I first played Teslagrad on the PS Vita. It was a super tight 2D platformer that focused on short thumb-twister platform sections. The two big selling points were the lovely hand drawn art, and the platforming was based around electromagnetism.
Playing the remake took me right back, the opening section is long chase section across a rain swept village. The platforming remains great and the intuitive way it weaves some Metroidvania exploration elements into it all makes it even better. Each section is built like a challenging Super Meat Boyesque series of platforming. Each of these is smartly broken up by checkpointing so finely tuned that, any longer would be frustrating, and any shorter would be too easy. Right now, the first game is worthy of a purchase.
In fact, until I had played Teslagrad 2, I was fairly certain that Teslagrad was not something that could be improved on.
Teslagrad 2 takes all the elements of the original – the hand drawn art style, the electromagnetism, the short platforming sections, and the silent narrative – and just refines all of them.
The artwork is sharper. Following a teslamancer called Lumina through her adventures the sense of scale and the attention to detail is improved. As our protagonist skips through new calamities everything looks clean and fantastic. Each of the areas positively glows with great touches. The way water moves as Lumina jumps in, the well animated enemies as they react to her passing, and the dynamic backgrounds of each stage are lovingly rendered.
In Teslagrad a lot of the electromagnetism was dictated by level design, by that I mean that the elements were in fixed positions with the player having to walk over the spot to trigger the effect. Teslagrad 2 places those powers and effects squarely in the player’s hands with them being able to trigger their powers, which makes all of the platforming more dynamic. There is even more variety in the platforming and, as a sign of a good game, Teslagrad 2 never lingers on style of play long enough for it to get boring. There is dashing, under water shenanigans, and some properly brain-breaking gravity reversing puzzles.
The silent narrative was a well paced in the first, but due to the improved animations it is even more evocative with Lumina being a great replacement for the original character. Her expressions and movement being well done everywhere.
So, the question, really, is it worth playing Teslagrad first? For fans of well-crafted platformers then that is the way to go. Diving back into the first shows that it hasn’t aged a day since its first release. The thing is Teslagrad 2 is better in everyway. Those only wanting to play one great 2D platformer, can safely jump to the second installment, that said playing both was my preferred way to go.
Conclusion
Teslagrad 2 is a step up in every respect to its previous installment, a fantastic platformer with a wonderful set of auxiliary gameplay elements anyone that loves 2D platformers should play this.
This game was reviewed based on Xbox One review code, using an Xbox Series S|X console. All of the opinions and insights here are subject to that version. Game provided by publisher.
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