From the Archives: Xenodrifter

From the Archives: Xenodrifter

How the littlest space guy helped launch Limited Run.

Limited Run Games quickly followed up on the dizzying retro-futurism of Futuridium with an entirely different (yet equally on-trend) form of retro action set in a futuristic world. Renegade Kid’s exploratory platformer Xeodrifter belongs to a category of indie gaming that’s proven to be even more popular and prolific than the shoot-em-up, the metroidvania.

Metroidvania adventures would go on to become a staple of Limited Run’s publishing lineup, and Xeodrifter was a perfect way to dip a toe into the genre. It’s a compact, bite-sized interpretation of the format, one that can easily be completed in the space of two or three hours. Well, somewhat easily—Xeodrifter isn’t as expansive as many other exploratory platform action games, but it’s steep on challenge. True to its creator’s roots in vintage games, it isn’t shy about stomping the player and their self-esteem into tiny pieces.

With Xeodrifter, Renegade Kid undertook an exercise in minimalism. The entire game plays out almost wordlessly, with no real player guidance outside of a space map where four planets are designated according to numbers. These numbers vaguely hint at the order in which you should tackle them, but, this being a metroidvania, there’s plenty of backtracking—in fact, the final showdown takes place on planet #3, not planet #4. You can travel to any of the four planets at any time, though the more advanced worlds contain physical barriers that block your progress as well as classic space-monster “meat walls” in the form of powerful creatures that can take out a neophyte drifter in a single hit or two.

Your ultimate goal in Xeodrifter is to find and reclaim the warp core for your damaged starship, allowing you to depart the small planetary system where you’ve become trapped. The core is held by a creature—or is it a succession of creatures?—that dwells in various key points around the maps. There’s basically only one boss in Xeodrifter, which you fight over and over again, and with each encounter it gains new powers. But that’s fair. Each time you defeat the boss, you also gain a new power to help keep the odds somewhat even for your next encounter.

This being a metroidvania, the powers you collect typically expand your ability to navigate the world(s). Some powers double as weapons, such as the solar burst charge shot that can vaporize most foes and break the boss’ otherwise indestructible shield, but your skill enhancements are primarily centered around exploration and discovery. You can dive into water with a mini-sub, dash so fast that you run along the surface of magma and acid pools, streak up tall shafts with a rocket jump, and—taking a page from Renegade Kid’s earlier hit Mutant Mudds—zap instantly into the background of the world to bypass barriers in the foreground.

Your drifter’s combat capabilities are primarily enhanced through collectibles that become accessible as a side effect of the exploratory skills you acquire. There are no suit or armor upgrades; merely health boosters. And though you never come across any kind of weapon to replace your basic blaster, the gun upgrades you can find hidden in secret passages throughout the four planets allow you to augment and customize your default pistol however you like. Each upgrade converts into a skill point that can be assigned to one of several weapon upgrade categories—strength, rate, waveform, and spread—and you can swap the allocation of these upgrades at any time to best suit a given situation. For example, you may want to emphasize the ripple of your beam’s wave or the width of its spread while exploring in order to take out fast-moving foes with minimal risk, but facing a boss typically means you’ll want to pour as much upgrade juice into sheer stopping power as possible.

The boss monster is capable of making use of some nasty tricks that can result in long, drawn-out fights if you’re not smart about using all the tools you accumulate by defeating its weaker forms. For example, it loves to duck into the background layer and refill its health. When you first meet the boss, you can’t counter this ability… but, once you earn the power to enter the background, you’ll be able to jump back and punish your foe while it guzzles energy. However, the constant push-pull of boss evolution means that the bad guy is always a step ahead of you; once you learn to zap into the distance, the boss will flood the foreground with magma and drop boulders into the background while hovering safely out of reach. You’re always on the defensive here, and the boss offers no quarter—though Xeodrifter does offer a small kindness in that it sets up a checkpoint at the start of each boss battle, so you don’t need to fight your way back to the showdown when you inevitably die.

There’s really not a lot to Xeodrifter, but between the steady evolution of the boss encounters and the way your own skill growth encourages you to seek out opportunities to open new paths and find hidden skill boosts in territory you’ve already conquered, it definitely makes the most of its compact size and efficient design. Xeodrifter captures the sense of mystery and isolation that made the old Metroid games so evocative—there are no waypoints or guide arrows to lead you to your next destination, nor does anyone ever bother to explain the plot, how the alien boss acquired all these powers in the first place, or why the tokens you earn from your boss victories can open the strange gate on world #3. It’s just you, powerful alien monsters, and a highly adaptable gun against a silent retrogaming realm.

Xeodrifter originated as a 3DS game, but it quickly made its way to many other platforms. Limited Run Games specifically brought the PlayStation 4 and Vita versions to physical media as releases #008 and #009—though this would be only the first of several collaborations between Limited Run and Renegade Kid (now known as Atooi). That includes 2020’s Atooi Collection, a compilation of multiple Atooi releases (including Xeodrifter) for Nintendo 3DS—Limited Run’s first release for the platform and a fitting homecoming for a title that helped establish the company’s publishing bonafides.