Video Game / An Untitled Story

"You're an egg..."

A freeware Metroidvania game created by Maddy Thorson chronicling the travels of an adventurous egg. Download it here.

As the player progresses through the game, multiple separate paths appear, new powerups are found, bosses are conquered, and the plot slowly develops around your travels.

The game has a uniquely cartoony appearance that, though simple, is still endearing and convincing. With a huge number of different environments, many of which are wholly optional, a healthy sense of exploration is definitely rewarded. Oh, and the game is really hard at times, with some jumping segments being pull-your-hair-out difficult.

Compare to Craz'd!, of similar gameplay, genre, and aesthetic.

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This game contains examples of:

• 100% Completion: 95 Hearts, 18 bosses, 10 golden orbs, the list goes on.
• After Boss Recovery: This is nice because aside from Healing Checkpoints, there is no way to heal.
• After the End: If you find the secret library, the world is apparently after the end of humanity.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Very, very, very present. If you're aiming for 100% Completion, it's smart to check every corner big enough to hide a Heart Container. Averted once you find the crystal ball in SkyLands: it will give you vague hints for an ever-increasing cost.
• Anti-Frustration Features: If you buy an item from the shop or unlock a treasure box but then die without saving, the upgrade will still be waiting to be picked up.
• Apocalyptic Log: A secret area in Dark Grotto contains the diary of a mining expedition that was attacked by the level's boss.
• Asteroids Monster: The boss of the Farfall area splits into multiple smaller copies as you damage it, filling up the arena in the process.
• Attack Its Weak Point: Every single boss except one is defeated by dodging its attacks for a little while, then jumping on it or shooting fire/ice at it when it's vulnerable.
• Betting Mini-Game: You can play a blackjack minigame in SkyTown, which functions as this.
• Big Boo's Haunt: the Curtain and the UnderTomb, which feature ghosts as enemies (completely different ones from those important to the story). The latter has entire flocks of them.
• Blackout Basement:
  • Dark Grotto, which is so dark that you and the torches only reveal a very small circle. Many monsters that you can't possibly see or expect will hit you, and for huge damage too. And of course, they don't emit light. Thankfully, at least the boss does.
  • One room in Black Castle is like this, with the lights intermittently dying on you and then coming back. Apparently the endboss is too cheap to replace his damn light bulbs...
• Bleak Level: The Bottom has absolutely nothing other than a Heart Container and access to CloudRun. It has no scenery and barely any music — if you could call the background noise "music." You can't escape without warping out.
• Block Puzzle: These are all optional and reward you with a Heart Container and plenty of money.
• Bouncy Bubbles: The DeepDive is home to bubbles that the player character can bump into for an upward boost and another use of the Double Jump ability. They also restore a bit of the player's Oxygen Meter.
• Broken Bridge: At one point you'll be quite nicely stuck until you figure out how to hatch from the egg.
• Bullet Hell: In an odd non-shmup example, most of the bosses in this game flood the screen with projectiles or other hazards in between which you must weave. Some non-boss obstacles qualify as well. The purple...substance falling from the ceiling in one room of BlackCastle comes to mind.
• CamelCase: All the area names are in camel case.
• Cash Gate: Some (fairly early) areas are blocked off by yellow walls with shopkeepers sitting next to them. Closer to Broken Bridge than most examples of this trope: the prices they ask aren't completely extortionate, and the main reason they block your passage is that you can't communicate with them until you hatch.
• Charged Attack: You can throw ice balls by charging your fireballs after collecting a certain upgrade.
• Collection Sidequest: The ghostly flowers.
• Collision Damage: Colliding with enemies costs the player health.
• Conspicuous Electric Obstacle: One of the obstacles the player encounters are zigzag bolts. The red parts of the bolt do damage.
• Convection, Schmonvection: Some screens in the Fire Cage contain lava. Despite the fact that, as the name implies, the area is an enclosed space, you will not be hurt unless you actually touch the lava.
• Copy-and-Paste Environments: Averted to a greater extent than is possible in most games, as not even the background graphics are the same from area to area. Rather than having tiled or otherwise regular backgrounds, nearly the entire game world is one continuous piece of hand-drawn (probably MS Paint) art, with every screen therefore having a unique appearance. (The exceptions to this continuity are MountSide and the combined block of BlackCastle and the proper final area, both of which are not directly connected to the rest of the game world and only accessible through portals or save point warping.)
• Cranium Ride:
  • You can ride the statue enemies in StoneCastle, as well as ghosts, the latter allowing for Sequence Breaking, at least until the Collision Damage kills you.
• Death Course: Short ones (just a couple screens) are all over the place, as platforming is the main part of the game. There are also some protracted sequences, made tougher with unforgiving save placement sending you back to the beginning if you die.
• Deliberately Monochrome: BlancLand, TheBottom, and IceCastle. Some other areas approach this, e.g. BlackCastle and MountSide.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • If you Sequence Break and complete the semifinal dungeon without completing the Disc-One Final Dungeon, you'll kill the boss of said Disc-One Final Dungeon, as he's a Recurring Boss. If you later complete the Disc-One Final Dungeon, you won't fight the boss.
  • If you skip the upgrade that lets you warp between save points and then fall into FarFall, which you can't get out of without warping, the upgrade will be waiting for you right next to StoneCastle's first save point.
• Disc-One Final Dungeon: The Curtain. You need pretty much every powerup you can get at that point just to get in, and it's pretty difficult compared to other areas you've gone through. There's dramatic music and lightning, too...
• Disconnected Side Area: The game contains quite a few of them. MountSide and BlackCastle can only be reached through special warps.
• Door to Before: Done creatively, though; as the player can find a powerup to teleport between save points... well, you can imagine what's on the other side of every boss.
• Double Jump: One of the first power-ups you get gives you one.
• The Dragon: Shakespeare.
• Earth All Along: The secret library reveals that the game takes place After the End.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: Most of the time, the platforming segments are tricky but not especially difficult. Then you reach the boss and get stuffed.
• Essence Drop: All of the bosses drop a tiny heart after their death which heals you back to full health in order to escape the arena.
• Equipment-Based Progression: The player progresses by finding heart containers and abilities which let them reach areas that were inaccessible before. Later, ability finding is replaced with searching for golden orbs.
• Event Flag: A rather blatant example is the warp that appears for no particular reason after you've talked to a certain character about something apparently unrelated.
• Face Death with Dignity: The two birds who get carried off by the ghosts realize that their time has come and don't struggle.
• Fake Difficulty: The sparse save placement and unforgiving platforming segments make some sections far, far more difficult than they really ought to be.
• Fetch Quest: An optional sidequest for the Ghostly Flowers.
• Flame Spewer Obstacle: Part of the surface that regularly spit out jets of flame can be encountered fairly frequently.
• Flip-Screen Scrolling: When the player exists one screen, another screen is entered.
• Floating Continent: SkySand, SkyLands, and IceCastle. The whole game world could as well take place on one.
• Floating Platforms: Via Frozen Foe Platform: Ice shots can turn most enemies into blocks of ice that can be used as floating stepping stones.
• Fluffy the Terrible: The boss of CloudRun is a flying mechanical death machine named Fluffy.
• Foreboding Architecture: Big empty rooms with no music and four torches on the walls? What could it possibly be?!?!
• Frozen Foe Platform: An ability is Charged Attack ice shots can turn most enemies into blocks of ice that can be used as floating stepping stones.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Getting the magnet upgrade which draws gems to you can do this. Collecting too many gems simultaneously causes the game to crash. Luckily you only run the risk of this by solving optional box puzzles and after beating bosses.
• Game Within a Game: The items you can buy for your house include several of these.
• Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: Some of the bosses have foreshadowing, but others will just come completely from left field.
• Gimmick Level: DeepDive is underwater. Your fire shots are rendered useless and you need oxygen to survive, but you can jump much higher. BlancLand would be a pretty easy platforming level but the stage tilts back and forth constantly. SkySand showcases the stickslide. DarkGrotto is a Blackout Basement. StrangeCastle is all about Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom.
• Goomba Springboard: While it doesn't make you jump any higher than it normally would, jumping on an enemy regenerates your Double Jump, so you can use an enemy as a platform to get to a higher area, or use enemies to form a "bridge" across spike pits and the like.
• Goomba Stomp: Your main method of defeating your enemies.
• Green Hill Zone: NightWalk is a grassy, forest-themed area, and where the game starts.
• Groin Attack: The method you need to use to defeat the boss of SkySand often ends up resulting in this, whether or not you specifically aim for it.
• Ground Pound: You gain the ability to perform a ground pound early on by jumping in the air and holding the "down" button. Unlike most examples, your movement is not altered and you can stop the ground pound at any time.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • Some players may find it very difficult to figure out how to reach the chamber with the first save point (and a necessary power-up) in SkySand if they have made a certain incorrect assumption about how the warp system works. You don't need to have used a save point to warp to it. You only need to have seen it.
  • Finding the secret library, which reveals a lot of the game's Back Story and explains the boss of CloudRun.
  • Locating UnderTomb. The only hint you'll find about the place is found in a book in the library. Even if you do figure out where it might be, it still requires dive-bombing every inch of the land until you suddenly find it.
  • In the RainbowDive minigame, you earn 10 points for making contact with a star. The game doesn't tell you that you earn 15 points for shooting a star. This trick is required to earn the best reward.
• Hailfire Peaks: FireCage is both a volcanic Lethal Lava Land and a machinery level.
• Harder Than Hard: Simple, Regular, and Difficult are analogous to Easy, Normal, and Hard. Then there's Masterful and Insanity. And on Insanity, you die in one hit from everything.
• Healing Checkpoint: Save statues fully restore your life.
• Heart Container: There are no fewer than 95 such items, each one adding 10 Hit Points on to your initial 100. Individually, these aren't that useful, when before long monsters and traps will do upwards of 100 damage. As a result of this, and possibly as a form of mercy, some areas (notably IceCastle) are absolutely stuffed with them.
• An Ice Person: Finding the fireball charge upgrade in DeepDive will let you charge them up into ice balls.
• Inconveniently-Placed Conveyor Belt: Volcano area has conveyor belts in it that push the player around.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chests: Averted, possibly. There are treasure chests, but they only appear when you stand next to them and they can talk to you. Maybe they put themselves there.
• Instant Home Delivery: Any furniture bought from the landlord in SkyTown will be delivered to your home as soon as you leave the screen.
• Interface Screw: BlancLand has the screen constantly tilting left and right.
• Intentional Engrish for Funny: The manuals found in the library are written in a style reminiscent of those for old video games.
• An Interior Designer Is You: You can buy a house in SkyTown for which you can buy furniture and minigames.
• Invincible Minor Minion: The purple ghosts, although unlike the archetypal example these are the most dangerous non-boss enemies in the game. The other kinds of ghosts are straighter examples (but still relatively dangerous), although the green ones can be knocked back by projectiles even though they take no damage. Also, the spike-headed things in IceCastle.
• Invisible Block: They're only visible for a second after you enter the screen they're on and if you're standing on them.
• Item Get!: Different fanfare for different items.
• Kill It with Fire: One of your first powerups is a fireball shooter.
• Kill It with Ice: One upgrade lets you shoot iceballs that kill an enemy once it thaws.
• Last Lousy Point: Finding all twenty Ghostly Flowers is... quite a task. (Though much easier if you catch on that nearly all are in rooms with savepoints.)
• Leap of Faith:
  • SkySand is located in an area only reached by jumping off the pinnacle of another area into seemingly blank space.
  • Farfall seems like a Bottomless Pit at first and doesn't really have anything in it until you can Ground Pound.
• Lethal Lava Land: The FireCage.
• Level in the Clouds: CloudRun is a dense sky stage where clouds not only act as platforms, but also as tall walls that make progression harder. It is unusual in that this location is actually one of the lowest lying areas in the game world. It is also pink instead of blue.
• Mercy Invincibility: Being hit grants you half a very brief period of this.
• Meta Power Up: The "Lucky Pots" and "Gem Magnet" upgrades.
• Metroidvania: More focus on platforming than combat, though.
• Mind Screw: The author herself states that a good deal of the game was designed to confuse/intrigue the player (hopefully in a good way).
• Mood Dissonance: CloudRun is a pink Level in the Clouds with no real combat and serene music. But at the same time it contains some difficult platforming shenanigans, is kind of a preview of the NightWalk sky parkour segments (which in turn is set in a place with calm music playing and generic peaceful landscape, the rest of which is the first area of the game), and contains a very difficult boss.
• New World Tease:
  • You can reach SkySand relatively early in the game. If you land on the platform and continue exploring, you'll be blocked by a flame that cannot be turned off. Looks like you won't be exploring SkySand for a while...
  • Go through one warp in the area above the Grotto and you'll end up in an enclosed area in SkyLands. You won't get to explore that world in its entirety until much later in the game.
• Nintendo Hard: Some of the bosses are ludicrously hard. Some platforming segments are no joke either.
• Noble Demon: The Ninja is one of these refusing trying to kill you till much later than he should, and even wishing you good luck right before he dies from the fight with you
• No-Damage Run: If you find a rather tricky platforming area, there's a good chance that there will be a door with a heart emblem at the end, which will only open if you have full health. On Insanity difficulty, this is required.
• Non-Lethal Bottomless Pits: In MountSide and boss rooms with open spaces at the bottom, touching the bottom of the screen damages you and flings you back upward. Everywhere else, an open space at the bottom means there's another room beneath you. Nowhere are there bottomless pits in the sense that you can fall through the bottom of the game world. (There's even an area called The Bottom.)
• Noob Cave: Grotto, the first major dungeon, has very little hazards, is very short, and the boss is pathetically easy.
• One-Hit-Point Wonder: Insanity difficulty turns you into one of these.
• Oxygen Meter: You have a drowning timer underwater that starts out rather short. Fortunately, there is only one real water level in the game; a few other areas contain water but not enough for drowning to be a realistic concern.
• The Paragon: The author of the "God Was Inside Us All Along" scroll in the library.
• Patchwork Map: The grassy starting area is right next to a snowy mountain and on top of a lava cave, for example.
• Playing with Fire: Defeating the second boss gives you the power to shoot small fireballs.
• Portal Endpoint Resemblance: The final dungeon, Black Castle, is reached through a portal surrounded by black architecture similar to the one inside the castle itself.
• Power-Up Magnet: Won in Bonus, the hidden thimblerigger game area, it makes you attract crystals.
• Puzzle Boss: The DarkGrotto boss requires understanding of both how your and how his Charged Attack works.
• Puzzle Reset: Every room you leave resets its enemies, pots and other entities. Also, don't go offscreen during Rainbow Ride. The game even warns you.
• Recurring Boss: "The Ninja," the boss of The Curtain and Black Castle.
  • He has a unique Battle Theme Music, too.
• Rewarding Vandalism: Destroy pots, get crystals!
• Run, Don't Walk: You always move at a brisk pace.
• Save Point: In the form of strange statues.
• Secret Level: Many areas are optional and some of them are harder to find than others, though all of them have collectible items like Heart Containers to make the effort worthwhile. And to give 100% Completion people a run for their money. How many areas are optional depends on the difficulty level; Some areas that are optional on lower difficulties are mandatory on higher difficulties because you need more Golden Orbs.
• Segmented Serpent: The boss of DeepDive.
• Sequence Breaking:
  • Since you can warp to any save point you've been on the same screen as, even if you haven't gotten to it directly, at least one boss can be skipped to go straight to the goodies beyond, depending on what abilities you've acquired by that point. It's actually possible to completely skip the Disc-One Final Dungeon and Climax Boss if you go through Deep Dive or the Dark Grotto instead, but only on Normal or Simple.
  • It is possible to skip the Nightwalk boss on Difficult and Masterful, since you can bounce off the small ghosts and they can shoot enough ghosts on these difficulties.
• Slippy-Slidey Ice World: ColdKeep and the IceCastle.
• Smashing Hallway Traps of Doom: They're much like Thwomps in this aspect — they smash when you get near, only the buffer zone of triggering-it-without-getting-hit is very narrow and the things do huge damage. However, outside of StrangeCastle, you can trigger them by shooting them, and an ice shot will destroy them.
• Speaking Simlish:
  • Anyone that speaks to you in text is perfectly legible. However, the Shopkeeper actually audibly speaks to you — in a "blarby buhblarbidyblar blarblar" or "Blarble blah burgerburgerburger" sort of speech.
  • There's also a boss that screams nonsense syllables when it first appears and when you hit it for the first time.
• Spike Balls of Doom: Many surfaces are covered with spiky black spheres. Sometimes they're obnoxiously stealthy.
• The Spiny: There are two different types of snail enemies. One is yellow with a red shell and is safe to Goomba Stomp. The other one is blue with a purple shell that protrudes spikes if you get too close. There are also spiked versions of the flying circle enemies, electric fish, and the triangle enemies in BlancLand. The first and third can also be killed with fire, and all of them can be frozen.
• Springs, Springs Everywhere: Jumping on balloons can be used to gain height.
• Stupidity Is the Only Option: To trigger the boss fight of the Dark Grotto, you have to light the four torches that mark the boss's health, implying you're summoning it or waking it up somehow.
• Tactical Suicide Boss: There are quite a few, but probably the most glaring example is the purple eye in StoneCastle which summons gold energy bits as part of its pattern that serve no purpose other than to let you jump up high enough to hit it.
• Teleport Spam: Shakespeare does this.
• Teleporter's Visualization Clause: You gain the ability to teleport between save points, and completing the game depends on the player realizing their initial assumption about the teleportation mechanics is wrong. You can warp to any save points you've seen, and not just the ones you've visited. Meaning you can warp to a save point as soon as you've been on the same screen as it, even if you haven't reached the save point itself by normal traversal. Players who assume the usual video game teleportation restrictions apply, inevitably get stuck at SkySand, where one of the necessary power-ups is in a chamber that's only accessible by save point teleportation.
• Temple of Doom: SkySand
• Temporary Platform: Sort of. In certain areas, platforms will slowly fall when you stand on them, so you can't stay on them forever. They hover upward again as soon as you're off them, however. There are also "energy clusters" which disappear as soon as you touch them, but also hoist you into the air upon contact. They do respawn after a few seconds, though. There are also "blue platforms" that only become platforms once they're shot at and only stay platforms for a short while.
• Tennis Boss:
  • Deep Red can only be killed by shooting his giant fireballs with an ice ball and sending the whole thing back at him.
  • The first form of the final boss, though you don't have to deflect it.
  • The SkySand boss is kind of in this category, too, in that you have to trick him into firing his sword at you so you can yoink out of the way and the sword will hit him.
• Toggling Setpiece Puzzle: Two late-game areas in feature red and blue blocks alongside buttons which can be divebombed to toggle their colour, turning blocks of one colour solid and blocks of the other passable outlines.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Though it's rather obvious if you give it a moment's thought.
• Town with a Dark Secret: Almost literally; birds can't leave Skytown because the ghosts will come for them.
• Turns Red: Damaging a boss three times will cause it to attack much more fiercely, and the music's tempo will increase. Some actually turn red.
• Under the Sea: The DeepDive level, complete with an Oxygen Meter. (There are even two powerups that increase your Oxygen Meter.)
• Unlockable Difficulty Levels: Completing the game on "masterful" difficulty unlocks the "insane" difficulty, which is like masterful but you are a One-Hit-Point Wonder.
• The Unreveal: The game makes it look like you're going to find out where the ghosts are coming from, what they're trying to do, and why. When you finally meet the primary antagonist you learn the proximate reason why he needs to keep the birds in SkyTown (his ghosts need darkness to operate, and the sun follows the birds), but you never learn what his actual goals are, nor do you ever learn anything about who he is. This would be standard Excuse Plot fare if the game didn't keep leaving Story Bread Crumbs that made it look like there was more to the plot.
• Walk, Don't Swim: Your bird player character ain't a penguin, and can't swim in water. He compensates by being able to jump higher.
• Warmup Boss: Grotto Red, the first boss, is pathetic. On lower difficulties, the game even tells you to jump on him when he's vulnerable.
• A Winner Is You: The ending is nothing but a white screen with something resembling the statue near the beginning of the game congratulating you, followed by a rather cute drawing of the protagonist and the pink bird holding hands, looking out over the sea.

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