ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 133.
Marina Kittaka and Melos Han-Tani return to talk about their narrative-rich platformer-but-also-more-than-that, Sephonie. It’s quite a different game from Anodyne 2, and as such, this is a fairly different conversation than the one they had with Drew about Anodyne 2. It’s equal parts a conversation about oscillating between hope and not-hope, and about the arcana of platformer design—from the flattening predominance of “mairoism” in platformers, to the mind-expanding exercise of reading Anor Londo and Sen’s Fortress in Dark Souls as platformer levels, to the unique and sometimes revelatory pleasures of playing games with bad controls.
We begin FLIRTING WITH SPOILERS for Sephonie at 36:16.
We then get into UNAMBIGUOUS SPOILER TERRITORY at 40:15.
You can get Seponie on Steam, GOG, and itch.io.
You can get the soundtrack on Steam and Bandcamp.
You can follow Marina, Melos, and Analgesic Productions on Twitter, and join their Discord.
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• This Elden Ring speedrun prominently features “zipping,” and is also notable for having a pinned comment that explains how exactly the zipping works in some detail.
• Melos did in fact post the code for player character movement in Sephonie!
• Here’s the interview where Marina and Melos talked about double-jumping.
• Here’s NitroRad’s YouTube channel.
• And here’s 20th Century Frog on MyAbandonware.
• This is the Everything Everywhere All At Once interview that I was remembering.
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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“ONYX Link Connected,” “Pulse of Sephonie Island,” and “Chasm of Towering Oak,” from the Sephonie Original Soundtrack by Melos Han-Tani.
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Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.
Everybody's Talking at Once 