Take on the forces of the Beljantaur Kingdom and its vile Queen Evangelyn as a pair of young women raised on the battlefields in a world devastated by war. Rush into the fray and eviscerate enemy battalions and war machines across 16 genre-blending levels to topple the evil empire.
You choose between either of the main characters, Tanya or Olga, and make your way through several stage. Each is capped off with a boss until you reach the end and face Queen Evangelyn to stop her evil empire. Each character plays the same way no matter which you choose. You’re equipped with a simple attack button, a dash button that uses up your stamina gauge, as well as a command that allows you to call in a bombardment strike that defeats all enemies on screen instantly.
The game overall can be explained as a simple running platformer. There is a point system that you can choose to focus on, but for the most part, many enemies go down in a few hits and then you move on. There are moments where the game does occasionally throw in specific turrets that allows you to wipe out a wave of enemies that come in from all sides of the screen.
The only collectibles in the game are health packs to replenish lost HP after taking damage, extra lives, and crystals that increase your health gauge. After every few levels you’ll get upgrades to your attacks, like floating swords that you can attach while double jumping at the cost of a small amount of stamina. As you progress through the game, levels expand allowing you to chose a couple of different ways to complete every stage. You can always aim to take the high route and possibly find some hidden health packs or extra lives, eradicate every enemy in the stage as you progress, or even just blitz through to avoid combat and head straight to the boss with as much health as you can hold on to.
The game can be played via single player or co-op and in time attack mode if you want to run through the game as fast as you can for a high score. Aside from the stages and the background art, the main style that you see of the characters up close look really good. However the entire in-game art uses simple chibi style characters that are polarizing in comparison to the main art style. When the cut ins appear in the game, the characters look really good.
The backgrounds and scenery in some stages do showcase some very nice sprite work. As you play through the game, you can definitely feel that this game is looking to recapture some of the glory days of playing side scrolling platformers that you would see from arcade machines to home console conversions. Still, it’s a shame that there isn’t a little more than just run and attack with an occasional opportunity to use either the turret tanks or be in a situation where you use the air support.
Overall, Infinite Beyond the Mind is a fun little game that’d can be enjoyed either alone or with a friend if you want a normal running platformer with a story and aesthetic that hearkens back to good old classics. It’s a decent buy if you want a simple yet fun challenge to sink your time into and relive the days of pouring quarters into classic arcade games of this genre.
