Mario Kart World is kind of two games in one – it is an open-world exploration driving game as well as a level-based racing game that exploits the open **** is very much in the vein of previous Mario Kart games, with the same general core gameplay – you race against each other, you get items to throw them at each other or use them to catch up, etc. The new mechanic here is wall riding/rail riding, where you can jump up onto the wall/rail and go faster, though oftentimes, you’re mostly just on the track. There are up to 24 players (or you plus 23 computers), and the further back you are in the pack, the better items you get. It leads to the typical chaos of Mario Kart, and it works well.Here, there are two main racing modes – the first is pretty much the standard “go around four tracks” mode, but with the twist of you racing between the tracks before doing your laps, meaning that you basically have a long road that you go along before you enter a new area that you go around on for one lap. The new tracks are fun enough, and it works **** other is the elimination mode, where you are going through six areas along the roads through the overworld, and your goal is to make it through each of the six checkpoints while NOT in the back four. You start with 24 players, and each checkpoint eliminates 4; this results in the race starting out in utter chaos, but as you get closer to the end, it becomes more and more “pure” racing, with less and less powerful/swingy **** open world part is instead a collect-a-thon with various challenges, which either require you to complete some task or race some distance, or to get up to some really hard to reach place.Overall, all parts of the game are quite decent. The open world is a good way to make use of the world that they’re racing through, the tracks are decent, racing between the places through the open world is neat, the various challenges give you interesting tricks to try out, and collecting stuff with your kart is fun. However, it doesn’t exactly reinvent the wheel. If you liked other Mario Kart games, you’ll like this one, as it is basically just a bit better version of all those with a fun open world side thing; if you don’t like Mario Kart games, this won’t change your mind.
Donkey Kong Bananza is a fairly decent 3D Platformer with a cool new mechanic of punching through the levels with the major flaw that they never really figured out how to make that lead to challenging **** play as Donkey Kong, but a new version of him. This game makes a lot of call backs to Donkey Kong Country without actually being like a Donkey Kong Country game at all; nor is it much like DK64. Instead, it is very much a new animal, where DK punches his way down towards the center of the planet, punching his way through a series of levels that are ostensibly underground (despite the fact that most of them feel like they’re actually outside, above-ground). Having played plenty of games with way too many underground levels, I am glad that they mixed things up here, and the levels actually have pretty good variety as a result of them not feeling constrained at all by the environment, letting the illogic of a snow zone a third of the way to the planet core fall by the **** core of this game is the transformation into various “Bananza” forms; there’s only five of them, but they do mix things up a bit, complete with bombastic music to go along with them. While ostensibly time-limited power ups, the nature of the game means you can basically access these almost 100% of the time. The game uses these to allow some new forms of gameplay as you get deeper into the game, as well as allowing you to access new areas. Some of these are more half-baked than others (the Zebra form only allows you to run over what I jokingly referred to as “racist bridges”, which are the only places you actually need it for) while others (the elephant form and the ostrich form) both felt pretty fun, if kind of freakishly muscular in **** are on the tail of Void Corp, an evil mining corporation which is going to the center of the planet to “get a wish”. The framing is pretty weak, and so are the enemies – while I liked their designs well enough, this was a very easy game. And while 3D platformers are, in general, easy, this game was easy even by those very low standards; I’m not sure if I died a single time in the entire game, and the overall design of it was such that I could just use my Bananza forms to get through any situation I found myself in. This wasn’t a bad thing, but I liked the more complex bits of Mario Odesssy that actually served to give you a challenge; this game had an equivalent but it was more tedious than fun.There are some minor twists and turns, as well as a fun swerve at the ending that I won’t spoil here that makes the end of the game the best part of it, but in the end, I think the game is only okay overall. Punching through levels and being STRONK MONKEY is fun, but the game never really figures out where to go with things from there. There isn’t the best enemy variety on display here, and in the game, because of how the game mechanics work, it’s hard for the game to construct particularly meaningful challenges for you that employ those mechanics because they kind of trivialize navigating the stages, so the hardest parts of the game are places where you can’t just punch your way through and it plays like a more standard 3D **** in all, I liked the game well enough, and played it through to 100% completion, but I felt like I was pretty done with it by the end, and the lack of a real challenge manifesting itself at any point made it feel a bit like I was just going through the motions.
Alan Wake 2 is a game of marvellous setpieces and weak gameplay, of fun little bits of lore to find mixed in with pretentious exposition (which is sometimes hard to tell if it is intentional shlock or not), of beautiful areas that you spend way too much time running through in the dark that hides all the pretty **** core of Alan Wake 2 is the story of two people – Saga Anderson, an FBI agent called in to respond to what looks like the cult murder of a person who had been reported missing since 2010 (the current year in the game being 2023, the year of its release), and of Alan Wake, who has been trapped in The Dark Place for 13 years, since the conclusion of the first game, frantically writing a story to secure his escape from that **** game likes to say it is a horror story, but honestly, while the game does try to jump scare you, and include various standard horror story setpieces, Saga’s half of the game isn’t really one. Alan Wake’s is, and he makes all the standard mistakes a horror story protagonist does, while Saga Anderson is encouraged to create her own story, and I was a little sad it didn’t lean into that more at the end. I would have liked to see the characters realize that they didn’t have to do that, and do something **** core plot is only okay, but it has moments of greatness; there are various setpieces in the game that are really fun, especially the moments that the Lost Gods of Asgard return, as well as some talk show segments that Alan Wake deals with. But at the same time there is an AWFUL lot of running through dark forests, tunnels, and corridors, fighting the same five shadow monsters over and over again. This game is 40 hours long (including the deluxe edition DLC) and it wears the gameplay QUITE thin by the end of it, as you play for a long time while only fighting a handful of enemy types. There’s only five bosses in the game to mix things up, and even there, one of them is repeated twice with modest changes.This is the big problem with the game – it has some good ideas, some really fun moments, but there’s large amounts of the game that is just a slog through samey dark areas (or worse, the SAME dark areas, as you go through the same small section of forest like six times through the game) and the actual core gameplay has barely evolved mechanically from 2010, with the flashlight to break the dark shields and the guns to kill the monsters underneath. This wasn’t great in 2010 and seeing it again was disappointing, especially after they showed with Quantum Break and Control that they were capable of advancing the gameplay. Saga and Alan, despite being two characters, play almost identically in terms of their core gameplay.Where the two halves differ is their “meta” mechanics. Saga has “the mind place”, where she employs seer-like powers to do “readings” on people, finding out secrets from people she’s speaking to, and putting together clues on a string and pin board to try and solve the cases. This is reasonably neat, and works fairly well for what it is; you aren’t really solving any sort of mystery, though, despite this part of the game ostensibly being an “investigation”.Alan’s part, meanwhile, lets him go to the plot board, to rewrite scenes, so that different environments appear in different areas of the stages. This allows you to progress as you find new scene elements that let you change areas to let you into new places or interact with scenes in new ways or get new information.There is also a light/dark switch mechanic that swaps areas between two versions, which is used in a few places in the game – mostly in Alan’s areas, though some of it is used in other places.Unfortunately, while both of these are fun gimmicks, neither felt like it was taken out to its logical extension; Alan’s mechanic could have been used in way more cool ways but is never actually used to defeat an enemy or otherwise mess things up mid-scene, which would have been really neat. Meanwhile, Saga’s thing is very much leading the player by the nose through the investigation, and is really just about finding things in the environment and sticking them on the **** game also has collectables in it for some reason, which power up your weapons and increase your inventory space, making the core gameplay a bit more fun, but at the cost of tediously having to find these things; some of them have fun little puzzles attached to them, but at the end of the game you gain tools that let you access new areas so you have to run back through big areas to go find the few places that you couldn’t get into before, open them up, and get the collectables there. Overall, this was not fun and messed up the pacing of the story, and made no sense in character for backtracking. They tried to tie this into the main plot threads, but in the end, it didn’t really work all that well. All in all, it has fun bits interspersed with pretty lackluster gameplay.
Silksong is a sequel to Hollow Knight, widely regarded as one of the best Metroidvania games of all time – and it is an improvement across the board. The gameplay is better and more fluid, with a new protagonist – Hornet, who had been a boss in the first game – who is faster and more agile than the Knight of the first game. Unlike the knight, she talks, and she has a rather formal manner of speaking – and she is a fun character to play as, with her higher mobility lending itself to better overall gameplay. The game world is better designed, the enemies are more interesting, the bosses have better tells and are better designed, and there’s better, more fluid animation overall. The world feels more alive and the NPCs are more interactive, though they are still mostly background features with a few **** way Hornet controls is great, but is also very much key to the game. In Hollow Knight, you could often facetank bosses and heal. In Silksong, most of the bosses do two damage per hit, so this isn’t an option; instead, you have to hit and run, strike at them, then come back to whack them again, keeping yourself alive and safe. Instead of getting one health back per three hits on the boss, you get three health back per nine, and because they deal two damage per hit, you need to get hit no more than once every six attacks you land. This means that every boss fight is about knowing when to hit and when to dodge. Your primary goal in every fight is to learn the pattern, dodge their attacks, and then strike when they can’t get back at you. This leads the fights to turn into these very interesting affairs where when you finally beat them, oftentimes, you barely take any damage at all as you just get out of the **** game has much better tells than the first game does, and does a good job of showing when and where the enemy is going to attack; this means it always feels like it is your fault when you get hit. The boss patterns were often predictable, and sometimes you could even trick bosses into attacking in particular ways at particular times and then dodge their attack to punish **** normal enemies were also much better than they are in most Metroidvania style games; going around the world was, as a result, a lot more fun, as the normal enemies felt like they had more life to them, and were more interesting to kill than the quite boring enemies of the first game. With over 236 enemies in the game, including dozens of bosses, there’s a huge variety of things to **** I had a complaint about the game’s core gameplay, it would be the game’s second currency system, the shells. The shells are used to replenish your tools at benches – new items that are basically this game’s supplement to shells, with a good variety of different ways of supplementing your attacks, from drills to knives to remote control attackers to things that set your weapons on fire. These are inherently limited on a per-rest basis, but are also limited by shells – but this mechanic only matters for so long, as by the middle of the game, you have so many rosaries (the game’s other currency), you can just buy huge numbers of shell shards to store up in your inventory as consuamable items. So it ends up not mattering much, except for early on, when it matters a lot – and it doesn’t really feel like it adds anything to the game.Also, the game has some issues with kind of dreary environments, especially towards the endgame. There’s some zones that are lively and very vibrant, but there’s a lot of dust and dirt and rock and dead stuff zones that end up feeling a bit monotonous visually, especially towards the end of the game. I really liked the zones that mixed it up more in terms of color and vibrancy.That said, the actual enemies were always fun to look at and fight, and looked wonderful, with excellent **** movement and platforming of the game was great as well; nothing as hard as the Path of Pain from the original game, but a lot of fun platforming sections and fun bits where you fight enemies and move through environments in a neat way. You get most of the abilities from the first game, but they are better on hornet and feel much more fluid, resulting in better overall gameplay as you dash through environments.I did feel like the maps could have been made a bit better; you are basically required to mark odd features on the map yourself, and so if you don’t do that as you go through the game, when you get the movement upgrade abilities you have to retread a TON of ground trying to find places that they’re useful. I realized this early on, but it is easy to not do and then will make collecting stuff in the end of the game almost impossible when you get the final few movement abilities. There probably should have been something in the endgame that would highlight the rest of the missing collectables for people who had trouble finding them. All in all, great game, with a few little quibbles.
Cocoon is a simplistic puzzle game with very vague stakes. You play as some sort of humanoid insect person, and you are solving puzzles. The central conceit of the game is that you are jumping between worlds, with each world contained in an orb. Place these orbs on certain places, and you can jump into the world inside of them; there are bouncy platforms in each world which will launch you out of the world back to the main world. This is a one-button game; you have directional controls, and you have an action button, which lets you pick up a sphere, place it on a designated position (you can’t drop them wherever you want, you have to put them on stands), activate things in the environment, and activate your currently carried sphere’s special power once you unlock it. While this seems very simple – and it is – the game manages to do a number of quite clever things with it, leading to increasingly clever puzzles as you unlock more and more of the spheres. As you get more of them, you have to do ever more elaborate puzzles involving jumping between spheres and manipulating them to get across obstacles, and by the end of it, it has added some additional ways of getting between spheres that further increases the game’s ability to use these simple mechanics and push them to their **** game’s puzzles are actually quite clever overall, and I think that the game did some interesting things with them – this is one of the best games that involves nothing more complicated than moving things around, and the visuals of jumping between worlds are quite cool. However, while the game’s puzzles are pretty clever overall, it’s not Portal; this is a pretty mechanically simple game, and while it ends up making the puzzles work pretty well, I honestly don’t know why this game is so hyped up. It’s definitely a decent puzzle game, but I didn’t feel like the puzzles were as clever as they were in, say, The Talos Principle 2; the game’s puzzles are all pretty simple and straightforward, and while there are some clever bits in there, you’re unlikely to ever get stuck, as the game is very deliberate in limiting the number of options, which helps you to find the solution as there’s only a small possibility space. That said, if you do like puzzles, it’s certainly clever enough. The game, rather unexpectedly, has boss fights as well; there’s not a huge number of them, but they work well enough, and they help mix things up and add a bit of action-based excitement. If you get caught by the boss, you get chucked up out of the sphere you’re inside, allowing you to go back in and go fight the boss again, and none of them are overly difficult or long. It works pretty well, and once you figure out that there are bosses, you have something to look forward to, as beating them is what unlocks the sphere’s special powers, leading to some new puzzles. Overall, the gameplay works well enough, and I thought it was quite decent; the game also knew it didn’t have TOO many ideas, so it kept things short, with a 100% play time of under 6 hours – in fact, it was likely under 5 hours, as I spent some time chatting to friends while playing. On the other hand, story wise, this game is very, very weak indeed. You are some sort of humanoid insect, but what your agenda is – what your purpose in doing the things you’re doing – is never really made clear, and this isn’t the kind of game that has audio logs or any sort of text descriptions in it. There’s honestly very little if any story to speak of, and while I think that the creators had some ideas in this regard, the game does a poor job of communicating them. As such, if you are a more narrative-focused player, you will find literally nothing here – go play Portal or The Talos Principle. Overall, this is a very decent puzzle game, and worth playing if you like the genre – but I feel like the 88 metacritic score makes this seem like a really amazing game, but I thought it was merely quite decent for what it was, but nothing that I think you’re missing out if you never play it. I liked my time with this game well enough, and if you like puzzle games, you probably will too – but it’s a good game, not a great one. Go in with that expectation in mind, and you’ll probably come away satisfied; go in expecting this to be the puzzle game of the year, though, and you probably won’t find it to quite reach those heights.
The Finals is a team-based, objective-based FPS with highly destructible terrain. You play as a group of contestants who are competing in a virtual world for money, with your goal being to collect “vaults” and then take them to points to “cash out”. To cash out, you must defend the point until the cash out goes through, meaning that the other players can (and will) try and steal it, in which case they win the points (money) instead. As a F2P game, this is one of those things which leans into a repetitive gameplay loop to keep people playing. You play in a match, you gain XP to level up, then you want to go into another match to level up more. You unlock cosmetic items by levelling, but you also unlock new weapons and abilities as well for the three “classes” in the game (light, medium, and heavy).Unfortunately, the game is somewhat lacking in character; your characters are very generic, and as such, all the characterization is provided by the over the top announcers, who make a bunch of fun little jokes but who, sadly, cannot hold the game up on their own. As a result, after playing a few dozen rounds, it was pretty obvious I’d already seen everything there was to see, and while the game has okay mechanics with climbing up over buildings, using ziplines to get around, blowing holes in buildings to make it easier to assault them, etc. the problem is ultimately there’s only so much there before it starts feeling increasingly repetitive. In the end, it’s okay, but it’s hard for me to see myself playing it for any significant amount of time; the F2P FOMO is there, of course, but it’s kind of transparent at this point, and the fact that many weapons are locked behind levelling up means you can’t mix things up in the limited ways that the game does allow all that much. I’ve played Overwatch, and this wore thin far faster than Overwatch did, and has less colorful characters, though it’s F2P monetization is not as obnoxious as Overwatch 2’s is. All in all, it’s okay to mess around with for a little bit, and as a free game, it’s hard to say that the price is wrong. But while it is OK, it is not really anything beyond that in the end.
Unpacking is a casual game where you unpack boxes and put items from them into rooms in houses. It is a very basic puzzle game, insofar that you have to put the items in logical places and make sure they all fit in there, but the game is pretty much trivial in terms of difficulty – if you complete unpacking a house and have items in the wrong places, the game will tell you which items are in the wrong places, and you can easily just move them around and put them in the right places. You start out with one room, but some of the later levels have far more than that, with the final level being an entire, full-sized house. The game is very simplistic, and almost all of the satisfaction you’ll get out of it is from this act of unpacking the boxes and seeing what the person has with them at this chapter in their life. The game uses environmental storytelling to tell a story, about a child who grows up to be an adult and starts their own life. Each chapter in the game represents a significant change in their life, and as you go through, you learn the person’s interests, as well as see what they’re going through at that point in their life. It’s fairly cute, and well-done, but it isn’t really enough if you aren’t into the core gameplay of unpacking and arranging things – and honestly, it’s not that interesting of a core mechanic, as it is very simplistic and it is mostly just kind of mindless and a little bit tedious. Fortunately, the game is quite short (less than 5 hours long to 100%), so you won’t be stuck playing it for overly long. All in all, it’s hard to recommend this game; it is kind of mediocre, and the clever environmental storytelling isn’t worth unpacking all eight levels of the game.
Uncharted 4 is a 17 hour long action movie, made of thrilling chases and collapsing buildings, deadly puzzle-traps and betrayal. But it’s also a 17 hour action movie of climbing (oh so much climbing) and mediocre cover-based gunfights with generic bad guys with guns. Uncharted 4 concludes the story of Nathan Drake, the world’s best – and worst – treasure hunter. He is the best because he has found multiple lost, legendary cities and their treasures by following a series of clues left behind by long-dead historical figures who did not die when or how history popularly described – long-dead lost cities which had surprisingly sophisticated technology for the early 1700s, especially, as in the case of this game, where a city was built by a bunch of pirates. And yet, he is living a middle-class existence because every time he finds some rare treasure, it ends up getting destroyed or otherwise blown up by a pesky band of bad guys – in this case, Shoreline PMC, a multinational mercenary force working for one Rafe Adler and led by Nadine Ross, a ruthless woman who repeatedly beats the snot out of Nathan Drake, but never actually kills him. Assisting him in his adventures are his wife, Elena Fisher, his best friend, Victor Sullivan, and his brother, Sam Drake, the man who drew Nathan into treasure hunting in the first place before being shot and “killed” in a Panamanian prison 15 years ago while working with Rafe Adler. Needless to say, given his position on the list, Sam is alive and well, and the game is kicked off by a desperate need to find the treasure of one Captain Avery, an eccentric pirate captain who loved building death traps used to test those who would “join him in paradise”, which, over the course of the game, you come to learn contains a great deal of pirate treasure indeed (assuming, of course, it wasn’t all spent or sunk on the bottom of the ocean somewhere). Sam was busted out of the prison he’d been stuck in by a notorious, ruthless Panamanian criminal, and it is up to you to find the treasure so that said criminal can be given the 50% of the Avery treasure that he demands, in exchange for freeing (and not murdering) Sam Drake. Thus is launched a whirlwind adventure that takes you fom Panama, through Europe and Britain, and eventually to the tropics. You travel across a variety of different landscapes and settings, all in search of this lost treasure, the treasure always in the next place, just ahead, with Rafe, Nadine, and an army of PMC goons either hot on your trail, or already there ahead of you trying to find the treasure only for you to sneak in under their noses. The game works quite well, with a plotline full of lies, betrayal, tests of people’s bonds (both of friends and family), and of course, a lot of bloodshed. You end up gunning down a small army of goons, though, somewhat amusingly (and unusually for the genre), depicting it as actually having an effect on them by the end – by the final chapter, the bad guy is down to only a handful of mercenaries, with the rest having been killed by our heroes, or dying horribly to insane pirate booby-traps. Because everything is ancient, stuff is crumbling around you all the time, leading to a bunch of sequences where you jump on stuff, grab on, only for it to break, and you going on some crazy little adventure where you only barely cling on and survive or run along collapsing wreckage. And when the ruins themselves aren’t busy collapsing on their own, Shoreline is more than happy to blow it up for you to generate these sequences. These are the coolest action sequences in the game, and lead to a bunch of crazy-looking events – but it also can feel a little wearing at times, because after you’ve seen it happen a half-dozen times, it’s no longer actually *surprising* when it does so yet again – indeed, the game is so eager to do this, it happens multiple times per chapter in most of the game. The game does a pretty good job of keeping things moving; the game switches between moving through and exploring environments, gunfights, and action sequences fairly well, giving you a pretty good variety of environments to fight across and to solve puzzles in. What the game does not do a good job on is combat. The game is a very basic cover-based shooter, and the combat encounters are just not that good. The enemies are just “guys with guns”, and while they try to mix up the environments, in the end you’re just fighting while ducking behind waist high walls and around corners in a very standard cover-based shooter format, with no special powers and pretty bland “realistic” guns. The final boss fight at the end of the game at least tries to mix things up with a unique swordfighting minigame, and it’s only OK. The game is also extremely linear, and while this is not a “bad thing” per se, it is palpable. Overall, this is a good game in many ways, but is held back from true greatness by its mediocre core game
Uncharted 4 is a 17 hour long action movie, made of thrilling chases and collapsing buildings, deadly puzzle-traps and betrayal. But it’s also a 17 hour action movie of climbing (oh so much climbing) and mediocre cover-based gunfights with generic bad guys with guns. Uncharted 4 concludes the story of Nathan Drake, the world’s best – and worst – treasure hunter. He is the best because he has found multiple lost, legendary cities and their treasures by following a series of clues left behind by long-dead historical figures who did not die when or how history popularly described – long-dead lost cities which had surprisingly sophisticated technology for the early 1700s, especially, as in the case of this game, where a city was built by a bunch of pirates. And yet, he is living a middle-class existence because every time he finds some rare treasure, it ends up getting destroyed or otherwise blown up by a pesky band of bad guys – in this case, Shoreline PMC, a multinational mercenary force working for one Rafe Adler and led by Nadine Ross, a ruthless woman who repeatedly beats the snot out of Nathan Drake, but never actually kills him. Assisting him in his adventures are his wife, Elena Fisher, his best friend, Victor Sullivan, and his brother, Sam Drake, the man who drew Nathan into treasure hunting in the first place before being shot and “killed” in a Panamanian prison 15 years ago while working with Rafe Adler. Needless to say, given his position on the list, Sam is alive and well, and the game is kicked off by a desperate need to find the treasure of one Captain Avery, an eccentric pirate captain who loved building death traps used to test those who would “join him in paradise”, which, over the course of the game, you come to learn contains a great deal of pirate treasure indeed (assuming, of course, it wasn’t all spent or sunk on the bottom of the ocean somewhere). Sam was busted out of the prison he’d been stuck in by a notorious, ruthless Panamanian criminal, and it is up to you to find the treasure so that said criminal can be given the 50% of the Avery treasure that he demands, in exchange for freeing (and not murdering) Sam Drake .Thus is launched a whirlwind adventure that takes you fom Panama, through Europe and Britain, and eventually to the tropics. You travel across a variety of different landscapes and settings, all in search of this lost treasure, the treasure always in the next place, just ahead, with Rafe, Nadine, and an army of PMC goons either hot on your trail, or already there ahead of you trying to find the treasure only for you to sneak in under their **** game works quite well, with a plotline full of lies, betrayal, tests of people’s bonds (both of friends and family), and of course, a lot of bloodshed. You end up gunning down a small army of goons, though, somewhat amusingly (and unusually for the genre), depicting it as actually having an effect on them by the end – by the final chapter, the bad guy is down to only a handful of mercenaries, with the rest having been killed by our heroes, or dying horribly to insane pirate booby-traps.Because everything is ancient, stuff is crumbling around you all the time, leading to a bunch of sequences where you jump on stuff, grab on, only for it to break, and you going on some crazy little adventure where you only barely cling on and survive or run along collapsing wreckage. And when the ruins themselves aren’t busy collapsing on their own, Shoreline is more than happy to blow it up for you to generate these sequences. These are the coolest action sequences in the game, and lead to a bunch of crazy-looking events – but it also can feel a little wearing at times, because after you’ve seen it happen a half-dozen times, it’s no longer actually *surprising* when it does so yet again – indeed, the game is so eager to do this, it happens multiple times per chapter in most of the **** game does a pretty good job of keeping things moving; the game switches between moving through and exploring environments, gunfights, and action sequences fairly well, giving you a pretty good variety of environments to fight across and to solve puzzles in.What the game does not do a good job on is combat. The game is a very basic cover-based shooter, and the combat encounters are just not that good. The enemies are just “guys with guns”, and while they try to mix up the environments, in the end you’re just fighting while ducking behind waist high walls and around corners in a very standard cover-based shooter format, with no special powers and pretty bland “realistic” guns. The final boss fight at the end of the game at least tries to mix things up with a unique swordfighting minigame, and it’s only OK (though it is better than having yet another samey shootout, I **** game is also extremely linear, and while this is not a “bad thing” per se, it is palpable. Overall, it is a good game held back from greatness by mediocre core gameplay.
Super Meat Boy Forever is a runner/platformer game made using the Super Meat Boy characters. While the aesthetic of the game matches the really great Super Meat Boy well enough, the actual game itself is pretty **** problem is that this is a runner game, and it is difficult to make those particularly good. It tries to use the Super Meat Boy aesthetic of stages full of horrible dangers, but because it is a runner, it doesn’t end up feeling as fun to beat as it does when you’re doing the precision platforming of Super Beat Boy. The constant forced movement forces the levels to have particular sorts of designs, and while they do a fair bit with it, the self-imposed limits make it hard to really feel like this is all that great. 2D platformers are just more interesting than runner games; while taking away your ability to slow down is an interesting concept in theory, in practice it is more **** than a genre for a reason. In the end, I gave up on this game after clearing a few worlds and realizing I wasn’t really having fun with it. It wasn’t too hard; it just didn’t hold my interest.
Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion is a game whose name is far more interesting than the actual game itself. The game is primarily a combination of a fetch-a-thon with a basic top-down primitive Zelda-esque game mechanics. The problem is, these mechanics are extremely basic and not very fun. Turnip Boy simply isn’t very fun to control, the enemies are all extremely simple, and there’s no particularly interesting fighting mechanics – you just swipe at things with your sword, and none of the things in question have particularly interesting fighting abilities. The original NES Zelda is a greatly superior game to this in terms of gameplay. And the fetch quests (which make up virtually the whole game) are inane and often require a bunch of backtracking back and forth across areas you’ve already explored. The story is jokey and not very interesting; it isn’t designed to make you care about any of the characters, everyone is terrible, and the jokes rarely land. While it tries to go with some Deep Lore as it goes on, it’s nothing particularly interesting or innovative, and doesn’t do anything to rescue the game world or narrative. The art in the game is very basic – it is not terrible, but it is not beautiful, and doesn’t really engage me at all. Games can have simple art (like Chicory: A Colorful Tale) while still looking really good; this game doesn’t accomplish that. This game is only about three hours long, but the time I spent playing it was nevertheless far more than it deserved. There was really nothing here to make me feel like the time I invested was worthwhile.
The Messenger is a Ninja Gaiden-esque Metroidvania game. You play as the eponymous Messenger, a Ninja who has been assigned to carry a magic scroll to a group of three sages on top of a mountain in order to help break a demon’s curse on his world. This sounds like a serious plot, but the reality is that the game mixes the serious with the jocular, and the game is far more funny than it is serious – which is a bit of a problem, because sometimes the game TRIES to be serious, but fails at it, making those serious segments fall flat. The game itself is broken up into a series of stages, each of which has its own theme. As you go through the game, you encounter progressively more difficult stages, and it is a mostly linear affair. However, after going through most of the zones, the game changes into a Metroidvania – and while this is a plot twist, unfortunately, it’s also necessary to talk about this to talk about the game, because it is really a big part of why the game isn’t that great. The early part of the game, with the linear Ninja Gaiden-esque stages, takes about four hours to beat. Almost every zone has a unique boss at the end of it, and each area introduces a new set of mechanics and gradually ramps up the difficulty. This works pretty well – it is better than your average NES platformer, being more like a SNES platformer in terms of quality and controls. Indeed, even graphically, the game “improves” from NES to SNES graphics when time travel becomes involved in the plot, with the older era looking NES and the new one looking SNES. While the “NES” graphics are serviceable, the SNES graphics are quite a bit prettier, and are nicer to look at – the stages in particular have very nice designs and backgrounds to them. Unfortunately, when the game gets to the Metroidvania bits, the game ends up being a lot worse. The Metroidvania bit involves huge amounts of backtracking through zones you’ve previously cleared, and while it is, ostensibly, the “second half” of the game, IRL, it took me about 4 hours to clear the “first half” and another 8 to clear the “second half”, meaning that the very mediocre Metroidvania bits are more than half of the game’s length. Worse, oftentimes you will have to backtrack through these areas several times, and while the “future” era in the past-era stages and vice-versa does mix things up a bit, it isn’t nearly enough. The levels are almost entirely linear and the fast travel system is limited to a very small number of portals for some strange reason, meaning you often have to run far distances to places, and then, if you find out you are missing a critical item for progression, run back and go elsewhere. The core of the gameplay is okay – you run, you slash with your sword, you chuck shuriken (which are limited drops, though later you gain the ability to regenerate them), you jump, you have a grappling hook that lets you launch yourself to nearby walls or enemies, etc. The main feature of the game is the “cloudjump”, this game’s variant on the double jump – when you hit a strikeable object or enemy with your sword, you gain the ability to double jump in the air. This is the game’s central platforming conceit, and it works pretty well overall. Unfortunately, the game struggles to keep things fresh after the Ninja Gaiden section ends – the Metroidvania section, rather than adding new mobility powers, instead ends up centering around retrieving items that unlock areas. You only gain one new mobility power in the last 8 hours of gameplay, resulting in the game ending up feeling increasingly stale. There is one other new mechanic – the ability to switch between eras by walking through certain areas – which is used for platforming puzzles, but alas, it is not enough for the game to sustain itself. If the game had cut out the entire mentroidvania bit, and instead added just a couple of the final areas to itself as the capstone, it would have been a lot better. Instead, it ended up dragging, and I had to force myself to finish it. The end of the game goes back to new linear sections that work pretty well, but it is just not worth slogging through the rest of the game to get there, and by the time you DO get there, all the mechanics are kind of old hat anyway, making them not as interesting. In the end, this game is a good example **** that tried to mix things up, but did it in the wrong way, and as a result, added a bunch of lower quality content to a stronger core. It would have been OK if it had just been the good bits; instead, it is mediocre. The game even had a free DLC that made fun of the Metroidvania segment of the game being mediocre. I would not recommend this game; there are better stage-based platformers out there, and much better Metroidvanias.
The Talos Principle 2 is the best puzzle game since The Talos Principle, and is likely the second best such game of all time, lagging behind only Portal 2.A direct sequel to the first game, this game looks at the society that the robots built after waking up at the end of the first Talos Principle. With humanity extinct, robots need to figure out what they want to do as a society – some of them want to limit their growth to only 1000 robots, while others want to expand and explore and make a better society, as the ones who set the process that led to their creation in motion wanted. After “Prometheus” shows up in town shortly after the creation of the 1,000th robot, you, number 1000, are sent on a mission along with several other robots to find the source of the “entity”. In the process, you discover a giant megastructure surrounded by a bunch of puzzles reminiscent of the first game, and are left to try and determine what exactly is going on – and this time, you interact with other robotic people and engage in roleplaying dialogue choices that end up determining how people perceive you and what the robots want to make their future into. Overall, the game is pretty great. The core of the game is puzzles – each world contains 13 puzzles, in the form of 10 standard stages, two “statues” that give you “sparks” if you solve their puzzles, and one “golden door” puzzle that is only unlocked when you complete every normal puzzle in the game. While the Talos Principle 1 felt like it ran out of ideas in the middle, and resorted to making really big/long puzzles, The Talos Principle 2’s central conceit is that each of the 12 major areas of the game (and eventually, a thirteenth “area” of sorts) contains a new gimmick. The game starts out with a tutorial area as well, meaning there are, in effect, about 14ish areas in the game, with well over 100 puzzles in total. The gimmicks in each area end up working pretty well – some of them are pretty basic, like having a drill that can put a hole through a certain kind of wall, while some of them are more wild, like being able to transfer into multiple robotic bodies or teleport around the map. Some of these puzzle elements show up again in later areas, allowing you to mix them together, while others are mostly confined to one **** end result of all this is a game that is constantly feeling fresh; every area feels like it has enough puzzles to explore the idea without belaboring the point, and when you run into some of these features again in later levels, they are combined with fresh twists to keep things interesting and novel. The puzzles are also mostly quite short and snappy – generally speaking, there’s only 1-2 “core insights” you need to complete each puzzle, but the puzzles, despite their apparent simplicity, make you feel quite clever for solving them. The game does a good job of teaching you the game mechanics, and there’s only a couple puzzles in the game (mostly the “statue puzzles”) which felt like “they hid the piece in the couch cushion” rather than that you were missing a key insight. The puzzles are fun, interesting, short enough that you don’t forget what you’re doing, but hard enough to feel satisfying to solve. Moreover, because you don’t have to solve EVERY puzzle in every area, players who aren’t quite as good at it still have some outs – and there are also a (very limited) number of puzzle bypass items, that allow you to bypass puzzles – but you don’t get “full credit” for solving them, and you can retrieve these solution tokens by solving the puzzles properly. I didn’t end up using them at all in my playthrough, but it was a nice way to keep players from getting stuck if they were having problems. The game also keeps things interesting with its philosophy as well. Not only is the philosophy highly topical, but it is very interesting and humanistic – ironic, considering that everyone in the game is a robot. But the game’s philosophy is very cerebral, and the game works really well at encouraging the player to embrace hope over despair and cynicism. The message came through very strongly, and while you do have the choice to make the wrong choice, the game’s stance on what you should be doing is quite clear – you should be embracing the future and trying to build a better tomorrow, and take responsibility for the world and its environment. Given how many writers embrace techno pessimism, it was nice to see a work of art that pointed out how shallow and sophomoric such takes are. If the game had a flaw, however, it’d be in the core plot. While I loved the characters and philosophy, the game sort of embraced a sort of magic-as,technology thing that felt a bit out of place given its theming. While I get why they did it, and I did appreciate the moral choice it presented as well as the argument it presented for metaphorically accepting fire from Prometheus, I felt like it was a bit weirdly fantastic given how grounded the game is otherwise.
The core of the game is very similar to every other Mario game – you run, you jump, you have power ups you get by hitting blocks with your head, you jump on enemies to beat them, and the power-ups do various things (typically giving you a special attack, though some of them give you mobility powers as well/instead). Like the other New Super Mario Bros games, there are multiple characters you can play as – including Peach, who doesn’t get kidnapped for once. Most of these are purely cosmetic changes – they play like Mario – but there are in effect “easy mode characters” (the Yoshis and Nabbit) who cannot die from colliding with enemies or otherwise taking damage (though the Yoshis are knocked back) and who get a double jump that’s directly built into the character, along with a tongue attack. They can’t collect power-ups, but they don’t really need them, either (though this might have had some negative ramifications on the gameplay). Like the old Mario games, you have three grades of power – small Mario, big Mario, and power-up Mario, but unlike the older games, getting hit in power-up Mario mode only knocks you to big Mario, making it easier to regain your power-up and giving you, in effect, 3 hit points instead of 2. In addition, you can also carry one power-up in reserve, either allowing you bonus hit points, allowing you to immediately power back up again after death, or letting you switch between two useful power-ups depending on the situation. There are four power-ups in this game. Fire Mario is the same as always, and is fairly mediocre – while the range on his attack is nice, the fact that he attacks down and along the ground makes his fire shots limited in value. Bubble Mario shoots bubbles, and is sort of a pseudo-fire Mario who instead shoots forward and UP – much more useful, and you can bounce off of the bubbles like you can an enemy head. Elephant Mario is big and strong, with a trunk attack that will instantly kill most enemies (even normally multi-hit ones) and can break blocks to the sides of you; in addition, you can **** water up into your trunk and toss it out, which messes with some enemies and can activate some features in stages (putting out fires or watering flowers to get stuff). Finally, Drill Mario lets you burrow into the surface of the ground – or the ceiling! – and go along under the surface, making you invincible as long as you are underground, and giving you a drill hat on your head to kill enemies above you with. This was probably the most interesting, as it allowed you to get into some tight spaces that were otherwise inaccessible and going across ceilings let you access some new places in interesting ways. Bubble Mario could have theoretically done the same, but there weren’t any secrets I recall that you HAD to have the bubbles for (though it was quite useful). Where this game really differs from other Mario games is that every single level in the game has some sort of gimmick, much like the Donkey Kong Country games, and in particular, they added “wonder flowers” to add a special gimmick to every level. While some of these wonders do repeat, they do add a lot of novelty to the game, and mix up the usual platforming gameplay in various fun ways. There is a pretty reasonable variety of enemies in the game, and you are frequently encountering new ones, all the way through to the end of the game. This is in sharp contrast to many other 2D Mario games, and is a welcome addition – it helps to mix things up and keep things fresh. Where the game did fall down was the bosses. The game, for all its “wonder”, only has two bosses, and one of them – Bowser Jr. – is repeated four times. This is quite lame, doubly so as Bowser himself was a cool, fun boss fight. They really should have leaned into Yoshi’s Island style bosses, warping normal enemies into cool things with the Wonder Flowers, but alas, they did not do so for some reason, and as a result, the repeated bosses were the worst part of the game. Two areas of the game, plus the final special area, didn’t even HAVE bosses, which was particularly lame and anticlimactic. The other weakness of the game is the lack of core gameplay evolution. They were afraid of making it so that you needed power ups for stages, and so the power ups are rarely, if ever, actually required to beat stages, which limited their value. Likewise, the actual core gameplay mechanics don’t evolve – even though they could have, and the game even built such evolution directly into the game. The game has a badge system. Over the course of the game, you get “badges” that give you special abilities that mix up the gameplay, and these are neat – you can, for instance, get Luigi’s super floaty jump, or get a double spin jump in the air, or get a special wall jump that lets you jump straight up after a wall kick, or even a vine you can shoot out to hook onto walls and pull yourself to them. These were cool additions, but the game mostly ignores them
Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart is a really beautiful third person shooter created by Insomniac. The premise of the game is that the titular Clank has built a weapon/item called the Dimensionator, by which Ratchet, the last Lombax – the other titular protagonist – can go and find the other Lombaxes, who fled from his dimension to other dimensions. Dr. Nefarious – Ratchet and Clank’s perennial foe – shows up to steal the Dimensionator, resulting in the duo (plus Nefarious himself) being catapulted into an alternate universe, ruled by EMPEROR Nefarious, a more competent and charismatic alternate universe version of Dr. Nefarious who has conquered the galaxy and who wins every time (unlike Dr. Nefarious, who loses every time). Cue the entrance of Rivet, a female Lombax and this universe’s version of Ratchet, a plucky freedom fighter who always loses. She has a mechanical arm because she lost hers in a previous battle that she lost, and she has no robot buddy. Ratchet and Clank get separated, and Clank ends up with Rivet while Ratchet ends up running into a robot buddy of his own from this dimension – Kit – who he quickly has adapt Clank’s role (and position on his back). The game, thus, alternates between playing as Ratchet and Kit and Rivet and Clank as they try to save this dimension – and every dimension – from Emperor Nefarious, who is causing reality to break down by abusing the power of the Dimensionator. The central appeal of its third person shooter gameplay is the huge variety of weapons – there’s 18 different weapons in the game, plus two new game plus exclusive weapons. These allow you to prosecute combat in a wide variety of ways, from shooting people with a simple pistol, to stunning enemies by turning them into living topiary, to opening up portals to dump huge objects on the heads of enemies. Some of these weapons are pretty standard, but most of them are at least a little wacky, and many are more than a little bit offbeat. As you go through the game and use the weapons, you level them up, allowing you to unlock more upgrade slots on them, which give the weapons permanent upgrades. Ratchet and Rivet share experience, and indeed, everything else – despite the alternate universe shenanigans, the two of them are EXACTLY the same gameplay wise, which is a missed opportunity. The guns are upgraded via drops you find in the environment and by beating bosses, and you can get other sorts of upgrades by finding collectibles. Unfortunately, while the game is full **** variety of nice to look at environments, the core gameplay itself gets kind of stale as it goes on. Ratchet and Clank alternates between third person platforming sections, and third person shooting sections. The problem is that the core shooting gameplay is kind of bad – the good weapons are so overpowered that once you get a few of the better ones, the combat becomes increasingly trivialized. No enemies – not even bosses – can seriously threaten you, and indeed, it is possible to stun-lock bosses to death using the stun abilities and alternating between those and shooting them. While it is nice that you can use all the cool toys on the bosses – it would be rather lame if you couldn’t – the game doesn’t really figure out a solution to this, and as you approach the end of the game, the game relies more and more heavily on throwing swarms of enemies in you, turning the levels into little more than a series of third person shooter arenas where you just slaughter waves of enemies with your powerful weapons and mass stun effects. But even the third person platforming stuff often isn’t really very good. It’s certainly no Super Mario Odyssey – most of the third person platforming in the game is very easy, with only a very small amount of challenging platforming content. And as the game goes on, there is less and less of it, with an ever increasing focus on the third person shooter arenas. There are some other random sort of “minigames”, like riding around on the back of a flying dragon who shoots fireballs and riding around on a fast bug (oddly, both on the same level), but they don’t last very long and it would be bad if they were longer because they basically do everything that those mechanics can do in the time you spend with them. The end result of it is that, while the game is very short, if it was any longer, it would outstay its welcome, and honestly, the end of the game ends up having you go back to previous planets to fight a bunch of arena combats, which feels like they ran out of time to make planets but still wanted to keep up the Ratchet/Rivet alternation. The core plot is very simplistic. The voice acting is good, and Rivet, Kit, and Clank were okay characters, but the NPCs are pretty one-note and the main cast is pretty much like two or three notes at best. Ratchet himself is a pretty bland character. I enjoyed the game overall, but mostly because it was fairly short and snappy more so than great core gameplay.
The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog is a cutsey visual novel/runner. You play as (Insert Name Here), a sonic OC who works on a train. The train is hosting a murder mystery game for Amy Rose for her birthday. Everyone was given a role, and someone is to “murder” Sonic and then try to hide the evidence, creating a whodunit. This is a rather silly game that has a few plot twists to it. It’s very straightforward, having no real meaningful choices, but it is cutsey nonetheless. The Sonic cast is presented well and in a humorous manner, the visual novel plot is okay, there’s silly little runner minigames to “figure things out”, and… well, that’s about it. If you’re a Sonic fan, chances are good you’ll find the way that the game plays around with characters to be fun, and enjoy the silly plot and character shenanigans. They are pretty true to their typical characterizations, but it all works well enough, and there’s enough little plot twists to keep the game interesting. The art is actually pretty nice as well – the characters have limited poses, but they look good, as do the environments. If you’re not a Sonic fan, though, I’m skeptical you’ll enjoy it as much; it is full of meta-references to Sonic stuff, with little in the way of explanations. Overall, decent but not amazing, but it costs nothing and is cute.
Marvel’s Midnight Suns is a tactical RPG made by the creators of XCOM; however, it is radically different from most TRPGs. Instead of being based on grid based movement and initiative order, the player and the enemy take turns as teams. You control three heroes, but instead of them having a preset set of actions they can each take each turn, you instead have a deck of 8 cards for each character, shuffled into a deck of 24 cards (plus one “combo attack” card, for a total of 25 cards), which you draw a hand of 6 cards each turn. You have three actions per turn, which means three card plays, but because some cards allow you to sometimes (or always) take an extra action, you may end up playing significantly more than three cards per turn. You can redraw up to two cards per turn, allowing you to sculpt your hand a little, and you keep extra cards from turn to turn. Some cards will draw you extra cards, while others will cause you to discard other cards from your hand. The game has a surprisingly large emphasis on spacing, even though most attacks simply move you automatically to your target. The main reason is the many knockback attacks in the game, which allow you to knock enemies into other enemies, causing them damage, or knock them into environmental hazards, damaging them or even killing them if you knock them into pits. There are various fairly simple status ailments, buffs and debuffs that increase or decrease damage or stun an enemy or ally, or which otherwise alter the mechanics slightly, like being cursed, which causes you to discard a card when you use a card with that hero. All in all, it makes for an interesting strategy game… at least, for a little while. The problem is, the game not only runs out of steam, but it also puts a lot of barriers between you and that strategy game. The first, and largest problem is the Abbey grounds – a small area around a central “Abbey” where your characters reside. This is unlocked metroidvania style, and contains tidbits about the characters and the world, as well as crafting ingredients which respawn and chests that periodically respawn that contain both expendable battle items and cosmetic items. It’s boring, it looks terrible, and it doesn’t add anything to the game – but you are going to spend many hours out there both unlocking the various areas and trying to gather ingredients for crafting items that are used to upgrade your cards and make consumable battle items that make you stronger in battle. This is really tedious and feels completely pointless and tacked on. There’s nothing about it that really enhances or even ties into the rest of the game very much… until you get to the VERY end, at which point it becomes lore-relevant. But even still, you only get very limited information, and it isn’t particularly interesting – there were better ways of doing this, but they just decided to do this probably because of Fire Emblem Three Houses, which did the same thing and was also tedious for this reason. The second thing is between-combat banter and hangouts. This is less tedious, but there is a huge amount of it. The writing is, honestly, fine – it’s actually nice seeing the characters develop, and they have reasonably good characterization. That being said, while this is way better than what Fire Emblem Three Houses did, there’s a huge amount of between-combat dialogue, and it is often not very well paced. It feels like more traditional cutscenes could have transmitted this information, and in a faster, more natural way that would have been more fluid and less tedious. Moreover, I’m wondering if this could have been delivered better – it could often take an hour or more between battles between searching the Abby grounds for ingredients and the between-combat banter and hangouts with characters. This is on top of the time you spend looking at the item drops you got – not to mention the fact that actually getting the item drops requires you to go to three different areas in the Abbey to unlock abilities, unlock intel missions, and unlock training and card upgrades, all three of which have to be visited between almost every mission. The game, thus, spends a huge amount of time on non-TRPG aspects, to the point where I’m quite certain I spent more time between missions than actually on missions. This gets a bit better at the end of the game, when ingredients stop respawning and you’ve unlocked the whole abbey, but it is still tedious. Worse, the actual TRPG aspect ends up getting dull. The game has 20-odd main story missions, but you have to do general missions between them, so you’re likely to do 50+ missions over the course of a playthrough. The thing is, the game has very limited enemy variety – there’s really only two “opposition forces”, they often are mixed together, and you basically stop getting introduced to new enemies in act 2 of the game.
Hogwarts Legacy is an open-world RPG set in the Wizarding Universe of Harry Potter, a century before the events of the book series. This is a game that is designed for fans of that universe – Hogwarts Castle, the centerpiece of the series, is marvelously detailed, and the game is full of the whimsy that the brand is known for. Visually, the game is a marvel, full of intricate details – Hogwarts Castle is the single best looking area in any video game, ever, and the world at large is quite nice. The game has you play as a fifth year student – a 16 year old – of the visual appearance and name of your choice. You get to get sorted into your house (though in reality, you can choose it), get a wand, and get to explore Hogwarts. You learn spells, and instead of fighting like a FPS or a standard action game, the game has a wholly original combat system based around matching shields and managing spell cooldowns and choosing your targets. It actually works well, and unlike most games which either abstract it a lot or feel like third person shooters, it actually feels like it is its own thing. But, while this game is a visual masterpiece, it falls a bit short on the actual experience. The game has a really good opening sequence, full of marvelous visuals and a lot of interesting set pieces, but after you get through the tutorial and start in on the game proper, you realize that there were some sacrifices made along the way to get this out the door, and this unfortunately makes the game world feel much less alive than it should. The other students are basically scenery – you barely interact with them, and the only times you really do is quests, of which there are an enormous number. Few of your fellow students or professors get much characterization – really, only four or so characters in the game really get explored all that much, and even then, one of them is terribly bland, and all but one of them have very bland designs. There are no companions here – there are some quests where you are accompanied by one of four fellow students, or by a professor – but they don’t last all that long, and they don’t do enough to characterize most of them. Ironically, the Slytherin companion is the most interesting one – and in fact, there are two interesting Slytherin characters, which works very well as they have a pre-existing friendship and you are sort of “intruding” on it, which creates an intersting dynamic. Moreover, one of them is very much into Dark Magic and is very emotional, while the other rejects it as dangerous. The one who is into it befriends you and influences you to try and find a cure for his sister, Anne, who has been cursed, at whatever cost – but even as he seduces you to the Dark Side, it kind of becomes clear that he is going too far and nothing he is doing is ultimately going to work out. Unfortunately, while this is a good tragedy, it is interspersed with a general plot that is nowhere near as good. One of the other students is okay – she has a bunch of beast-related sidequests – while the third is a fairly lame do-gooder whose characterization isn’t exactly exciting, and who is presented as some exotic figure – except the school is *extremely* international (much more than in the series) resulting in her not seeming so exotic at all. It just doesn’t work. There’s theoretically one more companion, but his existence is so fleeting that he shows up basically one and a half times. It is obvious he was meant to play a bigger role, but it seems like whatever subquest he was getting got cut – either because it wasn’t very interesting or because of a lack of time. Indeed, it is very obvious that the game was meant to have a companion system, where you brought people around with you; there’s remnants of dialogue from that, and unfortunately, without it, the world feels very sterile. You can’t interact with anyone but shopkeepers outside of quests, and so while the world is pretty, all there really is to do is to run around collecting stuff – which there is a plethora of, but it is mostly the same stuff, over and over again, outside of Hogwarts. The greater open world is honestly pretty weak – it looks good visually, but gameplay-wise, there’s just not enough enemy variety to sustain the game. The game could do some interesting puzzles, but there’s only a handful of them, mostly in Hogwarts, with most of the rest just being “use spell on object”. The actual combat is okay at first, but by the end you are just an overpowered wrecking ball and nothing can stand in your way, even without the use of Dark Magic, and the lack of enemy variety makes it increasingly repetitive the longer you go on. Overall, the game is a valiant effort, but the shortcomings hold it back from greatness, leaving it as a bit above par. If you play this, stick to the quests - they're quite solid - but the open world is not worth it.
Scarlet Nexus is an anime-styled action game with limited RPG elements. You control a character who is a member of the OSF (Other Suppression Forces), who uses weapons plus psychic powers to fight the Others, horrible otherworldly monsters who have come to Earth to eat the brains of people. The core gameplay is decent enough. It starts out pretty simple – you have a basic melee or short ranged combo attack, a dash ability (that can also be used to dodge), and a jump ability, along with your psychokinesis power, which lets you pick up (select) objects from the environment to hurl at your enemies. Some of these objects are special interactive objects and will hit the enemy multiple times – like something that breaks in half and then you smash the two halves together on the enemy, or a telephone pole you can make sweeping attacks with. As the game goes on, you gain allied characters, who themselves have special powers which you can “borrow”. These range from the ability to set things on fire, to making you temporarily immune to damage, to turning you invisible, to letting you see invisible or hidden enemies, to teleportation (which can also be used to navigate through the environment by teleporting through certain barriers). The core gameplay is decent but not amazing; there’s a decent variety of enemies, though most of them basically boil down to “use the correct power and use your basic combo attacks on them”. Still, they have different attack routines, have pretty wildly varied appearances, and manage to put up a decent challenge. Some of the boss encounters are more challenging, and while I only had a couple game overs, they definitely pushed you at times, especially if you weren’t using your abilities wisely. As you play through the game, you gain levels and you become more powerful by unlocking abilities from a skill tree, which lets you gain additional moves, improve your combos, use multiple borrowed powers at once, and just get straight up statistical boosts. The biggest flaw with the game in terms of its gameplay is that it can get a bit repetitive, especially in the side missions; the side missions basically are composed of backtracking through areas to complete kill quests, where you have to kill specific Others in specific ways to complete the quest. As this is all rehashed content, it is not particularly interesting. But even the main story suffers a bit fom throwing a bunch of encounters between you and your goal, where many of the encounters are basically the same thing over and over again; while these segments aren’t overly long, they can at times feel like they’re padding, especially when nothing significant story-wise happens. The real problem with the game, though, is that it is a pretty heavily story-focused game, and the story is not written very well. You will spend a lot of time on the story, but the story was written by people who end up making everyone act unnaturally to preserve the “mystery” of what is going on. At the start of the game, you choose one of two characters (a male character, Yuuito, or a female character, Kasane); while you might think this is just a minor aesthetic choice, this is, in fact, a choice between entirely different storylines – the characters not only fight differently (Yuuito being a melee character while Kasane has short-to-mid-ranged attacks) but they experience entirely different storylines and have different personalities. The storylines are in fact the same storyline, but told from different perspectives, so you will see one set of events with Yuuito, and then a second set of events with Kasane, as for the majority of the game the characters are off doing different things in different groups, so rather than doing the same missions with different characters you’re actually playing through the other “half” of the story line, where you get to see a different perspective on things. Unfortunately, the result of this is that not only do you often not know what is going on, with important events happening “offscreen” with the other set of characters, only to have those events intersect with what you’re doing, but you have little idea that making the choice you do affects who your supporting cast will be for most of the game (though eventually you do gain access to both squads of characters). The biggest problem, however, is that this is one of those games where weird stuff is going on, events are crazy, and people refuse to explain anything to anyone, even when it makes no sense whatsoever for them to refuse to explain thigs. This is extremely annoying as the “mystery” is really “when will someone tell me what is going on” rather than “there is this mysterious thing going on that I need to investigate.” Indeed, on at least one occasion, you will “investigate” something only for the person who was with you all along to explain it after the fact. Why? No reason.
Neon White is a first person platformer/speedrunning/FPS game. You play as the epooymous Neon White, a sinner who has been brought to Heaven along with a bunch of other sinners to kill demons for ten days. Whichever of these sinners – called Neons – gets the highest rank at the end of the ten days gets to stay in Heaven, while the rest are cast back out once more. Neon White has lost his memories, but other sinners who knew him in life – Yellow, Red, and Violet – are all also competing to stay in Heaven as well, and may be taking advantage of his lack of memories for their own ends. Over the course of the game, you uncover what is really going on, your relationship to the other neons, befriend some angels, and gather gifts during levels to give to people back in the home base to level up your friendship levels, unlocking conversations, additional secret levels, collectibles for your room, and eventually memories of your interactions with them in life. Overall, the plot aspect of the game is not particularly good – it is very anime (despite not being made in Japan) and the characters are fairly simple and archetypal, and don’t really feel much like they were assassins in live (with the exception of Violet) as they ostensibly were. My favorite character was Mikey, an angel who looks like a cat with a cigar and a hard-bitten voice. But that’s not really what you’re here for. The plot is mostly just an excuse for the action, and the core gameplay of this game is quite good. The game’s central premise is that you need to beat the levels as fast as possible for medals. Traversing these levels, you have the standard running and jumping, but you also get guns – these can be shot to kill demons or interact with some environmental objects, or can be discarded to give you a traversal power, like jumping, air-dashing, a mid-air rocket, a grappling hook, or a ground slam. Each weapon corresponds to a different secondary power, and there are six weapons in all in the game. Most of these weapons can’t break barricades with their normal shots, so you usually have to use the damaging traversal powers to break them down or bypass them. You have to kill every demon in most of the levels, so when you are trying to find a more efficient route, you need to be able to kill all the enemies even if you are cutting off big chunks of the levels in terms of traversal. This leads to an interesting core gameplay loop of going into a level, learning its layout, then mastering it, figuring out what routes you can take to save time and how to kill demons that are “off route” without going near them. It works really well, and the game has a fast pace and solid level variety, finding a good number of ways to show off the game’s mechanics and create interesting platforming experiences. The game gives out four ranks of medal at the end of each level – bronze, silver, gold, and ace – and there’s a fifth, hidden red rank that is not needed for 100%ing the game. Acing the levels takes some doing, but isn’t prohibitively difficult; getting those red medals, however, is a very difficult challenge indeed. The game also has built-in level rush modes which you unlock when you beat all the levels in the game, with internal leaderboards that both show how well your friends did on them, as well as how well you rank globally. The game also has a hidden gift in almost every level, which you can collect to give to characters; some of these require you to notice them in unusual places, while many are difficult to reach and require you to use your resources cleverly and efficiently to get to them. All of this combines to create a quite solid gameplay experience. If you like the idea of speedrunning, this game has fun with the idea, and the movement of the character through the levels is a lot of fun. All in all, I’d recommend this game to more mechanics-focused players who enjoy speedrunning/beat the clock, but people who are more story/narrative focused are likely to be disappointed.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale is a lovely little heavily narrative-based puzzle metroidvania game where you color in the world to navigate the environment. You play as Pizza, the Brush Wielder’s janitor. One day, all the color in the world goes away, and strange black trees show up in the nearby forest. With the wielder, Chicory, apparently out of commission, it is up to Pizza to go save the day. The Brush gives you the ability to paint in the coloring-book like world, allowing you to fill in between the lines with colors, and paint the world. This is used to solve various puzzles, from illuminating the environment to allowing you to move through gaps to activate various things in the environment to achieve some end. In terms of core gameplay, the game is fairly simplistic; you start out with nothing special in terms of powers beyond the coloring, but over the course of the first half of the game gain more abilities – almost all movement based – allowing you to jump, to dive through your paint (allowing passage through small gaps), to climb certain walls, and to swim. There is almost no combat to speak of; there aren’t “normal” enemies around in the world, only bosses at the end of a few dungeons, the source of the “corruption” in the world. As such, the vast majority of the game is a series of navigational puzzles, using your paint to activate things in the environment, move around things that allow you to destroy other things, climb up walls and then jump, toggle switches, etc. The game basically can be split into two halves – in the first half of the game, Pizza is on their own, going around and fixing the corruption that plagues the world, while Chicory is alone and miserable in her tower. This serves as an introduction to the world and its locations and NPCs, and over the course of this, you end up meeting a bunch of people. However, it is also very low impact; these people play little role in the plot, and only a few of them actually end up mattering all that much outside of a very small section of the plot. As a result, your relationship with these people is very ephemeral – while you briefly interact with them, you don’t really build a relationship with them in any way, and so you don’t really care much. This makes the first half of the game feel kind of weak – while there is an underlying plot, the fact that no one other than Pizza is really seeing it through means it is harder to care. But at the midpoint of the game, things change; events transpire that result in Chicory going around with Pizza for the rest of the game, and so for the last four major areas of the game, plus the final boss, you have a companion with you. This changes things massively, because the game is very much about Pizza’s relationship with Chicory and their relationship with the world at large, and the pressures Chicory was under that Pizza has inherited. This makes the game so much better, and Chicory – who was already the most developed NPC – becomes someone that the player cares about, and wants to see succeed and be happy, reflecting Pizza’s own desires. The player’s perceptions of Chicory evolve with Pizza’s own, and by the end, the relationship between the two is very satisfying, and has moved from idol and janitor to master and student to finally one of friendship and mutual trust and admiration. You do things with Chicory and for Chicory, and she does things for Pizza. This gives the whole second half of the game much more emotional gravitas and makes the harder hitting themes hit home. The second half of the game also isn’t as cutesy, but it doesn’t forget to be cute, and the relationship that grows between Pizza and Chicory has very serious aspects and very cute ones. All in all, by the end of the game, you are pumped and primed to solve the world’s problems – and to make Chicory and Pizza’s lives better in the process. One of the biggest flaws with “save the world” plots is that they often feel impersonal, but because of Chicory’s personal investment in the situation at hand, it becomes much more meaningful and important due to that human connection. There was a moment during the final boss fight that made me laugh with glee, and while I won’t spoil it, it is something that I feel a lot of games really want to do, but which few game manage to earn the emotional investment necessary to pull off. Chicory and Pizza earn their happy ending. If the entire game was as good as the second half of the game was, this would be one of the best games of all time. But, alas, it is not. In the end, this is a game that I’d recommend, but it is not without its flaws. In particular, the first half of the game is not as good as the second half, and the game has a bunch of quite time-consuming sidequests that are very much a mixed bag, particularly doing a bunch of painting side-quests that felt increasingly time consuming and repetitive.
The Paper Mario games are always very whimsical, and Paper Mario: The Origami King is no exception. As usual, you play as Mario, in his paper form, in a world made of paper. You are going to the Origami Festival near Princess Peach’s castle, and, as happens in literally every game, something terrible happens – in this case, Princess Peach has been folded up into a horrible mind-controlled origami replica of herself by the titular Origami King. You soon learn that all of Bowser’s soldiers have also been folded up, and poor Bowser himself is little more than a square with a face. Naturally, it falls to Mario and his origami companion, Olly’s sister Olivia, to save the world. You proceed through six (though actually more like fifteen or so) distinct zones, each of them capped off with a boss. As you go through the game, you learn more about the origins of Olly and Olivia, as well as recruiting a rotating set of companions, some of which are familiar faces and some of them entirely new ones. Well, okay, not entirely new; you’ve seen their types before, but these are original characters. There are some surprisingly emotional moments in the story, but mostly, it is just silly – which, while okay, rarely excels. There are some fun gags, but it’s all very light, and not tremendously memorable. The serious moments in the game ARE memorable, all the more so for how surprising they are and how much they contrast with everything else. Unfortunately, there’s only really two of these moments, and the second one doesn’t stick around enough to really impact the player. Sadly, the actual game half of the game is no better. Replacing standard TTRPG combat is a puzzle wheel system, where you rotate enemies to line them up to either smash them with your hammer or hop on their heads. You get a bunch of durability based weapons that can only be used so many times before running out, but you end up with enough of them (and they are cheap enough to buy) that you never DO run out, and basically it feels pretty much entirely pointless beyond “Do I use weapon A, B, or C against this enemy type based on the line up?” The bosses use the same system, but instead of you lining up enemies, instead Mario starts out on the edge of a circle and the wheels have to be aligned to create a path for him, set up with arrows that tell him to move in a particular direction, with other panels that boost his attacks, allow him to attack the boss normally, or to use special “magical” powers, the last of which have to be enabled with “on” switches that are hidden in treasure chest panels you have to run over to enable, which also drops hearts and coins onto the battlefield. The bosses are really the highlight of the game mechanically, and are all reasonably enjoyable; the ordinary combat encounters are honestly basically pointless, as they are fundamentally all the same and don’t really add much to the game. Overall, though, the core gameplay is pretty epehemeral. The bosses are really the only parts that are at all memorable, and going through the game, most of what you’re doing is not particularly interesting or exciting. They try to throw in some gags, but honestly, most of the areas are just kind of there and most of the environmental puzzles are straightforward enough that it just doesn’t sell the game to the player. All in all, Paper Mario: The Origami King is a game that is hard to have strong feelings about. It wasn’t bad to play, but at the same time, it was rarely actively good, with the strong parts interspersed with what was fundamentally filler levels that don’t challenge the player in a meaningful way. Only a few points did anything really clever, and the rest of it was just mildly clever at most. Alas, this makes it hard to recommend, though I wouldn’t say it is bad, either. It’s merely mediocre – and with so many good games out there, there’s a lot of better things you can do with your time and money.
Metroid Dread, AKA Metroid 5, is at least the sixth mainline Metroid game. Given that Metroidvania is right there in the name of the genre, you know what you’re in for – you start out weak, conveniently deprived of all your weapons and gear from the previous game by the Inciting Event, after which point you then have to go around the environment, beating bosses and finding rooms to collect items which allow you to explore more of the game, unlocking new areas to explore and bosses to beat, resulting in you gaining an ever increasing amount of power until you beat the game. You are Samus, a bounty hunter whose job seems to really be professional exterminator. You have an arm cannon you can shoot, more powerful missiles you can launch, and you can slide to go under short things. Of course, as the game goes on, you gain the ability to charge your arm cannon, get stronger missiles, can jump infinitely in the air, underwater, go through hot lava and frigid cold areas, dash, run super fast, curl up into a ball and drop bombs, and countless other upgrades. If you’ve played previous Metroid games, or even played Super Smash Bros, you probably have a good guess as to what kind of things you’ll be getting, as it isn’t anything new. That said, the game is pretty competent. It manages to be linear despite being a heavily non-linear environment, with you criss-crossing back across areas you completed previously to reach new places. Instead of tedious direct backtracking, the levels keep looping back on themselves, allowing you to get to where you need to go pretty quickly – a good bit of game design. Unfortunately, the game still has the other, tedious kind of backtracking to collect secrets you missed, and this is not much fun. A lot of them are just “use the new power up here to collect the item” and the only real puzzles that aren’t are running/shinespark puzzles, a mechanic you unlock a way into the game that allows you to propel yourself at high speeds which does not have a very good control scheme. Because of the tediousness, I would recommend mostly not backtracking until the end of the game, but even then, it’s still going to be annoying because of how spread out the game’s “fast travel points” (which are only unlocked at the VERY end of the game) are. This left me with something of a sour note at the end of the game; the game actually is not very great for exploration, and while it does an okay job of making you feel clever as you are going through sometimes, oftentimes it is just “I need to do this next.” That being said, it didn’t spoil the game for me as a whole. The core mechanics are mostly fairly decent, and the game has a whopping 30 bosses – which, considering it is less than 14 hours to beat the whole game 100%, means you are fighting 3 bosses an hour or so, more if you don’t bother to go back and 100% it. That’s a quite dense game, and it works very well – you are always running into new things, and while a lot of the bosses aren’t super remarkable, some of them are very well done, and the final few bosses in particular are quite neat to fight and do a good job of rewarding you for remembering all the game’s mechanics. The story and plot, however, are quite terrible. I had only briefly played previous Metroid games, and while I was aware of the metaplot, I had zero investment in Samus Aran. There’s only really three characters in the game, and one of them appears very briefly, and Samus herself is near-mute and has almost no dialogue whatsoever – which is very awkward as there’s a lot of moments where you’d expect her to say something, and she just awkwardly, silently stares at whatever it is she’s seeing. This at least makes some sense with the monsters, but there’s a few times where she SHOULD have replied and didn’t, and it felt really weird. The plot itself is mostly an excuse to make another game, and it didn’t really connect with me on an emotional level at all; it is mostly just throwing you around to the next challenge, with no real attachment to anything you’re encountering. This is quite the contrast with other games I’ve played recently, and with AAA games in general these days – and while it isn’t strictly necessary, it definitely can make games stronger, with games like Celeste and Hollow Knight giving you some emotional investment in their world and characters, and games like God of War pretty much carrying the game on its back with the quality of the work and characters. The best feature of this game, however, was its brevity. Where so many AAA games feel it necessary to stretch themselves out endlessly, Metroid Dread was always moving towards its end point, and at less than 14 hours in length, I was very happy with how long it was – it had the amount of content it needed, it didn’t throw in a ton of filler (though the backtracking for items was annoying), and the pacing was very good.
An open-world action-adventure game, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is a knock-off of Breath of the Wild by Ubisoft. However, after playing it for a while, it becomes obvious that the game is simultaneously a big step forward AND a big step back from Breath of the Wild. With a world chock full of puzzles, puzzle and dungeon design that becomes more sophisticated and challenging as the game goes on, and increasingly more difficult and dangerous enemies, the game manages to establish that it learned from Breath of the Wild’s often empty overworld, instead putting in large amounts of stuff to do that evolve as you get further and further into the game, giving you a greater variety of challenges to overcome and allowing you to upgrade your existing abilities to overcome new challenges. Gone is the weapon durability system; instead, you have a sword, an axe, and a bow, which you can swap between different versions of for different bonuses, and upgrade over the course of the game with materials you find. While this takes away the ability to grab a powerful weapon off a powerful enemy and temporarily be overpowered, it leads to an overall better game experience. This, combined with your combat-ready abilities, makes combat in Fenyx much better and less awkward than Breath of the Wild; you are faster and more fluid, but so are your enemies, and it ends up being a step forward mechanically from Breath of the Wild’s clunky mechanics. Instead of the clunky weapon durability system of Breath of the Wild, you instead upgrade your weapons and abilities directly, making all the random things you’re doing actually matter. Indeed, mechanically, Fenyx is a step forward in almost every way. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the world. Breath of the Wild was good at evoking a sense of wonder, and of giving you neat places to go. Fenyx’s world is nowhere near as interesting. And this is a huge problem; the single best thing about Breath of the Wild was its sense of discovery, but Fenyx is lacking in it. It gives you the ability to focus your vision, but instead of the organic highlighting of Zelda, or even giving you the ability to reveal things by looking at them, you can look right through walls and find things. Instead of the excellent landmarks of Zelda, many of the locations feel very unnatural and like they are there because it is a game, and don’t stick out nearly as well as landmarks. And this is a big problem, because it was one of Breath of the Wild’s biggest selling points, and the game just fumbles it. The game has a stronger narrative focus that it fumbles as well: with Prometheus and Zeus chatting to each other the whole game as a voice over semi-narration as you explore the world and restore four gods to their rightful forms, reacting to what you are doing and where you are going in-world, with the game working with the history of the Greek gods to add flavor to the world. Unfortunately, there’s three big problems: 1) The gods are a bunch of narcissistic jerks – which, while authentic to Greek mythology, gets kind of repetitive when everyone in the game is either the straight man (Fenyx, Prometheus) or a narcissistic jerk that they have to put up with (everyone else). 2) The game is trying to be funny, but because it only has a relatively limited repertoire of tones, it struggles with it. 3) Because we already know the Greek gods, we know what is going on, robbing the plot of a sense of discovery, tying back into the sense of discovery that feels missing from this game. All in all, then, it’s a good-ish game that falls well shy of greatness. While Breath of the Wild felt kind of bad about being a bunch of checkmarks to mark off, this game takes that to a whole new level, and while it’s checkboxes are far better, the actual sense of grandeur and exploration is worse, and the fact that the gods you are helping are all horrible people makes you question whether it is even the right thing to be helping them in the first place. All in all, while I liked playing this more than I liked Breath of the Wild, it lacked the latter game’s charm and core pull. If the poor mechanics of Breath of the Wild were the biggest offputting thing about it for you, then this is a very reasonable alternative; however, there are far better open-world games out there.
Spiderman: Remastered is one of Sony’s big PS4 era games. It combines Spider-Man’s web-swinging and wall-crawling movement with the Batman Arkham games’ combat systems, where you have a bunch of spider gadgets for combat along with your brawling, and you fight groups of thugs/armed goons/etc. in simplistic but flashy combat. Unfortunately, not only have there been four Batman Arkham games at this point, but the actual core gameplay is surprisingly not great. The problem is that while Spider-Man is fun to control, and Spiderman is better to play as than Batman in terms of fluid movement and mobility, it all ends up highlighting a big problem – the combat system is ultimately pretty shallow, and making Spider-Man even more powerful than Batman makes the combat even more trivial – all the more so after playing four Batman: Arkham games. The game leans very heavily on brawling combat, which was always the worst thing about Batman Arkham style combat, and the enemy variety isn’t great – there’s basically thugs, thugs with weapons, thugs with guns, thugs with shields, big guys, guys with magic swords, guys with magic whips, and flying guys. For a game as long as Spider-Man, that’s not all that many enemy types, and while there are four “gangs” of enemies, they are all pretty similar in a lot of ways, particularly as far as basic goons go. The predator style sections aren’t great because the environments, by and large, aren’t great; the starting sequence is cool, but most of the game is honestly pretty dull environmentally, making the predator sequences not all that interesting. Moreover, because Spider-Man is so powerful, he can actually fight guys with guns in the open, meaning that messing up a predator sequence or simply ignoring it in favor of fighting it out is an option – and it makes these sequences nowhere near as tense as they were in the Arkham games. Add this to the fact that, unlike in the Batman games where the villains were constantly taunting you while their goons were going at you, here it is just normal enemy callouts, which get even more repetitive given how much busywork there is in the game. The net result of all this is that most of the core gameplay of the game wears thin pretty fast. Moving around the city is reasonable enough, but it isn’t enough, and the novelty of Spider-Man’s moveset wears off after not all that long. Added to this is the core problem with the Arkham style combat – difficulty in making good bosses. This game really struggles with it, and several of the boss fights are glorified quick-time events. While there are a few bosses that are more than this, there’s honestly not many bosses at all – only ten, and four of them are basically repeats. And none of them are very good – they all tend to be very simple and repetitive. The result, then, is that the game relies heavily on its story… but it kind of falls down there, too. Playing as Peter Parker, the snarky, wise-cracking Spider-Man, you play in an open world version of New York City, specifically Manhattan. Like 90% of open world games, the open world is just boring distractions – there’s a lot of “stuff” out in the world, but most of it is not that interesting, and is basically padding and does little to nothing to contribute to the story. And yet the game contains vast amounts of this stuff, as if it would be fun to do 20 gang hideouts that are highly similar and only really have like four unique lines of dialogue. Spider-Man giving witty quips is fun; Spider-Man fighting piles and piles of goons over and over again without any interesting verbal interplay is not. The core plot contains nine different villains, but you only spend enough time with two of them to really get much out of them. Unfortunately, even there, their motivations are very shallow, and almost all of the enemies basically boil down to “guy who is angry all the time” in terms of characterization. While they have different gimmicks, they just aren’t that interesting as characters, and given the importance of good villains to superheroes, that’s quite the issue. The Batman Arkham games leaned heavily on the Joker for a reason, but Batman’s rogue’s gallery is just more interesting than Spider-Man’s, and this game, despite being an “original” Spider-Man story, doesn’t actually do anything to make the bad guys particularly interesting. Doctor Octavius is the most interesting of the lot, but he ends up feeling like “Generic revenge-driven mad scientist” almost all the time. It tries to introduce Miles Morales a ways into the game, but he’s kind of bland compared to Spider-Man, lacking his powers and feeling a bit generic in terms of characterization. MJ works better, but the missions where you play as her are not great, as you end up with very restricted movement and there’s not a strong story payoff, though she wasn’t a bad character overall.
God of War (2018) is the fourth – or perhaps like the eighth, depending on what you count – game in the God of War series. Set in the lands of the Norse Gods after Kratos pretty much wrecked the Greek world, Kratos has been living a quiet life with his wife and son. Naturally, by the time the game has started, his wife has died – apparently of natural causes – and she requests that Kratos and their son, Atreus, take her ashes to the top of the highest mountain in all the land to scatter them. Needless to say, things get a bit complicated, the Norse gods get involved, and before you know it you are off on an adventure through… well, the majority of the nine realms of Norse mythology, though in truth most of your adventure is in one realm (Midgard, i.e. the world of mortals) with your excursions to the other worlds little more than brief dungeons or series of challenges at most. The game is not enormously long, but it has a huge amount of side content which greatly stretches out its length. There’s a lot of places to explore and treasures to find, but the game is actually a bit short on actual monsters to fight. The problem is, the game actually runs out of new things to show you surprisingly early in its length. While there’s ostensibly a number of types of enemies, in reality there’s only a few actually different types – basically a very fast one that jumps on you, a standard melee trash mob, an enemy with a shield, an enemy with a big hammer, an enemy that throws ranged attacks at you, a teleporting witch, a big hulking ogre, a werewolf, trolls with big clubs, some flying enemies who shoot blinding things at you and then engage in melee, some other flying enemies who shoot things at you and sometimes buff enemies, and trolls. The game shows you all these types of enemies pretty early, though, and as a result, it feels like the game runs out of things to throw at you long before the game’s length ends. It doesn’t help that there’s really only five bosses apart from the trolls (which are very similar to each other) resulting in the game feeling like it is lacking for actually interesting combat content – which it kind of is. You fight some bosses multiple times (for story related reasons, but still) and unfortunately, it kind of becomes old hat by the end. The nine Valkyrie bosses do try to mix things up a bit themselves, and are the most interesting boss fights in the game, but they, too, get repetitive after a while. For all the spectacle that the game has, the game’s combat is honestly pretty mediocre – and that’s very unfortunate, because there is a fair amount of it. This is broken up by exploration, which is okay, but nothing super amazing – it’s pretty standard “puzzles”, but they’re all very simple and mostly are pretty much the same, just “the puzzle pieces are hidden differently”. Really, the only thing the game has to make it stand out from the competition is presentation – but fortunately, it does have that in spades. The voice acting is really good, the characters are fun to interact with (even if Kratos himself is mum about things for much of the game), and if you are a fan of Norse mythology, you can see all sorts of fun references in here, along with the game’s various twists and attempts to make the gods the bad guys (because, this is, after all, God of War, the series infamous for deicide – and while gods do die, you will likely be disappointed by the number, though fans of Norse Mythology will also be able to predict who is going to die and more or less how). The game’s core relationship – between Atreus and Kratos – works well, even if it is frustrating at times with just how taciturn Kratos is, but you can see how scarred Kratos is from his past experiences. The game, then, is about Kratos coming out of his shell a little while his son has to figure out who he is and what is going on. Atreus helps out in combat, and also helps with some puzzles, and while none of it is particularly spectacular in execution it works well enough. All in all, I felt like the game stretched itself out too long relative to its interesting content – it added two grindy sidequests for no good reason, as the combat is not anywhere near good enough to justify them, and it just adds to the length of the game without adding to the main thing that the game delivers on – the story of the relationship between Kratos and Atreus and their role in the world, including Kratos’ own undesired role, as he clearly detests his own nature as a god and fears what his son will be like when he realizes that he, too, is a son – trying to keep things as low-key as possible while avoiding giving too much away. All in all, the game's presentation saves its mediocre gameplay, and the side content is too often a boring distraction from the main thrust of the game.
I was very interested in Stray when it was first announced publicly. The idea of playing as a cat was very interesting, and I tried to avoid spoilers as much as possible about the game before playing it. Unfortuately, I think that was a very bad mistake; this game is honestly quite mediocre and honestly, boring. The problem is that the most basic idea – the idea of being a stray cat walking through a futuristic city – sounds really neat, but when you actually reflect on the question of “Sure, but what’s the actual GAME like?” you start to realize that, for all that that sounds like a really cool premise for a game, it doesn’t actually seem to suggest much in the way of meaningful gameplay. What do you do in this game? Not much of interest, honestly. The “platforming”, such as it is, is extremely simple; you can only jump up and down a certain amount, and only to platforms – the cat does not jump independent of going to and from places, so the whole game is actually pretty rigidly controlled rather than open. You can’t climb, you can’t fight (except for a brief, very simple minigame you actually get an achievement for skipping, and which consists of nothing more than shining a flashlight on enemies vulnerable to light in one chapter), and you can’t really do anything sophisticated because, let’s face it, you are a cat. The result, then, is a game with very limited “gameplay” – some fetchquests, some pre-designed moving around in the environment, and like 1.5 chapters of mandatory stealth section which is quite basic. That’s it. Now, you might think that this is primarily a walking simulator… but honestly, it is bad at the story as well, and the game itself is surprisingly ugly. The problem is that the city is in ruins and the only people you can communicate with are robots, which means that there is no dialogue where you move around and they are talking with you, you have to stop to talk every single time, as you have to read it. There is no voice acting, and the characters are all very flat and uninteresting – none of them have more than one or two personality traits, and so it is hard to really care when good things or bad things happen to them. The dialogue is limited, and most of the robots just say repetitive things. It doesn't even deliver on the futuristic bit - the city itself is very mundane in many respects, and doesn't feel very futuristic at all. There’s no real spark of imagination here – it’s like they came up with the basic idea then executed it in the most boring way possible. This does not feel like a world that you are living in, but is very video-gamey, and the core plot – getting back outside of the city – is very, very basic and is nothing interesting. The city itself has a very boring backstory – we only get a tiny amount of it, we don’t get an explanation of what happened to the world, what we do see of it makes little to no sense, and there’s just nothing to really latch onto. The world, too, is quite ugly, because it is all set in a dark city, and while the idea of being lit up by, say, futuristic neon lights and holograms seems cool, it actually mostly is just boring slum-ish and boring concrete and fence areas – nothing particularly interesting. They even stick in plants, with the explanation that somehow humans genetically engineered them so they didn’t need sunlight anymore. But overall, this game is just bland. It’s not very long, which is a good thig because there isn’t much “game” there, but it isn’t very good, either. This is very much an experience you can skip. I thought the idea of playing as a cat would be cool, too, but there’s just no substance here – the world is too boring to carry the bad gameplay, and the gameplay is too bad to carry the story.
The problem with roguelite games is repetition. You need really good core gameplay to make a roguelite or roguelike work, otherwise it just ends up repetitive and boring the player. Without greater challenges to overcome and interesting enemies to fight, it can quickly become tedious – and reusing the same few areas over and over again can make this even worse. Thus, it is strange that an AAA studio like Arkane fell into this trap. The core conceit of Deathloop is that you are trapped on an island in a time loop with a bunch of people who want to party for all eternity (the Eternalists). A few things quickly become clear: 1) Only you and Juliana, your nemesis, remember things between loops. 2) There are four areas or “levels” in the game, and you can visit up to four “levels” in a day, either repeating the same ones or going to different ones. 3) After you’ve visited four places (or died three times), the loop resets. 4) There are eight Visionaries, leaders amongst the Eternalists, who are the core of the loop. You must kill all eight of them in a single loop to win. 5) None of the Visionaries will naturally hang out with each other, as a deliberate means of making it impossible to break the loop. Thus, the core of the game is to figure out how to manipulate the time loop in order to get the visionaries to leave the areas they hang out in normally and go to other areas, grouping up so that you can kill a number of them at once. Unfortunately, while this SOUNDS really cool, in real life, the game basically is bimodal – each Visionary has at most one way to manipulate them into doing this, and some don’t have any, so there is a very particular solution that you must follow to solve the game. The game pretty much leads you to this, though, so it isn’t overly hard to figure out – which also kind of robs the game of a feeling of agency. Indeed, the game is remarkably inflexible for being a game about a time loop where your goal is to manipulate the loop to your advantage – there are very few ways of doing so, and most of them aren’t particularly interesting or exciting. While it is cool to show up “prepared” to a few things, by and large it is pretty mediocre, and after the first couple loops the game runs out of tricks. Rather than being a puzzle, it’s just a kind of drawn-out fairly linear affair, where you can attack different questlines in whatever order, but eventually you’ll figure out what you’re doing. The fact that you can “save” equipment across runs after you complete the second major questline also means that you don’t really have to interact with 99% of the weapon drops in the game for loops after the first couple you go through, which further increases the repetition, especially once you figure out where certain key weapons are and farm them a bit so you can have them every level. The enemies in the game are all normal humans, with only the visionaries presenting any sort of challenge; even still, you will quickly become more dangerous than they are and be able to rather easily overwhelm them. That leaves Julianna, which, in normal gameplay, can be an enemy human player who invades your game and tries to kill you – a frustrating experience when you are trying to make progress, but at least a somewhat neat idea. Unfortunately, playing in this mode also doesn’t allow you to pause the game at all, which is really annoying, as even if there isn’t a Juliana around, you still can’t pause. If you turn off the multiplayer, she becomes an AI, and while more powerful than the Visionaries, she’s still not terribly difficult to overcome, removing the only real challenge the game has. The only thing Deathloop really has is style. Deathloop is set in faux-1960s, though it quickly becomes clear that this is some sort of alternate reality. It has some dialogue between Colt (the protagonist) and Juliana, and some floating text along with notes and tape recordings in the environment which help you piece together the story. But these mostly run out within a few loops, with only a trickle of story remaining afterwards, and because you can do things in whatever order, you can figure out many of the game’s secrets “early”, and none of them are particularly difficult to see coming. In the end, I was disappointed in this game. It was not up to the quality of Prey, it lacked variety in the challenges it threw at you, it was overly repetitive (and too long relative to the amount of content it had), the plot was okay at best, and the ending was a disappointing little cutscene. There are a lot of better games than this one; if you like the style and the core conceit, it might be okay, but it will never be great.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a call back to a bygone era of games. This is very much a sequel to TMNT: Turtles in Time, but it also is leaning very, very heavily on nostalgia, pretty much running every single popular character and toy from the original series in the game as a boss or someone you have to rescue. Giving you the long-awaited ability to play as Master Splinter, April O’Neill, and Casey Jones, this game has seven characters instead of four, and while it is a side-scrolling beat ’em up, there are some differences between the characters. Unfortunately, this game also shows why they don’t make these games anymore – this game took a lot of effort to make, and is nicely animated pixel art, but it’s only two and a half hours long. If you try and collect everything, it might take you another hour… but after that, it’s just grinding for some tedious achievements, which isn’t fun. The other problem is that beat ’em up gameplay remains very simplistic, and this game is no exception. The characters aren’t especially mobile, and while it reflects the design of the era, modern games are more fun to play and less awkward and stiff. This isn’t bad as far as beat ’em ups go – in fact, it’s a reasonably good example, though Turtles in Time felt like it had better variety – but the game is still very simple, and not really super fun to play. Being short is a saving grace as much as it is a drawback; if it was any longer, you’d get bored. Which is the biggest problem, really – it isn’t 1994 anymore. Back in the day, I remember enjoying these games, but today, they’re just too simple compared to modern game design. The game is quite easy even on the middle difficulty setting, but cranking the difficulty didn’t really make me any more enamored with it. The high difficulty older beat ’em ups were designed as quarter eaters; modern games don’t benefit from that, but it reveals just how little content there actually is. While it was kind of nostalgic seeing all these characters again, the voice acting wasn’t great and the only thing that made me laugh was the “twist” at the end. All in all, I can’t recommend this trip down memory lane unless you get it for free, like playing it on Game Pass or something. There, it is a reasonable thing, as you can taste it and see if you want to see it through, and even if you do, it won’t feel like it took a bite out of your wallet for such a short and mediocre experience.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a call back to a bygone era of games. This is very much a sequel to TMNT: Turtles in Time, but it also is leaning very, very heavily on nostalgia, pretty much running every single popular character and toy from the original series in the game as a boss or someone you have to rescue. Giving you the long-awaited ability to play as Master Splinter, April O’Neill, and Casey Jones, this game has seven characters instead of four, and while it is a side-scrolling beat ’em up, there are some differences between the characters. Unfortunately, this game also shows why they don’t make these games anymore – this game took a lot of effort to make, and is nicely animated pixel art, but it’s only two and a half hours long. If you try and collect everything, it might take you another hour… but after that, it’s just grinding for some tedious achievements, which isn’t fun. The other problem is that beat ’em up gameplay remains very simplistic, and this game is no exception. The characters aren’t especially mobile, and while it reflects the design of the era, modern games are more fun to play and less awkward and stiff. This isn’t bad as far as beat ’em ups go – in fact, it’s a reasonably good example, though Turtles in Time felt like it had better variety – but the game is still very simple, and not really super fun to play. Being short is a saving grace as much as it is a drawback; if it was any longer, you’d get bored. Which is the biggest problem, really – it isn’t 1994 anymore. Back in the day, I remember enjoying these games, but today, they’re just too simple compared to modern game design. The game is quite easy even on the middle difficulty setting, but cranking the difficulty didn’t really make me any more enamored with it. The high difficulty older beat ’em ups were designed as quarter eaters; modern games don’t benefit from that, but it reveals just how little content there actually is. While it was kind of nostalgic seeing all these characters again, the voice acting wasn’t great and the only thing that made me laugh was the “twist” at the end. All in all, I can’t recommend this trip down memory lane unless you get it for free, like playing it on Game Pass or something. There, it is a reasonable thing, as you can taste it and see if you want to see it through, and even if you do, it won’t feel like it took a bite out of your wallet for such a short and mediocre experience.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a call back to a bygone era of games. This is very much a sequel to TMNT: Turtles in Time, but it also is leaning very, very heavily on nostalgia, pretty much running every single popular character and toy from the original series in the game as a boss or someone you have to rescue. Giving you the long-awaited ability to play as Master Splinter, April O’Neill, and Casey Jones, this game has seven characters instead of four, and while it is a side-scrolling beat ’em up, there are some differences between the characters. Unfortunately, this game also shows why they don’t make these games anymore – this game took a lot of effort to make, and is nicely animated pixel art, but it’s only two and a half hours long. If you try and collect everything, it might take you another hour… but after that, it’s just grinding for some tedious achievements, which isn’t fun. The other problem is that beat ’em up gameplay remains very simplistic, and this game is no exception. The characters aren’t especially mobile, and while it reflects the design of the era, modern games are more fun to play and less awkward and stiff. This isn’t bad as far as beat ’em ups go – in fact, it’s a reasonably good example, though Turtles in Time felt like it had better variety – but the game is still very simple, and not really super fun to play. Being short is a saving grace as much as it is a drawback; if it was any longer, you’d get bored. Which is the biggest problem, really – it isn’t 1994 anymore. Back in the day, I remember enjoying these games, but today, they’re just too simple compared to modern game design. The game is quite easy even on the middle difficulty setting, but cranking the difficulty didn’t really make me any more enamored with it. The high difficulty older beat ’em ups were designed as quarter eaters; modern games don’t benefit from that, but it reveals just how little content there actually is. While it was kind of nostalgic seeing all these characters again, the voice acting wasn’t great and the only thing that made me laugh was the “twist” at the end. All in all, I can’t recommend this trip down memory lane unless you get it for free, like playing it on Game Pass or something. There, it is a reasonable thing, as you can taste it and see if you want to see it through, and even if you do, it won’t feel like it took a bite out of your wallet for such a short and mediocre experience.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge is a call back to a bygone era of games. This is very much a sequel to TMNT: Turtles in Time, but it also is leaning very, very heavily on nostalgia, pretty much running every single popular character and toy from the original series in the game as a boss or someone you have to rescue. Giving you the long-awaited ability to play as Master Splinter, April O’Neill, and Casey Jones, this game has seven characters instead of four, and while it is a side-scrolling beat ’em up, there are some differences between the characters. Unfortunately, this game also shows why they don’t make these games anymore – this game took a lot of effort to make, and is nicely animated pixel art, but it’s only two and a half hours long. If you try and collect everything, it might take you another hour… but after that, it’s just grinding for some tedious achievements, which isn’t fun. The other problem is that beat ’em up gameplay remains very simplistic, and this game is no exception. The characters aren’t especially mobile, and while it reflects the design of the era, modern games are more fun to play and less awkward and stiff. This isn’t bad as far as beat ’em ups go – in fact, it’s a reasonably good example, though Turtles in Time felt like it had better variety – but the game is still very simple, and not really super fun to play. Being short is a saving grace as much as it is a drawback; if it was any longer, you’d get bored. Which is the biggest problem, really – it isn’t 1994 anymore. Back in the day, I remember enjoying these games, but today, they’re just too simple compared to modern game design. The game is quite easy even on the middle difficulty setting, but cranking the difficulty didn’t really make me any more enamored with it. The high difficulty older beat ’em ups were designed as quarter eaters; modern games don’t benefit from that, but it reveals just how little content there actually is. While it was kind of nostalgic seeing all these characters again, the voice acting wasn’t great and the only thing that made me laugh was the “twist” at the end. All in all, I can’t recommend this trip down memory lane unless you get it for free, like playing it on Game Pass or something. There, it is a reasonable thing, as you can taste it and see if you want to see it through, and even if you do, it won’t feel like it took a bite out of your wallet for such a short and mediocre experience.
The Pedestrian is a fairly straightforward platform/puzzle game with a limited number of mechanics. At its heart, it is reasonably stylish puzzle platformer, with quite decent art for an indie game. It is a short game – perhaps four hours long – but even at that, maybe it is a little too long. The core of the game is that you are a little pedestrian symbol who can move around and jump between platforms on signs, but you can only jump so high. You can also rearrange the signs that you are on, and draw connections between doors and ladders – a ladder going up must match with one going down, and a door going left must match with one going right. Redrawing these connections resets everything, but there are some puzzle elements which allow for persistence. It is these other puzzle elements which serve to mix things up a bit, but unfortunately, the game’s core mechanics really don’t end up being all that variable – you just keep doing the same things, over and over again, with something new tacked on, but that new thing often is just adding a slight complication. Some of these are more interesting and clever than others, but a lot are just kind of there. The result, sadly, is that the game ends up feeling a bit repetitive by the end, despite its short length. It was okay, but not great, and while the very final level manages to mix things up and add a bit of novelty, it wasn’t enough to put it over the top. Overall, I can’t quite recommend it, but it isn’t bad; it is just kind of okay, but a bit ephemeral.
Forza Horzion 5 is an open world racing game. The game is set in Mexico, but honestly, it barely matters; the game is really just an open world racing thing with some minor Mexican theming. You can tell that this game was made “with the cooperation” of the Mexican tourism board and the car manufacturers, because it is basically a gigantic advertisement for visiting Mexico and buying expensive cars. This isn’t a bad thing though, necessarily, as it gives you an excuse to race around in a variety of vehicles across over 125 courses, plus dozens of “story missions”. Unfortunately, the game suffers a bit from the fact that it doesn’t really do enough to encourage variety; it is entirely possible to just optimize a couple cars for the various modes and never switch, and while there are achievements for doing so, you can simply ignore them. The story, too, is quite weak; not surprising, considering what it is, but still. The main character is a “superstar” who is serving to promote the “Horizon Festival” by winning a bunch of events and otherwise doing various stunts across the landscape of Mexico. Everything is just an excuse for that, but while you and your coworkers are enthusiastic, you never really bond with any of them. The closest point is when you race in “The Vocho”, which belonged to another character’s grandfather, but in the end, there’s no real payoff. Sadly, that’s kind of the game’s biggest flaw – there’s lots of “stuff to do” but you’re likely to actually activate most of the most interesting things early on, and the sheer number of races aren’t really super exciting when they lack any real sense of progression. It’s really just a sandbox for racing cars, and while this isn’t a bad thing, it does mean that the game just sort of peters out as you run out of things to do. The actual core controls are pretty good, though; it’s an arcade racing game, but not super arcade, and you do actually have to pay attention to what you’re doing. The racetracks are nothing like what Mario Kart 8 provides, but they are reasonable for realistic tracks, and there’s some variety in them. Overall, this game is decent but not amazing. It is solid enough at racing and it has a lot of content, but the lack of a strong sense of progression and, for all its spectacle, it’s general shallowness, make it a bit hard to strongly recommend. Still, if you enjoy racing games, it is worth playing.
A HD remake of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, this game is a cross between a visual novel and a puzzle-adventure game. You wake up on what looks to be a ship, and your cabin immediately starts flooding with water. You have to “quickly” look around the room and try to find a way to get the door open so you can get out. This opening illustrates what the game is going to be like – you don’t know why you’re there, you don’t know what you’re doing there, and there’s a sense that someone is trying to kill you, but at the same time, the time pressure is an illusion. Which is ironic, as the game’s main theme is that you only have nine hours to escape. You find yourself with eight other people, all at the mercy of “Zero”, a voice over the loudspeakers who reads you a set of rules. You have bracelets on your arms that can open doors, but you can only open them if your numbers add up in a certain way; only 3-5 people can get through the door, and supposedly, there’s only one 9 door at the end, so some folks are going to be stuck (and, according to Zero, drown). Of course, not all is as it seems, and this group – supposedly of strangers – gradually are revealed to have certain connections, even as members of the group are killed off by the death traps, and you have to figure out some way to make it through. This is one of those games that gets a bit weird. There’s a branching path through the story, based on which doors you go through, which affects the story downstream and the endings; however, in reality, there’s actually a further layer of the plot, which you can only unlock after doing a certain ending, and then doing another ending after making all the right choices. The game helpfully has a flow chart of the scenes to help you make sense of the story and jump around after the game is complete to see all the things you missed and unlock the necessary paths to find the true ending. Overall, this is one of those games that straddles the line between intellectual and pseudointellectual; it has a lot of references to parapsychology experiments and fun ideas, but it spends so much time explaining everything it can get tiresome and take the wind out of your sails (even though it is necessary background). The characters aren’t really people, but more tools to explore ideas; they behave unnaturally, but in service to the story, a common Japanese storytelling method. And despite the game appearing to be a choices matter game with multiple endings, in reality, there’s only one real ending, and your goal is to find that amongst all the wrong ones, and figure out how to get there. Alas, this game suffers from a lack of confidence in its players. The puzzles are all very easy and the game practically explains a lot of them to you. Worse, the actual story plot is not something you can actually detective your way through – I figured out a number of the twists before they happened, and sussed out various secrets, but I couldn’t actually exploit them until the main character came across the idea on their own according to the dictates of the visual novel. As a result, this undermines a lot of the actual “gameplay” of the game, and while I liked some of the ideas, the game ended up dragging as I had to go back and try other options until I got to the path that actually let me progress to the real ending. In the end, this is okay but not great. Visual Novel fans might enjoy it, but if you’re looking for a strong puzzle game experience, this is not the thing for you. The story was okay, but not great, as I failed to really strongly connect with the characters. Overall, a shrug of ambivalence – you can do better than this game, but it’s not bad.
Streets of Rage 4 is a nostalgic throwback, a side-scrolling beat’em up in the style of old arcade games. Unfortunately, time has not treated these games very well, and the game is very simplistic. Moving around and beating up folks just doesn’t have the same charm as it used to, and it really wants to be something you play with your friends, as there’s just not a whole lot of substance there single player. The bosses are okay, but nothing to write home about, and the overall mechanics are kind of clunky, with slow moving characters with limited mobility and attack patterns. It feels like an old game, even though it looks nice, and it just kind of illustrates why it is that they don’t really make beat’em up games anymore – they’re just too simple compared to more interesting modern-day works that have more elaborate and involved gameplay. Overall, I can’t really recommend this – while it is a nostalgia trip, the actual core gameplay is still very much early 1990s, and the world has just moved on from that, and in a good way; games are just a lot better now to play, and feel more dynamic than this.
Psychonauts 2 is the very, very long awaited sequel to Psychonauts, a game about a kid who ran away from the circus to go to a psychic summer camp. It was a quirky 3D platformer of the kind that existed back in the day, but which pretty much disappeared. Come 15+ years later, Psychonauts 2 was one of maybe two (if you’re generous) 3D platformers to come out in 2021. How times have changed. Set immediately after the first game and the VR-only Rhombus of Ruin (which isn’t necessary to play, as the game does a recap of what happened during that game), you get to Psychonauts headquarters, only to find out that you are not, in fact, a “real” Psychonaut, but actually an intern. But trouble is afoot (or is that abrain?) at HQ, and as things go on, you uncover a bunch of new secrets that tie back into the first game, as well as expand the universe of the series. Psychonauts 2 is a 3D platformer which alternates between real world segments, in a hub world, and going into people’s minds and exploring their mindscapes. These levels are where the real meat of the game is, and are both varied and creative… sometimes. See, the problem is, this game varies between “this is a really cool premise for a level” and “this is just a trip through memory lane… again”. This is a problem, because some of the levels are, frankly, only okay. For every level where you go into a quirky cooking show or fight your way through a hospital that is also a casino, there’s a level where you walk through a bunch of quilts and see memories, or walk through a long hallway that consists of a bunch of memories and the locations they took place in. This is particularly odd as some of them are of very significant people and events. The first game’s levels were not always the best, but they often had very memorable premises; however, many of the levels in this game are pretty forgettable, even if the game is a bit improved mechanically. The humor of the story as well feels weaker. The first game was very Saturday morning cartoon and was very silly, and while this game is also silly, it deals with much darker subjects – like fictional Eastern European dictatorships – that the game ends up dwelling on for a very, very long time. The first game had some darker subject matter, but mostly was lighter and more quirky; this game spent too long in the darkness, I think, and suffered for it. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with more serious games – I’ve liked a number of them over the years, after all! The problem lies in the fact that the game is fundamentally relying on a bunch of rather silly character designs and a rather silly world, so throwing in too much serious stuff feels like the game is at odds with itself, as you have a bunch of silly-looking characters talking about something that was essentially genocide in a game that isn’t really sure if it is for kids or not. All that being said, I thought that it was an interesting experience overall. I did guess the major plot twist very early on in the game, but a number of the levels were interesting, even if some of the others failed to really deliver as interesting of backdrops. The overall platforming was okay, though not amazing – the game is easier than the first game, and more consistent in its difficulty, with nothing like the first game’s Meat Circus floating around to cause you trouble. You have infinite lives and an enormous amount of health if you bother buying the upgrades and searching around a bit, and as a result, the game itself is actually very easy overall. There are some pits you can fall into, but I rarely fell in for any reason other than trying to make jumps I wasn’t supposed to be making. The powers you get in this game are decent, but the limit of having only four equipped at once is annoying; you basically always need to have the levitation power equipped due to the float it gives you, and once you get the time power, it is so good that you’d be a fool NOT to have it equipped. That leaves you with only a couple power slots to play with for most of the game, and as a result, some powers ended up getting used far more than others, though all of them were useful at least sometimes. The platforming was decent, which is an accomplishment for a 3D platformer, but it never really rose to the level of something like Super Mario Odyssey. Still, it is okay, and better than games like A Hat in Time or Yooka Laylee. Overall, this is a decent but not amazing sequel to an older game that had its flaws but also its positive quirks. I liked it well enough, but it’s not the “must play” game that I think it seemed like it might have been at one point. Still, if you did like the first game, this is good enough that it is worth getting; if you haven’t played the first game, and you like 3D platformers, this might be worth a look.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game of highs and lows. An action RPG which is a “remake” of the original Final Fantasy VII, interestingly, not only is it a genre shift from the first game, but the story itself diverges – and the divergence of the story is a major plot point. It expands on the Midgar section of the original game, a section of the game that took about 8 hours to beat, and turns it into a 40-60 hour long game, all while engaging in a few meta plot twists to keep players familiar with the game guessing how much things will change. Unfortunately, this is the heart of the problem of the game: they didn’t know what to expand on, so they expanded on EVERYTHING, even making up a few new sequences. This makes the good parts even bigger and even better, and results in a few new sequences (like a sequence with the Avalanche sidekicks, who were largely a side note in the original game) which really worked well, and added significant characterization – but the game also expanded on the bad parts, resulting in what were previously brief inter-area travel sequences or mini-dungeons becoming two hours long (or longer!) of endless corridors, and some added dungeons that weren’t even in the original game which added nothing to the game but length. At its best, it strikes an excellent balance between characterization and humor that was common in 1990s JRPGs, then sort of faded from view. At its worst, it is hours of slogging down corridors and fighting monsters that aren’t very challenging to fight, over and over again. The best part of this game is the improvements in characterization. Every single character is more interesting, including the random background Avalanche characters, the Shinra characters, and even the random side characters in the Wall Market. Barret in particular ends up with a sort of almost preacher-esque character, which is really fun to see – doubly so because for all of his bravado and being so big and bad, he’s clearly got issues underneath and is putting on a bit of a show. Tifa’s insecurity comes through much more strongly than it did in the original game, and Cloud ends up with significantly more characterization, being both uncertain and putting on a show of being a badass SOLDIER. Aerith’s personality, too, shines through, with her playful mischief being a major highlight – at least, until she ends up becoming the Cetra Waif, which makes her much less interesting and more subdued (and generic). This goes down to the background Avalanche members, who get a lot more characterization, and thus build more of a connection with the player, as well as the random people in Wall Market, including some new characters, including the sadistic masseuse Madam M, a bit character whose interactions with Cloud are absolutely hilarious. The introductory sequence, the added characterization for Avalanche members (including a whole chapter that is totally devoted to them), the Aerith meeting all the way through Wall Market, the battle up the pillar to try and defend Sector 7, going up the Shinra building, and the battles at the top of the tower – all of these sequences are improved over the original, and add new context and characterization. Unfortunately, this is a game with 18 chapters, and in the end, chapters 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17 all contain very significant padding – meaning that over half the chapters in the game contain significant filler content. Worse, chapters 5, 6, 10, 11, 15, and 17 are basically entirely filler, with the only significant events occurring with the boss fights in them (and sometimes, not even then). This is a huge black mark on the game; it is the quality new story content that draws us in, but the vast amount of filler means that it ends up spaced out. Worse, it weakens the story very significantly; half of the game (chapters 5-7, 10 – 12, and 15-18) are all done under very significant time pressure, but each of these three sequences includes not one but *two* filler chapters, where you basically go through a “dungeon” that is just a bunch of corridors or pseudo-corridors. None of these are interesting, and they just bog down the progress of the game while robbing it of the sense of urgency that the pacing of these parts so desperately need. Perhaps the saving grace is that the combat of the game is pretty reasonable; while the normal encounters are mostly pretty easy, the game has a few sub-boss type enemies that help mix things up. Moreover, the actual bosses are made much more interesting by the new combat mechanics, and the game is significantly more difficult than the original JRPG – it is not an overly difficult game by any means but the combat is at least interesting. Overall, I think this game averages out to decent-to-good, but the really good parts are separated by padding.
Gorogoa is one of those bite-sized games. Less than two hours long, this game is quite short, but it is a solid little puzzle game that involves a lot of lateral thinking. The core of the gameplay is quite simple – you have somewhere in the realm of 1-4 tiles on screen at any given time. They are arranged in a 2x2 grid that you can rearrange at will by clicking and dragging. You can zoom in on certain spots in tiles by clicking on certain designated locations, you can move around in the tiles by clicking little arrow buttons in them, you can zoom out by clicking a – button… and, well, you can move them. This seems like a very limited set of interactions, and while in one sense it is, the game is very clever in how it uses them. Trickery like putting one tile on top of another when the front tile has a “hole” in it in the appropriate location allowing a character to move from one tile to another, or combining two tiles into one, is a common trick. So is zooming in on something and being able to drag the “frame” off of the object, revealing a scene beneath. In this way, tiles can be added and subtracted, and the game uses other tricks, like aligning tiles next to each other so that things can walk or travel from one to the next, or to have something become a continuous lever or shelf, resulting in you being able to displace objects. There’s all sorts of clever things that the game throws at you, and the puzzles, despite their simplicity, do actually require some amount of lateral thinking, as your options are so limited you must be able to figure out SOMETHING – but it can take you a bit to get the key insight as to what you must do next. For all that I liked it, however, it is a bit of a shallow game – the story itself isn’t particularly interesting and while it is attractive enough (and has some interesting tricksd up its sleeve), it is still an indie game. And while I wouldn’t want it to be any longer – south of two hours is about all you’re going to get out of these mechanics without getting overly repetitive – it is still a very short game, so if it bothers you that it is less than two hours of gameplay for $5 on sale, you might think twice. Still, I thought it was alright, and enjoyed it well enough. It made me feel clever for solving some of the puzzles, but at the same time, it’s not exactly a “blow me down” level of quality – if you never play it, in the end, I don’t think your life will be poorer for it, but if you like puzzle games, this is worth a shot.
Final Fantasy VII Remake is a game of highs and lows. An action RPG which is a “remake” of the original Final Fantasy VII, interestingly, not only is it a genre shift from the first game, but the story itself diverges – and the divergence of the story is a major plot point. It expands on the Midgar section of the original game, a section of the game that took about 8 hours to beat, and turns it into a 40-60 hour long game, all while engaging in a few meta plot twists to keep players familiar with the game guessing how much things will change. Unfortunately, this is the heart of the problem of the game: they didn’t know what to expand on, so they expanded on EVERYTHING, even making up a few new sequences. This makes the good parts even bigger and even better, and results in a few new sequences (like a sequence with the Avalanche sidekicks, who were largely a side note in the original game) which really worked well, and added significant characterization – but the game also expanded on the bad parts, resulting in what were previously brief inter-area travel sequences or mini-dungeons becoming two hours long (or longer!) of endless corridors, and some added dungeons that weren’t even in the original game which added nothing to the game but length. At its best, it strikes an excellent balance between characterization and humor that was common in 1990s JRPGs, then sort of faded from view. At its worst, it is hours of slogging down corridors and fighting monsters that aren’t very challenging to fight, over and over again. The best part of this game is the improvements in characterization. Every single character is more interesting, including the random background Avalanche characters, the Shinra characters, and even the random side characters in the Wall Market. Barret in particular ends up with a sort of almost preacher-esque character, which is really fun to see – doubly so because for all of his bravado and being so big and bad, he’s clearly got issues underneath and is putting on a bit of a show. Tifa’s insecurity comes through much more strongly than it did in the original game, and Cloud ends up with significantly more characterization, being both uncertain and putting on a show of being a badass SOLDIER. Aerith’s personality, too, shines through, with her playful mischief being a major highlight – at least, until she ends up becoming the Cetra Waif, which makes her much less interesting and more subdued (and generic). This goes down to the background Avalanche members, who get a lot more characterization, and thus build more of a connection with the player, as well as the random people in Wall Market, including some new characters, including the sadistic masseuse Madam M, a bit character whose interactions with Cloud are absolutely hilarious. The introductory sequence, the added characterization for Avalanche members (including a whole chapter that is totally devoted to them), the Aerith meeting all the way through Wall Market, the battle up the pillar to try and defend Sector 7, going up the Shinra building, and the battles at the top of the tower – all of these sequences are improved over the original, and add new context and characterization. Unfortunately, this is a game with 18 chapters, and in the end, chapters 3, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, and 17 all contain very significant padding – meaning that over half the chapters in the game contain significant filler content. Worse, chapters 5, 6, 10, 11, 15, and 17 are basically entirely filler, with the only significant events occurring with the boss fights in them (and sometimes, not even then). This is a huge black mark on the game; it is the quality new story content that draws us in, but the vast amount of filler means that it ends up spaced out. Worse, it weakens the story very significantly; half of the game (chapters 5-7, 10 – 12, and 15-18) are all done under very significant time pressure, but each of these three sequences includes not one but *two* filler chapters, where you basically go through a “dungeon” that is just a bunch of corridors or pseudo-corridors. None of these are interesting, and they just bog down the progress of the game while robbing it of the sense of urgency that the pacing of these parts so desperately need. Perhaps the saving grace is that the combat of the game is pretty reasonable; while the normal encounters are mostly pretty easy, the game has a few sub-boss type enemies that help mix things up and provide more of a challenge. Still, overall, the game feels bloated. It's an improvement over the original overall, but sacrifices pacing in a very real way. Overall, it's worth playing if you are a FF7 fan, or are really into action RPGs, but if you aren't a huge fan of those kinds of games, this isn't something you need to go out of your way to experience.
Guild of Dungeoneering is a mediocre dungeon-delving cardgame. It is similar to games like Shatter the Spire and the like in that as you go through a dungeon, you improve your character’s abilities by getting better cards in your deck as well as improving their base stats by levelling. The “twist”, as it might be called, is that your cards are based on the equipment you get, with each piece of equipment levelling up one kind of card, giving you better cards of that type. Mechanically, you have limited control over your “dungeoneer”; when you go into the dungeon, you don’t actually directly control them. Instead, you get a hand of five cards, which can include dungeon passages (with 1-4 entrances), monsters, or treasure, which is worth points at the end of the dungeon. Each dungeon has some objective, and your goal is to complete it by levelling up your dungeoneer by having them fight monsters. Your dungeoneer will tend to seek out monsters, especially monsters of their level, as well as gold, so you basically manipulate your dungeoneer into going the right way and fighting the enemies to level. The actual fights are a card game – you draw 3 cards, and see what card your opponent drew. Each card can deal damage (either physical or magical), block damage (either physical, magical, or both), heal you, draw you cards, or apply some benefit or drawback (like setting your opponent on fire to deal ongoing damage, or making it so you can’t die temporarily). Each turn you draw a card and play a card from your hand – hopefully one that stacks up well against whatever your opponent played. In addition to all of this, there are various static abilities – some tied to adventurers, some tied to particular pieces of equipment – which can boost you in various ways. One might cause you to deal bonus damage if you take 3+ damage on a turn; another might cause you to make it so that if you would take a single point of damage on your turn, you instead take zero, but yielding no protection against higher damage moves. Unfortunately, the game’s primary flaw is pretty simple: it just isn’t all that fun. The card game is ultimately quite simple, and it is mostly dependent on what kind of adventurer you’re using. Higher ranked adventurers are better than lower ranked ones, and your levels reset every time you enter a dungeon, but in the end, the game ends up evolving very little; you are playing a very similar game throughout its length, which means that it gets old pretty fast. Worse, the game is fairly RNG dependent in some dungeons, ironically mostly because of the dungeon tile mechanic, which can cause you to not draw the right tiles fast enough and lose because you run out of time. The attempted cutesiness of the bard narrator doesn’t manage to make the game any better, and some of the rhymes are outright painful (though maybe in a good way). In the end, it’s just hard to recommend this game. The problem is really just that the core gameplay isn’t interesting or varied enough, making it so that you’ll be bored well before the end of the game.
Wingspan is a digital adaptation of the eponymous boardgame Wingspan. Like many such games, it is an exact 1:1 replication of the game, and contains all of the contents of the base game, while automating the game rules. Wingspan is a pretty simple game. There are three major resources: • Bird cards – these are drawn from a deck. Each has a different bird on it, with its own name, point value, ability, nest type, and number of egg slots. Birds that you play are worth victory points, but they are worth nothing in your hand! • Food – in the form of berries, fish, grain, grubs, and mice. You have to spend this to play bird cards. • Eggs – these are placed on individual birds, with each bird having up to its egg slots worth of eggs. These are used to play birds later in the game, and are also worth 1 victory point each. Each player has a playmat composed of three areas, each of which has space for five birds: • A forest – This area allows the player to get food from the “birdfeeder”, a set of five dice which are rolled, with each face showing one of the food resources (one face shows a grub and a grain, allowing the player to choose between these resources – making these resources the easiest to get) • A field – This area allows the player to lay eggs on their birds. • A wetland – This area allows the player to draw cards, either from three face up cards or from the deck of cards. On each of their turns, the player gets one action. They can either choose to play a bird card (paying all costs associated with it) or to activate an area’s ability. The more birds you have in an area, the more resources you get from using that area’s ability; likewise, a lot of the birds have abilities that are activated when you use the area that they are presently located in. The entire game is broken up into four rounds, with each player getting 8, 7, 6, and 5 turns in each round respectively; at the end of each round, players are ranked against each other in competition for some goal (like having birds in a certain area, or having eggs in a certain area or a certain type of nest), with the player who has the most getting the most points. At the end of the game, a player’s score comes from five sources: • The point values on their bird cards • The number of eggs they have across all birds they have • Points based on the four round goals • Bonus points based on a card they’re given at the start of the game with some random objective on it (like getting such and such many birds with place names in the card name, or having a certain number of birds that eat a certain type of food); it is possible to gain additional cards like this from certain bird abilities • Some bird abilities directly give victory points in other ways Your goal is to score the most points. Most of the strategy of the game lies in collecting resources to play birds that allow you to gather even more resources, making it even easier to play more birds, and then at the end of the game transitioning over to doing high-scoring plays. While the game is pretty straightforward, the individual card abilities on the various birds allow for a surprising amount of strategy and optimization; figuring out the right order of doing things, working with the cards you manage to get on the fly, figuring out how to apportion your resources between various goals, and doing all this whilst trying to fulfill various other point goals makes for a very interesting game that has a lot of working parts. While it isn’t a particularly interactive game, there are some cards that have positive influences on other players, such as everyone drawing a card or getting a food resource or laying an egg on certain kinds of nests; in addition, there are “pink” bird abilities that have reactive abilities, giving you, say, a vulture with an ability that gives you food if another player has a “predator” bird “hunt” successfully with their ability, or a parasitic bird (like a cuckoo) that lays eggs in the nests of other birds (in your own habitats, not theirs) when another player uses the Lay Eggs ability associated with the field. Overall, the game is quite fun, and you can play it both against other players locally or online, as well as against the AI. There’s a couple dozen achievements for various random things you can do in the game, all of which are bird puns, and thinking about and trying to optimize your gameplay is quite enjoyable. All that being said, it is still a board game at its heart, so it can get a bit old after a while, especially as the games aren’t particularly short (a game against AI players can last 40 minutes, and against real players more than twice that), so playing too much of it all at once can cause it to wear thin. Still, I enjoyed this game for the amount I played it, and will likely revisit it if a friend wants to play it together sometime.
Ori and the Will of the Wisps is a beautiful 2D Metroidvania. A direct sequel to Ori and the Blind Forest, it follows on from the plot of the first game. In the introduction to the game, Ori and his little family help to raise Ku the owl. She is an adorable little thing, but has a bum wing and so has a hard time flying. Fortunately, you figure out that you can use one of her mom’s feathers (an item from the first game) on her wing as a sort of prosthesis, and she can fly after a fashion. Naturally, this cuteness can only last so long, and it isn’t long before Ori and Ku fly into a horrible storm over a nasty, shadowy forest. You get separated from Ku, and it is up to Ori to venture into this scary new world to rescue his friend/daughter. Visually, this game is pretty spectacular; it makes excellent use of light and dark, the enemies are menacing but have a certain glowy aesthetic appeal to them, while the various allied creatures are cute or cool looking. Everything in this game looks really good. On top of that, the game works quite well at pulling at your heartstrings. Not only are characters emotive, with Ori holding and hugging Ku, and sometimes getting hugs back, but the world has problems and the game does a good job of making you want to protect the people in it from them. The darkness is forboding, and bad things are happening to good people who are helping you out – or just trying to survive. As such, the game does a really good job of making you feel bad for the characters, and while it doesn’t always hit, it generally does, even if it ends up making the game a bit predictable at times. Still, these developments work well, and we do feel bad for various characters – even the villains at times, as we understand the origin of their dark feelings. If I had a quibble with the aesthetic half of the game, it is that the narrator is a bit of a weak point. The game probably would have been more powerful if it hadn’t had one, and while there IS a plot-related reason for their existence, I’m not sure that the payoff from it was ultimately worth the exposition. The gameplay, too, is really good. Ori’s movements are really fluid, and his command set is quite solid – you eventually gain the ability to double and triple jump, air dash, “bash” (launching yourself off of enemies or projectiles in mid-air, which will also send the enemy/projectile flying in the opposite direction, making it useful both offensively and for mobility), float (which isn’t actually that useful by the time you get it, but still appreciated), climb up walls and walljump, and generally get all the abilities you’d expect to. But what makes the game work well is that Ori’s movements are really smooth, and it feels good to control him – Ori is highly responsive to your commands, and easy to control and get to do what you want him to do. There are a number of interesting environments to go through, with a variety of mechanics; these include not only interesting platforming puzzles, but things like darkness that closes in around you and which requires you to dash from light to light, or icy areas that you need to thaw out by manipulating projectiles and getting them to the right location. There are even some very interesting timed segments, where you are trying to escape from some big horrible monster, or a catastrophe like an avalanche or flood, and have to keep moving as the environment disintegrates around you. These are really cool, and end up taking up the space of most of the boss fights in the game – they actively test your platforming skills, and are long enough to be exciting and present at least some challenge while short enough not to be obnoxiously long. This extends to some “spirit races” as well, where you race a ghostly spirit to some destination for a reward. Ori also does something else important – it actually has good pacing. Many Metroidvanias are a bit lame at the start of the game, but Ori manages to engage the audience with an unfamiliar landscape, excellent visuals while carrying around only a torch as a weapon, and getting the player some extra movement abilities early enough to avoid feeling stale. The game’s only real weakness is the combat, but it is a rather significant one. Ori’s own abilities are actually pretty cool – he has quite a variety of combat powers, and there’s even a “shard system” that allows you to modify them. The problem is, the game fails to make interesting use of them. Almost every enemy can be beaten with your basic attack, the few who can’t can be beaten with a hammer smash ability you buy, and… that’s about it. It doesn't help that the game is sparse on bosses as well, and the few that exist are pretty simple. Overall, Ori 2 is a very good game, and one well worth playing if you like Metroidvanias or enjoy the aesthetics of the promo videos.
Outer Wilds is a puzzle/adventure game. You play as an unnamed alien of the Hearthean race, a race of four-eyed, blue-skinned aliens who live on the Timber Hearth, a planet in a small little solar system full of strange planets. You are an astronaut – the fifth of your kind to go to space – and after speaking to a handful of your people on your home planet and doing some basic training to get used to the controls, you get the launch codes to your spaceship and head off into space. Well, for twenty two minutes, anyway. As you quickly discover, this game is a time loop. Your goal – such as it is – is to figure out what is causing the time loop and how to fix the problem you’re facing at the end of it, if such a thing is even possible. While a game like this might seem like something where you’d find items and use them to solve problems, there’s surprisingly little of that – there are some carryable items, but they cannot be carried between loops at all, and are almost always simply used on something nearby to reveal some text or other puzzle clues. The only things you have are the tools you got at the start of the game – a device that shoots probes that can take pictures, and a signal detection device. It turns out, this is enough. Because literally everything resets every loop, the only thing you can actually bring back in time is information. Fortunately, not only does this work well with the game’s sort of cerebral nature, but the game itself gives you tools for tracking the information you have in the form of your ship’s log, which both stores information by location (planet or moon or what have you) but also by connection – various things you find connect to other things, and it shows you lines heading off to unknown things you haven’t discovered yet. Fortunately, it also lets you know whether or not you’ve missed anything in areas you have explored, which helps to avert frustration. Because of the game’s 22 minute time limit per loop, none of the puzzles can be overly difficult mechanically – almost all of them are things that can be done in under a minute, if you know what you’re actually *supposed* to do. However, figuring out the whole puzzle of the game might take you until the end – even though the entire game can technically be solved in about ten minutes if you know what you’re doing. The game does a pretty good job of chaining together a variety of things and giving you a bunch of hints that lead you on to new areas and new puzzles. The puzzles tend to be environmental in nature, and you get plenty of hints (and sometimes, outright statements about how to solve them), though some are a bit more obscure and require more thought on the player’s part. Because every time you die or reach the end of the time loop the world resets, many things in the game are based around timing – one planet gets covered with sand while another gets denuded of it, for instance, which creates puzzles based on when various things get uncovered/covered up. Another planet is gradually crumbling, which can either allow or deny access based on how much it has fallen apart. Unfortunately, these puzzles, while cool in some ways, are also some of the most frustrating – because if you screw them up, you have no choice but to reset the loop, and if it is a puzzle that occurs near the end of the loop, you’re going to have to wait for the whole loop to go by to retry it. There are also some large underground areas which can be something of a pain to properly explore. There were several occasions where I ran out of time before I could finish exploring an area or solving a puzzle, necessitating significant backtracking, sometimes repeatedly. This created an odd issue – experimenting was sometimes a bad thing, because if I screwed up, I’d have to start the loop over and backtrack all the way back over to where I’d died. This created a weird situation where the time loop made me NOT want to take risks, as resetting the loop would necessitate me spend time jumping through the same hoops over again to get back. Indeed, for all that the game was a “puzzle game”, I honestly didn’t find myself enjoying the actual puzzles all that much. What really drew me in was the whole exploration and discovery aspect of the game - going around, seeing new places, and figuring out the plot and what was going on. The actual puzzles often were just flat-out explained to you by other hints, and some of the ones that weren't felt like they went a bit too far in the opposite direction. Overall, I thought this was a pretty neat game – trying to figure out what was going on was neat, and the game left some fun red herrings to mislead me into thinking that the end of the game was going to be very different from what it actually was. One bit of advice - avoid spoilers.
Framed is a puzzle game that centers around rearranging animated comic book panels to get a character from the start of the page to the end without getting in trouble. This collection includes both the first Framed game as well as Framed 2, which is related to the first game and includes some of the same characters. In both games, the protagonists of the game are criminals, or perhaps spies, who are on the run from the police; their goal is to navigate their way through the world, often while carrying around a briefcase or envelope containing something important. Each of the two games forms a single continuous story. As you go through the game, a few new mechanics are introduced; while it starts out as simply rearranging the panels, some of the later levels include rotating panels (sometimes which are two panels long, resulting in a change to the comic book layout that also needs to be taken into account) and reusing the same panels multiple times after a delay (allowing you to change each scene multiple times – for instance, having someone go by, knock out a guard, and then come back from a different direction within the panel to go through the panel a way that previously would have gotten them arrested). Each page includes some “fixed” panels (typically the one at the start and the very end, though this varies by page) and some that you can move around. This forces you to set things up to suit particular needs. A key part of the game is that many of the panels can be entered from multiple directions or be recontextualized depending on what happened in previous panels; for instance, you might be able to don a disguise by going through the right panel, allowing you to bypass a guard, or you might be walking along the higher path rather than a lower one, allowing you to not have to go the way that the guard is looking. Playing around with the order of events is what makes this game work, and while the mechanics are simple, the game manages to do a number of clever things in order to mix things up. Things from disguises to activating power switches to running along conveyor belts, even fight scenes, can all be rendered in this way, and there twists on even higher levels of rearrangement that can recontextualize what has been going on. These games are simple, but clever, which extends to the art style, which is simplistic but still looks really great. The whole thing flows really well, and presents a number of interesting challenges. There are only two real caveats. The first is that the game is very short; both games, combined, take maybe three or four hours to beat. While getting some achievements might extend this, you’re not likely to see it take more than five hours all told. Secondly, even at the very short length of these games, they do end up getting a little bit repetitive at times; there are only a very small number of mechanics, and while they do remix them in interesting ways, they still do feel like they kind of end up repeating some puzzles in some ways. All in all, though, this is a pretty cool game, and if you are interested in puzzle games and it sounds cool to you, you’ll probably like it. That said, it won't knock your socks off; it is pretty simple overall, so it is merely good, not great.
Return of the Obra Dinn is a retro-styled puzzle-mystery game. You play as an insurance adjuster, going onto a ghost ship and trying to figure out what happened to everyone on board. Along with your job assignment, you are given two tools: a journal and an ominous looking pocket watch with a skull on its face. The game has a striking visual theme – it is entirely in black and white, and is designed to look “old”, and yet it is very obvious that the 3D models in it are of much more modern vintage. The “retro” deliberately obscures some details – like color – and makes the entire game look like old 19th century drawings found in books – examples of which appear inside your journal. The journal serves as the player’s guide through the game. It has a complete list of all 60 members of the crew, along with some drawings that depict the crew in various scenes. Each crew member or passenger’s face appears once in these drawings (with a couple deliberate exceptions), but there is no connection between the images and the names. The goal of the game is to figure out who each of the people were, connecting the names to the images, and determine the ultimate fate of everyone onboard the Obra Dinn during its final voyage. The pocket watch is the central conceit of the game – when you approach a corpse, you can activate the pocket watch to be brought to the moment of that corpse’s death. This allows you to hear what was going on in the lead up to the death, and see (in a still image) what is going on when they die, and try to make inferences about how they died, who or what killed them (if anything), and who they actually were. As the game progresses, you fill in a series of sequential events in the journal, split up into ten chapters. Each pair of pages corresponds to a single scene viewed through the watch. In some cases, some people “disappear” from the story after a certain chapter, and you have to figure out why – what happened to them? Did they leave the ship in some way? Fall overboard? Die in such a way that they left no corpse on board? Early on, this is pretty simple – people will say their names or positions, or cry out at each other. But as the game goes on, things get increasingly difficult. Some people are only referred to by name in other scenes. Sometimes, someone will be injured, then die some time later, requiring the player to find the scene where they were originally wounded. Sometimes, people are injured, but pull through and recover, causing them to reappear in later scenes. After viewing nine of the chapters, you are invited to leave the Obra Dinn. But at this point, there’s a good chance you’ll have filled in only about half the names on your list, maybe less. At this point, you have to start getting increasingly clever – many people are never actually named or ranked even once in the entire game, requiring you to infer their identity from their uniform or attire, their accent (the nationality of each of the crew members is noted in the crew list), who they spend their time interacting with (for instance, the captain and mates have stewards, while people like the surgeon and carpenter have mates who serve as a helper), and various other things. This is a game about taking in all sorts of details, and making educated guesses and inferences based on information. Oftentimes, seemingly inconsequential details will actually give away someone’s identity, and various aspects of the journal itself can even give hints. The game does a very good job of getting the player all the information they need, but doing so subtly; exploring these scenes is rewarded, as is noticing various things going on in the background, listening to voices and accents, and looking at what people are doing and who they hang out with to try and figure out what their jobs might be. By the end of the game, you will likely be feeling quite smart for having figured it all out – and because the game does play fair, it is possible to figure everything out, often in a couple different ways. The game also assists you by “locking in” correct guesses, but only in sets of three – that is to say, if you correctly identify three people’s names, visual identity, and cause of death (including who/what killed them, if anything), the scribbled in information is replaced by typeset information, allowing you to gradually whittle down your list of unknown people with confidence. That's not to say that the game is perfect - going back through memories at the end of the game is kind of a pain due to lack of fast travel between them, the audio associated with a memory can only be replayed by exiting and re-entering it, and the plot is servicable, not amazing. But it is still a good game, and one I'd recommend to anyone who likes feeling clever for noticing minor details and making inferences.
Clocking in at about 11 hours and 30 minutes to beat, this sounds like a fairly substantial DLC. However, in reality, half that time is 90% a repeat of the end of the original Kingdom Hearts, with a few extra scenes thrown in, that you have to play through AGAIN. It is very tedious. There is not much in the way of new content here, particularly in terms of gameplay; the little new gameplay that is present is mostly just a rehash of what you’ve done before, though there are a couple new bosses. The game also tries to show off the rest of the keyblade masters who were with you, having them fight a bunch of Xehanort clones while Sora was battling with Master Xehanort. Unfortunately, while this is the most significant new content, it is also pretty bad; the mass battle is extremely simplistic and, while flashy, is not particularly interesting it terms of gameplay. Playing as Mickey, which should have been a highlight, is literally just a quick time event, and while I appreciated the chance to play as Mickey, this wasn’t the chance I was hoping for, as it wasn’t very good either. Once you’ve fought your way through everything, the ending plays again, and is only barely different. As the end of the game wasn’t great the first time, playing through it a second time (and in some ways, a THIRD time, as part of it was a repeat from the part that actually repeats in the MAIN GAME due to time travel shenanigans) was even worse. The only good part of this was that the hidden motivations of a couple characters were shown off a bit more – but in the end, this wasn’t worth the tedium, and some of the “hidden motivations” weren’t really that hidden to begin with and just took up time. After you’ve beaten the game AGAIN, the rest of the play time is fighting your way through 14 post-game bosses, 12 of which are, in theory, repeats. In reality, these boss fights are basically new; while they do draw a little on the main game, the way that these fights play out is wildly different. These fights are designed to be hard and actually challenge your skill at the game, and they succeed at this; even at level 99, these fights will often kill you repeatedly. About a third could be beaten on the first attempt, and a few more in the first couple tries, but a number were quite hard, with three taking an hour or more each. Two of the fights – Xion and the secret final boss – are entirely new, and not represented anywhere else in the game. These are also the two hardest fights, and were, in a sense, the most fun – though unfortunately, they were also the most frustrating, as they showed off some of the weaknesses of the combat system, like the item animations being interruptible and the fact that, once in the air, you only get one dodge, which means that it can be easy for enemies to combo you, making you feel helpless. On the other hand, they do actually require you to master the game a bit, which is in sharp contrast to the entirety of the main story of the game. Overall, all 14 of these fights are the best 14 fights in the entire game – they actually add mechanics to make each fight mechanically interesting, rather than the mostly boring fights with the keyblade wielders in the main campaign. All of them show off the various characters’ special powers, and the enemies feel distinct from each other in their attack patterns and the challenge they represent. But it just isn’t worth it. Playing through the entirety of KH3 is bad enough, but fighting through the end of that game AGAIN is just tedious. And for that, you get 14 boss fights which are fun for people like me who enjoy hard games like Cuphead, but which many players will likely not be able to beat due to the high challenge level presented – and given how easy Kingdom Hearts 3 is, the game does a very poor job of preparing people for these bosses, and they may alienate players who find the main game to be of a more reasonable difficult. I can’t really recommend this to anyone. People who are actual hardcore players will hate Kingdom Hearts 3 for how easy it is, making this DLC a moot point, and even people who played through KH3 will find it tedious and boring, and may find the bosses too hard.
It Takes Two is a co-op 3D puzzle-platformer game with a great variety of gameplay over the 14 or so hours it takes to complete it. You play as one of two members of a married couple who are getting a divorce, but a magical book of love intervenes, trying to force the two back together. As such, the entire game revolves around cooperative problem solving in a fantastical shrunken-down environment. The core cooperative gameplay of this game is quite decent. It is a 3D puzzle platformer at its core, with the main goal being to overcome various challenges to reach a destination, rather than exploration. The game is entirely linear, but it takes the player through a wide variety of environments, and does a good job of mixing things up. The main “gimmick” of the game is that you gain powers in each area of the game. In one area, one player might have a nail, and another a hammer head; this can be used to both nail stuff down, as well as to swing around from the nails using the hammer for the purposes of traversal. In another area, the characters are given silly guns by squirrels to go fight wasps, with one shooting globs of sap and the other being able to light them on fire and make them explode. Still later, you gain powers like the ability to shrink or grow, or walk on walls, or various other things. All of these are used to solve various environmental puzzles, usually revolving around traversal, but sometimes trying to make things line up or break something or accomplish some other task. These tasks vary considerably, and the game avoids repeating too much by changing up the gameplay not just between levels, but oftentimes within levels as well. This is a game that is afraid of the audience getting bored, and it generally does a good job of avoiding it; while a couple levels do linger a bit too long, generally speaking, it does keep things fresh. The fact that the players must work together constantly works really well; this isn’t a game where one player can just solve everything, both players have to work together to get stuff done. It’s a great coop game, and can be played both online and side by side. Interestingly, regardless of which way you play it, it is always played in split screen mode – the reason being that it is often necessary to see what your partner is doing, and often helpful for helping each other figure things out. Best of all, you don’t even both have to own the game to play it! Only one player actually needs to buy the game; the other player can join in via the friend’s pass version of the game, which makes it pretty ideal for sharing it with another person. If there is a complaint about the core gameplay, it is that while it mixes things up a fair bit, it is never really THAT great. It is always decent to good, but it never really reaches the point of greatness. On the flipside, however, the plot and story are rather weak. The protagonists actually have a good reason to split up, but their daughter doesn’t understand what is going on and is upset by it. The book is basically a product of their daughter’s distress, but unfortunately, it ends up not working out very well story-wise, as while the problems the characters have are brought up, they are never actually addressed. This is a huge lost opportunity, as while each area is supposedly addressing some sort of issue they have, none of these areas actually address the issue – playing inside a cuckoo clock is a cute way to represent that they never have enough time for each other or for doing the things they want to do, but the actual story never actually presents any sort of solution for the fact that one of the characters is working too much to spend any time with the family, while the other resents the lack of time they have with them (and frankly, does a rather poor job of being a house-husband). The problem is that the game sort of acts like there is some sort of progress here, even though none of it makes much sense as a means of actually overcoming their real issues with each other. I would have liked for the game to either resolve the issues in some way, or at least present a potential solution, or else have the characters be like “None of this has anything to do with actually solving our problems!” and have it all end with them being like “Nope, we’re getting divorced anyway.” The ending of the game isn’t particularly good or earned, and while it is a bit ambiguous, it’s not all that great. In all fairness to the writing, though, while the overall plot is lousy, the actual dialogue and situations are often amusing, and there are definitely some funny lines. Still, this is not a game to be played for its story.
Kingdom Hearts 7 is a game that pretends to be Kingdom Hearts 3, the sequel to Kingdom Hearts 2. Instead, it is actually a sequel to ALL of the Kingdom Hearts games, including both the handheld games and the mobile phone gacha game. And indeed, even if we’re talking in terms of linear time, rather than being a direct sequel to Kingdom Hearts 2, there is actually another game in-between KH2 and 3 that is referenced a fair bit. ALL of the “side” handheld games are, in fact, considered mainline games, and a huge part of the plot is tied into them – heck, even the mobile game for the PHONE is an integral part of the ending of the game. if you have not played the side games, then you will be completely lost absent a plot summary. Not that the game does, either. This is not a game that does a good job of delivering its story. The plot and pacing are absolute garbage. Virtually nothing of import happens on any of the Disney worlds – they could have literally just had two show up and it would have made no difference to the overarching plot. What the worlds actually were is almost completely irrelevant, with only Hercules and Twilight Town actually having any relevance to the meta plot, and Hercules only by serving as a way to deliver an idea to Sora. The Disney worlds here are completely pointless, and while the Organization does show up, only in the Toy Story world and the Big Hero Six world does the Organization member really interact with the characters in the world and actually affect THEM in any way. Almost the entire plot is packed into the very final, non-Disney world, and it is a jumbled mess. Everyone dies, and comes back to life. There are multiple versions of the same character more than once. Characters sometimes simply vanish from the plot completely arbitrarily, or enter just as suddenly. And once it is all over, it turns out that everything was the machinations of a random person who was from the freaking mobile phone game that even if you played it, you likely didn't get to the end of because it was a horrible gacha game. So, fine, the plot is terrible. But why would you play a Kingdom Hearts game for the plot? Clearly, it is all about the gameplay! Sadly, while Kingdom Hearts was very exciting when it was one of the first action RPGs, the genre has evolved to have like, actually good gameplay – which this game is completely lacking in. You can solve most encounters by mashing attack, with the odd jump or jump-recovery mixed in, and can use your magic (well, really, your thunder or fire, because why bother with any of the other powers?) to kill enemies more rapidly. You can also use “links”, which replace your entire party with an either overpowered or nearly useless summon, which can either clear out an encounter by itself or feel really janky. And mixed in with all of this are various super moves. Some of these, like the formchanges and grand magics, are just strong, but some are team combo attacks that wipe out half of an encounter by themselves, and some – the attractions, which show up constantly – can often completely solve an encounter single-handedly. Worse still, there’s only five of them in the game, so the same ones show up *constantly*, encounter after encounter, and because of the large number of enemies and the lack of meaningful challenge, it’s often best to use them simply to make things go by faster. On top of that, the attractions completely replace the normal gameplay with the attraction gameplay, which is not only even more simplified, but is often pretty lame. The game is very easy even on proud mode, and only Critical mode is all that hard – but Critical mode makes itself hard by making it very easy to get one-shotted and simply cranking up enemy health, rather than actually making the gameplay significantly more involved and interesting. All in all, then, this is a game that feels like it was going for spectacle over substance, but the spectacle wasn’t that good. There are some neat flashy things, but they happen so frequently that you become completely dulled to it. There are supposedly significant plot events that have absolutely no actual bearing on the plot, half of the most epic moments happen in cutscenes for no apparent reason, and in the end, there are a bunch of plot threads left dangling from games I didn’t even play. It’s hard to recommend this game to anyone. It is primarily a fanservice game, trying to wrap up loose ends for the fans of the previous games, but because of the sheer number of characters combined with the very poor pacing, they are all given very cursory treatment. For newcomers, or people who only played the first two games, it is likely to be baffling. The fact that 90% of the game is irrelevant to the plot was a baffling decision that only further weakens it for both groups. And even disregarding all that, the game isn't even fun to play.
Relicta is a first person puzzle game that really wants to be Portal. Like all such games, it falls well short. But unfortunately, it doesn’t even manage to stand out particularly as its own thing. Despite its high graphical fidelity and production quality, it starts out promising but ends up falling apart about halfway through, both in terms of gameplay and story. Like all such games, it has a “core mechanic”. The core mechanic here is the ability to give blocks (and some pads that can hold charges) either a red charge or a blue charge. Opposite colored charges attract, same-colored charges repel. In addition, you can make blocks weightless, allowing them to fly through the air after having been given a push from a charge, or continuing on their momentum from a moving platform. That’s it. That’s all there is. The game is entirely centered around grabbing blocks and putting them on buttons to get rid of various force fields blocking your way, and sometimes toggling the odd switch. The force fields can either block everything, or only one thing – you, blocks, or drones. There are some platforms that you can move, along with some drones that remove all special effects on all nearby blocks and charge pads, and which can carry blocks. And… that’s all the mechanics there is. The problem is, this is a 15 hour long game, but it has fewer, and less interesting, mechanics than something like Portal 2. So how does it make the game last 15 hours? Unfortunately, the answer to that is by just making increasingly long puzzles in the back half of the game. Frequently, puzzles would either be multi-stage things, where you go through a series of mini-puzzles, or a puzzle where there was some sort of “hub” that you kept on having to solve mini-puzzles to unlock a central door. Only rarely were there big puzzles that actually felt like they integrated all the pieces. As a result, the entire second half of the game starts to end up feeling tedious rather than interesting. Some of the later game puzzles were okay, but never was there a puzzle in the game where I felt like it was particularly amazing to solve. A lot of the “harder” puzzles were harder because you couldn’t find a particular “puzzle piece”, so to speak; once you actually had the pieces in hand, what you were actually supposed to do was often fairly straightforward, if sometimes fiddly later in the game, as you had to line things up rather awkwardly to make some puzzles work, as the “snap-to” portions didn’t work in some areas due to them not sending you in quite the right direction or being aligned in the right way. The game ends up just kind of dragging on by the end, and I just wanted it to be over. Which brings up the other problem – the story. It starts out promisingly enough – there’s some sort of inciting incident with a weird purple crystal, you have a set of coworkers around and a daughter who is coming to the space station, ect. The problem is, this all ends up falling apart about halfway through the game. The central plot twist of the game isn’t very good and results in almost all of the characters you spent the first half of the game talking with never talking to you again throughout the rest of the game. As a result, the game's supporting cast dynamics end up being totally tossed out the window and not mattering at all for the rest of the game, as you end up interacting with a second, and less interesting, set of characters for the second half of the game. Indeed, if you spend any time thinking about the plot twist, it both feels unnecessarily convoluted and makes no physical sense, nor sense with the other characters in the story, who act like no time has passed at all. The loss of contact with their former colleagues gets short shrift and the story itself seems to forget about what happened to them, as the characters don’t seem to care despite supposedly being emotionally invested. Only at the very end of one of the game’s two multiple endings (which are chosen at the last minute for… some reason? I don’t even know why it has multiple endings…) does the game remember “Oh, these people existed” and actually follow up on it at all, and then only in a stinger thing that is not very satisfying (though there’s more from a title update I have yet to play). Overall, then, the game fails to deliver in terms of story, character, or gameplay. The story doesn’t even make a ton of sense in terms of characterization, and the gameplay is too simple for a game as long as Relicta is. Despite a potentially promising start, it just doesn’t hold up, and it never really does anything particularly good, let alone great.
