Self-expression is at the core of all good art, capturing the raw emotion at the sum of the human experience. Musicians through instrument and word weave melodies of love, anger, sorrow, and tenderness. Paint brushes spill emotion on a canvas. People can put pen to paper and paint a world through words. Video games as a form of expression are unique because of their interactivity - the artist isn’t just giving a window into their minds, they’re also letting you play in it. The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest is the story of developer Elden Pixels themselves in the form of a little cowboy dude in a 2D world steeped in self-awareness, fourth wall breaking commentary, and a cast of characters that are both creatures of the artist’s designs and a mirror to how they see the players themselves.

The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest is a micro-sized metroidvania. You’ll go room-to-room jumping through platforming challenges and dispatching enemies with your six-shooter, among them cannons, laser guns, and wizards that look oddly close to David Cross. The distance between you and the enemies dictate how quickly you can shoot the gun, so there is a little bit of strategy despite being a one-weapon force. Eventually you get the standard kit of a double jump, dash, and butt stomp, but that’s where the upgrade train stops. You’ll get small upgrades like additional bullets to shoot in a row, but this is not a fully-fleshed metroidvania structure. Many segments of the map I traveled through were easy enough to jump right past any obstacle without a thought. Some rooms exist as a dead-end, without even an item or reward for finding them. This really could have been a standard, side-scrolling 2D platformer and not lost much in the translation.

Where the exploration stutters, the boss encounters shine. Given the abbreviated length, Fletcher’s Quest has a similarly small set of bosses, but the developer has a knack for making difficult boss battles that have a clear pattern to figure out but are still a challenge to overcome even when you do. The first boss (a mannequin two-piece horse armor piloted by a man) was a hard skill check that smacked me in the face by surprise after breezy world exploration. Taking the boss down felt like a big accomplishment. The bosses move in pre-scripted patterns, so it became a two-phase approach of learning the pattern, then filling the skill gap. Some of the difficulty comes from only being able to take two hits before death, but the game restarts your progress just a few screens away from the encounter, so you never feel a huge time loss. All the bosses are very unique to each other, too. That small set of moves Fletcher uses becomes less of an issue because some bosses give you new toys to play with, or have such wide swings in how to approach a boss that they could have come from a different game entirely. Elden Pixel’s creativity in game design shines here - they toe the balance of difficulty & fairness well for those who are good at pattern recognition and have a bit of patience.

Other than boss battles, the autobiographical storytelling through game design is some of the most creative work here. Fletcher, who in his mind is sucked into his own video game during a therapy session, is a self-aware character. He knows he’s in a game. The supporting cast know they’re in a game and exist only in the game/his mind, and understand their role clearly. It works because the story never takes itself seriously, and that lack of emotional oomph let me be a causal observer and just watch the events unfold. Sometimes it veers into outright wacky, like collecting the cast for what we’ll call an overnight party. There’s a vein of crassness embedded in much of the dialogue and events that is at times funny but often felt a half step further than I found funny. Other times the creativity is more vivid, like bug creatures that crawl along the screen and unveil clippings of user reviews criticizing its difficulty and game design, almost as if the developer is pre-emptively knocking down potential critics. There’s also musical numbers and other memorable moments that I don’t dare share. They’re surprises and delights that should be saved.

You can’t go through half a steam store page without tripping over a Metroidvania. Lots of great experiences to be had exploring wide ranging maps with hard stop gates you can only cross once you get that next special ability. The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest decided to step in that pond but stayed in the shallow end of map travel. There’s some comedy that oversteps the bounds of where my humor lies. Bluntly, in these spaces, a little bit of editing could go a long way. That said, when the jokes do hit, they’re really funny. When Elden Pixels tees up a gameplay surprise, it’s pure joy. When you get to that next boss, you’re going to feel good about dispatching them. The Prisoning: Fletcher’s Quest is a game whose highs are in the atmosphere, and is short enough where the flaws aren’t felt for long.