Indivisible Preview – A Great Balance of Platforming and Turn-Based Battles

I remember when I first heard about Indivisible shortly after its 2015 Indiegogo campaign launched. The game had so much charm and individuality which made it easily stand out as a must-play title for me. Little did I know, it would be four years until I could play it, but after playing a 30-minute demo, the wait is most definitely worth it.

During PAX West 2019, I was able to play as Ajna who had already received a few special powers and added a decent amount of fighters to her party. The level I played through was called TaiKrung and featured an urban city design. The environment contained various night clubs and cat cafes with a host of interesting things to look at and NPCs to interact with.

Not much of the story was revealed in the demo as it mostly featured the game’s platforming and battle systems. From the story events that I experienced, it was evident that Ajna has a firecracker personality, and she is continuously discovering new things about the world around her. What would be interesting is if the story allowed her and the player to learn things about this world together. However, I can see that the people she surrounds herself with also keep her informed which has a nice flow to it during the story scenes.

In my time with the demo, I was able to mess around with the gameplay systems. Ajna has a variety of abilities that allow her to ascend walls, cross huge gaps, or even invent ways to bounce on dangerous objects. These platforming sections of the game are challenging, but break up the other systems. I enjoyed looking around at my surroundings while trying to find the best way to get up to a ledge. However, even if you find a way there, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy. I will admit, I died a few time while I mastered the skill of bouncing on lanterns. I would have liked a little more time with the game, to get the hang of Ajna’s other skills of traversal because they are all unique.

The battles make up the other part of gameplay in the demo. What I learned was that these battles are pretty challenging. Each encounter requires the player to approach the match with a tactical mindset because merely going in guns blazing didn’t seem to work too well for me. During fights, Ajna and the party each have a few actions to burn to rush in and attack the enemy or heal the party. However, during the enemy’s turn, it’s up to the player to react and trigger a block that minimizes the incoming attack. Battles are interactive and require the focus of the player to gain victory.

Luckily for Indivisible, it is a gorgeous game to the point that sometimes I got lost in its beautiful animations. Events in and out of battle are just great to look at. I don’t know if this game will ever look dated and I attribute this to the hand-drawn character models that give it a timeless presentation. I’m excited to see the various environments and new characters that this team has created in the full game.

During my time with the game, the only thing that stuck out to me is if the battles will become too long to the point where I start to avoid them. I notice that the encounters took up more moments of gameplay than anything else I did. While this could have something to do with the demo’s difficulty, I’m still eager to see what the release build has in store.

If Indivisible wasn’t on your radar before, I urge you to check it out. See if it’s a good fit to keep an eye on because I’m honestly looking forward to it.

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Indivisible is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and PC-via Steam on October 8, with a physical retail release for console on October 11.