Elsie review for PC, PS5, Nintendo Switch

Seeing as Elsie is published by Playtonic Friends, I had high hopes for it. They’ve also published games like Yooka-Laylee, Lil Gator Game, and Blossom Tales II, among others, so I figured I’d be in good hands if I trusted them for their latest release.

Unfortunately, all I feel about Elsie is…indifference, basically. It’s not terrible, but it’s nowhere near on the level of the publisher’s other games. It’s just a very generic, forgettable game.

I mean, it’s a roguelike Mega Man clone. While I wouldn’t say that genre is brimming with other titles, at the very least Elsie is awfully similar to games like 20XX and 30XX. Broaden that category to include other retro-futuristic 2D platformers, and suddenly you have games like Bzzzt and seemingly hundreds of other games like Elsie all over Steam. With that kind of competition Elsie would’ve had to do a lot more to stand out, and it simply doesn’t really do anything noteworthy.

Again, though, it’s hardly a bad game. You can decide on your loadouts and upgrades before levels and decide how you want to take on all kinds of bad guys, which sort of introduces some strategy and variation to the seemingly random levels – though if you just want to go into every new level guns a-blazing, you can turn on invincibility mode. Movement is pretty fluid, and shooting is fun enough.

But again, nothing in Elsie makes it seem very original. It’s borrowing heavily from games that are decades-old without putting any real spin on any of it. If you just miss Mega Man and want a slightly more modern take on that game, you’ll get that here, but you won’t see anything new.

Playtonic Friends provided us with an Elsie PC code for review purposes.