Environmental Station Alpha by Hempuli

[Law]

Oh look, it's a Metroidvania game! I haven't seen a topic on this yet, so here we go.

Environmental Station Alpha (ESA for short) is of course, a Metroidvania. You play as a robot sent to a biological environmental station, abandoned a few decades prior to the events of this game. Of course, the station started sending signals out and because they need to hide the existence of a Metroid breeding program keep the place safe, they decide to send you. There was a demo released a while back, but it's finally headed for release after 3 years in development.

Some words from the developer as to what ESA is:

This game is basically my attempt at implementing one of my personal dream games - a very basic metroidvania with all those cliché map systems and powerups. I started planning the game about a year ago, but didn't start working on it partially due to being lazy and busy, but also because I wanted to make the game really special in some way and thus avoid the usual metroidvania clichés. Some time after christmas I decided to throw originality out of the window and just make the game; it's been a lot of fun and designing stuff like bosses and new, interesting enemies is a blast! The limited colour palette and 160x120 resolution are further attempts at reducing the amount of boring work. Hopefully the end product will be as enjoyable to play as it has been to create.

The release date is expected to be on April 22nd 2015, and it's already been greenlit on Steam Greenlight, so look out for it at some point! It looks to cost 8 USD (image link), which given the fact it's been 3 years in development, I'd say it's gonna be worth it.

Game Website + Demo: http://www.hempuli.com/esa/
Steam Page: http://store.steampowered.com/app/350070/
Twitter: @ESAdevlog
Development Thread: http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=24101.0

Now for some screenshots (Probably from a WIP version):




Edit (April 7 2015): Environmental Station Alpha will have a discount of 10% for the first week after its release!

[Mayo-chan]

It looks pretty nice. I'm glad you didn't opt for a chiptune soundtrack.

[Quietus]

It looks pretty cool.  The character reminds me of the retro power-ups I designed years ago:
[spoiler][/spoiler]

:^_^:

[SlyPork]

This looks very promising. I have always thought that it would be very interesting to see an exploration-based version of Risk of Rain instead of its roguelike style, and this looks exactly like that. Looking forward to seeing more about this  :^_^:

[passarbye]

I played the demo about 2 weeks ago and it played great. can't wait for the final version!

[Smiley]

SUOMI FINLAND PERKELE!

...
*cough*

This looks interesting.

[Law]

It looks pretty nice. I'm glad you didn't opt for a chiptune soundtrack.

Well, it's not like I had a choice in the matter. I'm not the developer after all :P

But yeah, this game is pretty solid, and the demo really gives a reasonable difficulty indicator of the main game. It's quite a challenge to not die.

[Infinitys_End]

Was able to get a press copy of the game straight from the dev!  I'll be putting up a review on the MDb after the game's released.  :grin:

[Mayo-chan]

It's a really good game, not much of a fan of the graphics but once I started actually exploring, and listening to the excellent soundtrack I was totally hooked.