.
So what’s the deal with Atone? What is it about?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a god wrongs the protagonist of the video game, so he – and it’s always he – must slaughter his way through a pantheon of gods and monsters before arriving at his quarry, usually the head god or someone close enough to them that the head god must get involved. The use of pre-medieval histories or mythologies as a setting for video games has the capacity to facilitate so many interesting stories and game conventions, but in the last few years has opted for the same destructive formula. God of War is the exemplar here but I could also point to Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice and even, to a lesser extent, Assassin’s Creed: Origins and Odyssey.
In its opening moments, Atone: Heart of the Elder Tree seems to head in this direction too. We meet Thyon, the leader of a Nordic village, drinking mead and bragging about his special, magic battle axe with his friends, Buldr and Dallr. They are in the throes of revelry after putting a man to death for loving a god. That night, while Thyon is sleeping, an unseen force slaughters everyone in the village. He wakes with a start, and rushes to the base of Yggdrasil, the World Tree, to find his young daughter, Estra. He gives her his necklace and tells her to run deep into the forest. She gets tangled up in a thicket of trees and witnesses a shadowy figure fight, best, and kill Thyon.
And so, there you have it. A setup for your typical third-person revengeathon slaughter-fest, ready to go. Except that’s not how this goes. Estra travels west with her grandmother and starts over; she learns to fight so she can defend her new village, not take revenge for her father’s death. In fact, she believes the Norse pantheon – Odin, Loki, Freya, etc. – has abandoned Midgard entirely, and is accordingly reluctant to get involved with the spirit world. She only begins her journey to her homeland – and to Yggdrasil – after a villager infected with something called the “blue vein” attacks her grandmother.
Her journey takes her through notable places in Norse mythology and brings her into contact with various unsavory characters, like Jörmungandr, the World Serpent, and Loki, God of Trickery. Estra’s beef, such as it is, is never with the gods, and there are moments when she can choose not to fight and not to kill. Also in her path are puzzles of various difficulties. Many of the puzzles involve taking note of Estra’s surroundings; others are more logic-based. There’s an item that can brute-force Estra through them, but at the cost of chaos odal energy.
By the end of the game, the culmination of your choices affects how events proceed, but not by much. You still have to fight Freya and destroy a magical object on Odin’s request. In doing so, you save humanity but sever Earth’s connection from the spirit world forever.
I’ve talked a bit about the game’s systems and lore, but there’s so much more to love here. The music is incredible, blending traditional music with synths in a way that surprisingly works. The animation is mindboggling; everything in battle is rotoscoped, which created an interesting throwback effect. Aside from the sharp difficulty curve, the only thing I really didn’t enjoy was the lack of a pause button during battles.
It feels cheap to end this on a “I liked it, go play it” note, but I think that’s honestly all that needs to be said. It’s an Apple Arcade exclusive as of now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if it eventually made its way to consoles or PC.
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