El Viento for Genesis is baffled by world-ending cults

destructoid.com:

I really hadn’t heard of El Viento before Retro-Bit announced their re-issue of it. It’s really hard to know what to make of it. It seems displaced from time, occupying an era that doesn’t exist.

That may be a weird way to describe it, but I think what I’m trying to say is that it looks reminiscent of Valis. It’s a sort of grainy-looking side-scroller that feels like it was developed for an early Japanese home computer before being ported to the PC-Engine and finally landing on the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. A drifting vagabond tied to no home. To clarify, that’s what Valis went through. The difference here is that El Viento was never on a platform aside from the Genesis, and the developer, Wolf Team, wasn’t behind the Valis games. Though, they did handle some of the ports of the first game, and Renovation/Telenet published the lot in North America. Anyway, not important. I’m just saying, they’re similarly unusual.

Its similarities with Valis are largely that they’re both somewhat janky sidescrollers that feature a female lead. It just doesn’t have that distinct Genesis flavor to it, but that’s not to say it doesn’t have a flavor of its own.

You play as Annet, who is part of the bloodline of Hastur, an eldritch being from Robert W. Chambers’ 1895 book of short stories, The King in Yellow. A cult in New York is trying to resurrect Hastur, which Annet, despite being related through blood, recognizes as being a spectacularly stupid idea.

She frequently asks the antagonists, “Why are you doing this? You know they’re just going to destroy the world,” and nobody really has a good answer to that. I think the idea is that they’re going to take control of their power through Restiana, another woman of Hastur’s bloodline, but that