Swords of Ditto squeezes an entire Zelda game into just a few minutes

There’s nothing quite like a vast, expansive RPG. Exploration, discovery, combat, puzzles, and traps. You get all of it and come away with a good story. But what if you could squeeze all of that into just a few minutes? That’s the idea behind onebitbeyond’s The Swords of Ditto. I sat down last week at E3 and played a round of the game with director Jonathan “Bidds” Biddle, who previously worked on games like Stealth Inc. and Fluidity.

I often find myself frustrated with games that call themselves Roguelike because it’s so easy to lose meaningful progress. I only have so much time to play games, and a sense of progression helps me walk away feeling like I’ve done something with that time. The Swords of Ditto takes a page from Roguelikes, but doesn’t tie itself to that definition.

The game features the major hallmarks, like procedural level generation and high difficulty, but takes it in a slightly different direction. In my time with Biddle, we were able to finish the game on our first try. Now, he’s the director of the game and has played it countless times this week alone, so I had a slight advantage, but the takeaway should be that, once you make enough sense of the systems and mechanics, The Swords of Ditto is quite digestible. You won’t be simply playing until you die.

But where many games like this are brutally fast-paced, Ditto seeks to take you from the idyllic village life that begins classic RPGs up through the intense boss combat that ends them in the course of one game. Things start out slow. You’ll get the chance to navigate your little town, which combines elements both fantasy and modern into one place.

Visually, Ditto feels a lot like Adventure Time and other shows like it. There aren’t many sharp points to be found in the world. Instead of pointed leaves, trees are filled with drooping, green tendrils. Some things that shouldn’t have faces on them do for no special reason other than that it looks whimsical and cute. The color palette is bright and varied, but not eye-searing. Colors tend toward pastels or earthy tones. Your character is a tiny little stump of a person (or robot), but everything around you is over-sized, making it feel like you’re a kid going on a big adventure.

Maybe it’s a Zeldalike

Article source: https://www.technobuffalo.com/2017/06/19/swords-of-ditto-zeldalike-preview/