Since we’re already sharing trailers from non-Geoff awards shows, here’s another: a first in-motion look at Lola’s Familiars: Prison of Argnoh, a 2D side-scroller and “lite-vania” that sees its shy witch-in-training making her first summonable friends. Then, borrowing their powers to bust out of a dark fantasy oubliette.
It looks like this’ll be a mix of passively familiar-enhanced punching and more active, mayhaps traditionally Metroid-y power upgrades, Lola’s ghastly pals looming over her tiny frame when called upon. It’s all presented in a hand-drawn, lightly anime-ish style, complete with a story setup straight out of Saturday morning TV – Lola’s only stuck in Skullcatraz because of a summoning-gone-wrong that occurred in pursuit of her school’s unlikely Ofsted-compliant ‘familiar contest’. I’ve attended school several times, and will attest that non-sporting contests, which students remain unaware of until seeing a poster for them, do not exist outside of childrens’ television*.
This doesn’t seem to be kid fodder, though. Lola’s a bean but the familiars, and the prison’s other denizens, are growling towers of jaws and decaying flesh. Developers Caracal Games are promising they’ll star in a “heartfelt and emotionally resonant story about growth,” to balance out the grimness, though I’m less clear on a following blurb point that declares it a “lite-vania,” into which you’ll “dive into exploration, trial-and-error and platforming, without feeling frustrated.” While this might just be an attempt to assuage fears that this’ll a Hollow Knight– or Nine Sols-style controller-thrower, I do wonder how one goes light on ‘vania. Maybe some of the ability gates open if you just ask them nicely?
That aside, I’m already quite charmed by Lola’s Familiars, especially the designs of its bag-eyed wallflower of a heroine and her contrastingly hench minions. Release date is TBC, but the Steam page is up.
*Granted, no TV example was ever as egregiously misleading as Jack Black vehicle School of Rock, which convinced me – then a barely-pubescent aspiring bassist – that winning a local Battle of the Bands would pay out thousands in cash, as opposed to the drinks rounds and packs of guitar strings I’d end up competing for a few years later.