From the Archives: Futuridium EP Deluxe

From the Archives: Futuridium EP Deluxe

Because future-proofing is overrated.

Platform: PlayStation 4 / PlayStation Vita

Genre: Shooter

Developer: MixedBag

Initial Release Date: Sept. 30, 2014

Limited Run Release Date: May 9, 2016 [PS4 / Vita]

Imagine if Housemarque had created Rez and you’ll have a good sense of what Futuridium: EP Deluxe looks and plays like. Launching as Limited Run’s fourth release, just a few weeks after Oddworld: New ’n’ Tasty, Futuridium made for a startling contrast against Abe’s updated oddysee. Where Oddworld presented players with a moody, shadow-drenched world built from fantastic yet realistically rendered environments and characters, Futuridium is a pop-rock explosion of color and light.

And, unlike Oddworld’s meticulous precision-platforming, the pace of Futuridium never slows down to allow players to soak in the atmosphere—on the contrary, the game constantly leaves you with the sensation that you’re not going nearly fast enough.

Really, Futuridium has exactly one thing in common with Oddworld: At heart, they’re both puzzle games. It’s just that Oddworld is a puzzle game about navigating deadly traps and evading murderous foes through careful planning and panicked execution. Futuridium, on the other hand, is about blasting bright glowy balls as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Developed by a small Italian studio, MixedBag, Futuridium hearkens back to classic arcade games. It’s almost—but not quite—a rail shooter along the lines of Nintendo’s Star Fox or Sega’s Panzer Dragoon, with the difference being that you can veer from your designated course here rather than flying strictly on invisible rails. But just because you can doesn’t mean you should! Futuridium presents a simple objective—to complete each stage as quickly as possible—and it’s the kind of game that eschews exploration and dawdling in favor of plotting out the fastest, most efficient way to reach your target… then developing reflexes sharp enough to pull it off.

Every stage of Futuridium has the same basic goal: You need to shoot down all the blue spheres, then destroy the stage core that becomes visible once the spheres are taken out. It’s straightforward enough, but the game throws in a few complications as you advance, such as orbs that remain hidden until your ship passes through an object that reveals their location.

Futuridium provides you with a limited set of abilities for taking on each of its 50 stages. You can steer, shoot, accelerate with a quick burst of speed, and reverse direction with a dizzying instant 180º turn. The complexity you’ll find here emerges not from the controls but rather from the design and layout of the stages, which grow in sophistication the further you advance into the game. Futuridium seems fairly simplistic at first glance, with long, rail-like structures lined with straightforward arrangements of targets, but the designs quickly blossom into challenging 3D puzzles that must be solved entirely with the tools you have on hand—that is, banking, shooting, and reversing.

The hyper-stylized visuals factor into the difficulty level. Futuridium has no interest in realism or trompe l’oeil depictions of three-dimensional space; it’s all about neon-drenched objects dotting the ramps and passages of bone-white structures suspended in the inky blackness of space. The lack of shading and shadows gives Futuridium a dazzling sci-fi look, but it also plays havoc with the eye’s ability to perceive spatial depth and the relative locations of objects to your ship. You have to train yourself to see how objects relate to one another in Futuridium, because operating on instinct alone will only lead to ruin: You’ll steer into walls and targets that are actually much closer to your ship than they appear to be, or hit the reverse button a little too quickly as you bank and smash into a wall.

A collision in Futuridium isn’t necessarily the end of the game, but it’s always a significant setback. Your ship has a limited amount of energy with which to finish a stage, and smashing into something doesn’t simply deduct a steep energy penalty—it also sends you back to the start of the level, meaning you’ll end up burning more energy flying back to the point at which you died. Disaster becomes even harder to avoid once the structures begin activating point defenses like beam cannons and homing missiles while targets disappear from sight as they drift behind moving walls.

You have only a single life in which to complete the game, with permanent checkpoints activating every 10 stages. So there’s not a lot of room for failure… at least, not at first. However, the EP in Futuridium’s title stands for Extended Play, and it’s not just a reference to how the music and retro-futuristic visuals evoke synthesizer music of the 1970s. The longer you play, the more chances you unlock for additional—you know, extended—play. Every blue sphere you destroy as you play through the stages is added to a cumulative target total, and as you reach specific milestones, you open up new features for the game. Sometimes these are simply cosmetic perks, such as skins, but you also unlock credits. Play long enough and eventually you’ll unlock 10 credits per attempt—enough for even the clumsiest shooter novice to brute force their way through the game.

Of course, with as much play time as it takes to unlock a full pocket of virtual quarters, you’re likely to get a good enough handle on the quirks and mechanics of Futuridium that you don’t really need the additional help. After a while, the challenge of Futuridium is less about completing stages than about completing them as quickly as possible. You’re graded and given medals for your performance in each stage according to three factors, including speed and efficiency. Unlocking every single medal in Futuridium is a task for a true savant-level video game fanatic.

Speaking of the game’s title, Futuridium also speaks to the creators’ intentions: Its design was inspired by a European microcomputer classic called Uridium, which was originally released on Commodore 64 way back in 1986. While Uridium never showed up in the U.S. in its original computer incarnations, console collectors may know it in its localized form, Mindscape’s NES shooter The Last Starfighter. Futuridium takes the basic premise of Uridium, in which players had to navigate over space fortresses, taking out gun emplacements with each pass, and tweaks it with the low-poly behind-the-ship viewpoint of Sega’s Panzer Dragoon, creating something at once steeped in the history of video games yet decidedly fresh and inventive.

It’s an interesting, artful take on the classic rail shooter, blending together both modern and retro aesthetics with classic game design principles to create what feels like nothing so much as an obscure, cult classic PlayStation 1 rail shooter that someone dug up and remastered with high-definition visuals. Of course, it’s not a PS1 game; it’s a PS4 game and a PS Vita game, and Limited Run released both versions on physical media as the company’s sixth and seventh titles.