By Amr (@siegarettes)
- Flat Heroes
- Developer- Parallel Circles
- Publisher- Deck 13
- Nintendo Switch, PC
Flat Heroes is a minimalist action game that demonstrates how animation and solid controls can make even simple shapes feel kinetic. Actions are simple–there’s a jump, a dash, an short burst attack, and wall kicks. Your avatars have weight–they roll around on their corners, and latch onto walls as their flat sides create friction. Enemies almost feel like they have they have personalities, operating with different behaviors, their basic shapes communicating immediately what their patterns are.
Each stage is a bite sized, almost puzzle like stage. Every stage is a single square screen. There’s a short countdown to let you take in the layout, then obstacles begin to come to life. This might be a series of shots that require you to observe and dodge their sequence, laser beams that cut off areas of the stage and require cover to escape, or enemies that chase you in waves as you pass them by. There’s a lot of variations, and they’re each slowly introduced before mixing them with other obstacles to complicate the problem. You’ll die frequently, but once you figure out the solution stages are brief, never going past a minute in length.That is, if you can nail the sequence.
So Flat Heroes becomes a loop of scouting, forming a plan and executing it. There’s a certain tactile pleasure to it, as you feel around the space and work out what your options do. Boss fights in particular are real fun, requiring specialized tactics to deal with. One boss blotted out entire quadrants of the screen, making it a challenge to sneak back and forth between areas as they lit up. My favorite was a snake style boss that dragged a long tail behind it, creating walls that you could jump off of or be trapped in, and needed to be taken down by forcing it to bite its own tail.
If there’s a flaw with Flat Heroes’ approach its that the consistent room size sometimes conflicts with the changing scales it operates on. The game zooms out to shrink down the characters and level geometry, letting it create bigger rooms without changing the size of on screen play space. In extreme cases this makes your air mobility options feel limited, since you’re going the same distance in terms of scale, but the distance on screen is shorter. For instance, a zoomed in stage might have you traverse half the stage with a dash, and a wider one barely an inch.
Those inconsistencies aside, Flat Heroes is a good example of how strong movement and well paced play can make even the simplest visuals engaging. It’s smartly designed, and almost effortless in how it proves its concept.