Not humanity's.

Background

Senturion is an indie game released in 2018, the sequel/rehash/major expansion of a 2013 Flash game of the same name. It's a 2D dungeon crawler/action-platformer, similar to games like Hollow Knight and Neon Abyss. You play as a Sentret you name at the beginning of your adventure.

Moveset

At first glance, the movement... kind of sucks. Both your snail-pace waddling and jump that barely gets you above your ears' height leave much to be desired. You can sprint on all fours to get to a somewhat reasonable speed, but using it tanks your Stamina bar. It seems like this is going to be quite the boring game...

Until you realise that if you aim at the floor and use the aerial version of your tail-slap (Left Click, goes towards the mouse), you go absolutely flying. Further experimentation reveals that extending your tail (Hold Right Click, goes away from the mouse) lets you bounce like a pogo stick in a similar fashion to the hammer from Getting Over It.

Using these movement options together (along with exploiting certain levels' mechanics) is key to defeating enemies and traversing through rooms.

Inventory

You get various “Tail Armours” as you progress through the game. These are Pokémon-themed equipment for your tail that affects how your tail-based movement works. Here's a few examples!

- Ditto: Your goopy tail can compress into a wall if extended at high velocity, sticking you to it and slowly charging a super-bounce for when you release.

- Nidoran: Direct damage is only dealt via headbutts. Swinging your tail shoots a burst of poison darts and boosts you forward.

- Chikorita: Reduced damage, but vines on either side of your tail increase its length and add a powerful sweetspot to the end of your tail swings.

There's also Trinkets! You have a few slots for passive Trinkets and a single active Trinket, which can be swapped out with ones in your inventory between Sections (see Levels).

Passive Trinkets are your accessories, and some effects include:

- Increasing base stats

- Health regen after clearing a room

- Increased loot

- Modifications to movement too general to be a Tail Armour, such as decreasing gravity or increasing impact force

They all come with upsides and downsides though, so you need to consider carefully which ones you equip.

Active Trinkets have an effect upon pressing the Use Active Trinket key. Every Active Trinket has a cost to use, and this can be almost anything. You think of a number, changing it can be the cost of an Active Trinket.

Some Active Trinket effects include:

- Spawning a wall at your cursor facing the Sentret that takes away your Stamina

- Throwing a bomb, but you can only use it once per room

- Giving you extra max health for the rest of the dungeon, but the boss at the end of the dungeon gains 20x that

- Making you invincible but slowly increasing your gravity while the button's held

You get Tail Armors, Trinkets, and other items from chests, bosses, shops, and as drops from rare variants of certain enemies.

Levels

Levels have the standard dungeon-crawler layout: floors (referred to as ‘Sections’) consisting of rooms that you can only exit once every enemy inside is defeated, culminating in a bossfight at the end. The rooms are big, and can be mostly vertical, mostly horizontal, or all kinds of wacky shapes.

The group of levels associated with each individual faction (more on that later) all have a gimmick that ties them together. For example, a volcano level could have lava that bounces you away but damages you if you touch it without the right Trinket.

Story

The story begins in a cute little forest village full of young forest critters (the parents of all the critters had disappeared a while ago), soon having you go to the task board and accept a mission to collect apples from a nearby patch of apple trees. It serves as the game’s tutorial, giving you the opportunity to learn to use your movement options to pick the apples from a series of high trees that culminate in a tricky chained bounce up a cliff to get to the tree with the best apples. But as soon as they’re in sight, an attack from offscreen knocks you tumbling back down. With your tail sprained, you’re left to run back to your village from a group of Pawniard, Bisharp, Escavalier, and other mediaeval-themed Pokémon, instantly passing out from the shock once you leap through the open gates.

The next morning, you awake to see that everything’s changed. Huts are caved in, farms are destroyed, and everyone’s working together to figure out what to do in their parents’ absence. They’re all young and scared, but they've managed to band together into a tight-knit resistance.

The main gameplay begins here, similar to the flow of Pokémon Mystery Dungeon. You take quests to go through levels to get loot, progress the story, and develop close bonds with the other critters. 

As you progress, though, you realise that there's another group trying to invade the mediaeval Pokémon. And someone doing it to them, and doing it to them. Turns out the entire region's covered in nations trying to invade each other, all being supported from the shadows by a mysterious Pokemon called ‘The Oracle’.

You return home as fast as your tiny legs can carry you burst into the war room for the forest critters and tell everyone about this just before one of the Oracle's messengers arrives. Thoughts of "liberating" land from other factions have been slowly gaining popularity amongst the forest critters throughout the game, but you put a stop to it and convince everyone to focus all efforts on defeating the Oracle.

You then go through a level consisting of one floor from every faction's buildings you've been to, until you reach the Oracle's Spire. It's taller than anything anyone's ever seen, and it's made of a strange smooth material with angular channels of light pulsing throughout. As you climb up it, it's full of strange Golurk, Rotom, and Porygon. At this point, the player realises the twist…

…It's a massive supercomputer. (Important note: This is the first thing anywhere near modern technology you’ve seen in the entire game. Everyone else has only just figured out advanced smithing.)

Turns out there's a small group of Pokémon that's been advancing incredibly quickly but not sharing their developments with anyone. The Oracle is their magnum opus, an AI that disguises as a prophetic wizard-guy to pit the rest of the nations (once almost completely at peace) against each other. The plan was to have them all weaken each other so they could sweep through and take all the land and power for themselves.

You then have to go through the last floor of every dungeon again, but this time without hurting a single enemy so you can tell their leaders everything. You all turn on the Oracle, and with the help of all of the enemies you’ve faced you’re finally able to reach the AI for an epic final boss battle. It’s incredibly difficult and takes everything you’ve learned to its uppermost limits. 

You go into the "control room" after the fight to come face to face with these horrible dictators, but…they're all weak first stages? They begin a long monologue about how the world’s ‘unfair to little guys like us’, but it’s quickly cut off by the now-released parents of the forest critters pinning them down and dragging them away.

The credits then roll. A cutscene plays beside them showing the Oracle's Spire being dismantled and the leaders of the rest of the nations work together to spread the hoarded advancements to everyone.

Overall, it's a commentary on how powerful figures aim to gain power by dividing the people, and how technology can either be of great benefit or terrible detriment to society depending on the people controlling how it’s used.