It's another episode of Indie Game of the Week here to remind you all to look where you sit at a barbeque, or else you might get your anus charred. (Sorry, I had like a dozen different intro sentences sitting in my editor and somehow that was the best one?) Anyway, Anuchard. It's an action-RPG, or maybe just an action-adventure, from Indonesia's stellarNull. It tells the story of the Bellwielder: a mythical hero who wields a bell (no shit?) to restore the titular world of Anuchard from its current modest status as an island nation where people eke out a living with a limited number of resources to its past self where it once enjoyed all the boons of heaven and beyond due to the auspices of five "Guardians": governors of elemental forces worshipped as gods. However, even while the Bellwielders of the past were able to bring back the Guardians after humanity forsook them due to having easy lives where they wanted for nothing, as well as revive all those that go seeking for them in the dangerous and unpredictable Dungeon beneath the island, eventually the dream of Anuchard fades, a new Bellwielder arrives generations later, and the cycle perpetuates itself.

Anuchard reminded me, to my chagrin, that I never did get started on that Moon: RPG Remix Adventure remaster that I bought at some point, because to my untrained eye the aesthetic of Anuchard's painterly top-down world is remarkably similar, as are the uncommonly gangly characters of its world. There's also shades of Mother 3 to its story, as a small society of egalitarian farmers and laborers who trade what they need with one another are slowly but surely corrupted by a cushy lifestyle free of burden and embellished by all manner of wealth and wonders. The game sort of develops this plot in the background as it tasks you to delve into the dungeon, memento in hand, to rescue some previous visitor who now stands stationary as a soulless statue: their souls are still trapped down there, it turns out, and only you as the Bellwielder are capable of freeing them. The game's loop typically has you awaken to a new chapter, get your bearings, procure a new memento to take you to a specific dungeon where someone awaits, complete said dungeon instance that often bounces between environmental puzzles and self-contained arena-style combat encounters, save the disembodied spirit within after a boss or mini-boss fight, and then start the loop over the next day. These new NPCs might further the plot, add new features to the dungeoneering side by lending their support, offer a side-quest, or else add more flavor to the island's vox populi.

The gameplay of Anuchard is relatively basic and naturally revolves around that there bell that the Bellwielder is, uh, holding. It's shaped like a mace, and there's a real satisfying clunk it makes whenever it knocks seven (other) bells out of something, which uses a light attack that can be chained several times or a heavy attack that has two parts to it: a shoulder charge and a mighty whack that sends them flying, doing damage as they bounce off walls. The heavy attack actually takes some time to get used to, as it also operates as your evade roll: what this means is that the first half of it, which has a relatively short range, needs to connect to your target to damage it, as the second half turns into a roll that won't do anything besides help you escape harm. As such, you get used to aiming it up properly—the angle is often important, not just for bouncing enemies off multiple walls at once by going at them diagonally but also for the environmental puzzles that use the same mechanic—and not overestimating its range. The puzzles tend to involve knocking a gem bubble towards a switch of some kind, redirecting it while it's floating in the air as needed—the bubble will eventually burst after hitting three walls without the player's intervention, but there are cases where you can't reach it any more (it goes behind a wall or over a gap, say) so there's some foreplanning needed. They're not particularly tough puzzles though; about on par with other Zeldersatzes.

Beyond that, there's not a whole lot more to the game mechanically. The dungeons aren't complex enough to need maps (though they might've been useful for a couple of them) and while they do have resources worth finding for a town planning feature—that occasionally includes useful combat upgrades—those aren't too tough to find either. I generally found the combat unappealing due to how easily it can stun-lock you with certain enemies, especially if they get you trapped, while most encounters are over in seconds because you can do the same thing to them. Bosses tend to be a bit sponge-y if you don't bring in a food buff that increases light attack damage, with long stretches where you can't touch them unless you jump through enough hoops. There's also that heavy attack and its quirks to overcome which might lead to some early frustration.

A significant chunk of the game is set on the surface, where you complete tasks for your neighbors and set up the next memento-dungeon combo. The game shines more in these parts, as you check in with the expanding cast as you rescue ever more citizens from their petrification and observe the slow change in them that results from the return of the Guardians. The side-quests you can do up here tend to be somewhat fetch quest-y but often serve to introduce new lore and will invariably result in a new little decoration to put in your home, if that's the kind of sentimental feature you enjoy (I do; collecting these "souvenirs" was one of the more rewarding parts of Bully and The Outer Worlds, to name two examples). Sadly, the game suffers from a shaky localization, though one that feels very specifically ESL-impaired. Mostly tenses and plural forms that get messed up; I'm not familiar enough with Bahasa Indonesia to say for sure (my only exposure is from clips of Kureiji Ollie and Kobo Kanaeru) but maybe its grammar uses a different system for those. It wouldn't be much of an issue in any other action game but owing to Anuchard taking some talk-y, themes-y RPG/action-adventure types for its inspiration there's always plenty of dialogue and text to read, so having a less-than-ideal localization hurts its messaging and worldbuilding all the more.

I do still admire Anuchard's ambitious presentation and its confronting of heavier and headier subjects of greed and chasing unrealistic utopias while maintaining a compelling enough Zeldersatz dungeon-crawling core to prop everything else up. Once again, I can't help but regret that I didn't get to Moon before this so I could appreciate the parallels more (something for next year, I suppose). It ends on a pretty trippy and narratively bold note too, so even if playing the game was mostly a case of going through the motions there's enough happening in the periphery to make the journey worth the busywork. Sometimes the gameplay works to service the story rather than the usual other way around and I'm entirely fine with games like Anuchard that go that route, especially if they happen to take after some slightly more obtuse inspirations in the process.

Rating: 4 out of 5.