Epic Loon (Switch)

Referential humor is a bit of a risky gamble. Not only does it depend on the audience having a level of familiarity with something outside of a game’s context, but oversaturation of it or overreliance on it can sometimes be viewed as cheap, robbing the title of an individual identity. However, Epic Loon is so incredibly self-indulgent when it comes to its references that it’s hard not to be swept up in the fun it’s having, especially since the game presses in so hard on the subjects its lampooning that it’s essentially become a full-on parody.

 

The set up for the game sets out a perfect platform for this approach as well. The game’s antagonist is a huge movie buff with an enormous collection of VHS films, the game unafraid to show Terminator posters and actual movies on his shelves, immediately jumping in with the references to the huge hits. One day, his VCR starts having trouble, so he gets a cleaning tape that ends up unleashing four aliens into the hardware, allowing them to sabotage all of his favorite movies. To try and rid them from his system, this cinephile begins putting movies in the VCR that he thinks have a chance of eradicating the aliens with their violent monsters. The selection of films used for this purpose are cinema classics with huge lasting footprints in pop culture, and while the game couldn’t get away with using the actual films here, you get to select between playing sets of levels based on Godzilla, Jurassic Park, Nosferatu/Dracula, and Alien. Despite having to skirt around the copyrights a bit, the parody follows the events of these films pretty closely, holding many of the expected scenes but not alienating anyone who hasn’t seen these specific movies. You don’t need to have seen Jurassic Park to enjoy goofy looking Brachiosauruses, and the snooty sounding Dracula talking about picking up chicks is classic role subversion. You will certainly enjoy the game more if you have a breadth of movie knowledge since it’s packed to the gills with cute allusions, but sadly, it doesn’t maintain its energy in all parts of the game. The Alien levels pull back pretty hard for quiet levels with far fewer jokes, but Godzilla manages to avoid that problem by having a silly director’s commentary over a film that might have otherwise faced the same fate.

Playing as one of the four aliens, your goal is to sabotage the tapes that are being used as weapons against you, but how you go about doing so is a little odd. The aliens in the game move about by turning into mounds of mush that can launch themselves about the 2D levels to try and reach a white glowing exit, their bodies sticking to the first piece of ground or wall they hit. There are some surfaces that are too smooth to stick too and red tinted ones that prove deadly to the touch, but death is incredibly common and goes unpunished as it seems the game would be far too frustrating otherwise. To make your leap, you must wait for an eye stalk to move back and forth and launch when it’s pointing in the proper direction. The lack of control over your jumps can lead to many issues with accuracy, especially in areas with a lot of moving objects, bounce pads, and in longer stages where a death sets you back quite far. You can get a hang of it eventually and learn how to game it, such as shifting back to your normal form to reduce your flight momentum, and while your normal form is usually pretty useless, it can do tiny hops to position your body better to navigate the maze-like jumping puzzles. It is possible to feel out the system and develop a knack for the odd approach to platforming, but there is one odd game decision that sabotages your efforts no matter how good at it you get: the game’s insistence on four player play.

 

In the Story mode, the only mode where you earn the unlockables, you cannot play as just a single alien navigating the levels. Speedrun mode has that option, but otherwise, you must bring three tagalongs, be they human players or ones controlled by the game. Unless you can get a full play group, you’re stuck with at least one partner piloted by a strangely idiotic game AI. The goal for each level is just having the human played characters reach the stage exit, but the AI characters will bounce around and potentially block your progress, sometimes seemingly uninterested in the goal and causing quite a few issues. The first is that the game is presented mostly in a black and white art style, and while that makes for some really great visuals, it can be easy to lose your alien due to their size and only small bit of color tint used to distinguish them. Not only might you mistake yourself for a different pile of alien goop, but their movements around the stage force it to zoom out, meaning that you do get a better view of the detailed art, but it becomes harder to track your own character as they get tinier and tinier. The upside is that it let’s you see where you might be launching better, but the next issue is almost entirely a detriment, that being when a stage integrates objects you need to move. The AI, or even other human players, will hit these objects either with no direction or perhaps counter to your attempts to use it, moving vines out of reach, spinning wheels in the opposite direction, or rearranging loose objects to potentially become more dangerous. This makes the other aliens essentially hazards to overcome, and while that’s interesting in the easier levels, I recall one instance where I needed to spin a ship wheel to reach the other side of a ship’s deck and they kept spinning it the opposite way. The way I got around it in the end was the ship wheel glitched out of place and fell off screen, making the jump across deck much easier. It was at least the only meaningful glitch I encountered during play.

At least in the multiplayer battle mode you expect the sabotage from other aliens, but it makes certain story levels last too long. The battle mode lets you play through random levels hosted by a parody of It’s Pennywise to try and get through the exit first to earn points, and no matter which mode you play in, if there are human players who are left in the level after an alien pops through the end of level portal, the antagonist will begin messing with the game speed to try and end the stage, fast-forwarding and rewinding to try and either make you reach the end faster or kill you so the game can move on. Oddly enough, if you die during those segments, you enter the next level swimming about the air, needing to touch another alien to get back to normal form. Battle mode can be fun, especially with other humans who can intelligently try to block you or have better chances of winning, but there are odd segments where the players doing better get penalties to their movement for a few stages that mostly just aren’t fun too experience such as reversed controls or being unable to move. They are meant to be equalizers to help the losing players catch up, but they are a bit too harsh.

 

While the alien nuisances can drag down your experience at times, the level design is where Epic Loon ensures it’s still enjoyable to play. The concept of entering famous films is used to full effect, certain scenes reproduced for you to launch your little alien about in. There are some incredibly creative decisions for what might constitute a platform, with living characters, impaled corpses, Godzilla’s rubber costume, and more joining typical walls and floors as things that make up the stages. Not every level is a showstopper, but there are certainly some that mix challenge and interesting visuals to make for memorable stages, the narration often adding an extra touch to always drive you to want to see what the game has in store for you next. There are a few repeated level concepts, with each film having one it likes to reuse such as Godzilla’s film having you bounce between Japanese letters on paper or how the Jurassic Park stage has many broken glass mazes. The time it takes to complete a stage also varies, some you can complete on a good first launch and others requiring careful and intelligent navigation to overcome, although some are only really long because your little alien escorts will constantly mess you up during it. They can prove an unexpected benefit if they finish a hard stage for you in story mode by chance, although it might not sit easy if you were determined to beat that stage yourself. Most levels being short makes for a snappy general pace that isn’t completely ruined by having to engage some levels for a while longer, but having your success sometimes dependent on an uncontrollable factor just doesn’t feel good to push against.

THE VERDICT: An irreverent lust-letter to classic cinema, Epic Loon is unafraid to go all-in on turning popular films into parody playgrounds. The visuals and humor alone give the player a motivation to press on into the later stages, but while there are some impressive ideas for level designs on display, the gameplay might be a bit too odd for it’s own good. Launching yourself around and sticking to surfaces isn’t a bad idea, but your required alien accompaniment and their interference makes it harder than it needs to be, with your jumps already tied to a small waiting period that is less about precision movement and more about proper timing.  The challenge does seem somewhat tied to that unreliability though, allowing some more interesting level designs to exist because of that lack of guaranteed accuracy, so it’s a flaw that only crops up in the occasional level that tips into a mechanic it has a bad relationship with like moving objects or tight and dangerous spaces.

 

And so, I give Epic Loon for the Nintendo Switch…

An OKAY rating. In Speedrun mode or with a group of competent humans, Epic Loon’s biggest flaws can be ignored, that being the sabotage caused by the meandering AI, but the gameplay still feels a touch simple, the appeal of the game definitely being the detailed environments and complete embrace of movie references. Unafraid to be ridiculous and having well-known films as its bigger focuses means it’s easy to enjoy it even when it goes for a deep cut. My familiarity with the major films covered and many of the others that are tangentially referenced meant this game’s aesthetic appealed to me immediately, but oddly enough, despite the flood of pop culture references, it’s the gameplay that might need to be more focused on a broader appeal. The platforming’s mix of chaos and simplicity achieves an acceptable balance but feels like it could have been tighter by having the levels provide more of the challenge rather than it coming more from the other aliens and your movement controls.

 

Epic Loon’s main appeal is its commitment to style and concept, so many delightful small touches cropping up during play that, while guaranteed not to be understood by every player, give the game it’s identity as an unabashed video game tribute to the major films of the past.