The last time I wrote about the Sonic fan game, I innocently and absent-mindedly described it as “SNES style.” This led to a dog pile on social media of an intensity usually reserved for large international banks that accidentally tweet line34, a howl of mockery that washed over me over and over again as I rolled around on the floor under my desk screaming at Graham to please delete the entire internet, I want to start all over again.
Let’s see if it goes better this time: Sonic Galactic is an absurdly successful Sonic fan game from Starteam that broadly imagines what the Mega Drive and Genesis platformers would have looked and felt like if they were for the Sega Saturn made. There’s a new demo if you want to try it for yourself. You can find it here on Itch.io. Maybe if I had moved the download link higher up the page in the other article, people would have gotten distracted and not come at me so terribly.
The basic marker for judging any post-Mega-Drive Sonic game is: which sidekicks did they keep? Because, after all, the addition of sidekicks has gone hand-in-hand with the dilution of Sonic from an iconic platformer to a mess of franchise clutter. Expand beyond the core trinity of Sonic, Tails, and Knuckles, and you add an array of, at best, gimmicky, at worst, actively toxic spices to an excellent layer cake. But there are circumstances under which a dollop of Amy Rose, a little bit of Shadow, can bring spiciness and spice.
Sonic Galactic seems to have the right idea. In addition to Sonic, Tails and Knuckles, it adds Fang the Sniper (a jerboa) from Sonic The Hedgehog Triple Trouble, and a new character, Tunnel the Mole (a mole). Each character has their own moves that let you modulate the classic Sonic pinball sensation through beautiful, “hand-pixelized” arrangements of ring-covered loops and ramps, then crash into some spikes when you’re 10 rings away from a 1-ring. Upwards.
I played a bit of the demo, which scares me a bit because it’s tutorial level, with rather cumbersome text instructions that pop into view as you’re platforming. For the rest, the game fits my memories of the Mega Drive games like a glove. It feels very much like the game Sonic Team would have made if they’d been asked to iterate on Sonic 3’s visual and ability design – it has the same selection of basic TV power-ups, but adds a wall kick for Sonic and various useful techniques for running on water. So far, Galactic seems to be playing things fairer than the obvious comparison, Sonic Mania, which I think is more notable in its remix of elements from the older Sonic games.
It is in the special 3D stages that you see the most the “power of Saturn”, a very good console now mainly remembered for being beaten up by the PlayStation 1. The chiptune soundtrack, meanwhile, has that fast-paced melancholy that I associate with the series at its best.
Sonic Galactic was announced in 2020 and does not yet have a release date. Go ahead, take the demo for a spin attack.