This concept sounds kind of dumb. It is. Headlander is extremely dumb because most development teams wouldn’t think to model a Metroidvania-styled game around a rocket-propelled sentient skull that clears out rooms, solves puzzles, and attaches itself to bodies as a means of dynamic progression. Instead, they go for emotive creatures, space ships, submarines, cyber ninjas, and luchadores. Most of those are safe plays when it comes to creating a central presence and corresponding methods of interactivity. People already know how to play those characters and this allows their games to get a running start.
Anchors create a sense of familiarity, but they also establish inescapable weight. It’s 2016, and while the influence of Symphony of the Night and Super Metroid can’t be measured with our puny Earth tools, it’s starting to feel like we’re hitting a wall with this stuff. Headlander, which if I haven’t made it clear is a game about a voiceless disembodied head flying around and doing crazy shit, is the enemy of this status quo. Headlander’s blueprints—ahem, a series of connected levels unified by an intuitive map and open to progressive exploration as game mechanics develop and players increase in proficiency—are consistent with Metroidvania’s beliefs, but the materials used to assemble them favor animation over obedience.
Headlander, a 2D game principally concerned with moving through different levels of platforms, doesn’t have a jump button. This is because the player can freely banish their body and fly away. Enemy robots called shepherds are rainbow color coded based on some sort of nebulous rank with an escalating series of colors granting access to doors and rooms. This ensures the player is always returned to a tactile surface at some point, save some secret rooms dotting the map that are for head-only. Ideally, you’re supposed to do whatever’s necessary to exit the present room and move on to an objective in parts unknown.
Naturally, your head doubles as a powerful vacuum, granting the ability to suck off a variety of surfaces. Sometimes this is for specially marked vents concealing secret passage ways, but it’s chiefly employed as an offensive measure against enemy robots. You suck off their head with a pleasant thunk, attach to what remains, and assume control over their body and weapons. Most all of this translates to ricochet-friendly laser rifles, the potency of which escalates over the course of Headlander’s adventure. Your opposition is expendable, meaning it’s perfectly fine to enter a body, unload its laser, and then decline to wait the three seconds it takes for them to recharge in favor of jettisoning your own head and finding a new host with a new energy bar.
Basic combat has room for precision, you can even hold a button to line up your shots, complete with anticipated reflections, but in practice it’s kind of sloppy. Headshots were possible, but I never seriously went for them. Headlander isn’t especially demanding inside of its combat encounters. Melee options, including a strategic battle roll and standard punching with fists, are available, and later on can even be improved with fits of invincibility, laser gun boosts, and requisite health and armor upgrades.
I found it more rewarding to exist as head-only whenever possible. Toward Headlander’s back nine the head gets a sweet turbo boost upgrade along with some tricky shields that basically turns the thing into a missile. I lost a lot of health doing this, especially with the head’s armor-deficient frailty, but it was fun to try and plow through Headlander this way. I’ve played Metroidvania’s where I’m a floating craft and I’ve played them where I’m some guy on the ground, but never one where I’ve essentially had the option to do both whenever I please. It feels good to be the head; it’s got a neat little thrust, the contrails look cool, and I’ll never tire of getting a running start with the body, ejecting the head, and watching the dumb decapitated robo-corpse come to a hilarious walking halt. It reminded me of riding my bike down my parent’s driveway and jumping off before a brief autopilot crashed it into a ditch.
There’s a modest amount of efficiency in Headlander’s design. It’s a Metroidvania staple to tuck hidden rooms away for later on when you’ve got some new gadget to play with. With all the different colored enemy robots and corresponding doors, this could be a nightmare, but Headlander typically replaces its enemy loadout with the highest caliber of foe, granting easy access to doors that used to be obstacles. Checkpointing that usually places you in the last-visited room and some helpful (though occasionally confusing) teleport rooms make travel even more swift.
A curious progression system monitors the player’s development. Powering up your head’s thrust, armor, and life bar can be done by finding hidden rooms all over the space station. Some of those rooms, along with a handful of sidequests and the occasional random pickup, provide the player with energy that can be spent on abilities in a skill tree. These include a double-sided shield, the ability to turn an idle body into a turret, and a head-butt that instantly trades bodies. Outside of the shield none of these are absolutely essential, but by the time I was done with Headlander I had enough points to buyout the entire skill tree.
Idle slivers of Headlander—the perfect suction noise when you rip a head off, the predictable inertia of its severed-head physics, the razor sharp humor—flow well together, but there are some pieces that get stuck in the mud. There are a lot of elevators, and all of them are powered by your head leaving a body and attaching to the controls. This feels cumbersome quickly, and it’s never interesting to pilot an elevator. Similarly, lining up shots with an analog stick feels imprecise and twitchy, and this because a problem late in the game where you have to nail perfect shots off a series of reflective mirrors.
Combat, for all of its goodwill, also falters when applied to boss fights. Normally you can sort create enough chaos to get through almost any situation. Boss fights, however, demand another level of precision and aren’t exactly short affairs. The last (of two) boss, in particular, can either feel incredibly cheap if you’re not especially good at demanding mechanic that Headlander establishes inside the fight. I get trying to add something new to fill the room in the grand finale, but it sucks the wind out when you realize it’s going to require luck mixed in with trial and error.
Ostensibly, all of this madness is happening because of fizzled attempt at transferring the entirety of human consciousness into robot bodies. It’s not a complete failure, the denizens of Headlander’s world still spend plenty of time doing the robot equivalent of a hookah orgy at the Pleasure Dome or engaging in some kind of chopped and screwed remix between chess and capture the flag, but there’s also something wrong with the place. It’s a mystery that’s slowly rolled out over Headlander’s eight to ten hours, although it’s tough to say plot is top on this list of Headlander’s goals.
Given its pedigree, it’s safer to assume Headlander’s writing prefers punchy dialog and stinging barbs over pesky aberrations like plot and motivation. There’s a wandering map robot that is consumed with making sure you know where you’re going, sentry guns who profusely apologize for having to shoot you, and sentient locked doors that are so over this shit and clown on the player for not having the right clearance to enter. It’s cute, and it operates as if the player is laughing and spilling popcorn everywhere instead of holding a wine glass, deeply invested in the absence of traditional mortality.
Headlander’s look helps sell its preposterous vision of retrofuture. It’s sci-fi through the lens of autumn leaves and chunky robots, neatly laying out a 70’s cultural aesthetic against the 50’s perfunctory approach to robotics. Headlander’s splendid logo encapsulates this sentiment, and its pulses style throughout Headlander’s drug-addled bloodstream. Glass hamster tubes for people, obtuse machinery of dubious purpose, brown/yellow/orange shadows spilling off the player, occasional dives into kaleidoscopic hell, and a female-fronted underground rebellion are evocative of 70’s science fiction and cinema. Headlander is a patchwork of throwbacks that provide warmth for aesthetic admirers and worried questions from unread bystanders.
The best compliment I can lay on Headlander is that it doesn’t spend all of its time building a monument to Super Metroid, opting instead for a dangerous medley of absurdity that’s nevertheless stable and, once you really start to look at it, kind of marvelous in its ability to stand upright and qualify as evidence of meaningful dissent. It reminds me of when Shovel Knight’s performed as an extensive compliment to Mega Man and Zelda II instead of another pallet-swapped ode to an empty nostalgia mine.
Everyone out to make a new Metroidvania has a secret ingredient they swear will leave an indelible mark in the genre’s collective pallet. Who would have thought that weaponized silliness was the most delicious of them all?
