#itta

📷 itta.magazine: A Cuts

Itta – Nintendo Switch

Publisher: Armor Game Studios

Developer: Glass Revolver

-David Perez 4/28/2020

Bullet-hell adventures are a dime a dozen that I typically skip right by, but having seen multiple bosses of Itta over the past months had me hyped for it. Itta did not disappoint. This twin-stick bullet-hell adventure is set in an ominous, atmospheric world where exploration and boss-battler meet. After waking up, surrounded by her dead family and pet cat, Itta is thrust into the dark world of the Garden with a spirit revolver in an attempt to get back to a time before tragedy struck. 

The gameplay loop of Itta is quite simple. As Itta you explore three varied locations finding story books and meeting long-time inhabitants of the Garden that give cryptic insights into the lore of this world. When not exploring the world and finding new weapons, Itta encounters epic boss battles where reflexes are tested as you avoid a variety of bullets and projectiles. As well as simply avoiding bullets, Itta can roll through them, which is absolutely necessary to survive through the boss fights. Itta faces her first couple of boss battles with her trustworthy revolver, but can find up to seven more weapons including bombs and a greatsword for future challenges. Although the variety in these weapons helped change the flow of combat, there was no need to switch weapons in combat and I found the spray and pray minigun to be my weapon of choice.  Unfortunately, I did not get to try the scythe or greatsword in my first playthrough. I am not the type to explore every nook and cranny, so I must have missed them along the way. 

Despite not checking every corner, the exploration of Itta’s new world was as fun as the boss battles. The pixelated art style of the Garden is beautiful. It is a mostly abandoned world that looks grim while maintaining a colorful palette. This environment is further complimented by great character and boss design and made almost perfect by the amazing soundtrack. From the starting menu, to every section of the world there wasn’t a single part of the audio I can complain about. The soundtrack not only added to the atmosphere but helped convey the emotions Itta felt as she progressed through her ordeal. This helped the storytelling as overall there isn’t much dialogue in the game. The music of Itta also helps in getting your heart pumping as the boss battles reach later stages with bullets covering almost the entire screen. The boss battles got quite frenetic with increasing difficulty as the boss came closer to defeat. These second halves of battles were the real highlight as the bosses showed their true power with more variety in their attack patterns distinguishing them from other bosses. About half of the 18 bosses posed a real challenge that took me multiple attempts to beat. Despite this, I would not say that Itta is an overall difficult game. It’s clear that Jacob Williams, the developer, wanted Itta to be accessible even giving the option to turn on damage multipliers, and invincibility. I did not end up using these although I was tempted to when fighting The King. 

The King, despite being one of my favorite bosses, is where I first began to have minor issues. This boss has a teleport move that is currently not telegraphing properly leading to easy deaths. I must have had over 15 attempts at this boss before finally coming out on top. Outside of this bug, I had a few others including: getting stuck in corners after a roll, bombs not tossing on multiple occasions, and frame-rate drops while in handheld mode during the busiest moments of battle. In handheld mode I also had a few camera issues where the boss would just not be in view as they got too far away during some attacks. I mainly used the minigun as mentioned earlier to circumvent this issue of needing to have precise shots as I play handheld more than docked. None of these issues are game-breaking in any way and the developer has already patched The King on Steam and is working on a bigger patch for Nintendo Switch. Outside of technical issues, there are a couple of things that I believe would take Itta from being great to amazing. The combat is fun, but overall repetitive. I was not able to quickly switch weapons during combat as the best time to do so would be during a roll to avoid getting hit. Unfortunately, I could only access the weapon wheel when not rolling which would lead to getting hit easily as it is quite intrusive on the screen and takes time to go away. I think that if Itta was required to switch weapons throughout different stages of each battle to overcome challenges, combat would have been less repetitive as the flow would have to change. Finally, I am okay with the overall story being ambiguous as to how the world came to be, or even what Itta’s fate is. However, I would have liked more findable lore before each boss to get more of their backstory and how they fit into the world. These bosses were so greatly designed visually that more of them should have had a story to match. 

ITTA is a beautifully animated twin-stick bullet hell adventure where a girl and a ghost cat look for answers in a decaying world!