During the time of year we see slow releases, it's nice to check out a variety of the smaller indie games, and one of the ones that caught my attention this time was Lenna's Inception. It's a game with a clear inspiration from the early days of The Legend of Zelda, and the last time I saw a game like that was Shotgun Legend which turned out well. Following around a teacher named Lenna, when her school 'glitches' out of reality, she sets off to save to find out what happened to Lance. Upon finding him, the one suppose to be the Legendary Hero, she tries to train him and he dies in a freak cave in, leaving her to pick up the sword and save the day.
There are some positives to the game that include some interesting story twists. It gets a bit meta, as you may have guessed from the 'glitching' aspect of the plot. Honestly, this self-aware plot idea is a bit stake for me, but Lenna does a good enough job to at least keep it interesting. Nothing in this game is something that I would describe as amazing, but nothing in particular about the plot is really bad.
The gameplay borrows heavily from The Legend of Zelda, as mentioned before, but with enough interesting ideas added in. The biggest one of them being an item later in the game that forcibly 'glitches' the world. Though that's not the way the game describes it. The visuals get a bit distorted, and when you move through the side of the screen to go into the next, what happens instead is you wrap around to the other side of this screen. It's kind of cool that when you do this it legit looks like something that would be a bug in another game. Normally something like this would be used by players in old games to skip over sections of certain maps, but here it becomes essential. It really is when the gameplay starts to become engaging.
However, the game does suffer from each new game being a newly generated world. It's not that it's a bad idea on paper, but the game ends up feeling a bit lifeless and lacking in atmosphere. Up until you get the aforementioned item, nowhere in the game really feels all that unique and lacking in any kind of cohesion. It just feels like a random bunch of screens thrown together. Though to be upfront, I've only played through the game once. It is possible other possible map seeds would be more interesting, but at the very least you could end up with some pretty boring maps.
I do like that you can select to play the game with either sixteen bit or thirty two bit graphics. It doesn't seem to change anything beyond visuals, but at the same time it's a fun little touch that adds a bit of charm to the game.
You also have a bit of an issue with enemies being too easy, most of them can be very easily stun locked using nothing more than your basic attack. Now boss fights tend to have some unique aspects that can make them fun and interesting, another nice bit of flair that helps keep the game enjoyable, even if the fights tend to be a bit too easy.
All I can really say beyond this is that it's a good solid game for ten dollars. It's kind of what you expect out of a good indie game. It's fun, cheap, some interesting ideas and gimmicks, and nothing really all that bad to drag it down.
And while it's a pretty simple game, and more likely than not most computers won't have an issue with it, here are my PC specs when I ran this game, running at a solid 60FPS the whole game.
**Ryzen 5 3rd Gen 3600 (3.60GHz) (6 cores, 12 threads)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6GB
16GB DDR4 3200MHz RGB
1TB SSD
AMD B450 (Motherboard)**