Experimental indie games are all over the place. Just take a skim through itch.io sometime to get an idea of how strange things get on the fringes of gaming. You never know what you’re going to find and sometimes that’s a good thing. Other times, it’s not. Occasionally, you’re left just scratching your head. This is one of the latter.
The Edge of Allegoria is made by indie developer Button Factory Games and published by Cobratekku Games and it’s almost indefinable. Sure, this is a traditional turn-based RPG, but the content is far from anything you might be used to. Instead of your standard hero quest, the minutia of the game is spent mired in juvenile jokes, explicit language, and incessant swearing. That’s not to say that there isn’t an interesting game underneath, but on the surface, not only is this a particularly adult game, but it’s honestly hard to get past the packaging and look at what’s going on underneath.
You start out in a small village. You’ve got to choose a pet (cat or just leave now) and then you’re off, talking to people who insult you at every turn, listening to villagers rant, talk about getting high, and offer you sexual favors. No, that’s not an exaggeration. As you’ll see from the screenshots, we chose to censor images from this game because the dialogue is so extreme that it would easily be considered NSFW. Sure, you’ve got to defeat some dragons and save the land, but honestly, it’s hard to focus on that with all the swearing drug use, and explicit sexual content. It’s genuinely surprising that Nintendo even allowed this game on the eShop at all to be honest.
In fact, it’s hard to focus on anything besides the spectacularly aggressive language in The Edge of Allegoria. Some of the enemies, like the Goblin King, only reinforce that humans are filth and probably deserve to be exterminated and he’s really not wrong because the people in The Edge of Allegoria are irredeemable and incredibly unlikable. It’s hard to say exactly what the allegory is here, but maybe they’re symbolic of social media or the developer’s personal life. Either way, nearly everyone is awful and the game feels like you stepped into a back corner of 4Chan no matter where you go.
Stepping away from the plot however yields some surprising results. The Edge of Allegoria incorporates a number of concepts including turn-based RPG gameplay, a clear visual tribute to the original Pokemon games, and some unique mechanics and quality of life designs that will charm your socks off. It’s all wrapped up in an absolutely offensive package, but that’s clearly by design, right down to the forest signs that all say “Eat Ass”. With that in mind, let’s take a look at the gameplay.
The Edge of Allegoria has you fighting a variety of monsters. You have a standard attack, special abilities, and you can run away. It isn’t very complex on the surface but there’s some really nifty things hidden away here. Each weapon you get has a single special ability. Once you have mastered that weapon by using it in combat, you permanently gain its abilities. There are an absolute ton of weapons in the game and you can keep up to 5 abilities set to your character at a time including your equipped weapon. What’s interesting about this is that many of the abilities complement each other. For example, I can gain an ability that increases the likelihood of giving enemies the Bleed status effect, then one that gives enemies Bleed, then one that does more damage for Bleed effects. Combine the three and suddenly I’m wiping out enemies without even trying in a few shots! Instead of building up your Pokemon, you build up skill masteries and then mix and match to turn yourself into an absolute badass.
Not only can you master every piece of individual weaponry in the game, but you can master all the armor too. Naturally, you’ll have to buy all this equipment but fortunately enemies drop all kinds of wild crap you can sell for huge cash so coming up with the funds won’t be too onerous. Mastering armor adds to your stats as well but it doesn’t explicitly add to the numbers when you check them, which is a bit confusing. Instead, the more you add, the more bonuses you get so you slowly get stronger with each added armor as well. It’s an interesting system that hasn’t really been seen before and surprisingly innovative!
Items in Allegoria are equally weird. You can get booze, drugs, and all sorts of other stuff that can heal you, drop status effects on you, or both. There are a number of status effects that enemies can hit you with including bleed, mad, poison, burn, and more. Each one changes the screen to a different color, which is particularly noticeable since the entire game uses an original Game Boy aesthetic. It’s an excellent reminder that you need to fix that status ASAP since they remain after battle is concluded. Stocking up on essentials to clear those status effects is highly recommended, as is stocking up on food items to boost your HP, since random enemies tend to be quite powerful when you least expect it. You’ll figure out what the key items are pretty fast though.
Once you’ve unlocked the initial travel areas, The Edge of Allegoria looks like a pretty open-world approach. That can be misleading though as there are some serious Zelda vibes hanging around the edges of the game. Your pet has a tendency to lay right in the road, blocking your way if you’re not supposed to be in a certain area or the way may be blocked by boulders or bushes depending on which dungeons you’ve completed. On the upside, this is where those quality-of-life ideas come in. You can go to the map screen and select any key point you’ve visited in the past, instantly warping there for no cost. No more wandering about aimlessly across hundreds of screens just t o get to where you already need to go here! Instead the game provides straightforward and simple travel whenever you need it, though you can’t fast travel from inside a dungeon and you can’t go just anywhere on the map with it.
There’s a lot of nostalgia in The Edge of Allegoria too. As a game that’s intentionally designed to look like an old Pokemon game, it’s hard not to enjoy the 8-bit throwback graphics and greenscale imagery. Character models are simple but interesting and the levels are pretty neat as well. The menu GUI is mostly straightforward but it was a bit confusing to equip specific skills at first and may take a smidge of practice. Unfortunately, the music in the game is definitely not up to the level of the visuals and the handful of tracks available start to become irritatingly repetitive as you continue to play. This is a fairly long game at around 20 hours or so and a lot of grinding, so that weak musical selection is definitely an issue. It’s not like every old game with chiptunes had good ones mind you, but turning the sound off is definitely an option for this one, especially while you’re grinding levels.
The Edge of Allegoria is a unique game with an interesting premise. It has a strong focus on raunchy, outrageous language that the average high schooler would find hilarious and the average adult will find idiotic, but at the same time, there’s some incredibly interesting gameplay underneath, all wrapped in an excellent vintage wrapper and some decent playtime. All in all, that’s a pretty solid experience and it all depends on whether you’re down with the script or not if you’re trying to decide whether you’ll enjoy the game. It would be amazing to see a more traditional game from this developer as they have some fantastic ideas and they would go a lot further with more interesting dialogue and a better plot. Either way, at $25, you’ll have to consider where you draw the line before buying The Edge of Allegoria. It’s an undeniably unique game but it definitely isn’t for everyone!
This review is based on a digital copy of The Edge of Allegoria provided by the publisher. It was played on a Nintendo Switch in both docked and undocked modes and played equally well on both. The Edge of Allegoria is also available for PC on Steam.
Nate Van Lindt has been a gamer since the days of yore (aka Commodore 64), and has played a bit of virtually everything out there. He's also an avid comic book collector, both vintage and current, and reads a fair amount of sci-fi and fantasy. On top of that, he watches a fair number of movies and TV shows as well. Oh, and he has a family, a full-time job, and lives somewhere in the urban wilds of Southwestern Ontario, Canada, foraging for old video cables and forgotten game soundtracks.