Video Game / Vernal Edge

Vernal Edge is a 2D Metroidvania developed by Hello Penguin Team and published by PID Games.

Taking place in the Kingdom of Haricot, a series of Floating Continents ruled by the Church of Aloe, the game stars Vernal, a young woman from the surface below seeking to kill her father Asphodel. After her attempt to get to Haricot by stowing away on a Church airship nearly kills her and leaves her stranded on an abandoned island, Vernal meets Chervil, a former colleague of Asphodel who he manipulated into placing his soul inside a mechanical body. Fearful of what Asphodel has planned and also interested in getting revenge of his own, Chervil offers to help Vernal escape the island, and the two join forces on a quest spanning all of Haricot.

The game features an open-ended world to explore combined with combat influenced by the Stylish Action genre, featuring a wide variety of combat skills the player is encouraged to use skillfully. This includes healing — Vernal's main method of regaining health is using her sword, the Pulse Edge, to drain the life from her foes with a variety of special Pulse attacks, each of which has its own strengths and weaknesses and is just as useful for offense as it is for healing.

Vernal Edge was released on March 14, 2023 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

---

This game features examples of:

• Abandoned Mine: One of the first accessible areas is an old mine full of giant fungi and poisonous gas. The mine is full of elevators and lever-driven mining platforms that, at one point, can be used to attack enemies.
• Ability Required to Proceed: The plot-relevant areas feature a structure akin to The Legend of Zelda dungeons requiring Vernal to track down a machine that grants her a "major memory," a new ability, usually in the form of a movement upgrade, that allows her to finish the area.
• All There in the Script: Some characters whose name is never revealed in the game proper, including most of the backer-submitted characters, have their names revealed in the credits.
• Archnemesis Dad: It's established at the beginning of the game that Vernal's goal is to kill her father Asphodel. It's later revealed that this is because he abandoned her mother while she was still pregnant with her after she got sick. Her loathing of the man only grows when she discovers that he's planning to cause the death of everyone on the islands as part of his plans.
• Artificial Human: Alstroemeria is revealed to be one after her defeat in Asphodel's Tower, having been created in Unreality to resemble what Asphodel thought his abandoned daughter would grow up to be.
• Artistic License – Physics: The poisonous gas in the Fungal Mines is represented by giant purple gas bubbles that, when touched, pop and inflict Damage Over Time. As long as Vernal does not touch these bubbles, she can spend as much time in the contaminated areas as she wants with no ill effects whatsoever.
• Big Ol' Eyebrows: Vernal has rather thick eyebrows, accentuating her acerbic personality.
• Blade Spam: Vernal's grounded down Pulse attack is a barrage of stabs followed by one final thrust.
• Bonus Dungeon:
  • The Pyramid Trial, an area centered entirely around platforming. The entire area is timed, and it features two segments; one for when it's first accessible, and another for when you've collected all the major memories.
  • While the first half of the Tower of Battle is mandatory, the second half that unlocks after Opening the Sandbox is optional and provides some of the toughest battles in the game.
  • A secret pathway in the Unreality section of Barren Cave leads to Slime's Summit, a blue island with a Wintry Auroral Sky containing a Cat Boy who tasks Vernal with collecting his pet slimes that ran away from their home and have scattered across the island. This area requires every major memory (aside from Reading) to navigate and includes both enemy encounters and platforming of all kinds.
• Boss Warning Siren: Each boss is prefaced by a screen displaying their name alongside a progress bar that becomes their health bar when it's finished loading ^note it's possible to land a few hits and even get off a charged attack or two before this with two scrolling marquees on the top and bottom of the screen reciting the poem "Fire and Ice" by Robert Frost.
• Brain Uploading: For reasons Chervil can't remember, he and his colleagues were convinced by Asphodel to upload their souls into robotic bodies, or "Shells," prior to the events of the game. It turns out that this was done as part of Asphodel's experiments on Unreality, since putting the soul in a mechanical body makes it immune to the harmful effects of Unreality.
• Break Meter: Enemies have varying amounts of Poise, which, when depleted, stuns them and allows them to be juggled. Some enemies, with how many depending on the difficulty, lack Poise and can be subject to a Cycle of Hurting.
• Calling Your Attacks: Vernal says "Pulse!" when she uses a Pulse attack.
• Catchphrase: Chervil frequently says "oh my."
• Cathartic Crying: After Asphodel is defeated and the source of her anger is gone, Vernal's emotions catch up with her and she breaks down sobbing.
• Childhood Friends: Vernal has Saffron, her old training partner. He abandoned her some time ago, and Vernal wants to "kick his ass" for it.
• Color Motif: Unreality is associated with the colors pink and green; among other things, it appears around the rifts to it created by the Pulse Edge, on its terrain, and in its background.
• Control Freak: Asphodel is obsessed with control to the point of seeking to cause the deaths of an entire kingdom as part of a plan to create a new world so he can "finally be free of the shackles of this miserable reality." This is exemplified by a brief speech he gives about gardening near the end of the game:
  Asphodel: Despite how pleasing the results are, I've always hated gardening. No matter how much you prune and pluck, the plants always find a way to grow ever outwards. Nature is as terrifying as it is beautiful.
• Corrupt Church: The islands of Haricot are ruled over by the Church of Aloe. It is mentioned that they institute economic policies comparable to banditry, pay their soldiers horribly, and generally have no interest in helping the people they rule over.
• Counter-Attack: Attacking immediately after blocking an enemy attack results in a stronger attack that reduces the target's Poise.
• Deadly Walls: The Arboretum and Forest have areas where the walls are covered in brambles that hurt Vernal when touched. Downplayed in that they don't instantly kill her.
• Diving Kick: Little Yellow knights have the ability to do this.
• Double Jump: A variant. Rather than simply being able to jump twice, Vernal eventually obtains the "dashjump" ability, allowing her to perform a second jump, which can be aimed in any direction, after dashing.
• Eldritch Location: Most of Unreality consists of a chaotic mishmash of stone, metal, and what looks like some kind of purple Meat Moss over a black void that periodically lights up to reveal an ocean of floating green and purple patterns. Some parts of it also deliberately look "glitchy," with bits of material inexplicably floating in the air and different materials incongruously phasing into each other.
• Elite Mooks: The strongest type of monster resembles a levitating wizard, carrying a staff and book. This creature rotates between various types of "spells" that have all sorts of ranges and properties, including a barrage of homing projectiles, a platform-bypassing wave of skulls from underneath the target, and an Always Accurate Attack that needs to be blocked rather than evaded. It also has very high health, and the fact that Vernal has to be constantly jumping to attack it only makes it harder to kill.
• Elevator Action Sequence: The climax of the Fungal Mines has Vernal enter an elevator, where she is beset by Church knights summoned by Patche in an attempt to take the Pulse Edge from her.
• Epic Flail: Big Yellow knights fight with a giant ball-and-chain several times the length of their own body.
• Evil Gloating: Alstroemeria gleefully mocks Vernal over her "pathetic display" after getting the upper hand against her during their first battle.
• Extra-Dimensional Shortcut: Some areas in the only second half of the game require a trip through Unreality via a portal found elsewhere, for various reasons; the Mossy Cave is blocked off by an Unreality storm, the Aloe Air Fortress can't be accessed without the portal because it'll just shoot their airship down if Vernal and Chervil try to board it, and the Slime's Summit just... doesn't appear on the world map until Vernal finds the portal to it.
• Faceless Goons: The Church knights all wear face-concealing helmets of some sort.
• Facepalm: One of Vernal's main ways of expressing frustration.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: All sorts of fantastic beings live in Haricot, including demons, orcs, and animalistic humanoids of both the Beast Man and Little Bit Beastly variety.
• Fishing Minigame: The Debris Field features an action-oriented variant centered around using your combat abilities to knock various types of jumping fish out of the air and onto the ground before knocking them into a fishing net.
• Floating Continent: Haricot is a country that mysteriously rose into the sky years ago, becoming a group of floating islands. It turns out that the islands were raised by Asphodel as part of his scheme because doing so brought them into an area where Unreality's presence was stronger.
• Four Eyes, Zero Soul: Asphodel wears red-tinted glasses and is a seriously amoral scientist.
• Fungus Humongous: The Fungal Mines and Fungal Ruins are full of mushrooms the size of Vernal's body. The scientist's journals reveal that they became that way because they were mutated by the increased influence of Unreality upon the islands rising.
• Ghost Town: The Fungal Ruins are revealed to be the ruins of the capital city of Haricot and Saffron's old home.
• Gimmick Level:
  • The Hidden Facility has very little combat aside from its boss. Instead, the level centers around exploration, with Vernal having to locate various computer terminals containing keycard IDs scattered across the area and then take them to the respective doors they're used to open while evading an Invincible Minor Minion.
  • The Foggy Ruin is an optional area that, initially, is mostly blocked off by fog which transports you to the beginning of the area if you enter it. The fog can be dispersed by ringing a set of bells in the right order, leading to another, more expansive puzzle of the same variety.
• Gotta Catch Them All: The second half of the game centers around gathering the five Arc Compasses, one of which being the "treasure" from the Arboretum, so they can use them to get to Asphodel's Tower, which is "displaced in higher dimensional space" and can't be accessed normally.
• Ground Pound: The Ground Slam major memory, found in the Fungal Mines, is a downwards slam that can break through wooden barriers. It also causes Vernal to rapidly slide when used on a slope.
• Harder Than Hard: You start out with the standard Easy, Normal, and Hard modes. Upon completing your first playthrough, you unlock the extra-hard Vicious ^note with the letter V in red like on the game's logo difficulty. For Challenge Gamers, it's also possible to choose it on your first playthrough by entering a code in the settings menu.
• Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: The first battle with Alstroemeria. Regardless of how well the player was previously doing against her, once her health drops below a certain point, she immediately ends the fight by immobilizing Vernal with a floating Neck Lift.
• Heart Container: Heart-shaped Health Pieces can be found that, when three are collected, increase Vernal's health. Items that serve a similar purpose for her mana and Memory Points also exist.
• Heel–Face Turn: Alstroemeria turns on Asphodel in the final battle, interrupting him with her hammer just before he can hit Vernal with an unavoidable attack.
• Helpful Mook: Many areas have lesser enemies that drop health and pose very little threat to Vernal; they die in one hit, and their attacks are easy to defend against (and you can stun them with the Pulse projectile if you want to be safe). Similarly, some areas also have lone enemies separate from the full-fledged fight segments who can similarly be used as a punching bag for healing or to charge the Pulse Edge with minimal risk.
• Hypocrite: As the trainer in Pyrena points out, low-ranking church knights are paid poorly on the pretense that they "shouldn't feel attached to worldly possessions," which doesn't gel with the fact that the Church owns, among other things, a pointlessly giant airship.
• In Their Own Image: Asphodel's ultimate plan is to kill everyone on the islands with a giant portal to Unreality, then use their souls to make a "greater, deeper cut into our reality" and create a new world with himself as its omnipotent god.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chest: Justified. An old pirate in Rosalis explains that, in the past, he and his crew had so much treasure that they couldn't carry it all and had to start storing it in treasure chests across the islands "just so nosy folks [...] would stop asking about it."
• Invincible Minor Minion: In the Hidden Facility, a strange electric ghost will periodically appear and attack Vernal while she has an ID assigned to her keycard. This ghost cannot be harmed, only disappearing when Vernal uses the ID and the card becomes blank again.
• I've Come Too Far: Asphodel's words before initiating the second phase of his boss fight have him essentially telling Vernal that it's too late now for him to turn back from his plans, as he's already sacrificed too much in the name of it and can't afford it amounting to nothing.
  Asphodel: I've sacrificed everything; my wife, my child, my closest friends. You wouldn't let that be in vain, would you?
• Jungle Japes: One of the Arc Compasses is located in a thorny jungle simply called the Jungle; it's here that Vernal gains the pulse flight major memory and learns what Asphodel's plans are.
• Kick the Dog: When Vernal sees an illusion of her dead mother during her first trip to Unreality, Alstroemeria appears and mocks her for her reaction to the illusion before shattering it with her hammer.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Certain enemies have differently-colored variants with added abilities. Specifically, green variants gain the ability to explode, while pink variants gain some kind of ranged attack.
• Levels Take Flight: One of the Arc Compasses is found on the Aloe Air Fortress, where Vernal has to maneuver through its security while fending off knights sent by its captain, who periodically mocks her efforts through a telecom.
• Life Drain: Vernal's main method of healing is using the Pulse Edge's special Pulse attacks to drain life energy from her foes. The attack comes in various forms depending on what direction you're holding while using it, including a homing attack that bypasses other enemies to hit its target, ranged attacks that juggle the target in the air or damage their poise, and a Blade Spam move that locks Vernal in place but does great damage and can hit other enemies besides the target.
• Limit Break: At the end of her first fight with Alstroemeria, Vernal unlocks the Bloom ability, a screen-filling five-hit attack that takes off a point of Poise with each hit. It can be charged by defeating enemies, taking damage, and absorbing health while already at full health.
• Lotus-Eater Machine: Unreality can create illusions of the dead loved ones of those inside it, as Vernal discovers during her first trip to it. Later, when Vernal meets Saffron again in the Fungal Ruins, it turns out that he seeks to use the Pulse Edge to create a simulation of his dead family in Unreality, seeing nothing to live for in the real world.
• Luminescent Blush: Vernal often starts blushing while shyly looking down during emotional moments.
• Magic Mushroom: The Fungal Ruins has mushrooms that, when interacted with, bestow Vernal with various different properties, such as becoming lighter (and gaining the ability to jump higher) or becoming heavier (and losing jump height but gaining the ability to break through boards that her normal Ground Slam doesn't work on).
• Manipulative Bastard: Asphodel is described as being very good at manipulating others into doing what he wants, most notably in convincing Chervil and his colleagues to become Shells.
• Mirror Boss: The boss of the Hidden Facility is V-Copy, a machine that projects a hologram of Vernal which possesses many of the same moves as her. Unusually, you don't defeat it by attacking the projection (which is immune to damage, although that doesn't stop some homing spells from targeting it anyway), but rather the machine creating it.
• Money for Nothing: There are three shops — two in Pyrena, and one in Rosalis — to spend pieces in. With enough exploration, it's easy to amass enough of them to buy everything they have to offer and still have plenty left over.
• Neck Lift: Vernal's first battle with Alstroemeria ends with her on the receiving end of this. It can happen again during their rematch if Vernal gets defeated by her hammer while she's using her Desperation Attack.
• Never Learned to Read: Vernal is revealed to be illiterate when entering the Tower of Battle. In the Hidden Facility, she finds a major memory that grants her the ability to read, which opens up a sidequest that involves reading a series of previously unreadable journals in various locations.
• Nice Guy: Aside from with regards to Asphodel, Chervil is unfailingly kind and civil; for example, during his first meeting with Chervil, Vernal threatens to assault him for asking her too many questions and Chervil apologizes to her.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: One of the rooms in the "tour" prior to the final battle with Asphodel is a dining room where Asphodel reveals that he was planning to have dinner together with his daughter, expressing disappointment that she refused to side with him and "now the food has to go to waste."
• Non-Action Guy: Chervil is a docile scientist trapped in a mechanical body who doesn't know the first thing about fighting, instead aiding Vernal by piloting their airship and giving her advice.
• Non-Lethal K.O.: Defeating human enemies knocks them unconscious rather than killing them, with them collapsing to the ground with stars circling around their heads.
• Ominous Pipe Organ: One faintly plays upon death.
• Opening the Sandbox: At the game's start, Vernal is restricted to the lower half of the world map, with the upper half being blocked off by an Unreality storm. The early game ends with Vernal finding the source of the storm, some kind of floating sword-like object with a glowing sphere at the hilt, and destroying it, clearing and opening up the rest of the map — part of it is still sequestered by a separate Unreality storm, but this storm is not locked by progression and can be dispelled at any time following a trip through the portal in the Barren Cave.
• Point of No Return: Averted. Chervil advises Vernal to tie up any loose ends before she enters Asphodel's Tower because "[he doesn't] believe we'll have a chance to later." However, just before the final battle, he shows up and crashes a hole into the Tower's wall with the airship, allowing Vernal to go back to the world map and explore to her heart's content again.
• Power Dyes Your Hair: Vernal's hair becomes bright red when the Bloom is ready to be used. The same thing happens to Alstroemeria's hair during their second duel.
• Press X to Die: The herbicide used to kill the plants in the Arboretum explicitly states that drinking it is a bad idea. It's also one of the few items that can be "used" in the menu, and if you do so, Vernal drinks it (after going through an Are You Sure You Want to Do That? prompt), inflicting her with a Damage Over Time effect that kills her almost immediately.
• Princess in Rags: Male example. Saffron was the once the prince of Haricot; just before its destruction, his father sent him away from the capital city. It's not shown what his life was like after this, but considering that Vernal is illiterate and considers this normal, it couldn't have been very luxurious.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The lenses of Asphodel's glasses are red tinted, giving off this effect. And it goes without saying that he's shifty from the get-go and only gets worse the more is revealed about his schemes.
• Recurring Boss: Alstroemeria is fought twice — first in the Abandoned Lab revisit that caps off the early game, and second shortly before the final boss.
• Retraux: The game resembles a 2D title from The Fifth Generation of Console Video Games, combining detailed sprites with low-poly 3D graphics for the overworld. The game's story also shares many elements with the Eastern RPGs of the time, including airships, a Gotta Catch Them All plot, and an antagonistic Corrupt Church.
• Sad Battle Music: The music that plays during the final battle with Asphodel is a mournful piano and string piece. It does become more fast-paced once Alstroemeria joins the fight and it becomes possible to break his Poise, but the sad tone remains.
• Sampling: The music that plays in the first phase of the final boss fight samples the line "nowadays it's the ways of the underground" from "C'Mon wit da Git Down" by The Artifacts.
• Sequential Boss: The final battle has two phases. The first has Asphodel watch Vernal from the background while a monster in the form of a cycloptic head with Giant Hands of Doom fights her. Once this enemy is defeated, Vernal fights Asphodel himself, who uses a combination of Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs, magic, and variations of Vernal's own Pulse attacks.
• Shield-Bearing Mook: One type of monster, called the "shield guy" in the patch notes, wields a red BFS that it uses to defend against attacks from the front.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Unreality levels strongly evoke Axiom Verge; especially that game's "Breach" zones.
  • One NPC in Pyrenia looks exactly like Hat Girl
  • One in the east side of Unreality looks kind of like Kris from Deltarune
  • Likely coincidental but Saffron looks like a gender swapped Michiru Kagemori.
  • The giant bird-man-thing behind the mysterious door in Mossy Isle is in the pose of a Chozo Statue.
• Slasher Smile: The face Alstroemeria makes whenever the prospect of fighting Vernal comes up.
• Small Name, Big Ego: In the Arboretum, Vernal encounters an unnamed Little Yellow knight encouraging Vernal not to bother trying to get the area's "treasure" before him because his "overwhelming strength, courage, and intellect" allegedly guarantees he's going to get it first. In the end, he does technically get to the treasure first, but the treasure winds up turning him into the Corrupt Knight, the game's Warm-Up Boss.
• Smash Mook: One of the first types of monster introduced is a hulking, ogre-like creature wielding a rock. Its attacks are strong, but they're also slow and easy to counter; in the tutorial, the counter mechanic is introduced to the player during a fight with one of them. Later areas introduce a red variant that can create shockwaves with its attacks.
• Smashing Survival: One enemy can summon a cage around Vernal. This cage will eventually damage her, requiring the player to break the cage by rapidly attacking.
• Sore Loser: Captain Chard, when defeated, whines "I'm supposed to win!" in an incredibly childish tone before banging his fist on his throne as his projection explodes.
• Sprite/Polygon Mix: Most of the game is in 2D, but the overworld is 3D.
• Stock Animal Diet: The NPC who lets you play the Fishing Minigame is an anthropomorphic tiger.
• Take Your Time: It's explicitly stated that everyone on the islands is going to be killed by a massive Unreality surge in less than an hour unless Vernal stops Asphodel's plans in the final stretch of the game. You can still do as much exploration as you want before challenging the last boss.
• Talk to the Fist: When Vernal encounters Asphodel's hologram in the final dungeon, her response is to immediately try to attack it just as he starts talking to her. Then she does it again not too long after.
• Technicolor Toxin: The poison gas in the Fungal Mines is the color purple.
• Throw the Mook at Them: Launching an enemy into another damages the target and takes a point off of their Poise.
• Timed Mission: Some platforming sections have holographic purple blocks. These blocks are accompanied by a giant purple lever that, when pulled, causes the blocks to materialize for a limited time, requiring Vernal to quickly maneuver through the section to use them.
• Useless Useful Spell: Many of the spells aren't good for much simply because they don't do anywhere near enough damage given how limited your ability to cast them is. For example, most enemies can survive having you spend your entire mana bar casting Barrage on them, meaning you can't exactly use it to pick off foes from a distance.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Rosalis contains a Lizard Folk artist named Berry painting the sky. Vernal can stand in front of her and block her view for no reason, to her growing irritation. Eventually, Berry will demand that Vernal move out of the way, and if Vernal refuses enough times, she instantly kills her with an explosion, causing a game over. Talking to her again after this results in Vernal immediately moving out of her way when asked, noting that she finds her "inexplicably terrifying."
• Video Game Flight: The pulse fly major memory. Using this ability, Vernal can launch herself in any direction after a brief charging period. As the name suggests, it costs Pulse energy to use, with a full Pulse meter having enough for three charges of the ability; because of this, areas centered around the ability have blue flowers that refill it when touched.
• Visionary Villain: Asphodel seems to legitimately believe that the best version of reality can only be achieved if he's the one running it, even if that means wiping out the current one to create the new one In His Own Image.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: The boss fight with Alstroemeria at the end of the Abandoned Lab revisit. Compared to the Corrupt Knight and, to a lesser extent, Rook the Relentless, her attacks are much more varied and difficult to defend against.
• Warm-Up Boss: The Corrupt Knight, fought at the end of the Arboretum, is likely to be the first boss the player faces ^note you could fight Rook the Relentless first, but that would require getting the airstep major memory and then leaving the Arboretum to do the Tower of Battle as well as the easiest. His attacks are fairly slow and easy to defend against, and he spends a substantial amount of time simply using the attacks of a normal Little Yellow knight.
• The Watson: Having spent her life on the surface below, Vernal is unfamiliar with the islands, leading to several conversations where Chervil explains the setting's worldbuilding to her and by extension the player.
• We Can Rule Together: Asphodel makes several attempts to get his daughter on his side. She shoots down every one.
• Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises: Vernal's eyes become like this when she gets angry. Alstroemeria does the same thing in her Slasher Smile portrait.

---