Rhythm-Platformer Antro Wants to Beat the System with Beats

Antro can be just a little too imprecise for what it’s aiming for, which means it can be a little too frustrating a little too often. The rhythm component should remove any doubt or fidgetiness in the parkour, and I fully cop to many of my deaths being entirely my fault. (I’ve played in bands for literally decades now. You’d think I could keep a beat—unless you ever actually heard any of those bands.) Sometimes, though, I’ll hit the button at the perfect time, and either because I wasn’t moving fast enough or hadn’t reached a specific, tightly defined point on a platform, I would watch my little guy go plummeting off the bottom of the screen. Sometimes he wouldn’t fall but would instead jump head first into a girder he should’ve cleared, or mistime a wall-run. Again, often this was entirely due to my own incompetence, but at least as often it was due to the game’s controls or how its frequently sludge-colored platforms regularly blend into the game’s constantly sludge-colored background. 

There are other, more minor hiccups you can excuse for a game from a small studio, like the weird way the same looping audio lines get cut off when Niitch dies, or how they continue even after the character who I’m pretty sure is supposed to be saying them should no longer be able to communicate with Niitch. A parkour-inspired, rhythm-driven, action-heavy platformer needs to nail the basics of its locomotion, though, and Antro doesn’t quite pull that off.

There’s still a lot to admire here, though, and even actively enjoy. Not all of the levels I’ve played are flawed, and when one does work well Antro’s propulsive platforming is an exciting thing to experience. And the pieces of its story that I encountered were well-conceived and just unique enough to not feel like boilerplate sci-fi guff. 

It also doesn’t hesitate to overtly reference real-life politics. At one point Niitch passes what is clearly Shepard Fairey’s iconic Obama poster, defaced to read “No We Can’t.” Almost immediately after you see graffiti of a Trump-looking man in a suit wearing a red “Make Antro Great Again” hat. Beyond situating Antro in our world and making it impossible to deny that this game is a warning about where we’re headed, it also confronts us with the thought that the increasing authority ceded to corporations isn’t a partisan issue. It’s continued at full speed under both supposed liberals like Obama and far right extremists like Trump, making you wonder: if both of America’s political parties are to blame for out-of-control capitalism, maybe the problem isn’t just our political system but something inherent about America’s embrace of capitalism itself?

There’s a scene early on where Niitch runs by a group of workers right as they have to take one of their regularly mandated breaks to recite some kind of pledge of allegiance to La Cúpula. It feels eerily like a prayer. “I, who am guilt and consequence / Of everything that was once destroyed / I give myself to work / Work frees us from all guilt,” they intone, as Niitch speeds past, trying not to be seen by the workers’ robot overlords. This specific type of dystopia is in no way a new or novel concept, but the world we live in today feels closer to it than at any other point in my life, which makes Antro feel incredibly pointed and prescient for a video game about the power of dance. That alone makes it worth your notice, even if you might wind up falling into a pit more than you’d like.

Editor-in-chief Garrett Martin writes about video games, pinball, theme parks and more. You can also find him on Blue Sky.