Tricking out my room with a Dark Fountain from Deltarune, a Smoke Machine from ENA Dream BBQ, the Mani-Mani Statue from EarthBound and the planetarium projector from Revolutionary Girl Utena to see if I can stack four surrealist fantasy worlds at once
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bniNdxkx77k – Listened to this because a wiki page for ENA Dream BBQ said that one particularly memorable track from the game was a heavy stylistic takeoff of it… I like that track, and honestly this whole album feels like ten longer versions of it, so I'm happy ^_^
Honestly the ENA Dream BBQ world is just the Homestar Runner world but where Teen Girl Squad and the 20X6 characters and the like are just part of the same world instead of being in-universe fiction.
Playing Betterified VI and ENA essentially back-to-back has ruined my taste in games. Just now I started another game, and IMMEDIATELY something expected and logical happened : (
After crawling all over this game like a sack of termites… I'm actually getting worried about whether they can maintain this quantity of sheer work for another 3-to-5 chapters >_>'
…Which is kind of nutty to think for a 2-hour game, but, they WILL only get bigger from here…
🌚"AAA could never make ENA because they lack the courage to present the player with this much surrealism."
🌝"AAA could never make ENA because they lack the courage to have most of its secret areas contain nothing but a view to another area you literally cannot enter."
The 3D styles and environments are also pretty consistent, with most of the variation being in textures (low-res low-color-depth PS1-style, cel-shading, and modern styles).
All in all, the game's art direction has a lot more focus than may seem from its initial eccentricity.
Despite being a "clash of artstyles" indie game, I think what makes ENA work for me is how selective the art styles are - the 2D anim styles are pretty similar to each other despite being from different decades, and there's no photocollage or claymation or pixel art mixed in.
Reaction image that will be on every social media site for months once more people play this
This quest HUD animation is really good
Despite this game's ostensible point-and-click-adventure basis, the fact that it has multiple routes to the end and quite a good number of missable NPCs and dialogue in general feels like a pleasant departure from the usual linear expectations of the genre.
Favourite room in the game
I saw this and immedately thought of the NeXT logo
I wonder if it will be easier to get a bead on what this is "about" and where its heart is at, as the series progresses (this being only "chapter 1"), but as of now, there isn't quite that much to go on. (Contrast with, say, Anodyne 2's more focused imagery during its earlygame.)
One issue, though, is that so far it feels narratively/characteristically weaker than that, mainly due to most of the NPCs, and especially ENA herself, being duplicitous and enigmatic… her more grounded and relatable foil, Froggy, doesn't get that much screen time, either.
So far it and the predecessor toons I checked afterward have the tone of… the same kind of playful surrealism seen in stuff like the Adventure Time pilot (not just in world design but also toying with language), but taken to a further, stylistically denser level.
Been playing "ENA: Dream BBQ", an adaptation/"reboot" of a cartoon series "ENA" from Newgrounds.
It's funny that I looked at these for like 1 second and my mind immediately detected which game had influenced this, perfectly preparing myself for what would come next.
