Alpha Nomos (PC)

Alpha Nomos is a rhythm action rogue-like game where you try to land your attacks in time with the beat, but the fighting goes a bit deeper than that. Each weapon you acquire is also an instrument, and just like with an actual piece of music, you don’t play an instrument just by hitting the same note repeatedly in the same rhythm. You need to figure out how to space your attacks to produce a better sound and in turn a better combo, and just like with a song, the more you hear it, the better you can perform it. It is a battle system with room for a lot of depth, but Alpha Nomos might not quite be the robust rhythm battler it first appears to be.

 

Alpha Nomos has you playing as Cello, a little clown doll who is dropped into the wild and realizes she’s been separated from her friends. While heading through the underbrush of the forest she finds a village of abandoned toys like a gorilla stuffed animal who can make her new weapons or a jack-in-the-box who will teach her new moves, the village serving as a base she’ll come back to as she heads out to face danger and can either come back after successfully beating a boss or after she’s been taken down by hostile toys. The story reasons behind Cello’s situation aren’t really touched upon much and it can almost feel like Alpha Nomos was released with the intent to maybe wrap up plot points in later patches. There is still a final boss to face, although progression through the game’s three areas are gated by the need to beat the three bosses for the area in separate runs before you unlock the ability to continue to the next one. You also need to always start from the forest area before you can pass into the amusement park and final surreal area, but Alpha Nomos doesn’t really mix up the design of rooms you pass through so you will become overly familiar with room layouts as you work your way towards the final boss.

Combat in Alpha Nomos leans on the earlier mentioned system of fighting not just in time with the beat, but in different rhythms to shake up how you strike. Your first weapon, the Xyloblades, are already a satisfying set of tools that exhibit the potential of the system pretty well. With the standard attack button you’ll not just slash, you’ll create little musical bursts that sounds like a xylophone playing, and depending on if you immediately attack again or wait a beat, the sound of your next strike and how the bursts happen will change. The game’s background music is often mostly focused on providing a clear distinct beat, parts of the environment and even the characters constantly bouncing a little to help visually represent it alongside a beat meter that you can choose your personal preferred presentation for. While some clearer music sometimes emerges rather oddly and goes away just as quickly, listening to the sound of your weapons is an important part of keeping the rhythm of your specific preferred combos, the Xyloblades even able to make a few catchy tunes if you can manage to get a longer sequence of strikes going. Later weapons like the SaXword saxophone and OwlClaw guitar have their own rhythms and attack types like the guitar able to hit from farther away with its musical bombardments, and you have two attack types for each weapon to vary things up some too. A weaker combo-friendly attack is joined by a stronger blow that is slower to combo but might also have extra effect if held like the Xyloblades able to increase its attack power for a time.

 

In a fight, you’ll need to be dodging a lot as well, another action that is important to keep on beat but doesn’t seem as punished or demanding of precision as attacking. Mess up your timing on an attack and you’ll do wimpy damage and not be able to combo it, but a bad dodge can still get you a bit away, and enemy attacks are not only indicated by highlighting the ground red ahead of them before they strike, but their attacks will appear in your beat markers so you can time your dodge dashes better. Perfect timing does make moves more impactful as well compared to just getting a Good for nearly having the attack line up with the beat, and some combos have extra effects like launching an enemy airborne for potential follow-up attacks. It feels like a battle system rich with potential for almost making music out of your battling, but there are some aspects of the combat holding things back. Battles in Alpha Nomos often have a few enemies to consider at once, and while you can build up a meter to temporarily stun a foe, other foes might still try to strike you while you try to whale on the incapacitated one. What this amounts to fairly often is an all too limited window for making the longer and more intricate attack combos that give the fighting system some of its texture. The BPM is fairly quick and this does seem to be to encourage you to maybe attack every other beat while rapid slashing every beat is viable if plain, but even at such a speed you likely won’t have much time before you’re about to be hit and need to dodge away. Even if you do get off a longer combo, the amount of damage it deals might not necessarily be better than hit and run tactics with the stronger strike or other simpler forms of fighting, and options like aerial attacks lose their value since keeping a foe airborne long enough for a good sequence isn’t too feasible. There are some exceptions to the rule, certain weapons play into elements better than the others, but it feels like the musical attacking is let down by realities of combat, and things don’t necessarily get much better when you start looking at the rogue-like elements.

 

During a run of Alpha Nomos, you pick your weapon, a little trinket that has a small effect, and then head off into the forest, some lush backgrounds and ones that nail in your small size making it at least a nice place to be going through fairly often. However, to increase your strength, you’ll need to collect upgrades along the way. Some of these are called Plugins, the player offered a choice between a few boosts that can all be accrued over the course of the run so long as you keep finding Plugin opportunities. These can range in value as can the more distinct character upgrades, Cello able to get new powers that are named after musical elements that may impact the background music as well but it’s difficult to tell. With names like Delay, Compressor, and Echo, they provide boosts that can be upgraded over the course of the run or even transformed into new effects if you upgrade them to a certain level, but all Plugins and upgrades are lost on a death. The effects these can provide vary, some like the Delay upgrade exciting because you are able to place a bomb on an enemy with your strong attack for extra damage and others like Plugins that let you deal a little extra damage to a full health enemy not so exciting. There are good ones to be found and some can shift your play style a little like Delay being good for hit and run tactics, but a good deal of them also play into elements of the game that are underfed. Getting boosts to aerial attacks or rewarding you for delaying attacks doesn’t quite gel with combat that doesn’t combo as well as it should, and even if you do try to utilize them sometimes the bump up in power feels rather imperceptible unless you really layer on extra levels for the upgrade. There are enough good or so-so ones that there’s still room for a very strong build paying off the investments and decisions you make during a run, but some feel like they were chosen for the ideal form of this game’s combat rather than the actuality of it.

As you pass through areas in Alpha Nomos you’ll face a few different enemy types, although most of them are Scrubs, a name for the little ragdoll people that come in a few different variants. While some might come armed with a fork, throw needles from afar, have a laser eye, or attack in some technically different way, they do all feel a bit samey, especially when you will inevitably fight tons of scrubs due to the forced repeat runs through areas even if you were to beat a boss every time. There are a few bigger and more unique foes, slimes that can heal the other foes or nutcrackers that are tougher to crack being the main ones, and later areas do vary things up a touch better with little guys with rocket launchers that flesh out an enemy pack better but also mean more dodging and shorter combos. Bosses can be a bit of a mixed bag too, some just upgraded versions of Scrubs you’ve faced, although the final boss has a bit of a different issue where she spends so much of her fight doing easily dodged attacks only for the moments you can actually approach her be very risky because she can attack so quickly you might not be able to dodge it effectively. Most enemies and bosses play into the dodge system better even if it restrains you from doing long musical combos and there’s still legitimate challenge in trying to work your way around a crowd to land hits and survive, healing even dished out after every fight if you get too low to try and balance out how hard some foes will hit even early in the adventure.

 

You do get to pick you path through each area to some degree even if the shapes of the rooms repeat. You’ll often see two exits to a room once you clear it out, a symbol telling you what reward awaits you should you pick that route. You can play towards getting upgrades and plugins quickly, maybe head to a health room if you’re nervous about your life meter, or even go for long term goals like getting pieces for Maestro the jack-in-the-box so he can teach you new moves or gifts that can be given to any villager to unlock their side quests. While dying and heading back to the village doesn’t give you too much room for progression between runs, gifting the other toys will open up small optional tasks on runs like grabbing a certain Plugin or finding a lost item that will then get you a reward like the bunny who runs the shop carrying more items or the gorilla will make new types of Plugins start appearing during runs. It can be a bit slow to get gifts even if you always go for them when they’re available, and there are some times during runs where you’ll be forced into a regular fight room with an unclear reward or into a helper space. Helpers will provide little bonuses like the bunny letting you spend the temporary money called Junk you found on that run or a fisherman will let you have a pick of a few fish to eat that have both a benefit and a detriment. The bunny store is useful for healing or a reliable way to buy some useful improvement, the fisherman can sometimes be more of a hindrance when his catch is all fairly detrimental, and a teddy bear can let you trade upgrades or Plugins but he decides which ones so they aren’t always worth it. It’s still nice to have these systems even if they could also be handled a bit better like fish with more interesting effects, but the gift system at least feeds into them and makes even the mandatory return trips to the village potentially more than just a break between run attempts.

THE VERDICT: Alpha Nomos has interesting systems for long musical combos, but then the fight format doesn’t really make them practical. You can still find some challenge in trying to attack and dodge on beat, but your instrument weapons can hardly get going before you have to zip away, leading to a fair few upgrades and Plugins not really having much value. You can acquire a few useful perks on a run to make you a better fighter or grab upgrades that reward things like frequently landing perfect hits, but Alpha Nomos loses steam due to a small enemy pool and the gift system making meaningful changes between run a bit too rare to make frequent replays consistently rewarding.

 

And so, I give Alpha Nomos for PC…

An OKAY rating. Cello’s weapon options are all unique and trying to figure out the right pace for leaving breaks between your attacks to pull off a new version of your combo could have been a rewarding process in a game that better allowed you to explore the feature. Even boss enemies attack too quickly or won’t be stunned for long enough to really invest in a better combo when simpler strikes or small sequences do better, and it’s a shame because there are well animated and musically pleasing sequences to perform. Fighting to the beat still gives encounters substance, even the most basic of Scrubs requiring you to feel the rhythm and strike right to get full credit. The final boss is the only foe that really feels like she’s breaking away from the fairness found in typical enemy design, indicators and fighting on beat themselves meaning you can dodge effectively even if the need to do so is one thing holding the combo complexity back. The upgrades can seem a bit too optimistic about the battle system, trying to reward you for situational options that could have encouraged different battle approaches if not for the reality of the way enemies attack. The idea of Alpha Nomos’s action feels like it is still trying to find its footing and feel its way through, the satisfying attacks not finding themselves in a game that makes the most of their variety. The rogue-like elements might be part of it, enemies being one of the things lightly randomized between area revisits so they are built to be flexible parts of a group battle rather than something you can duel with complementary dodging and combo building. The baddies do work somewhat well in bunches, not so much for letting you explore battle systems but because they keep the fights active and test your ability to stay on beat so you will still find enough challenge in this game that it isn’t a lost cause. However, Alpha Nomos would have benefited from enemies that could let the player explore the depths of their weapon’s skills to maybe make some of the upgrades more meaningful.

 

Alpha Nomos does seem to have plans for more updates and refinements in its future that may fix some weak points like the final boss, but the musical fighting might need too large of a rework for it to escape some of its pitfalls. Difficulty in fighting on beat comes through as the main challenge at present and it buoys the game somewhat, but it also thins your options because it is a bit too demanding without leaving room for the advanced maneuvers that the game can’t adequately reward. Perhaps the upgrades could be made more drastic or unique as well, but Alpha Nomos is still coming to grips with its composition, not everything coming together in harmony despite a mostly decent core.