The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

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evil_ash_xero
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The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by evil_ash_xero »

I thought I would try to bring a little attention to this game on here, as it took Konjak 7 years to make...it's the least I can do. :lol:
This is the follow up to the totally dope "Noitu Love 2", which I have whored on this site, quite a bit.

I bought this on PS4, and have finished it. I really liked it, but it has more narrative than I would have preferred. Also, it's story is confusing. The characters are interesting, and there is a lot of emotion in their dialogue, which you can get wrapped up in. But the overall plot takes a bit of...umm...well, it takes going to GameFAQs and reading what people pieced together, for it to make sense (completely). I don't think that was Konjak's intent, but he made the game without a script, and wrote as he went along. And well....it shows.

Other than my issue with "too much narrative", the game is very good. It's a Metroidvania style game, with absolutely lovely 2D sprite graphics. The bosses are a highlight, and are quite different in how you take them down.

I recommend it to anyone who likes that sort of thing.

Here's the trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1YotsyXxRNw
Here's some screenshots:

Image Image ImageImageImageImage
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mamboFoxtrot
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

My backlog of games I haven't even bought yet grows larger yet :lol:
Liked Noitu 2 quite a bit - not as much as some people, but still - so I'm definitely looking forward to trying out this one.
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Jonny2x4
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Jonny2x4 »

The heroine has such a weird face.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by PC Engine Fan X! »

Yep, The Iconoclasts is available on the USA region PSN store site and even features cross-buy if you buy it for the PS4, the PS Vita version is available to d/l at no extra charge. How cool is that?

PC Engine Fan X! ^_~
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Mischief Maker
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Mischief Maker »

Is it absolute murder on your mouse buttons the way Noitu Love 2 was?
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by BulletMagnet »

Can be played entirely with a controller, though sometimes a bit of Strider-style button-mashing is helpful.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by evil_ash_xero »

Mischief Maker wrote:Is it absolute murder on your mouse buttons the way Noitu Love 2 was?
Luckily, no. Just normal stuff, control-wise. I know that put a lot of people off of Noitu Love 2.
Jonny2x4 wrote:The heroine has such a weird face.
You think so? I think she looks pretty normal. Now, her hair that's shaped like a U/Magnet is another story.
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Obscura
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Obscura »

Too bad the game's controller configuration is completely broken. "Accept" mapped to the same button as "jump", and this can't be fixed; "shoot" doesn't map to the correct button in the menu; and you can't get to the control menu without quitting your current game, so you have to navigate 2 minutes of menus every time you try to fix something.

I really wanted to give Konjak money (I loved Noitu Love 2 and Legend of Princess), but this is just too inept. Refund time.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Ji-L87 »

^ That's weird. I had no issues configuring it and playing with my Saturn USB pad.
CHECKPOINT!
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Mischief Maker
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Mischief Maker »

So just to be more precise on the controls for weirdos like me know don't like controllers:

Is it Keyboard only, or Keyboard + Mouse?

Can you bind a single action to two buttons?
Two working class dudes, one black one white, just baked a tray of ten cookies together.

An oligarch walks in and grabs nine cookies for himself.

Then he says to the white dude "Watch out for that black dude, he wants a piece of your cookie!"
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Jonny2x4 »

evil_ash_xero wrote: You think so? I think she looks pretty normal. Now, her hair that's shaped like a U/Magnet is another story.
She looks fine as a sprite, but most of her close-ups and promotional art gives her a weird blow-up doll-like face.

Spoilered due to width.
Spoiler
Image
Image
Image
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evil_ash_xero
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by evil_ash_xero »

She looks a bit like a toy in those pics.
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XoPachi
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by XoPachi »

Gonna have to agree on the too much narrative bit. I feel like I'm making no progress in this game and got kinda bored from how much it wants to hear itself talk. I'm at that prison tower in the electro forest and just...stopped. Had some other personal gripes with it, but that was my main one.
It's a pretty game at least. On the level of WayForward pixel art on the DS.
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Obscura
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Obscura »

Konjak did contract art for WayForward on Contra 4, so that art comparison is particularly apt.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by BulletMagnet »

Mischief Maker wrote:Is it Keyboard only, or Keyboard + Mouse?
Keyboard only.
Can you bind a single action to two buttons?
Doesn't look like it.
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BrianC
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by BrianC »

There was an unfinished game at konjak.org named Ivory Springs that is pretty much an early version of Iconoclasts. It has some of the same characters and plot elements, but for some reason, the plot in this one has something to do with Robin chasing a crow.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Herr Schatten »

Just finished it and enjoyed it very much. I wish I had started in harder mode rightaway, as normal difficulty is largely devoid of any challenge, but it really didn‘t diminish the experience much. Good platforming, nice puzzles, and fantastic bosses that were a joy to figure out and very satisfying to subsequently master made my time with the game well spent.

There was a little too much dialogue for my taste, but the story itself was interesting and the characters and their motivations made sense. I‘m always complaining that games rely on ways of storytelling borrowed from other art forms (cut scenes, walls of text) too much instead of using their own, but Iconoclasts has my new favourite example for how to do it well.
Spoiler
The bit were Robin has to leave Royal behind.
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Sumez »

So I made the mistakes of combining shipping on my LRG order of Iconoclasts with the absurdly delayed Celeste, so I didn't get the game until now, and this is one I'd been looking very much forward to playing.

I like going in completely fresh to a lot of video games as I do with movies, so I often make the mistake of making completely wrong assumptions about a game - such as The Messenger being anything like Ninja Gaiden - and this one was no different. I just saw the graphics and expected a fun mega man-like platformer, with metroidvania elements or whatever you could expect from indie games nowadays.


Following the introduction part through the first boss I was immediately celebrating how great the game felt at setting up a world and telling a story without any single line of dialogue - a video game trope that I'm particularly fond of. I saw the tutorial signs which stuck to explaining mechanics entirely through images, and appreciated that Konjak seemed like he was trying to go the extra mile to avoid written words entirely.
But then you get back to the main character's house, and suddenly people start talking.

And then they don't stop talking and talking and talking for the next few hours until you are done with the game.

At first that was incredibly off-putting, and I started out ignoring most of the dialogue. But I eventually latched on to it when some of the stuff going on started turning fairly interesting.
I'd really have appreciated it if it weren't like evil_ash_xero states in his very first post here, that the story really feels unnecessarily vague. I kind of like the idea that there's a world set up here where your only direct exposure to what is going on is via the individual absurd theologies of two conflicting societies inhabiting the game's world. But I don't like the idea that "what's actually going on" feels entirely inconsequential, and honestly kind of random and pointless. I'd love to hear what it was you found out on your venture to GameFAQs, because maybe I just don't get it?

And to my big surprise, the story in general is an incredibly blunt one. It's the kind of stuff you'd only get in a true indie game - People die, and they die horribly and occasionally in a gory manner. The game will make you like even the bad guys, and then kill them off whenever the hell it feels like it. And let's kill innocent kids too, why not? It is a stark contrast to the fun, bright and colorful graphics, but matches the themes of religion and totalitarian regimes.
At the end of the day, I think it ended up being my favourite part of the game. Especially Agent Black's entire story and her eventual bittersweet demise.


In terms of gameplay, it's, well... it's not really an action game, and definitely nothing like Mega Man. There's the shell of an action game, but essentially everything you do in the game is solving puzzles. Some of them are fun, while others are bland. My favourite part was probably the stage where you go back and forth in the tower you were captured inside, which has a really fun structure of slowly getting access to more and more areas - like a mini-metroidvania on its own.

The boss fights, too, are kind of a puzzle too. There's an action element, but the primary "challenge" is finding out just what you need to do, like a modern Zelda boss.
In fact, one of the more annoying elements to me was that the game is incredibly bad at telegraphing what's going on, and what stuff will actually kill you. The game looks gorgeous, but there's so much going on in a boss fight that it's really hard to know what you need to watch out for until you've already seen it play out and had the time to analyze how everything works - so expect to die a couple of times to every boss before you find out how to beat it - at least if you're playing on "Harder". On one occasion I did manage to beat a boss without ever actually figuring out what the game wanted me to do though.

But in general the bosses are fun and very original, so as long as you don't get caught up on tight gameplay design, or the lack thereof, I'd say they are at least memorable and a part of what makes the game stand out. Just don't think of Iconoclasts as an action game - it's a puzzle game. Or, it's a long winded dialogue heavy story which sends you backtracking over and over just to tell a story, and occasionally you need to go through some puzzles.
BrianC wrote:There was an unfinished game at konjak.org named Ivory Springs that is pretty much an early version of Iconoclasts. It has some of the same characters and plot elements, but for some reason, the plot in this one has something to do with Robin chasing a crow.
Well that explains
Spoiler
the final boss
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

played through this game a few days ago, myself. I didn't mind the amount dialogue, but I'm pretty used to the idea of games being chatty now. I did, however, mind that the only reward for exploration and puzzles, beyond basic progress at times, is materials for making minor perks that I never cared about equipping. It made huge chunks of the game, and the whole decision to be a metroidvania (and to a degree honestly even the choice to make the player character a mechanic), feel extremely pointless. I looked up a 100% guide after playing the game, and despite ignoring over half the game's stuff, I apparently only missed out on two optional boss fights that can only be triggered through what seemed like some pretty annoying/obscure NPC hunting near the end of the game anyways so w/e.
evil_ash_xero wrote:But the overall plot takes a bit of...umm...well, it takes going to GameFAQs and reading what people pieced together, for it to make sense (completely). I don't think that was Konjak's intent
It actually was his intent, according to an interview. Some kind of personal writing challenge.
Herr Schatten wrote:There was a little too much dialogue for my taste, but the story itself was interesting and the characters and their motivations made sense. I‘m always complaining that games rely on ways of storytelling borrowed from other art forms (cut scenes, walls of text) too much instead of using their own, but Iconoclasts has my new favourite example for how to do it well.
Spoiler
The bit were Robin has to leave Royal behind.
Spoiler
I felt the complete lack of any kind of cutscene here made this moment feel comically anticlimatic. Just... *plop* "later, chump". And as some other people have pointed out, its extra-goofy for a MECHANIC to be stumped by a mildly-busted door switch like that. Not that Robin ever really does any kind of mechanic-work besides twisting some nuts lol
and on a rather unrelated note...
Sumez wrote:I just saw the graphics and expected a fun mega man-like platformer
If you DO want a Mega Man game with a mechanic main character, there is Mechanic Man :lol:
https://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/winnt/ ... 85513.html
its a pretty decent game
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by Sumez »

mamboFoxtrot wrote:
Spoiler
I felt the complete lack of any kind of cutscene here made this moment feel comically anticlimatic. Just... *plop* "later, chump". And as some other people have pointed out, its extra-goofy for a MECHANIC to be stumped by a mildly-busted door switch like that. Not that Robin ever really does any kind of mechanic-work besides twisting some nuts lol
The problem here is that the scene happens in a game that's already drowning in excessive dialogue, so not even addressing that until a short side note much later in the game does come across as super jarring.
In a different context it would have been pretty cool - going back to the earlier comments I made about storytelling in a game without using words.
If you DO want a Mega Man game with a mechanic main character, there is Mechanic Man :lol:
https://www.vector.co.jp/soft/dl/winnt/ ... 85513.html
its a pretty decent game
Wow, that's just a completely anonymous page with absolutely no pictures, just a bunch of unintelligible japanese text and a ton of most-likely-spyware ads. I'm not sure I'm going to use that link for anything sorry. :P
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by mamboFoxtrot »

lmao yeah vector pages can be pretty low-info.
but it's a legitimate website. Pretty much any JP freeware game/software that isn't on FreeM is on there, and even FALCOM sells some of their games on there. (Used to be where BUSTER's games were before he scrubbed everything off the 'net)
tho... I always have adblockers on so I have no idea if that's actually one of those annoying sites that pop-up ads any time you click on something :shock:
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Re: The Iconoclasts - Konjak's new game - PS4/PC/PS Vita

Post by BulletMagnet »

Click the big green "Go to the Download Page" icon, then the big green "Download Now" button and that should do it.
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