Indivisible starts with 4 warriors fighting a god that's intent on destroying the world. After that battle, we switch to a girl named Ajna, who lives in a village in a forest with her demanding and emotionally stunted father. He's always on her to "remember her defense" during training. Until he dies in an attack by the armies of Ravannavar. Someone didn't take his own advice! Ajna's confronted by one of the soldiers, a swordsman named Dhar, and defeats him.
Dhar's sucked into her mind, an (initially) unwilling passenger as Ajna sets out to take revenge on Ravannavar. She meets many more characters along the way, with a variety of designs (based on a wide variety of cultures), backstories and combat styles. From Leilani, a girl from with a Pacific Islander look who's following a prophecy she's supposed to save the world and carrying a sword ringed with shark teeth, to Zebei, who looks like (I think) a Mongolian archer who protects a city/monastery in the mountains, there are 19 other characters who can potentially join up with Ajna as fighters, plus several more that offer services from hints, upgrades, combat training and alternate costumes. Some are mandatory, others are only unlocked if you speak to them and do whatever's needed.
The gameplay's a mixture of things, but always side-scrolling. The battles are RPG-style, where you have a party of up to 4 characters. Whether a character can attack is based on whether there's at least one filled circle beneath them. Different characters recharge those at different speeds, and different attacks - basically depending on whether you press up, down, or nothing on the controller when you attack - take longer or shorter times (something I didn't know until I read it online earlier this week.) Certain attacks build up your "iddhi" or spiritual energy (that bar in the upper left corner), which can be used for more powerful moves.
Blocking drains iddhi, especially the more characters you have blocking simultaneously, and the longer they're doing it. The game will show you the path of an attack and who's being targeted, but it's still sneaky. The enemy may move closer to strike the person in the rear of your party, but the path of the attack means it also hits the character in front if you aren't on the ball (each character's assigned one of the 4 buttons for their attacks and it also activates blocking.) If you time it right, you can even get a little health back instead, so there's an element of awareness beyond just reflexes to it.
When you aren't fighting, you're platforming. Spiked pits, spiked walls, spiked ceilings, electrified signs and floors. Platforms that crumble within seconds of your touching them, narrow passages to slide through. The plot requires a lot of backtracking and revisiting of locations, and there are little red gems scattered about to help make it worth the while. Collect enough, you can upgrade your offensive or defensive abilities, but many of them will be in places you can't reach the first time through. As the game progresses, you pick up new skills to reach those places, and brother, do you need them.
This game delights in making you chain numerous skills, especially in the long, long climb to the final boss. Taking the above image as an example (and far from the most challenging.) Use the spear to pogo across the spiked floor to the right wall. Wall jump between the right wall and those glowing blocks (which will begin to crack and crumble once you touch them). Reach the faulty stone platform. From there you might be able to use one of your skills, or a combination, to go straight up, past the spiked platform to another glowy, fragile block. Or you can use a combination of skills to reach the left wall and scale between it and the vertical blocks there. That gives you a chance to pogo across the spiked platforms to the glowy block.
It's a lot, is what I'm getting at. Fortunately, the game is generous with the save points, even if it doesn't feel like it when you have to make it through 2 or 3 of these horror chambers in a row. Also, there's usually more than 1 way to make it across, so if you find yourself more adept with certain skills than others, you can still cobble together a strategy.
OK, so that's how it plays, what's it all in service of? The story has an obvious arc. Ajna's very angry and very stubborn. She keeps bulling ahead, getting goaded until she loses her temper, and the situation does not improve. Ravannavar is actually trying to unleash the sealed-up god who created the world (that was after she destroyed the last one, which she had also created after the one she destroyed prior to that, and so on.) Ajna inadvertently helps bring this about, but she just keeps taking the same approach - charge ahead and punch whatever tries to stop her. You can see how it's going to go a mile away, and the game only reinforces it the more the other characters point out that maybe she ought to listen to other people.
Which is a little frustrating, that you can see it but not turn her away. Instead of her guilting Thorani into sticking with them on this quest, stay in Tai Krung and help with the plague that's set in. Stay in the Iron Kingdom and try to deal with the slime burying everything. Actually work on finding Quadira's missing brother. After playing a game like The Outer Worlds, the lack of control feels stifling. But I remind myself I'm not playing as me, watching all this crap happen to other people. I'm playing as Ajna, who's angry and mourning her dad and guilty about things unsaid and hoping if she just keeps going she can fix everything she messed up.
The back half of the game, after that all blows up in her face, is a bit more satisfying. You get the option to help all the people she's gathered to her with various business of their own. This can vary from helping Kampan recover the gold stolen from her by the King of Thieves, to helping Razmi destroy the demon sealed within her lantern before it kills the spirit of her tiger friend in there.
The downside to these is they involve a lot of backtracking, and it's a lengthy process. Wherever you need to go for the first part of a quest is inevitably far away from any portal or exit to reach whatever place you need to go next. In many cases, you're only in a location long enough for a single conversation, then it's lots of running and jumping to get to another exit. But, those aren't required to do, though it gives Ajna a chance to level up some more, and boosts the strength of each friend as you complete their quest. It boils down to how much of a completist you are (I definitely was this time), and how much the idea of helping these other characters matters to you (quite a lot in my case.)
And the game wants you to care. In addition to letting the other characters get involved in conversations Ajna's having, you can venture to Ajna's "Inner Realm", where these characters all hang out when not helping you fight. There you can just, talk to them. About silly things, usually, like Razmi's question about the weird dark thing she'd seen slithering around in Ajna's mind (which comes as a complete surprise to Ajna), or Baozhai's awkward attempts to flirt with Thorani by talking about making beer. But it builds their personalities, making them more distinct while creating a sense of unity between Ajna and them. That despite the differences, and several of the characters get frustrated with Ajna, they're all in this together.
It worked on me. I helped them with all their quests, and near the end, when Ajna concludes she has to finish this alone, I took the chance offered to say good-bye to each one. Watching each character fade as they're released from her mind was a melancholy feeling. I almost didn't want to win, because it meant it was all going to be over. Razmi's good-bye, which I saved for last, got to me. Big surprise, the darkly sarcastic loner who loves to read and burn things was my favorite character.
For a game I bought on a complete whim based on the back of the case, Indivisible worked out really well.
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