Astral Chain is a game with many influences, yet it feels so fresh

One of the many words that games really need their own version of is Syncretism, as far as I understand it, is the word for the convergence, or attempted convergence, of different religions, bringing all the points of similarity and all the contradictions together into one bubbling religious stew. Actually, stew is the wrong analogy for what this is, I suspect. Rather, it makes me think of the stately movement of continents, old shorelines removed by collisions while new landscapes become visible over time.

And of course, it makes me think of video games – particularly the open-world video games that Ubisoft is so gifted at producing, each one incorporating ideas from other games, each one expanding, refining, slowly codifying a new kind of every-game in which the map is scattered with icons and is unlocked by climbing towers, in which skill trees flare characters in a range of different but familiar directions, while running from the cops is always a matter of moving outside of a circle of visibility.

This video game syncretism can be extremely pleasant to play, but it is generally perceived as a bad thing. I’ve certainly had that moment over the last few years when I’ve been mowing my way through an open-world, chomping from icon to icon in a heady sort of trance, and I’ve realised that I’ve forgotten the specifics of what I’m playing. Do I climb towers here or do I ascend every now and then in a balloon? Do I have a grapple hook or do I have that Arkham-style combat-dance to look forward to?

Then something like Astral Chain comes along, and I realise none of this is as simple as I have been thinking it is.

Astral Chain Switch Analysis: A New Direction For Platinum Games? Watch on YouTube

Astral Chain is the latest from Platinum, and if you wanted to look at it through this specific lens, it’s the studio’s most syncretistic (sorry) game yet. It sees a bunch of general video game ideas coming together everywhere you look. There’s detective mode from Arkham, along with the attendant crime-scene analysis bits and pieces. There’s a trippy dimensional realm that is visited now and then, bringing to mind everything from Dishonored to that bit at the end of Tomb Raider 2. And beyond that, there’s also a bunch of ideas plucked from other Platinum games. Dodge an attack and you get a bit of slow-down, as was the case in Bayonetta. Trigger a special sword move and you can perform an angled slice that comes straight out of Metal Gear Rising.