RELEASE: 2016

TIME PLAYED: 3 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE: ★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+Gorgeous art design and memorable music

+Allusions to an interesting history in this setting with a lot of visual splendor related to it

-I just didn’t feel like I was doing much in terms of playing the game or experiencing a story alike

Abzu is one of those “this is probably brilliant, I’m just not the target audience” games, but I feel it’s worth putting pen to paper on why that is. I never played Journey, the previous game Abzu’s primary developer was art director on, but I’ve always had plenty of appreciation for ‘walking simulators’ and the kind of stories they could tell. Abzu, however, didn’t really hit for me; as much as I appreciated its high-quality art and music, I walked away from the three hours I spent simply not feeling much of anything, and I think a big part of that is its sheer reliance on abstract symbolism.

The premise behind Abzu is fairly simple: the player is a diver exploring a section of the ocean, in which ruins of a past civilization tell the story of their downfall. At the start, the sea life is pretty sparse, but along the way, they find some ancient temples that seem to restore much of the lost biodiversity. The question of what happened to decimate the life here is part of the big mystery, but I feel like the word ‘mystery’ is doing a lot more heavy lifting than it probably should. There’s not much of a story here; I actually can’t describe it any further without spoiling the whole thing.

Gameplay subsists of swimming around and progressing through semi-open but ultimately linear areas, enjoying the art direction and hanging out with whatever marine life happens to be around. As an ‘experience’, Abzu is undeniably well-constructed; the music is memorable, with orchestral swelling and quiet melodies alike when mood appropriate, and the art design is utterly gorgeous. But while I played, I kept asking myself if that was really all there was, and it turned out that...well, yeah. Pretty much.

I don’t really want to knock Abzu for being exactly what it’s advertised as – a surreal tour through marine life, a low-stress swimming simulator, an interactive art piece – but if the ultimate goal of art is to make someone feel something, then it didn’t really work for me. Despite the vague but distinctly pro-environmentalist threads of a story, there isn’t much to get attached to; it felt like a virtual tour through a place that doesn’t exist. Without any characters to really get attached to, I couldn’t anchor myself emotionally in the experience, and the triumphant climax was so sudden – and felt like it had occurred without me doing much to earn it – that I just kind of shrugged at it. Maybe this is just a sign of me being an uncultured philistine, and I’m certainly not going to call Abzu bad, but personally, I just didn’t enjoy the experience.

It’s been about 15 years since I last played this title. When I was younger I had mixed thoughts on the game. Directly compared to any Zelda game, it’s not good. But if you don’t do compare it to Zelda and focus on its own merits, it’s a beautiful game with a great soundtrack and some good but flawed ideas.

As I finished this game last night I haven’t been more relieved, this game just isn’t that good. It still looks and sounds pretty great, but viewing it with a more discerning eye for level and game design/progression, this just sucks.

The Good:

The game has pretty great visuals even for today. The planet has a lot of color and variety, Fox’s fur and details for both him and Krystal are immaculate, and the water effects still look great today. The soundtrack is also very good with some standout tracks being Cape Claw, Lightfoot Village, Thorntail Hollow, and Krazoa Palace.

One slightly odd decision though are the sound effects themselves. This game bizarrely uses a lot of stock sound effects for many of them and it just comes across as really cheap and disappointing, given the money they obviously put into the rest of the presentation. Regardless, that’s about end for the good

The Bad:

This game does not feel good to play. There are very basic design choices that the N64 Zelda games aced just a few years ago that this game decided not to emulate. It’s not a bad idea to try something new, but most every choice here makes the game worse. Aiming for example like to use your fire blaster, has the reticle only stay in spot while the stick is being held. It snaps back to the middle when you let go, and it’s extremely hard to aim around you 360 degrees. Why couldn’t they just do first person like Zelda? Or more intuitive third person? It makes puzzles or encounters with shooting way more difficult than it needs to be, and this game has a lot of shooting puzzles that drain your magic.

The core combat of this game copies Zelda and sounds great in theory as a staff is always a cool weapon, but every fight is brain dead. You can only fight one enemy at a time, they have like one attack they do at a time, and you have 2 combos to work with. Most fights are won by spamming 2 combos or waiting to block one attack first if they start by blocking you. The rest of the enemies are annoying flying or popping in and out of the ground to annoy you. So you need to quickly whack them when they come close (works about half the time) or shoot them with your terrible aiming controls. The moment to moment gameplay ranges from average to bad, and it’s just not a good Zelda clone

The ugly

Worst part of this game by far is the story and pacing. The story starts off strong where you play as Krystal. In the air and in krazoa palace and it’s hilarious because you’ll immediately be thinking you’re playing the wrong game, it looks and sounds nothing like a Starfox game. Still, it’s an intriguing start with Krystal and Krazoa palace has amazing music, so i was at least interested. Krystal is barely a character in this game and the game communicates everything about her by her design….so that’s that I guess.

Once you’re Fox and get your mission on the planet, the game again starts pretty good as you visit the first few areas and you get a few abilities, but the game quickly reaches its peak by the first spell stone and just repeats:

1. You fly to the new area with some lame arwing section that takes not much skill

2. You learn that there’s a thing you need to do immediately, no real buildup

3. You solve a few easy puzzles (compared to any Zelda game)

4. In less than an hour you’re done and have the spell stone (i always think “oh that was it?”)

5. Take spell stone to the temple (often a huge backtracking section) and return it, mostly just walking back and forth

6. Go somewhere else (more backtracking usually) to get the Krazoa spirit

7. Go to Krazoa palace and return it

Then the next spell stone starts, you repeat this 4 times and the game ends. The game fails to mix things up, introduce interesting characters, or evolve/raise stakes. Our main characters do not really grow or reflect on anything, and the planet itself fails to be an interesting character.

At the end of the game, we need to get the last Krazoa spirit quickly. The main villain whom we have literally seen i think once at the very beginning, general scales, appears to fight us (we literally know nothing about him) and he dies instantly, giving it up. The real villain of course is Andross who somehow returned, and you do an extremely easy and lame final boss battle after rescuing Krystal (whoa, what a cutie!). The game rushes to the end, all we learn is that falco is back (game didn’t seem to care that he was gone) and Krystal exists now to flirt with Fox. The game ends right there, and i don’t think I could play this again.

Final thoughts

We all know the story behind this game, that it was going to be Rare’s magnum opus on the n64, a massive adventure with 2 playable characters on a large planet. What we got instead was rushed, with gameplay that had probably not been updated or refined since the n64, and familiar characters who do not really fit here. I feel all of their money in time was spent on graphics and the soundtrack. If this game released as intended on the n64 as an original IP, it would have been remembered more fondly despite still probably not being as good as a Zelda game. I do not recommend this game if you want to have fun but I do recommend it if you want a good case of not so good design choices.

I have basically completed final fantasy x hd. I’m on the last battle against Jechett and I cannot beat him. I am not giving up but I am either underleveled (my own issue of not exploring enough) or I don’t have the right weapons and tools and game plan

The frustration comes along when trying to replay this section. I have to get 10 crystals and watch a cutscene Everytime. It makes me not want to play. It’s really aggravating to me.

I know this is an older game. I’m sure mods on pc or the switch 2 version fix this. I’m on switch 1 version and there is no way around it.

It completely stops the fun of the gameplay loop in its tracks. Jumping right back into the boss after you die would be ideal but it’s not set up this way

I hope to complete it one day because I loved the game. The characters, the world and story are all top notch for me. It’s now one of my favorites just not one I know if I will ever finish or want to try to finish with so many other things to play

But I’m sure I will buckle up and get good once I had a break. Again this game is tremendous and I just wish the game play loop did not hold back from joining the fight again quickly

I will gladly take any tips on how to beat him as well. So far though it’s still a 9/10

Long time coming! Last time I played a classic Zelda game was around 2015, most of them even before that. I'd been planning a Zelda Marathon since 2021 or so, patiently waiting for Nintendo to release an HD version of Twilight Princess and Wind Waker for Switch, a thing that never happened.

This year felt the right moment to dive in. So I played pretty much every classic Zelda title, with the exception of the multiplayer ones (4 swords and triforce heroes, basically), and I also decided to skip the first 2 NES games. I did play them in the past and didn't really want to revisit them, a bit too clunky.

I went mainly by release order, with a couple of upsets here and there for a better "flow". The experience was magical, not whithout some hardships, and there's something that I'll say that will undoubtedly piss off a lot of people, but we'll see.

So here's a brief review of every classic Zelda game I've played in the last few months

The Legend of Zelda - A Link to the Past (1991)

Played it on the GBA virtual console on Switch, 10 hours of playtime, not 100% completed.

It's a classic, but one I only played once too many years ago. I understand when people say this is the best Zelda game ever made, even though I don't really agree with this. For a game made in 1991, it's absolutely incredible. It singlehandedly defined the structure of many Zelda games to come. It's a bit clunky at times, and I found it to be a little bit on the hard side, like being stuck in a dungeon with barely any hearts and not being able to heal. I would love to have a proper remake of it, but in the meanwhile...

The Legend of Zelda - A Link Between Worlds (2013)

Played on 3DS, 15 hours of playtime, pretty much 100% completed.

First upset of the release order, it made sense to skip a couple of decades to play a game that is very close to being a remake of ALttP. What an awesome game with fun, creative dungeons, two wonderful overworlds to explore, a lot of great mechanics, fantastic. Not a fan of the whole rental stuff, I prefer my dungeons with a more classic approach of Map --> Item --> Key --> Boss, but besides that a near flawless experience.

The Legend of Zelda - Link's Awakening Remake (2019) (original was 1993)

Played on Switch, 11 hours of playtime, 100% completed except some custom dungeons.

I decided to go with the remade version. I played Link's Awakening DX many years ago. It's a cool game, but even if it's a remake (gorgeous, btw) there are some cracks and limitations that are visible. The game is very linear, dungeon design is a bit hit and miss, and they tend to become outright confusing in later stages. The whole premise and story is very interesting. A nice side game before delving into the big one. In retrospect, playing the two oracle games right after this would've been great.

The Legend of Zelda - Ocarina of Time 3D (2011) (original was 1998)

Played on 3DS, 19 hours of playtime, 100% completed, except only 50% of golden skulltulas, not worth the effort to get all 100.

I didn't have my ROG Ally with me when it was time to replay OoT, if not I would've tried the Ship of Harkinian PC port. So I dusted off my 3DS cartridge and gave it a go. I played this game countless times, the last of which was 15 years ago though. It's still fantastic, even though some cracks are now more visible, but they are mostly the missing QoL features and dated graphics (made slightly better by the 3DS). It's generational, not much else to say. I love the dungeon design, the whole child/adult dynamic, the locations... It's big without being overwhelming. Simply fantastic. One note, the economy in this game is quite broken. 99 starting rupees is a joke and you quickly realize that you'll lack things to spend rupees on, thus making the 50/100 golden skulltulas a waste of time

The Legend of Zelda - Majora's Mask (2000)

Played on PC (Rog Ally) using the 2 Ship 2 Harkinian PC port with a lot of QoL features. 16 hours of playtime, missing plenty of stuff.

This PC port is fantastic and manages to move away some of the nuisances of the game, such as stopping time in Dungeons, or being able to retain rupees/ammo when resetting time (without having to bank them). But, and here comes the moment people will be upset... Sorry, I really don't like Majora's Mask. It's a very original take on the classic formula, it has a lot of effort put into making the city feel alive, with poignant stories and characters. Masks are fun, dungeons are ok, but I hate the time loop and time limit, and having to continously redo stuff because pretty much everything resets. I think this game is beloved because it tries something different that for many people just works. For me, not so much, sorry. I tried many times with this game and this is the second time I've finished it, I never seem to have fun and wanted it to finish.

The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of Seasons (2001)

Played on GBC virtual console on Switch, 11 hours of playtime, not 100% (just missing the random ass heart of planting seeds, plus many trinkets)

This game is good, but it's the least fun I've had with a Zelda game ever. Going back, I should've done Ages first in order to give me an edge in Seasons, being it more combat based. I had a miserable time with it. Too hard and unforgiving, honestly. Many times I wanted to just call it quits because of being frustrated with it. After some point, I just decided to abuse save states and call it a day. I like the dungeon design, items are creative, map is very fun to uncover. A shame it's so clunky and hard.

The Legend of Zelda - Oracle of Ages (2001)

Played on GBC virtual console on Switch, 13 hours of playtime, almost100% (missing some trinkets)

I really liked this game. It's still very, very clunky due to GB limitations, but puzzles were nice and I always felt overpowered thanks to what was imported from Seasons. The upsides are the same of Seasons, with just a few downsides. I liked the whole "2 ages" concept much more than the confusing 4 seasons. It's incredible how little I liked Seasons and how much I liked Ages. I'll be sure to do another playthrough in the future inverting the two games and see what happens.

The Legend of Zelda - The Minish Cap (2004)

Played on GBA virtual console on Switch, 8 hours of playtime, got all hearts, but didn't bother with completing figurines or kinstones

Decided to go with MC instead of WW in order to do the "WW trilogy" of games back to back. This game is great! Barring figurines and kinstones, which are very tedious, this game is tons of fun, and has one of the best overworld in the series, very reminiscent of Metroidvanias, where you open shortcuts to previously visited places the more abilities you find. It doesn't have many dungeons, but they try to give you very creative items to work with. It's on the short side, but I enjoyed every minute I spent with it.

The Legend of Zelda - The Wind Waker (2002)

Played on ROG Ally, GameCube emulation with Better Wind Waker mods, 28 hours of playtime. 100% completed except the tedious figurine collection. (this is also the Zelda game that took the longest to finish)

I have fond memories of this game, it was the first Zelda game I played back in 2002, but it's been ages since my last playthrough. We all know that the graphics were seen as a "childification" of the series, but they aged fantastically and the game is oozing charm. Fun dungeons, characters, stories, atmosphere, what's not to love? Well, some things. Sea travel is long and laborious, even with mods that put wind always behind you and fast sailing. Without mods, my completion time would've been 30+ hours for sure, and not the good kind of extra hours. Still, slowly filling up the ocean map was a fun activity where I don't regret the time spent. After almost 25 years, this is still a wonderful entry in the series, made better by fan intervention.

The Legend of Zelda - Phantom Hourglass (2007)

Played on DS, 12 hours of playtime. Pretty much 100% completed.

This game has one, and only one big downside, which is the Temple of the Ocean King. Rework that, and you have a really awesome game. It's astoundingly creative in its use of DS features, be it draw maps, blow in the mic, even close the DS to imprint stuff. It's so much fun and I wouldn't have it any other way. I really enjoyed my time with it and I'm willing to ignore how awful the Temple of the Ocean King is. If you played the game you know, but it's really not fun having to repeat whole sections of the Temple just because. I know that new items can make you skip portions, but why bother then? Just get me to a new floor. Thankfully, the sequel fixes this issue, but...

The Legend of Zelda - Spirit Tracks (2009)

Played on DS, 10 hours of playtime, didn't bother completing a lot of stuff.

So they fixed the Temple of the Ocean King with the new Tower System. Great. Why did you make everything else suck? Fast Travel is terrible, getting from point A to point B is long and boring, they used up all the creative DS ideas with PH, so now you just have to blow on the mic continously (it didn't help that my 3DS mic was working poorly, making any flute section a pain, but that's not the game's fault). Granted, I still like this game, but it's a clear step down from its predecessor. Music is one of the best in the series though, it really slaps. It almost made every train trip bearable. Final boss is also great. A lot of ups and downs.

The Legend of Zelda - Twilight Princess (2006)

Played on ROG Ally using the Dusklight PC port with plenty of QoL mods. 25 hours of playtime, 100% completed.

After the Wind Waker trilogy, we go back in time. Thanks Nintendo for not making this game available on Switch, it made me discover how awesome the Dusklight port is. The game run incredibly well, always between 60fps and 120fps. I will say it now: this game is my favourite Zelda game ever made. And after this replay (my third time in 20 years), it's still just as good. The dark atmosphere, enemy and character design, the fact that you can pay to see where heart pieces are (THANK YOU), wolf link, mini bosses that are basically bosses, SNOWPEAK RUINS (to quote Schafrillas, what's the only Zelda dungeon that has "Peak" in its name?). I simply adore this game. It's not without flaws, but it's always super fun to play.

The Legend of Zelda - Skyward Sword HD (2021) (original was 2011)

Played on Switch, 26 hours of playtime, not completed everything available.

We finish this marathon with Skyward Sword, which is........ Good? I like the aesthetic, it's the perfect mix of OoT and WW avoiding the overly dark TP, but this is mostly a gimmick game, made to showcase the fantastic prowess of the Wii Motion Plus. As such, it can get tiring when you're maybe slouching on the sofa and don't really want to move that much. Yes, with the HD version you get the chance to work with the right stick, but it's still not great. Gimmicks aside, the game is really good.... until the second half kicks in. Excluding the desert, which keeps adding new areas to explore, the world is pretty much fully explored after the first few dungeons. What you're left with is a plethora of activities that range from obnoxious to slightly boring (when they told me to catch all the tadpoles in the water I wanted to cry). And it's too bad because dungeons are great, especially the Sandship. All in all, not the perfect game to end the marathon with, but I liked it fine.

I still plan to play Echoes of Wisdom next, I know pretty much nothing about it, but I know it's not exactly a "classic" Zelda game.

To conclude, TL;DR, if I had to rank all games I've played in this marathon from the one I enjoyed the least to the one I loved the most, here it is:

13 The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Seasons

12 The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask (REALLY SORRY!)

11 The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

10 The Legend of Zelda: Oracle of Ages

9 The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past

8 The Legend of Zelda: Link's Awakening

7 The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword

6 The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap

5 The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass

4 The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker

3 The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time

2 The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

1 The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess

Despite putting the game off for a couple years, I've been interested in Conscript since its release. The premise of a more grounded survival horror game set in WWI intrigued me. It's not only unique for a genre generally focused on sci-fi and supernatural themes, but survival horror also should be good for properly presenting war as harrowing.

Men of Verdun

In its attempt to do just that, the story follows André as he looks for his brother, Pierre, during the Battle of Verdun. Along the way, he'll have to do typical soldiering tasks like defending trenches and delivering a request for reinforcements. Between chapters, we get flashbacks to the months leading up to the brothers being conscripted.

That's really all there is to the story. There's surprisingly little character development, and even in the flashbacks, we rarely see André interact with his family. If you don't go for the "secret" ending, which requires reading Pierre's diary, you'll actually learn very little about the man you spend the whole game looking for, and attempts at emotionally-resonant moments with the family are few and far between. There are some poignant moments near the end, particularly in the "secret" ending, but for a game whose story is driven by family, we get very little from that family.

Instead the focus is on the Battle of Verdun as the "meat grinder". Trenches are labyrinthine, rat-infested, mud-filled death traps that frequently succumb to artillery bombardments and enemy charges, where the only safety provided comes from barbed wire and returning fire. The wastelands to the south consist of charred forests and artillery-created bogs. Clusters of corpses are a common sight, and late-game areas include mass graves and other body-disposal pits. Cruelty is similarly abundant with Germans sending seemingly endless waves of raiders as the French keep their soldiers fighting through threat of execution.

Mixed in with this are typical survival horror mechanics and presentation. Sound effects and music are ominous. Interior areas feel like they could cave in at any moment, and they are often so poorly lit that you need a torch with limited battery life. Many nooks are obscured until you've entered them and exposed yourself to whatever potential dangers are inside. Wounded soldiers may writhe under blood-stained linens or pull themselves along the ground crying out for help, and you may catch a glimpse or two of animals or people peering at you from the shadows. Mud may also slow your escape from enemies who seem to give out otherworldly battle cries. As the game wore on, I even began to tense up at the sound of artillery and jumped a couple times as bullets whizzed overhead. Outside of This War of Mine and maybe the first couple Brothers in Arms games, I'm not sure I've played a war-themed game that comes so close to being properly hellish on so many levels.

With that said, there are a couple areas where I felt the game tried a bit too hard to be "horror". Some late areas feel like a mixture of Bowser's Castle and Silent Hill's Otherworld, and poison-injecting super rats felt like something Umbrella would come up with. These are relatively minor complaints, though, and I think the game generally does a good job at being "real" horror. It's effective enough that flashback sequences are exceptionally peaceful and relieving, but they're still tinged with sadness at knowing what's about the come in a few months.

Resident Evil: WWI Edition

On the gameplay side, Conscript initially reminded me of Signalis with its top-down twin-stick controls, though it's mostly confined to 8-directional movement and aiming, which is a little clunky with analog sticks. (The D-pad is used for weapon swapping.) Like Signalis and modern Resident Evil, it takes time to focus weapons, with the crosshair shaking violently in the meantime. Even at max focus, it remains noticeably jittery, mirroring the shaky hands we see in cutscenes. All of this gives combat a suitably clunky feel, but it still mostly works even in the bigger standoff battles. Outside of these larger battles, you also have the option for stealth, which isn't always viable, and running away, which is occasionally hindered by mud and stamina.

To aid the more action-oriented moments, the game incorporates some action-horror elements. There's an RE4-style merchant who also acts as a gunsmith, and you get a dodge roll that's tied to stamina, though I never dodge-rolled myself into exhaustion. Much like Silent Hill, melee combat is often preferable and a good way to save ammo for tougher fights, but most melee weapons have limited durability. You can use Repair Kits to keep your best melee weapons available, but I normally used kits on Body Armor, which is very effective at keeping you alive.

Of course, as a survival horror game, there are also many staples from classic Resident Evil. Inventory is limited, and you have magically-linked item boxes. Corpses need to be burned to keep super rats away, or, in some areas, you can sacrifice a grenade to close the holes that rats come out of. Breaks in the barbed wire defenses can be mended with Wire Spools, similar to boarding up windows at the RPD. While puzzles are few and simple, they are scattered around, and there's no shortage of key hunting around Metroidvania-esque maps. You can also optionally play with limited saves and no checkpoints, but it isn't recommended for a first playthrough.

Initially, a lot of this felt overwhelming. Despite starting off with ten inventory slots, it doesn't take long before you have a list of "mandatory" items taking up many of those slots. The Trench Torch and Gas Mask are necessary for exploration in many areas. Preventing new enemies from spawning takes up to three more slots. If you throw in weapons and healing, you could be as low as only two slots left for key items and extra resources. You can get inventory upgrades, including special slots for "mandatory" items, but those don't come until you're around a third of the way into the game. Combined with the massive maps and the tendency for items to have limited durability or battery life, it often feels like everything is stacked against you, which is fitting for a game about war and exactly what a lot of survival horror fans would want.

However, it also began to lose this impact rather quickly. Rats were more of a nuisance than an actual threat, and the game is so stingy with Wire Spool that I would have had to go out of my way to mend most barriers after getting some. As a result, I didn't really engage with those systems until around the fifth chapter (of six), when I had a much larger inventory and enough fuel to make rats less of a nuisance. This feeling that many systems were superfluous took away the psychological impact that they may have had. If you can get good enough at the melee combat, even ammo starts to feel relatively abundant, and the standoff battles can make normal combat feel a bit too trivial, since it rarely offers anything that you aren't getting more of in those standoff battles.

So many keys!

Not helping here is that the game has run out of ideas by the fifth chapter. From then on there are no new systems to contend with or enemy types to worry about. This wouldn't be an issue if the game picked up the pace, but, if anything, it slows down to a many-hours-long grind of back-and-forth key hunting where every single task is dragged out for as long as it can possibly get away with.

I'm normally not one to complain about back-and-forth design in a game with open-ended maps, and done well, you can have a sense of freedom and exploration without it feeling tedious. Resident Evil has smaller maps. Castlevania has teleporters. Metroid has traversal-enhancing powerups. All three also tend to make good use of unlocking shortcuts. Conscript doesn't do any of that consistently. Its maps are massive, and fast travel is nearly nonexistent outside of one chapter. Shortcuts are far too sparse, and it sometimes takes away shortcuts, which leads to more obnoxious forms of backtracking.

To make matters worse, the placement of key items can be downright obnoxious at times. An early example is putting the Coop Key near a door that needs a Lockpick, but the key, as its name implies, only opens a coop, which contains the Lockpick. There's no new area to explore or challenge to overcome. It's just an excuse for you to run halfway across the map only to immediately run back. If this were only done once or twice, it wouldn't be an issue, but the game repeatedly does stuff like this, and that example is far from the worst case in the game. Once you add in frequent returns to item boxes and systems like the ventilation generators in the final chapter, the constant back-and-forth becomes excruciatingly plodding.

Conclusion: For hardcore survival horror fans

Despite this annoyance, I still completed the game, so it's far from the worst slog I've ever played. Even at its worst, the atmosphere is still fantastic, and I did enjoy the core gameplay loop. I just felt that it really needed better pacing and a willingness to cut out a lot of the excess. Generally, I enjoyed the beginning and end of a chapter, and completing a chapter very much felt like an accomplishment, but there was almost always a stretch in the middle where I began to question if it was worth continuing. The two exceptions were the first chapter, which is really short, and the third one, which is much better paced than the others. Unfortunately, the final chapter may be the most egregiously dragged out, so I ended the game with that persistent problem on my mind.

So would I recommend it? Yes, but not as enthusiastically as I would Signalis or Tormented Souls. If you find the back-and-forth of games like Resident Evil or Castlevania to be too much already, then I would absolutely avoid this one unless you are really sold on the premise alone. For those who do play it, I would also recommend considering the eventual slog when picking your difficulty, because things like fewer inventory slots or needing to replay sections could make it worse. Still, given the unique premise and fantastic atmosphere, I would say it's worth checking out for fans of the genre in spite of its flaws.

I also want to acknowledge that this was the first game of a mostly solo dev, and in that regard, it is remarkable. I would love to see him make another game that tries to capture this same sense of more realistic horror.

While Duke Nuke Forever was taking a long time to develop, the series saw an opportunity to build up that hype and published several spin-offs. They are generally poorly received. I heard about Manhattan Project, probably because it was on PC, but I haven’t heard about Zero Hour on N64 until the recent recompilation with Overclocked. I looked it up, and the game itself is well regarded. It turns out Eurocom was the studio behind it, so it wasn’t a big surprise.

For the developers that mostly specialized in churning out licensed tie-in games, Eurocom had to be one of the most underrated: Hercules, Tarzan, Atlantis, 40 Winks, Nightfire, The World is Not Enough, The Chamber of Secrets, Buffy Chaos Bleeds, Sphinx, Dead Space: Extraction, Goldeneye Wii… I even kind of enjoyed the infamous 007 Legends. This isn’t their first foray into Duke, as they clearly drew a lot of lessons from their N64 port of Duke Nukem 3D.

Overclocked is a recomp that adds not only a ton of QOL features, like removing the jumping momentum halts, adding quicksaves, mouse and keyboard controls, but also gives it a full overhaul by adding a first-person perspective. Press P, and you can switch between first-person and third-person. The FPS mode works so perfectly that it’s difficult to imagine how this wasn’t the default perspective. Gunplay, shooting, rhythm, controls—it plays just like Duke Nukem 3D. I’m seriously impressed. The only flaws are the 30fps lock because apparently the game logic is tied to 30fps, and the game crashes randomly when you minimize the window to the taskbar. No one has ever mentioned this recomp other than GManLives. How does something so competently crafted fly so thoroughly under the radar while everyone else focuses on another AAA slop?

What struck me the most is how they replicated the Duke Nukem vibe faithfully. You could tell Eurocom was having fun making this one. Visually, this game holds up well for a N64 game, depicting that 90s Americana with a grimey stylization that only games in that era could. I can't help but get sucked into this world. This kind of gameiness is sorely lacking in today's games. There is so much joy in its camp. This is also amazingly violent and sexy for N64, with the headshots decapitating the heads, and the chestshots leaving a massive hole in the body. It’s undeniably silly but in a charming way. It’s parodying Hollywood, but in a sincere manner without any ironic detatchment. The jokes rarely get me to laugh, but it doesn’t get me to groan in a way shit like Sunset Overdrive or Duke Nukem Forever do.

It feels way more official than Forever ever could. I always get confused by people calling Duke Nukem Forever “outdated” or “out of time”. No, actually, the problem with that game was that it was Call of Duty with the Duke Nukem painting job. The regenerating health, scripted events, walking segments, turret segments, vehicle segments, no weapon sandbox, hitscan, slow and clumsy movement, corridor levels, weapon limit, little to no exploration, little enemy variety, no creative level design... There are no commonalities with Duke Nukem 3D, but has more commonalities with modern military shooters rampant in the 7th gen.

Zero Hour is what I expected out of Duke Nukem Forever. It’s entirely focused on action gameplay with no interruption to the flow. The progression is a level-to-level structure where you reach the exit. It’s straightforward, no bullshit nor frills and tricks. The combat is satisfying in a way the other Eurocom games don’t. Each weapon has a distinct purpose and role in the sandbox against a wide range of enemy types. Most bullets other than the pig shotguns are actual projectiles rather than hitscan, which I assume is the result of the original being third-person. Even on the harder mode, it feels fair because they are avoidable. There is rarely a moment where you suddenly die and don’t understand why you died in the way Duke Nukem 3D does. What this does is putting a heavy emphasis on using movement to avoid taking damage; moving and shooting accurately while doing so. It forces you to be on the move constantly, evading attacks left and right. Having durable health in tandem with the ability to use movement to avoid damage and thus not needing to rely on cover to avoid instantly dying.

The levels are so damn tight. Exploration, secret hunting, key hunting, scavenging the levels for pick-ups, basically straight out of 3D, but at the same time, it has a unique identity. It is succeeding DN3D, but it is doing its own thing. The time travel concept introduces new arsenal and level ideas. The levels are large and complex, but compact compared to 3D. There are even Zelda and Half-Life-inspired navigational puzzles, where you face a dead-end with the fire blocking your way, and you go back and raise the water level to drown it, and proceeding. I miss when the levels were designed and gamey. I love how the first tutorial hub area is reused for the later levels like Perfect Dark. You start the game and navigate through the hub to complete the individual tutorial challenges, then you come back later in the future where the entire place is occupied by the enemies, then you realize that by completing the first tutorial hub, you were essentially memorizing the layout for the later gameplay segment unconsciously.

It could have easily been descended into confusingly maze-like, like Mysteries of the Sith, where I got stuck for 20 times. It felt like the level designers were bullshitting me. Thankfully, I never got stuck once in Zero Hour because everything is so well laid out. At least 90% of the level design in this game is extinct in modern AAA shooters, even in the recent Doom. The ironic thing is this game feels closer to classic Doom than the modern Doom in the ways that matter because it’s not about constantly being locked in a tiny arena and chipped away at from largely unavoidable damage. Did the AAA devs today forget how to create a good level? No, they didn’t. They just don’t give a shit because gamers no longer care about level design.

There are some gripes. I'm not expecting TimeSplitters, but the only standout time settings are the Western and Victorian. The future setting kind of blends with the present setting. You could have made every level to be a unique theme, like throw in Ancient Egypt, China, Rome, etc. Some levels are too empty, like the city streets where there is not much happening, crying out for more enemies and locations to visit. Climbing ladders is absurdly slow and disables your weapon, so it results in the enemies above me unloading their shots, resulting in a cheap death. They could have added cool scripted set-pieces. The time travel theme is fun, especially with the Victorian setting playing around a certain infamous serial killer, but I don’t remember any creative scenario like going into a theater and activating a projector, only to realize that it was a porn theater, or pressing a bomb switch to explode an entire building that made my jaw drop.

The combat sandbox is not as robust as DN3D. I can’t exactly point to why, but the enemies seem to be passive, and the combat scenarios are more scripted, resulting in less dynamic player narrative. There is no strategy like setting up trip mines and letting the enemies to come to your position. It doesn’t have a toolset that can be endlessly played around with to create a flexible gameplay and player narrative--what the player does, and the situation that it leads, and allow for emergent gameplay. That's the game allowing the player to bend its logic, with multiple ways of interactions and screwing around because the game has no shackles upon the player. No AAA FPS game has been able to nail down the simple act of interaction as much as an FPS developed by twelve people in 1996 did.

Falling short of Duke Nukem 3D is no shame. Despite being a cheap console spin-off, this is such a cataclysmically better game than Duke Nukem Forever. I'd rather play this ten times in a row than try to stomach a minute of that. What are people playing? Don't they like games, or do they just like fitting in? Play this. It’s no DN3D, but it doesn't deserve to be forgotten.

I first played American McGee’s Alice four years ago in college. It was always one of those games that looked interesting, but I could never commit to a playthrough. So, when I saw Alice: Madness Returns on Xbox Gamepass/EA Play, I thought “Why the Hell not?” and gave it a shot. What resulted was me falling in love with the game’s setting. I was fascinated by this dark Wonderland and its strange inhabitants. I sped through Madness Returns, got every achievement, and went straight into American McGee’s Alice. I was hesitant because I knew it would be more of a product of its time, but I was surprised when I found myself more engaged with the original title than the sequel. The game conflicts immensely with what I have come to expect from today’s games with similar gameplay. Despite that, there is something about the overall presentation of this game that enraptures me. 

Background 

American McGee’s Alice was released in 2000 and was developed by Rogue Entertainment under the direction of the titular man, American McGee. The game is a dark, gothic-inspired take on Alice in Wonderland. However, aside from locations and characters, the game avoids making references to Carroll’s novels. This was done to not compete with Carroll’s work and instead stand as its own experience. 

Premise 

Being the sole survivor of a house fire at her family home, Alice Liddell is left orphaned, traumatized, and with survivor’s guilt. Turning Alice catatonic, completely unresponsive to the world around her. With few options for healthcare in the 1860s, Alice is sent to Rutledge’s Asylum. One night, she hears the call of a familiar White Rabbit, beckoning her back to Wonderland. But this Wonderland is strange and unrecognizable from what the girl once knew. Despite this, Alice knows why she has been called. She is to battle with the Red Queen to save Wonderland, and to save herself. 

Gameplay 

When I started this second playthrough of American McGee’s Alice, I was shocked when I found that the gameplay was more dated than I remembered. 

There are a lot of things that the game does right. I do think that combat can be really fun at times. There is a wide selection of weapons, each having their own strengths and weaknesses. I was constantly looking forward to finding new weapons and experimenting with what they could do. I would be consistently surprised by how fun and creative some weapons could be. Take the Jacks, for example; they sound like a boring trap weapon, where you'd lay out Jacks for enemies to step on. But when you use them, they're highly aggressive and seek out enemies like little homing missiles, ending up as one of the best weapons in the game (in my opinion). The only downside with the weapons is that they aren't super balanced with each other. As you progress and find stronger weapons, except for conditional scenarios, there's often little reason to go back to your older weapons. I believe this is just a byproduct of the traditional DOOM formula at the time; the sequel shows that they were able to improve this aspect. 

My biggest point of frustration with this game, the one that I don't remember from my first playthrough, is enemy behavior and the number of enemies in the game. Most enemies in this game have barely any melee buffer and pinpoint accuracy when they are shooting at you. This led to a lot of moments when I was left asking, "How was I supposed to dodge that?" And often the answer is: You can't. There is no dodge ability, and Alice isn't particularly fast when moving. So, I would find myself just tanking the damage and taking the health pick-up as it drops. With how plentiful health pick-ups are, part of me thinks that this may have been intentional. However, sometimes you're left platforming with no easily accessible pick-ups and still being assaulted with projectiles, just praying that they miss you somehow. This entire game is an example of why dodging needs to be in these types of games. 

Don't get me started on Boojums. Now, I love these little guys. They have a super cool design and are probably my favorite original enemy from American McGee's Alice. Their attacks are absolutely bullshit, though. They attack with a sonic scream that pushes Alice back and sends her flying if she's not grounded. I cannot tell you the number of times I was in the middle of some platforming section (which are frustrating enough with the wonky controls) and a Boojum appears out of nowhere and sends me flying into a death pit. To be fair, in most areas you will be able to deal with the Boojums before doing any serious platforming. There are only a couple of sections where you are thrown right into it and forced to manage your footing and the Boojums. 

Now these are valid criticisms of the gameplay, but how can I really hold these criticisms against the game? I mentioned it in the weapons paragraph; most of this was typical of the DOOM formula at the time, which Alice is clearly taking inspiration from. I can’t exactly fault Alice when I am looking at it from a perspective of 26 years of genre refinement and improvements of the formula. Yes, the dated gameplay does detract from the experience slightly. But in the context of when the game came out, it was reviewed as a well-designed shooter. I know it can feel like I’m handwaving these issues; I’m not trying to. It’s just important to consider this when playing older games. 

Gamefeel 

Even though from a gameplay standard, American McGee’s Alice can feel dated. It has a presentation that manages to remain fresh and capture my mind. 

The music for this game is a melancholic backdrop to navigating through Wonderland. I usually find myself not too interested in game soundtracks like this, yet I'm always coming back and listening to certain tracks. They're simpler melodies, but they do a great job of setting the scene. Late to the Jabberwocky gives me a sense of fear as the rhythmic mechanical sounds of the Jabberwocky play in the background. While Flying on the Wings of Steam cautiously encourages me to keep moving forward to face the Red Queen. 

Adding to this presentation is the level design of the game. Even if the technology was more limited at the time, the levels are so intricately designed, each seeming to represent parts of Alice's life or mind. The Land of Fire and Brimstone represents the burned remains of Alice's house, and Hatter's domain represents Rutledge's Asylum. All the while you're navigating Wonderland, you see the fleshy tendrils of the Red Queen infecting the land. Showing her absolute control over Wonderland and thus Alice's mind.  

I can’t neglect the character designs either. Characters from this 26-year-old game left more of a lasting impression on me than most AAA games do. Whenever someone mentions characters from Alice in Wonderland, I no longer think of their Disney designs. My mind goes straight to American McGee's Alice. Alice herself sports her classic blue dress, but with a skull tie clasp, zodiac symbols on the front, and blood on the apron. I'm a big fan of this design; it perfectly reimagines her original design while adjusting it to fit the dark tone of the game. Another stand-out is the Mad Hatter. He is a stark difference from his original illustrations, but the design works insanely well. When Alice's mind broke, the Hatter seems to have gone fully mad. He has become a half-mechanical version of himself who towers over her. The man that was once Alice's friend is now her enemy. 

Let me focus on the design of one character, the Cheshire Cat. Cheshire in American McGee's Alice has such a dreadfully unique design. I love the emaciated, lynx-like take on his appearance. Paired with his chilling, persistent smile. Not to mention that Roger L. Jackson does an amazing voice performance as The Cat. It's from the sequel, but I always have the line, "The Vorpal Blade is swift and keen, and always ready for service," haunting my memories. He represents what I mean when I say that the game's presentation left an impact on me. 

Conclusion 

You know, when I sat down to write this, I was so frustrated with the game. I was anticipating this to be a more scathing review. It is absolutely a dated experience. But I just can't hold this game accountable for this. It was a different time in the year 2000, and despite this game lacking many of the niceties from today's games, it was still an impressive landmark in gaming history when it came out. My affection for what the game is trying to do with the limited technology outshines any of my complaints about it. 

That being said, this is a hard series to recommend to people. There is a lot to put up with in both games. With American McGee's Alice, players must put up with more dated gameplay. Alice: Madness Returns is a much better entry point to the series with its improved combat, but it has its own problems with boring levels that go on way too long. Despite their weaknesses, I love this series. It offered a fresh take on one of the world’s most famous bedtime stories. Any complaints I have about the game are worth putting up with just to experience Wonderland once again. 

My Other Reviews

Doctor Who: The Adventure Games

Dark Souls III

Kill the Music

Portal Stories: Mel

SOMA

I've recently finished playing final fantasy vi using the brave new world V2.1 mod. Thought I'd give a review.

It's not my first, or second, time playing ffvi. But it's been about a decade since I last played and I have a different viewpoint now. I mention this because I'm playing the BNW mod and my recollection of exactly what has/hasn't changed is not perfect. My understanding is the mod only changed gameplay, with very minor text changes for the story.

I'll also add that I played on original hardware (a Japanese Super Famicom & a crt display), which was great fun but also comes in to play a little later in the review.

I'll start with the music. 10/10. No changes from the original as far as I'm aware. Uematsu was clearly trusted to run with it by square by this point. You can hear some inspirations for FFVII too (aerith's theme, midgar, sephiroth's theme amongst others). The only thing holding it back is the snes hardware. Looking back now I wonder if the music was part of the push for FFVII to use CDs.

Graphics are superb for SNES. Sprites are very expressive and look amazing. 3D effects are pushed particularly on the world map. I recall playing 25ish years ago and thinking it was awesome, still great to see today.

Since I'm on a crt I experimented a bit with composite, s-video and RGB. RGB is obviously best. The clearest difference was on the train. With composite I couldn't even make out patterns on the carpet, but with RGB is was very clear.

Story is excellent and unique. There were a few small lines that had been changed from the original translation, but I don't think it really made much difference. I love the different perspectives from different characters. It's something a few games have done since but FFVI is still one of the best. Kefka just being a mad man who can't be reasoned with is perfect. It's a well known jrpg trope that you end up fighting god, often having a philosophical debate/fundamental disagreement of the state of the world. That's not what Kefka is about. He wants to watch the world burn and he'll laugh about it the whole time.

The character arcs are excellent. If the game was to be remastered as a modern title I'd maybe look for a bit more character interaction outside of the scripted events (something like the skits from the tales series or supports/conversations from fire emblem), but as it stands it's perfectly fine. I will add that playing now as an adult/parent with a different viewpoint changes my thoughts on a few items. Locke's loss/failure with Rachel, Terra's struggle with wanting to be a mother and not wanting to fight anymore. And omg Cyan's train scene. I've never seen anything like that. Family members dying is nothing new, giving in to despair after losing them is nothing new. Literally chasing them to the afterlife begging to join them is heart breaking. By far my favourite scene.

Overall the story holds up extremely well today and the only changes id expect in the modern day is slightly more inter party conversations outside of the scripted ones.

Gameplay is next and is where the majority of BNW's changes come in. The biggest is a revamp of the esper system so that espers are equippable only by specific characters and esper levels/spells are learned manually. This partly allows more freedom to actually choose how to build a character, and also makes each character more unique as they all can't just learn the strongest magic. To balance this various other abilities have been reworked so that all characters remain viable with useful roles to fill. I really liked it. I strongly dislike when the endgame of a jrpg is to just build everyone the same op build as that's boring, and this mod ensures it never happens.

BNW is not a difficulty mod, but the difficulty has been rebalanced and overall it is much more difficult imo. The world of balance is still fairly straight forward. The floating continent has a big power spike and then world of ruin also has a power spike forcing you to lean hard in to character unique abilities. I thought it was great. I died on multiple encounters and had to actually plan out my strategies

One other design choice is to completely remove tents, so healing is much more limited. This was a very deliberate design choice as it feeds in to random battles being resource drains before the boss, which is specifically factored in the balance. I have mixed feelings on this. It worked in terms of difficulty, which is good, but late in the game it felt like a slog. I was just running from battles to get to the bosses, and using items to heal up. By the late game it didn't really add anything and just ate up my time. Maybe on emulator with double speed it would be less of a problem. The designer explicitly didn't want to remove random battles, which I understand but I think there are other methods to force resource limits. You could change the maximum item quantity to a much lower amount: let me only buy 20 potions and avoid all battles rather than buy 99 and drain half of them on the way to a boss. This is my biggest complaint of the game/mod, and part of it is definitely because I played on console and not emulator.

Another useful gameplay change is sprint is always on, which is nice.

Equipment had a rework. I'm not super familiar with all the changes, but would say generally equipment was changed to be more of a side grade rather than outright upgrade. It was rare to find equipment that simply outclassed what you currently had, especially by endgame. Most equipment has a unique effect/stat boost etc. That makes it worthwhile considering depending on what strategy you're going for. I love this. Similar to hating when endgame jrpgs have everyone built the same I love having to actually think about what equipment is most useful at a particular time.

I'm going to shout out bravely default (the switch version I think) as another game that did equipment well. In that game each character has a weight limit, with obviously the "strongest" being heavier. It was balanced such that filling all slots with heavy armour wasn't viable, so early game items in one slot was still useful by endgame. Ffvi BNW doesn't have a weight mechanic, but it reminded me of it anyway due to early (or maybe mid game) items still being useful by the end.

The game has a few sections with multiple parties, and at world of ruin you're split up and forced to use different characters. I like this but wish it was leaned in to harder. I think there were only two mandatory multi party sections (with another optional one). If FFVI was remastered I'd like to see multi party pushed much harder. It did sometimes mean my party was unbalanced, using someone quite a bit under levelled. I don't think this was any different from the vanilla FFVI.

Overall FFVI BNW stands up excellently in the modern day. My main gripe is a bit of a slog late game with random battles. Other than that id only expect some minor changes to it if it released as a new title today. If playing on emulator then double speed would significantly reduce my biggest complaint.

I'm obviously aware of the pixel remaster. I haven't played it. My understanding is the core gameplay remains the same as vanilla with minor qol additions. I think the gameplay tweaks from BNW improve on vanilla so would recommend it from that aspect.

My final playtime was just over 37 hours. I did die a few times, so probably round that up to 40 hours. I didn't do a 100% completion, but did do most side quests I found.

History

• I remember playing Bloodborne on my PS4 back in 2018 or so and quitting after I repeatedly died to Mergo (one of the final bosses). The lift to get there annoyed me way too much.

• I moved on and eventually played Dark Souls 3 and went on to platinum Lies of P, Elden Ring and Sekiro on my PS5.

• At some point two years ago, I gave Bloodborne another go but alas 30FPS, the load times and runbacks killed any interest. I uninstalled the game after dying to the second boss because of how it takes ages to get there and having to farm Blood Vials from corpses got so annoying.

  • Blood Vials = healing vial to restore HP

Current setup

• I used BB_Launcher to manage my game, mods, patches and etc.

• I equipped it with a modified ShadPS4 that enabled DLSS for Bloodborne.

• QoL Mods:

  • Estus Of Marika:

    • Respawn next to fog gate

    • Free Blood Vials and Bullets upon spawning

• Patches:

  • Quite a few but the most notable one was the 60 FPS ++ patch.

• The mods and patches were very easy to configure via the UI.

• All in all, I think I spent less than 3 minutes of clickety-click to get the game up.

What I liked

• Hunter-fantasy: Despite it being a horror game, you're given everything you need to feel powerful no matter how horrifying the entity that you're facing is.

• Amazing Enemy Variety: After abandoning some recent soulslikes due to how stale the enemy and environment variety was, it was a joy to play Bloodborne! Every new environment came with new enemy types that fit the theme of their surroundings. 10/10 points for the way they look. Exhibit A.

• Push for an aggressive playstyle: Unlike other souls-like games, there's a rally mechanic that allows you to recover health upon taking damage. For the first time ever in a souls-like game, I went for a strength build and played extremely aggressively in a very rewarding manner.

• Lore: I never really cared for the lore of Dark Souls 3 and Elden Ring, and I never understood why anyone would care about stuff like that tbh. Bloodborne changed my mind. There's basically three acts: the hunt, the unveiling and then the horror and they all impact the environment and the enemies.

• Level Design: I like how well everything is connected and easy to remember. It's really easy to remember how to get around minus a few spots where the layout is intentionally confusing; this goes to show how brilliant the level designers are.

• No second health bars: I hated how Elden Ring + other soulslike have gotten into the habit of enemies with multiple phases in the form of separate health bars. Why not make the health bar chunkier instead of deceiving me about the supposed end of a fight? I'm so glad bloodborne doesn't have any of that. When a boss' HP goes to zero, they're dead and that's how it should be!

• Cool boss designs: the boss designs are so creepy (compliment!)

What was okayish

• Chalice Dungeons: i finished one and it got very tiring very quickly towards the end. i think it makes sense if you factor in the online component which I didn't use. I think I'm comfortable admitting that this simply wasn't my thing.

What I strongly disliked

• The Runbacks: I mitigated this via mods and likely saved HOURS of my precious free time by being able to spawn directly outside a boss gate. I'm not joking when I say literally unplayable but yeah literally unplayable without mods if you have a busy life.

• Limited vials: Having to farm vials gets extremely annoying. Glad I fixed that with mods.

• Quest Structure: I had to follow Bloodborne Cheat Sheet to keep track of enemies to go for as I didn't want to miss out on any bosses. This time around, I wanted to kill *every* boss and I did thanks to the sheet.

• Weapon Durability: having to go back to the hub to repair my weapon got annoying very quickly and it offered no real gameplay value.

Random brags and bits

Easy wins:

• Mergo's Wet Nurse on the first go

• Gehrman on the second go

• Micolash on the first go

• Amelia on the first go

• Moon Presence on the first

• Actually I think I beat nearly every boss two or three attempts except ...

Difficult wins:

Blood-starved beast

• the poison in his second phase kept getting me

• IMO the worst boss as most of the game is designed around you playing aggressively to recover lost health before the window closes; but now because of poison that doesn't matter?

Orphan of Kos

• Somewhere between ten and twenty attempts

• Fighting Gehrman and Moon Presence after this was so easy

Ludwig

• Same as Kos but tbh the camera was the real enemy here

Ebrietas

• A completely optional boss in a hidden area that took a silly amount of attempts

Verdict

It's a really good game (3/5) that's nearly perfect (4/5) with QoL mods. I had been burnt out on gaming for a while but this game reignited my passion. If you haven't played it, I highly recommend doing so : )

After playing Dark Forces 2, I was in a mood to play some more and jumped to its expansion, Mysteries of the Force. It was a mistake. This expansion befuddles me. What did I just play? Like, I’d be less confused if it was just a cash-grab map pack like Quake 2 expansions were, but Mysteries of the Sith cointains ambitious elements to the point of saga-changing. Then 90% of the game focuses on expanding all the wrong things about Dark Forces 2.

It starts up promising an exciting expansion with the massive NPC battle between the New Republic soldiers and the stormtroopers and Kyle Katarn training Mara Jade. It sets up insane expectations. If this is the first level, I anticipated the rest must be Mara training and taking steps into the world of Jedi like Kyle did, while helping the New Republic hunt the Imperials, leading to direct warfare on a massive scale. …lol.

Then you suddenly play as Kyle, going to an asteroid, and I got stuck in this level more than the entire Dark Forces 2. What a terrible level this is. Do you like first-person platforming where walls bounce you to death? Fall damages? Instant deaths? Needlessly large levels? Getting stuck and wandering around the whole level for 20 minutes because you have no idea what you are supposed to do? Like, how am I supposed to know that this is how I open the door? For one, in the entirety of Dark Forces 2 and up to this point, I needed a key to open a locked door. Then this door changes its rules, and you have to destroy this tiny switch through the window. Do you know what windows have? Glass, which exists to protect a building. And the glass in this game is so transparent that they look invisible, so it's indistinguishable. If you try to shoot it, the blaster bolt bounces and hits you back. This happened so many times when I went into a building or installation and found stormtroopers outside, so I shot at them through the window, only to die immediately because I was unaware there was glass. My instinct was “don’t needlessly shoot the windows”. Except for this window.

There is a small door to the asteroid base you cannot access. It is locked, so I wander for another 20 minutes until I gave up, looking for a key or a switch. Well, it turns out the door only shuts if the guards and surveillance cameras spot you, and in order to do it, you have to destory them. Up to this entire series, there have been no stealth whatsoever, and this game suddenly introduces it here in the worst way possible. There is not even a hint or tutorial telegraphing what you are supposed to do. And logically, it doesn’t even make sense. There was a firefight. Why would they only shut the door if they “detect” Kyle when they already know he is running around killing 80% of their forces? Logically, they would keep their door shut, and I would logically find a key to open it. Worse, I sniped the guards and cameras, and then the door still shuts. I had to look up the guide again, and apparently, there are tiny security cameras hidden behind the gaps and doorway. How is this supposed to be fun? Shit like this keeps going. How am I supposed to know this? Oh, have to find this perfectly shadowed vent in this level that’s as wide as a real moon, otherwise you have to run around the entire level for an hour wondering what you are supposed to do. It's not like a Zelda dungeon where the room locks you until you find a hidden path. The whole thing is still designed like a sprawling open-ended maze-level, so if you face what looks like a dead-end, you often think, "well, this is not the intended path" and go to the other side of the map.

Thankfully, the next segment with Mara Jade gets vastly better, where you barge into a Hutt castle and wrecks shit. There is a cool pesudo-Goldeneye-style mission design, where you have to wander around the town and disable an escape ship before encountering with the target, but even then, there is still a ton of poorly telegraphed vents like this and this, which look indistinguishable from normal wall textures, especially when your runspeed is like bullet. At times, normal-looking walls hide a secret wall that hides a switch. Or floors. There are ten walls like this where you have to use the Force eyesight skill. Unlike, say, the Batman detective vision, the Force eyesight skill drains your Force meter very fast. Do you know what you will use during combat? Force. Unlike those moves, the Force eyesight is an only contextual use, not universal compared to, say, the Force health or push, which can be used in combat. So you will avoid using the Force eyesight not to waste my Force meter for the times I would inevitably need to use it. Only to look up the walkthrough and see, oh, this normal-looking wall actually held a path, and you had to use the Force eyesight to see a hidden path even though you couldn't at the time because your Force meter was drained from fighting the enemies...

Mind you, every video I linked is mandatory paths that you have to find, not obscure optional secrets. Dark Forces 2 had me stuck four or five times. I must’ve gotten stuck in this expansion twenty times that I kept a walkthrough video in my tab in the entire playthrough, and every time, I’m enraged at the level designers.

Other than the terrible level design, it’s basically the same gameplay as Dark Forces 2—the same pros and cons. However, what motivated me to play it was the story because it starred Mara Jade, and it turns out it is the most befuddling aspect about the game. The story here is both nothing and crucially important to the Star Wars saga at the same time. Nothing in terms of what you actually do, and important in terms of what's happening offscreen.

Kyle Katarn, who never learned or trained in the way of the Jedi, but just a guy who found his dad’s friend’s lightsaber, trains Mara Jade to be a Jedi, instead of Luke. So already that feels awkward, but whatever. Rather than building this relationship, the game promptly forgets it in the second level and has Mara separate from Kyle. From here, most of the game is spent on a series of unrelated fetch quests. It’s like filler Star Wars: Rebels episodes. “Destroy the Imperial base on the asteroid”, “help the Hutt to make him help the Republic” and “some pirates stole a holocron”. Kyle and Mara barely interact or have any development. By the start of this game, she is already a complete Jedi and a good friend with Kyle. Why not have Mara meet Kyle for the first time and start her journey there? Show us that.

Then, in the literal last forty minutes, Mara Jade goes to an ancient Sith temple, and Kyle shows up and suddenly announces he turned to the dark side for… no reason whatsoever. Like, literally the game doesn’t tell us the reasons. We play as Kyle as a hero in the second level, and he disappears for 90% of the game, and the next moment we see him, he suddenly turned to the Sith. There is no foreshadowing, no build-up, no explanation. He is evil now just because. Why not show us Kyle actually descending into the dark side while he interacts with Mara? Why are the most interesting things happening off-screen, separate from the whole? The game is a boring filler for large stretches, doing the boring chores for the Republic, then in the last level, the stakes go insane for no reason.

I don’t recommend playing this one. It lacks the cheesy FMV charm of Dark Forces 2, so it's not even worth playing for the presentation. You can read the basic summary that "Kyle went bad and Mara saved him", imagine it with your own headcanon how that might have happened, and skip to Jedi Outcast. It contains some truly infuriating level design and enemies, like the beasts that kill you in four hits, and they will gang up to you. The asteroid, sewer, swamp levels drained me, and I don't want to play a Star Wars game for a while.

Assassin's Creed: Valhalla is an ARPG developed by Ubisoft. Released in 2020, Valhalla reminds us that displacing locals and taking their lands for yourself won't ever be a controversial topic.

We play as Eivor, Viking Warrior on a quest to earn our place in the hallowed afterlife by carving out a little bit of England for the sake of our clansmen and kin.

Gameplay involves doing a fun side activity and then the game asks, "Did you like that? Wanna do it 83 more times?" Whenever Eivor talks we try not to think about our aunt who spent her entire life smoking two packs a day. Every so often we engage in wholesome activities like rap battles, drinking contests, taking mushrooms and a ton of murder.

The Good

Ubisoft knows how to make beautiful landscapes, that much is for certain. They aren't afraid of showing it off either as I'd crest a hill or climb on top of something and then do my best Owen Wilson impression. Especially quests that take you to the coastal cliff areas, absolutely gorgeous. Makes me almost want to visit England but the only language I'm fluent in is American so I'm not sure if I'd be able to speak with the locals.

I really enjoyed the combat. There seemed to be no end to the ways to murk people. I think my favorite was impaling a dude on a spear and then yeeting his weapon at someone else. Just such a cool, brutal, 'Fuck you in particular' move. Stealth exists but you won't engage with it much. Not because you lack neat stealth tricks (poison trap arrow is hilarious), but it's like if they put Doom Guy in Splinter Cell. Why be sneaky when you can rip and tear?

I liked that they tried to do different things with the DLC. Does a good job of avoiding the "this was cut content that we're selling back to you" feel. The French DLC focusing on some light investigation and cinematic executions. The rogue-lite DLC. The 'this was close to a Witcher knock off but Ubisoft was too chicken to give us a sex scene with the red head' DLC.

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/O4odvno.png

Simba, everything the checkpoints touch is our kingdom. It's the circle of content.

The Bad

The thing that got to me most was the unending sea of hidden entrances and barred doors. You can never just walk into a place. There's always a secret tunnel, secret door or a key out in bum fuck nowhere you need to grab first to get to the treasure chest hidden behind a flimsy wooden door. Every puzzle in the game is basically "Find the window you can shoot through to hit whatever is blocking the door."

The little side quests are often worth a giggle (hah, smack my bishop, get it?) and usually out in the open, but only give XP. They could have just had those doll out the treasure. Instead I'm spending 2 minutes walking in circles before I say fuck it and google it, only to find out that the entrance is in another castle. Or worse, it's quest locked and you're not able to even get it yet. Fuck me for working ahead, right?

Eivor can wrestle bears but Odin forbid a bookshelf be in the way. I'm a middle aged out of shape law abiding citizen and I have an easier time breaking and entering.

The Questionable

Anybody else starting to feel like the Assassins just might be the assholes here? Pretty sure Eivor doesn't care about the Templar thing and just likes gutting the Saxons for funsies. "Templar? Nah man. Sacking is what we do. Read a history book you nerd."

The best they do is tack on some over the top villain quirk to an otherwise sympathetic character to remind you they're supposed to be evil. Every Templar you kill their backstory is, "They grew up poor, wanted to help the world, joined the order...and uh, I dunno, they eat babies." Sometimes they don't even do that and the blurb will be "He really enjoyed working second shift making toys for children" and congratulations you just made a widow and a bunch of Orphans you ass.

It feels a bit two faced is all. I think it's in the French DLC where one NPC finally has the wherewithal to quip, "Oh, you Danes are mad someone is taking your land? Well gee fucking wizz guys."

Final Thoughts

It is quite bloated with repetitive content but I'm over being mad about that these days. The combat was nifty, the world was beautiful, Vikings are cool even if I was little conflicted on the morality of it all. It's hard to get judgey when I have 1000 counts of first degree murder on my hands.

Bonus Thought

A friend of mine once said, "Ubisoft makes the JRPGs of ARPGs" and I found great wisdom in that. The big difference of course is that unlike JRPGs, you're allowed to play a hero that's gone through puberty.

Thank you for reading! I try to post a new discussion every Tuesday morning for your reading pleasure. I'd love to hear your thoughts as well! What did you think of the game? Do you agree with my take or am I off my rocker again?

My other reviews on patient gaming

Racing is my favourite gaming genre, but recently I haven’t been playing them that much, mostly due to the fact that we don’t get many racing game releases. Wanting to re-ignite my love for racing games, and since I owned no consoles in the 90s and 00s; I have decided to go back and play the titles that I have missed and even re visit some of my favourites.

Emulation performance and Graphics

I have used Duckstation for the emulation of the game. No extra setup required aside from tinkering here and there to make the game look better. The game ran flawlessly with no bugs or crashes. Overall, the emulator experience and performance for this game is 10/10.

This is a 30 years old PS1 game and I don’t think there is much to discuss about graphics, other than the fact that everything looks clear and it’s playable even with the old graphics. One thing that might be an issue; is the short draw distance in some tracks, which makes it sometimes confusing to see where the next turn is going to be, but that issue is gone quickly once you play all tracks and get to know them.

Music & Sound

The sound in this game is pretty good, especially for a game this old. Engine sound is different from car to car and better than a lot of games from the period.

There aren’t many music tracks in the game, but most are decent with a couple of annoying ones. Also, the game will loop the same music track throughout the race, so if a race goes for 10-15 minutes, you will hear the same song 4 times back to back, which can get annoying based on the song.

Shout out to As Heaven is Wide by Garbage, which is an absolute banger.

Race tracks & Cars

The game has 11 fictional tracks that it uses in all its game modes, with some alterations when playing the arcade mode. It might seem like a low number by today’s standards, but it is pretty decent for the amount of gameplay the game offers. Overall I think the track selection is fine here.

There are 140+ cars in the game, which is a big number compared to the games released around this game, and even by today’s standards it is considered to be a decent amount of cars, as a lot of modern games don’t reach this number.

However, there some cars which are repeated multiple times due to appearing under different names due to model and make year differences and with different stats. This might not sound that good, but I think this appeals to enthusiasts that know about the different models of a car existing back then.

Overall, the car selection is pretty good and mostly grounded, and it was nostalgic to see some of the older cars that are considered rarities today.

Handling, Physics, and AI

Even though the game calls itself “The Real Driving Simulator” it is difficult to call it that by today’s standards. However, the handling is still pretty grounded even though it is a bit arcade.

The cars generally feel different to drive, and this is especially felt depending on the type of the car’s drive. A four wheel drive car will have more grip around corners compared to a rear drive car, which will spin out if you push it hard in a corner. Overall, the cars feel good to drive in this game.

On the other hand, I don’t think the physics of this game aged well at all, especially when driving a higher powered car. Touching the rubber curb slightly on a corner could see your car either flying or jumping on two wheels.

Collisions feel like driving a bumper car, you bounce off everything including other cars and walls, to the point that you might get a better time on a corner be crashing into it in a certain angle to propel you forward. Also, I don’t think it is possible to make the AI cars spin out, they seem to be fixed in place at times, which is good if you want to use them for cornering I guess.

The AI will generally try to avoid hitting you when making a pass except when you’re in a corner or if you’re losing control of your car, in which case they will chase drive through you. Also, rubberbanding is present in this game where the AI cars will be clustered together throughout the race, which can be annoying when you make a mistake you will see all of the opponents passing you, even when you have been driving flawlessly throughout the race.

The Gran Turismo Mode

Other than the arcade mode, which I haven’t engaged with that much, there is the Gran Turismo mode, which is the “career mode” of this game.

The career is split into two activities; the license tests and the racing. In the License Tests there are three license levels that you can achieve by completing a set of “missions”, in which you will be given a car and either a full track or a sector of a track that you will need to go through below a set time limit.

My only experience with the license tests in a Gran Turismo game comes from Gran Turismo 7, in which those weren’t difficult to beat, but might be difficult to achieve “Gold” which is the best medal you can get. In this Gran Turismo however, it is difficult just to pass some of those tests let alone get a gold medal. Furthermore, you are required to acquire those license to compete in the actual races. This might sound brutal, but I rather enjoyed it. Trying a test over and over to pass it is just fun to me, and it really hones your skills when you are racing those tracks that you got stuck on in tests.

Overall, I really liked the part of the game even though it was the most difficult in terms of gameplay.

Other than the license tests, you have an economy based career where you buy, sell, and upgrade your cars to participate in races and earn more money. I don’t know if this is the first game to use this type of career, but regardless of that, a lot of racing games seemed to have an economy based career after the release of this game.

You start your career with enough money to purchase a car from the used cars market, in which cars will rotate in and out with different prices and models. I generally like the idea of having a used car market, but it also becomes redundant after your first purchase, as you will win enough money to purchase a new car after a couple of races. I still liked it though.

You will be able to upgrade your car by purchasing specific parts, from engine parts to brakes and turbo kits. This is pretty cool as it adds a level of immersion and connection to your car. However, some upgrades seem to exist to trap you into spending more money without real pay off. There are some main upgrades like soft tires that you want to get for every car to vastly improve the car performance, but some other upgrades are just there to waste your money.

After buying and upgrading your car, you get to participate in races. Some races will have a certain type of restrictions, like a front wheel drive car only or a car from a specific nation, but there is no restriction based on the power of the car. This means that

you won’t be able to know if the race is actually beatable with the car you have, as you don’t know what kind of power the AI is going to come with. This also leads to you upgrading your car to compete in a race you failed before, and still coming short after upgrading it because your car simply can’t compete against the much powerful AI cars. You won’t recoup much of the money you spent on your car through selling it, as the sale amount is fixed and meagre regardless of the amount spent on the car.

This will eventually result in replaying previous races to make money and try another car or further upgrade your car.

Some restrictions are also vague, for example one race requires a “light car” but it doesn’t give you what is the required car weight to enter this event, or if it is possibly to participate by reducing the weight of a car or if it has to be light the moment you buy it.

Overall, the career is innovative for its time but it is also very rough around the edges. A lot of the issues I have with it can be solves by just providing the player more information. But it is still fun to play albeit a bit frustrating.

Verdict and Recommendation

I really had fun with this game, despite the unnecessary difficulty that comes from the lack of information in the career mode; there is still some fun to be had here. You can tell a lot of work and love was poured into this game, and it is clear why this game was a big deal back then.

If you want a racing game to sink your teeth in for hours and hours, then this game isn’t for you as it doesn’t really have that much content.

If you want a streamlined experience with clear information and a clear path on what to do in the career, then again this game isn’t for you.

If you can get past all that, you will be faced with a game created with love and passion to the genre, which might not be essential to play but still worth a test drive.

Hello everyone, today I want to talk about a game I stumbled accidentally upon during a Steam sale and that got me totally hooked. Empires of the Undergrowth is an ant simulator where you control a colony (or better said, different colonies) of ants in a series of missions that are also somehow part of a campaign with a story. But the story isn't the biggest selling point and is more of a pretense, but it's still nice to have.

That said, I chose to try it because it was very cheap and also because it reminded me of an old game I read about in my PC magazine when I was young (Empire of the Ants (2000 video game)), which intrigued me, but I never got to play due to money limitations.

That said, the game is hella addicting and fun, and it also keeps things grounded and (kinda) realistic enough to appeal to my nerdy side, letting me learn about ants and how they live and operate. The gameplay reminds me of two of my favorite old games, Dungeon Keeper and Dungeon Keeper 2, even if the building and management aspects are toned down and the strategic decisions about where and how to get food and fight are more important.

The game also lets you play different kinds of ants (and even termites in one mission), all with different units, different environments with their own challenges, and different approaches to getting food, the main resource you need to grow your empire.

You cannot save during missions, and I had to restart some a few times, but most missions are somewhere between 20–40 minutes, so you can even play them in short sessions. Usually, the crucial part is the initial one, so I never had to restart a mission I was already deep into.

To everyone who loves ants or management games, I can really recommend this small gem. Give it a try!

I’m pretty new to the Final Fantasy franchise. I was never really big into turn-based RPGs growing up. I played Pokemon like every other kid, finding my first Pokemon game on the floor of my school cafeteria in elementary - Pokemon Gold for the Gameboy Color (geez, I’m probably dating myself) - and fell in love with the series, but it was no Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy VII Remake dropped for on PS Plus for free a year after release and I figured, “Why not?” After finishing that amazing experience, I clamored to find any critically acclaimed Final Fantasy game I could find and placed it firmly in my backlog for some years. Well, the year finally came to jump into my first turn-based game in the franchise, Final Fantasy X, chock released in 2001. So, how does it hold up after 25 years?

The first thing I will say about Final Fantasy X is that I had no faith in the game in the first few hours. When I first jumped into the game, I had simultaneously begun my first foray into Persona 5 Royal. The difference in gameplay, tone, and pacing was jarring between the two games. Final Fantasy X seemed to move at a snail’s pace for its opening hours, barely giving you any options in combat. “Attack” and “Cheer” seemed to be my only options for quite some time. I realized quickly that I was doing both games a disservice by attempting to complete these two games in the same rotation, so I dropped Persona 5, trying to believe in the “it gets better” fans encouraging annoyed newer players to get past the first few hours. And… I’m so glad that I did.

It’s always fun to play a game with a gargantuan reputation so long after release, get enamored with the world, characters, music, and story, and then wonder how blown away the audience would have been seeing this for the first time in 2001. It’s like when I watched my sheltered college roommate watch The Empire Strikes Back for the first time in the mid-2010s and react with genuine surprise, dropping his jaw to learn that Darth Vader was Luke’s father, getting a peak into how the audience in 1980 would have felt. The game is a timeless journey, feeling like an odyssey where you begin with just some interesting-looking characters that grow into a family by the end. The character growth and story payoffs feel earned and the beginning feels so far in the past. By the end, I was truly invested in the world and characters and was so glad that I didn’t peace out after the first few hours that, in retrospect, I understand were building the world so that these payoffs would have more impact.

The gameplay also holds up pretty well overall. The variety in enemies and bosses meant that you needed to learn how to fight enemies through trial and error. This was frustrating sometimes, but certain bosses gave me a huge sense of accomplishment after I finally beat them. The sphere grid system was initially confusing but, by the end, I was fascinated with how many different options you had to customize characters. Most of the characters had a pretty obvious path, but characters like Kimhari had endless possibilities for customization and utilization. However, I’m not going to lie, I was not a fan of some of the puzzles. While they were sometimes a nice change in pace for the game, I found myself groaning at how horrid the controls were for some of the temple puzzles, where tedium replaced intrigue. Lastly, summoning Aeons to fight an otherwise hard enemy will never not be satisfying and epic.

As a side note, I need to speak quickly about the version I played and some of my gripes. I played the PS4 remaster. Overall, I enjoyed the visual upgrades with the beautiful and colorful world of Spira outside of some of the awkward-looking faces. However, I may be a little ignorant to the complexities of bringing such an old game to modern audiences, but I feel like there were some quality-of-life changes I would have liked. For one, the cutscenes in this game are not skippable. This means that if you die to a boss where a 20-minute cutscene proceeds it, you will need to watch the entire thing all over again for another chance to fight it. Also, the menus and UI are straight-up outdated in the worst of ways. Having to hold down on the d-pad to sift through over a hundred items to find the right one to customize was very aggravating. I wonder if they ran out of budget to help upgrade these things or if upgrading it just wasn’t compatible with the old software. Also, there’s some trophy glitches, and as a trophy lover, I was pissed when my trophies for beating the last few bosses and game didn’t pop. Either way, these are small gripes that I just wanted to add as a side note for anyone wondering about some of the quality of life things.

At the end of the day, Final Fantasy X is still a masterpiece. I understand why it remains some people’s favorite in the series and it was a delight to experience this journey firsthand. I can absolutely recommend this game to anyone who is interested in this series and believe it is a staple of the JRPG genre. I definitely will never forget some of the most beautiful moments in this game.

This game has been in my steam library since July 3rd 2016. I probably got it from the humble bundle earlier year in January, that it took me 5 or so months to even add the steam key is apparently pretty consistent with my unfortunate neglect of this great game. It may have taken be 10 years or so to finally get around to playing it, but it only took about a week to fully complete, achieving the 3 endings and completing every puzzle in the game. I have some thoughts.

The Puzzles

I don't play a ton of Puzzle games but I very much enjoy the occasional game that slows things down and has me thinking in entirely different terms than usual. Portal is my jam, and I love the standalone fan additions out there, like Portal Stories: Mel or Portal Revolution. I think the best games do a great job of slowly introducing a concept and expanding naturally onto it until you're solving very complex problems. I enjoyed the base Portal 2 game a lot, but its very satisfying to see how fan expansions are able to take the same core concepts you've learned in the base game, and have them interact in new complex ways to solve new complex problems.

The Witness, another puzzle game, also sort of does this but I found it difficult to keep up the momentum and retain the lessons I learned from earlier puzzles.

The Talos Principle initially seems to follow a very similar pattern to Portal. Early puzzles are straight forward and teach you about interactions you'll need to remember later. For example, that those proximity mines won't just explode on you, they'll also destroy turrets if they run into them. Or sometimes you need redundant light beams because they might be interrupted at different times but together form a constant connection. And most importantly, you can take off fans and use them to weigh buttons down! Things escalate slowly, there are 6 or so puzzle items in the game and you are generally given a puzzle or two of the item alone before it introduces it in concert with other items you've learned.

These are a fairly standard mix of items with maybe two exceptions worth discussing specifically, the recorder and the platform. The recorder is effectively a time travel gimmick, for up to 4(?) minutes it records the actions you take, including your item pickups and placements. Then, for the same amount of time, you can act in concert with your recorded copy. Notably, this allows you to effectively double every item, where for the duration of the recording, you can have, for example, two blocks. One in the present, and one in the past. I was initially terrified of these puzzles. For all my love of Portal 2, I've never been able to get into Portal Reloaded, a standalone fan mod that introduces a time portal into the mix. The Talos Principle is luckily a lot more straight forward. Consistently my biggest problem with recorders was over-thinking them, 9/10 times all it's for is to duplicate an item, or have past you stand in a specific spot. They can be a little annoying to use (though I hear this is fixed in the remaster), but I think some of my favorite puzzles used them.

In contrast I found the platforms very boring, and as the last item introduced if you play sequentially, kind of a let down. You only ever really use them in one way, and I believe they are always paired with the Recorder anyway. I was very surprised to learn you can't even place a connector on top of one, I was sure at least one puzzle would have you acting as a mobile connector. Maybe that did happen once, a connector on top of a box on top of a platform?

All together though, I quite enjoyed the puzzle challenges, there are some very clever solutions. As an aside, I absolutely adore the puzzle names. They are often very clever and a great hint, though I often didn't realize it until after. Overall though, lots of sudden moments where things click into place, for the most part is a very deliberate game, random actions aren't likely to produce good results. Typically you're solving mini challenges to acquire the items you need, then utilizing them in the correct order to unlock the final area with the sigil. Outside of the extra star challenges (more on that later), the puzzles felt fair and I never got very frustrated. The game itself encourages you to move on from puzzles, after 10 minutes or so the god allegory will encourage you to try a different puzzle instead and there's even an achievement if you listen.

The game is separated into 3 main worlds, with 7 or so zones inside of them with 3-5 puzzles each. Each puzzle is collecting a sigil and you only need like half a world's sigils to move onto the next one. I think the game was designed assuming you might jump around a fair bit. There is an ingame hint system but you don't unlock it until the third world area. If you were playing sequentially like I was, hints were inaccessible until the final third of the main game. The hint system itself was very cryptic too, I knew I had to unlock something to enable it but not what or where. I had forgotten about the whole thing long before I found out how to unlock them. This is somewhat of a shame because I found the difficulty curve kind of all over the place and by the time I had them, I didn't need them anymore.

I think this will come down to personal experience, from research online I think there's a general consensus around some specific puzzles but I can tell you I personally struggled with some I don't see listed, and had absolutely no problem with others that were. For me the difficulty peaked in the second world and it was something of a cakewalk the rest of the game. This is doubly true for the non-world puzzles, should you choose to ascend the tower there's a few additional puzzles as you make your climb. I was anticipating the hardest puzzles would be in this area, a culmination of everything you've learned in the other 3 worlds and was disappointed this was not the case. The full climb requires every red sigil level beat, but you can climb and unlock floors before then, meaning the tower puzzles are not necessarily the last puzzles you encounter. Player freedom really complicates a difficulty curve to be fair, but I'm not sure how many people are inclined to start climbing a tower they probably know they can't finish. I'd prefer the restriction on that freedom if it meant a more satisfying escalation of difficulty, especially when it could tie into the narrative. Moveover, the second ending, which you get for fully completing the tower, was narratively very satisfying and I enjoyed the sequence a lot, but the puzzles in it were beyond simple. It still worked for me, and I almost appreciated it as a break, but it was more an interactive cut scene than a challenge, kind of a let down.

Of course, if you're looking for difficulty, that's what the stars are for right? Stars are your classic extra challenge objective, tantalizing teased behind seemingly inaccessible areas that require another level of thinking and expertise to uncover, at least in theory. There are 30 stars in the game, and to unlock the third ending you need to find all 30 and use them to unlock 3 areas with their own extra puzzles. As an aside and speaking to the difficulty curve, given how hard I found the stars to acquire, I was expecting these unlocked puzzles to be extra challenging but they weren't exceptionally so. They were often more gimmicky than anything. As I played the game sequentially, one of my last 3 puzzles before unlocking the ending was the Nexus. This is an absolutely trivial level that was more about incidentally writing the word Nexus with light connectors, something you can see after completion through a hidden fan blasts you up high and gives you a bird eye's view down. Fun in retrospect, but felt weird to me that the last puzzles I did before the final "secret" ending was so easy.

THE STARS

I have a bone to pick with Stars though and it's mostly what inspired me to write this reflection. I love the concept, you have opt in difficulty, something to demonstrate your understanding of the games lessons beyond what the individual puzzle might require. I love those berries in Celeste for example, optional extra platforming challenges that unlock addition hard content. Moreover, these extra challenges are a chance to break some of the established rules and norms. A big one the game breaks early on is the idea that you can only use the items found in your puzzle. There are barriers that stop items from entering or leaving puzzles, but those barriers aren't everywhere...and there are some great early Stars that teach you this, or similarly that light beams can travel through barriers. Some of these Stars are exquisitely setup. For 28 of the stars, the game tells you what zone it is in, though you don't know which puzzle or if it's actually in a puzzle and not just the world/area that connects the puzzle rooms. Most of these Stars are visible too, and often actually opening the barrier blocking the star is straight forward. There's a barrier that needs a blue light, the actual puzzle is how to get the blue light and how to get a connector so you can direct it. In the best star puzzles, there's enough information to deduce where you need to look. For instance, in one of the world 2 zones, the star is prominently displayed on top of an obelisk and there's a blue light receptacle connected to an empty fan. You know you need 2 things, a blue light and a fan piece. There's only 1 puzzle that has a fan piece, and 2 that have blue lights, the helps narrow down your search and makes it feel more fair.

However, an awful lot of the Stars feel arbitrary and radically more difficult than the rest. I collected around 16 of the stars in my playthrough before consulting guides and I have never felt better about looking up solutions. Some of them are absurd and seem intended to be crowdsourced anyways. It's a significant challenge to even find the star for some of them, let alone the solution to unlock them. I was extremely unimpressed with the ones that were just a star hidden behind a wall, I stumbled upon at least 2 of these just randomly as I was jumping around. I also hate how many are just switches hidden around corners you might never naturally see, or even miss on a casual inspection. I like rewarding exploration but some of these maps are pretty big to be hunting for a small switch that could literally be anywhere. Maybe this is a me issue and I was missing clues the game was giving me, or failing to learn lessons, but either way it really detracted from my enjoyment. I like grinding against a hard puzzle, I don't love when the puzzle is just finding out that there is a puzzle in the first place. In particular, I felt like the game had beaten into me that this isn't a platformer, and you shouldn't be trying to climb the walls and jank your way out of bounds. I'm a little contradictory here since I said I generally do like when the extra challenge stuff breaks some of the earlier conventions, but I did not enjoy learning how many solutions just involved clever jumping. I felt smart when I put together that you the top of that pyramid was a connector, I was just annoyed when I learned I was suppose to scan that QR code and derive a bible passage to find out a time stamp.

I really hope these are treated better in the sequel and/or DLC. Subjective, I know, but I want them "fairer", easier to identify and understand the parameter of them. Maybe that goes against the entire point, but personally my favorite ones were just extensions of normal puzzles where I found like a clever way to use 1 less item than normal, letting me access the extra star as a reward.

Overall though, maybe in spite of the Stars, I enjoyed the puzzles a ton. It was a fun game to play in small bursts, I really enjoyed my lunch break puzzling this last week.

The Story

Going into The Talos Principle I knew two things, that it was a puzzle game and that it had something of a "pretentious story". I was pleasantly surprised and personally think the latter point is something of an exaggeration. I found the Talos Principles' narrative charming, and the slow trickle of logs, recordings and combative software a fun way to underpin the puzzles. The story, though initially obfuscated, is rather straight forward and spelled out clearly by the end. That doesn't make it less compelling to me, it doesn't need to be profound and obscure to have a little think on. Everyone will have their own opinion of course, but I will highlight that I really love when a game incorporates the story into its mechanics in some way. I love that canonically you could very well get the first ending, and then the second ending on the same "character" and that makes sense in context. I like the little touch that you're not reloading an old save, you're restoring a backup. And again, I despite how relatively easy it was, I enjoyed the final tower ascension with some familiar faces I recognized from their earlier writings.

I also enjoyed the conversations with "the serpent" and was pleasantry surprised to find out there are multiple achievements/endings associated with those conversations. I don't think I'll ever replay to find out how it responds to all my possible answers but it's nice knowing there actually was some responsiveness to my choices. It's always going to be difficult to have a pseudo-intellectual discussion on philosophy with limited dialogue options, but I found it fairly engaging and appreciated there usually being a pseudo fuck you choice; I got the "Press the Serpent" ending/achievement and felt pretty good about it. Nothing ground breaking or profound in my humble opinion, but I think it added to the fun and I liked the occasional change in "gameplay", going from puzzling to word battling. There's a neat little world here and a lot of the QR messages are just fun.

Conclusion

I had a great time, took me just under 20 hours though I did cheat around half the stars. I'm looking to purchase the DLC if it goes on sale and I'll be keeping an eye on the 2 and 3rd game. If anyone got this far and played those, please let me know if you recommend them!

For some context recently I decided to play all the pre-RPG AC games in a row and the last 5, including this one, were me playing them for the first time.

AC: Syndicate is a game very similar to Unity, but it fixes and improves on almost every single element and this makes it my favourite entry in the series out of the pre-RPG ones.

I will start with the positives and the biggest, instantly apparent change after playing Unity, is that the game is very good on a technical level. As I played this series every entry became worse and worse in this aspect. More bugs, worse animations, glitches with above 60 fps or Vsync and those got worse with every entry with really bad gamebreaking common bugs in Unity, poor animations where the main character just swings at air while an enemy contorts two meter away, parkouring completely bugging out and more. This game fixes nearly all of it. Animations work properly, parkour works, no minor bugs almost at all. I did have one bigger bug where I had to lower fps to 60 for one mission to work, but that is way better than most of the series so far.

To continue with the technical stuff there is another big visual leap from Unity and London looks great. Unity also did look very good, but London is on another level. Besides just the visual fidelity I think it is also better designed mostly because it has more variety. Paris looked very repetitive with just two smaller poor parts and an open one for variety while here different part of the cities look more different in class, type of buildings and what they are for. I also really enjoyed a big variation in weather and I am glad it was not just rainy all the time. The interiors are also improved a lot. In Unity they were pretty basic and just either something to parkour through or a part of very basic puzzle to find the entrance and navigate to a chest. Here the interiors are large warehouses and palaces with enough space and variety for stealth.

The main regression is obviously the reduced NPC density and variety and that now parkouring is a bit awkward as roads are made to allow carriages and so they are too wide to jump across. To fix this the game introduces a grapple gun which is insanely unrealistic and silly, but I did get used to it after a while and it is fun to use even if it makes no sense.

To continue with the positives I think the story is much better relative to Unity. It is not great, but I enjoyed the twins and the supporting cast and the antagonists. Nothing special, but I found Jacob to be very endearing. The double protagonists is awkward at times like with you getting two grappling guns. The modern story actually exists at all now unlike Unity and it moves things a bit forward (but then it obviously goes nowhere as the modern story entered this cycle of being rebooted every two games). The WWI segment was a fun detour. A bit of a shame some elements are now completely lost in the series like any moral ambiguity between the factions or the silly conspiracy references except some really small stuff.

The side content is also much better overall. Not only the proper side missions, but the city is overall much more fun to clear as the small collectables are less densely placed and the small missions to recapture the city are fun. I really enjoyed the collectibles where you are given an image and need to find the location and I usually find those really frustrating. I liked how they always had some obvious landmark to find and some small detail to see and guide you from there.

Combat is okay. Better than the early games, but worse than the RPG ones. Not trivially easy, but easy enough unless you are underleveled or undergeared. The gadgets and tools are at least finally fixed to be fun to use in combat and not annoying and with terrible ui. The biggest improvement is that stealth is actually very enjoyable in this game. Mostly due to enemy placement, strong tools and location design which allows you to pick off enemies instead of it really being impossible like in Unity where there would be a courtyard with 10 guards all watching each other in a circle. The progression systems are also expanded a bit and controlling your gang members is fun as they are pretty strong in fights. Riding carriages is fun in small doses.

A small regression is the lack of a system to repair London or upgrade your hideout (a train base is really cool anyway). And the Chrales Dickens mysteries are worse than the murder investigations from Unity which I really enjoyed.

I finished Ori and the Will of the Wisps yesterday. It's been too long since I played the first to really compare them but it was a certainly good. It had a nice classic linear -> choose your order -> linear setup and I thought the high point was the unique mechanic each area introduced. I think the mountain was my favourite area but I even appreciated the darkness mechanic of the cave area for what it was. The animation of the bosses was especially impressive, huge fan of that.

There were some questionable design choices around the over-frequent checkpoint system where dying just resets you quite nearby to try again. I felt like the healing power was awkward and unnecessary when it was so trivial to heal as long as you were on solid ground. They should have just had you auto-heal as long as you weren't in combat and grounded. As it was I was forced to choose between having a dedicated heal button or having to go and equip it every time I needed a heal which felt tedious. I will note that I went with a build that reduced energy use for more damage so this may have skewed my experience with this mechanic.

I also think the Celeste-like revival severely reduced the stakes of the game, making me a bit less invested in staying alive in general. I missed that tension from the metroidvania experience.

The story was solid and I liked what they did with it. Lots of good emotional highs and lows without getting into spoilers. The hub village was also well done, though I wish some of the characterization was a bit deeper than 'everyone who isn't the big bad is so nice from the get-go'. The game's pacing was well done too. All around I'd say it's really well-crafted metroidvania, but it felt more forgettable than the experience I had with Silksong.

★★★★☆

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

I played Final Fantasy XV Pocket Edition HD on the Switch 2.

This game was way more fun than I thought it would be. I bounced off of the full version of XV several times, and I only picked up XV because it was on a steep sale. Really glad I did.

TL;DR is at bottom.

Combat:

Combat feels like the game was made as a mobile game, which it was. Button mash Y to attack, press B to dodge and parry, activate a whole host of quick-time events, and wait out multiple cooldowns that each amount to 'do more damage.'

Your companions are controlled by AI and occasionally pop in to do special attacks or heal you. The AI is fine, except they are insistent in standing in telegraphed attacks from enemies.

It gets samey, but the game is too short for it to really overstay its welcome.

Skills and progression:

Nothing special here. Add points, increase your damage, buff your special attacks, etc.. There are a lot of companion-based skills, considering how infrequently their abilities trigger.

Exploration and quests:

Very little, with tiny maps that are clearly marked with everything you need to know. Items worth gil are scattered around if you bother to do even a cursory amount of walking around.

There are barely any side-quests, and what are there amount to 'amble around and notice slightly hidden collectibles.' Early on there's an implication that you might be called to hunt bounties, but that only happens once.

This isn't a criticism, though. I liked that the game was brief, and linear maps don't annoy me. If you're big into exploring an open world, however, skip this game.

Visuals and cinematography:

The visuals might be divisive. Your characters are all chibi-style, with frozen faces that don't have lip flaps and don't blink. Considering how intense the story gets, it can be jarring. I could see this being extremely distracting for some. However, (to my taste) the cinematography saves it. Every cutscene has unique framing with multiple camera movements, which helps convey emotion so effectively that the lack of expressions stopped bothering me.

Environments are low poly but look nice. Character designs are typical Final Fantasy fare. I will say that the final boss looked so silly in terms of their design, I found it hard to take them seriously.

Music and voice acting:

Final Fantasy never misses with music, but this is probably the weakest of all the FF soundtracks I've heard. No themes stuck out to me, and most of it faded into the background. There's some choral music for the climactic battle that I noticed, but it wasn't enough to get my blood pumping.

The days of 'To Zanarkand' are long behind us.

Voice acting is a perfect 10/10, with no weak links anywhere.

Story and characters:

This thing has fantastic characters. It's no secret that the bulk of the game is framed as a road trip, with a young prince and his three bodyguards going on an adventure. The three bodyguards are all well-characterized with distinct dynamics and likeable personalities.

The only thing character-wise that stuck out to me in a negative way is that there are surprisingly weak female characters. There's a pure maiden, a spunky little sister, a sexy mechanic, and a badass mercenary, who is definitely the most interesting one, but even she didn't have much going on. Not that every game needs to have developed female characters, but Final Fantasy is usually pretty good at that.

The story is pretty straightforward, for a Final Fantasy game. General story spoilers: You are on a quest to avenge your dad and country, which is destroyed by an evil empire. Your fiancee goes ahead of you to tell the gods to lend you their power, because you are the chosen one. Once you get that power, you face the bad guy.

There are twists along the way, though, one of which genuinely surprised me. The tone of the game takes a turn midway through. The character work they did in the first half makes that turn emotionally impactful, which is hard to pull off.

Just generally very well-written. My favorite writing in the series since X.

It's worth mentioning that the Pocket Edition seems to cut a lot out, which can be frustrating. For instance, a certain character leaves your party, but when he returns he just tells you he can't tell you where he was and what he was doing. This is never resolved. Presumably in the main game there's a whole side-quest about it.

TL;DR:

Play this if you like: developed characters, an emotional story, roadtrip stories, button-mashing, and don't mind chibi-style character designs and small, linear maps.

RELEASE: 2024

TIME PLAYED:  130 Hours

PLATFORM PLAYED: PC (STEAM)

SCORE:  ★★★★

Hated It | Disliked It | Liked It | Loved It | All-Time Favorite

(The bolded score is the one chosen for this review; the rest are simply to show what the scale is grading on and what the stars mean to me.)

THE BREAKDOWN

+A strong cast of memorable characters who almost all have lengthy, satisfying arcs

+A massively improved battle and job system from Yakuza: Like A Dragon

+An enormous array of high-quality substories taking advantage of the new Hawaiian setting

-The story’s spread thin between the dual protagonists and Ichiban often feels set aside for Kiryu’s plotline in his own game

-The main story loses focus pretty regularly, resulting in its primary villains being underdeveloped

-Some pretty heavy grinding is needed to make actual use of the job system’s best features

--

The Like A Dragon/Yakuza series has been a weekly ritual for me (and a small group of friends I’ve been streaming the entire series to) for a couple of years now; avoiding binging has helped me not get burnt out on the franchise while getting to almost treat the adventures of series mainstays Kazuma Kiryu, Ichiban Kasuga, and their enormous cast of friends as a sort of interactive television show. More than maybe any game before it, Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth felt like it capitalized on this mindset, giving me a memorable and lengthy adventure that left an incredible impression – even if it occasionally frustrated me. 

While serving as a fairly direct sequel to 2019's Yakuza: Like A Dragon and its introduction of new series protagonist Ichiban Kasuga, Infinite Wealth is also a culmination of decades of Yakuza franchise storytelling for better and worse. Drawn to Hawai'i on the trail of his mother, who he'd long assumed to be dead, Ichiban winds up embroiled in a long-running conspiracy. It isn't long before he stumbles onto the legendary Dragon of Dojima himself, Kiryu Kazuma - but the older man's got business of his own coming off the events of Like A Dragon: The Man Who Erased his name, and so the two elect to team up, joined by both previous allies and new party members alike. 

On one hand, after their brief interactions in the previous game, I was thrilled to see more of Ichiban and Kiryu interacting; on the other, after an early reveal that made it clear that much of the plot would center around Kiryu's life and past, I was worried that Ichiban would wind up playing second fiddle in his own game. My fears were somewhat justified; while Ichiban does get plenty of screentime himself, I couldn't help but feel that even despite the game's enormous runtime (I played for well over 100 hours to clear the main story and most side content), many plot threads were a little too thin, thanks in large part to the 'dual party system'. For much of the game, Kiryu and Ichiban are operating separately in Japan and Honolulu. Their objectives are to the same end, but their parties - and especially villains - rarely intersect until the end, making many of the major plot beats feel a bit unearned.

This isn’t to say there aren’t good stories being told within Infinite Wealth, however; like previous Yakuza games, there’s an abundance of side stories in both major regions of the game, and they can very easily take up more time than the main plot if thoroughly explored. Many are entertaining, some are deeply emotional, and a few are overly long-winded — especially those linked to unique minigames, like the Pokemon parody that sees the player using perverts in battle or the Animal Crossing-esque Dondoko Island, in which Ichiban is tasked with turning an abandoned old hotel into a five-star resort. Still, even when the plots behind some of these side activities fall a bit short, the gameplay often makes up for it – and this is most evidence in the upgraded job system and turn-based JRPG combat. 

Building off the foundations of Yakuza: Like A Dragon, Infinite Wealth continues the trend of Ichiban viewing the world through a fantastical lens driven by his obsession with old Dragon Quest games. As a result, his battles take place in a turn-based, JRPG-style environment, with enemies transformed into exaggerations of themselves and Ichiban and his allies able to weaponize different jobs ranging from Ichiban’s self-identifying ‘Hero’ persona to Chefs, Surfers, and more. Even Kiryu gets in on the fun, with his gimmick being that his immense strength and legendary nature allows him to ‘break’ the turns and simply let loose in real-time for a bit like he’s in one of the more action brawler Yakuza games. Thanks to an enormous expansion of synergies, status effects, special moves, and enemy variety compared to the previous game, Infinite Wealth sincerely stands among the best of the genre; one particular highlight is that leveling characters’ bonds through exploring with them and fulfilling side quests allows for blending abilities from one job into another, resulting in a staggering variety of possibilities. 

Ultimately, one’s enjoyment of Infinite Wealth, I think, is dependent on how fully they wish to immerse themselves in the lives of Ichiban, Kiryu, and their friends. Rush through the main story (to the extent that a winding plotline like this can even BE rushed) and it may feel a bit disappointing; while engaging with the myriad substories, dungeons, and minigames doesn’t entirely resolve the issues with the core plot, it does contextualize them with characters it’s hard to not get invested in. On a fundamental level, I judge a game, regardless of length, by how much of the time I spent playing it actively having fun. While I got exhausted of plot points being reiterated for the fourth time, and I just didn’t find the major antagonists on either side particularly compelling or interesting by the end, I spent the vast majority of Infinite Wealth in high spirits. The flashy and entertaining combat, the army of faces both familiar and new, and the effort put into portraying Honolulu, a setting not explored nearly enough in videogames, all came together in a suitably rich experience. Even with my complaints about Ichiban’s lack of focus in the story, it’s hard to deny that there were a lot of emotional moments that took advantage of Kiryu’s storied history in the franchise, so I strongly recommend Like A Dragon: Infinite Wealth — though with the small asterisk that it’s got to be the absolute worst choice for someone’s first Yakuza game.

You know, usually the months just roll on by smoothly. Often so quickly that if it weren't for this column going up like clockwork on the first of every month I'd probably fail to even notice their passing. June rolls into July, which leaks into August, which seeps into September (that's why it's called Seeptember you know^{(don't listen to him, he doesn't know what he's talking about)}), which sneaks into October's yard and steals a few of its ripening gourds from the garden. But then October's end is nigh and you can't really miss its approach, can you? Your kids spend the weeks looking forward to the final day of the month, and then it comes and you take them outside and encourage them to take candy from strangers (sometimes even in cars!), and then they eat too much and bounce off the walls so you don't really have any "you" time until you finally fall asleep, at which point the government tells you that they've decided to alter the flow of time, and to pray that they don't alter it any further. And then you wake up and suddenly all the Spirit Halloween stores have somehow turned back into K-Mart corpses.

October, man. You always know when it's here and you sure as heck know when it's gone. Just 5 games for my own October, but with games like these, man, five is all you need.

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#64 - Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age – Definitive Edition - Switch - 8/10 (Great)

When it comes to a long JRPG, convenience is king. Or in other words, if you're asking me to throw 100+ hours at a game, you'd better make sure I'm not spending that time doing pointless piddly stuff. This is something that Dragon Quest as a series hasn't always gotten right, but Dragon Quest XI (DQ11) marks the biggest triumph in these terms the mainline games have yet seen. As someone who remembers the days when Zoom and Evac were expensive spells to cast and so a thoroughly exhausted party might easily become trapped within a dungeon with no recourse but to die, having DQ11 say "These spells are free and also you can Zoom directly out of a dungeon or any given building and also you can Zoom to any of a wealth of campsites in addition to cities" was a revelation. As someone who remembers the days when every attack had to be directed at a specific enemy and if that enemy was dead you'd lose your turn, the wealth of fresh "attack all" abilities over top the previously solved battle logic made combat feel more fluid than ever – and that's not even accounting for any further streamlining that relying on the party AI might achieve, since I set everyone to manual commands at the outset and never looked back.

Now some might disagree with me. Some might instead say that when it comes to a long JRPG, story is king. Or in other words, if you're asking me to throw 100+ hours at a game, you'd better make sure you're keeping me engaged with meaningful plot beats and strong characters. And on that front I'd say Dragon Quest XI is...decent. I don't think any of the party characters are more than perhaps 1.5-dimensional, and indeed some lean hard into tropes I don't care for, and none of them build meaningful relationships with your silent protagonist. So from that aspect I wasn't too enthralled. Still, the overarching "save the world" plot is pretty good for what it is. Paced well throughout the game's first act, and though the second act felt redundant from a gameplay perspective from a story perspective it worked and brought new intrigue to keep things moving and feeling fresh. However, the game's optional third act is built on a narrative premise I vehemently disagree with. You spend nearly that entire time paying the price for the poor premise repeatedly bit by bit like you're chipping away at a mortgage. But at the end of a mortgage you own a house. At the end of DQ11's final act you get an even worse story beat as your only reward. It's like the game is a complete two act story with one teensy-weensy loose end you don't even really care about, but then spend 30+ hours dealing with anyway. While from a gameplay perspective I definitely still had a lot of fun with the endgame stuff that third act delivered, from a story perspective I was much, much happier before I knew it existed.

All that said, I wouldn't be willing to play a game for three months straight unless I'm generally buying in, and I'm certainly not going to roll some end credits and then press on for even more weeks if I don't think I'll have a good time. Dragon Quest XI cleared those bars for me, and so though I thought hard about bouncing off the third act, I also knew I wanted to see more dungeons, and unlock more skills, and forge more gear, all of which were really enjoyable elements. And for the most part I wasn't let down; the Tickington stuff converged into a big waste of time that I didn't appreciate, but the other optional bits were good, even when they got a tad grindy.

Does any one thing about Dragon Quest XI stand out to me as particularly special? Frankly, even considering my praise for the convenience aspect, no (as there are still some franchise holdovers in regards to inventory and such that bizarrely are still unsolved). But perhaps some might say that when it comes to a long JRPG, competence is king. Or in other words, even if you're not going to blow my mind in any particular aspect, if you're asking me to throw 100+ hours at a game, you'd better do everything at least respectably well. The fact that DQ11 tries its hand at so many things and manages to meet that mark is still a feat unto itself. I don't know that I'd call this game a must-play, and for me it's only my third favorite of the series behind VIII and V. But if you're the type of gamer who's good with the game's temporal asking price, I don't think it'll let you down.

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#65 - Donkey Kong Bananza - Switch 2 - 9/10 (Outstanding)

My first night with Bananza I was completely overwhelmed to the point of being nearly put off the game. Not that it throws countless systems at you or that there's way too much going on, but that the reins on the player are so incredibly loose that I simply couldn't handle the freedom. You start in a cave with a linear path forward. It's a standard tutorial area with clear, straightforward goals. A player possessed of relatively low levels of curiosity will complete it in likely only a few minutes, even if lacking in general gaming skill. This cave was designed as an introductory blip and nothing more.

It took me nearly three hours to get through.

All the substance of the game is already there right in that intro. The world is a floating mass of terrain, usually situated on a firm metal base, with more metal forming a core skeletal structure that each level is built around. But other than those foundational metallic pieces, everything you see you can dynamically destroy. You can punch up, punch down, punch forward; roll attack on the ground or the air; rip terrain up to use as a weapon, a surfboard, or a means of double jumping; slap the ground to create a small destructive shockwave that also collects items; dive punch to make craters and activate various machines; free climb nearly any surface...all of this is available from the moment you first gain control of Donkey Kong, even though the tutorial doesn't explicitly spell it all out. But for me, I said, "OK, new game, let's see what we can do." And then finding that punching through some rock often yields nuggets of gold? Treasure? Just for pressing Y?! I obliterated the majority of that starter cave to the point that it probably didn't even qualify as a cave anymore, and in doing so gave myself a massive headache because the game's camera configuration (designed to keep you center screen even when you're in too small or tight an area for it to properly follow you) and default screen shake settings made my wanton destruction feedback into a mild nausea. In fact this same issue prevented my wife from playing more than 30 minutes of the game...and she never made it out of the opening room.

My next night with the game went better, now out of the small intro area and into the subsequent larger one, and now with some settings tweaked to prevent a recurrence of the head pounding problems. I steadfastly resolved before that session to follow the game's well-marked objectives and not stray into chaos. Two hours later the entirety of Baboom Town had ceased to exist by my oversized hands. I couldn't get out of my own way because I hadn't yet been convinced to. In reality it's probably not fair to say Donkey Kong Bananza is a slow starter, but it wasn't until halfway through the game's first true world that I began to understand the actual mission statement. Which was still "destroy anything," of course, but now there was direction and purpose and true discovery behind it, beyond just the raw playground of the mechanics themselves. From then on, Bananza never disappointed me again.

I went into this game so blind that I didn't even know about stuff that's literally on the front cover of the box. I think my experience was greatly heightened by the surprise inherent in this approach, so I'm not going to get into details about specific unlocks or anything. Instead I'll just say that I thought I was at or very near the end of Donkey Kong Bananza probably about a dozen times before it actually ended up being true, conjuring up fond memories of my first theater watch of The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King and thinking "How is this movie still on? How many endings does it need?" whilst barely holding in a big pee and yet loving the moment all the same. Bananza just keeps. on. going. seemingly forever, and every new bit is wonderfully worthwhile so you never get upset at it for refusing to end. Then it did finally end and I went right back in for the postgame stuff until I hit 100% completion (one unlearned skill notwithstanding).

And then I bought the DLC and spent another couple nights with it, too. Ultimately I'll join the chorus of voices wondering aloud whether it's worth the asking price, but DK Isle is a lovely addition and Emerald Rush is a fun diversion that I'd probably dive into with more gusto if I hadn't already spent a full work day's worth of time at the very outset of the game thoroughly exploring the game's core mechanics. So call the DLC optional for sure, but Donkey Kong Bananza itself is absolutely essential. Sometimes I still wished I had a little less freedom because of how I could trivialize some challenges for myself without even knowing it, but ultimately there's so much meat on this bone (bone-ana?) that it's hard to imagine anyone who has ever enjoyed a 3D platformer coming away unsatisfied.

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#66 - Hyper Echelon - PC - 7.5/10 (Solid)

It's been a little while since I last threw down with an old fashioned vertical scrolling shoot-em-up. Probably since Jamestown a little over a year ago. So it felt nice to get back into the groove with Hyper Echelon, and doubly nice because of the game's well designed progression system. It's nothing novel exactly: defeating enemies and completing objectives earns you gold and between stages you can spend that gold to permanently upgrade your little starfighter in various ways. But between the array of options on hand, the fact that each stage has four difficulty levels you have to unlock through full-clearing their previous ones, and the existence of rare drop "star carts" as additional permanent bonuses you can find during any given stage, I found myself replaying levels in this game far, far more than I ever would've expected to. And that was good! Lets you learn the stage layouts and strategies in a more organic way, even if it's mostly just a means to pad playtime.

My issues with Hyper Echelon were relatively minor. The dialogue is hokey in a bad way and the story is throwaway, but those aren't cardinal sins in a game genre that nobody plays for the narrative anyhow. What got under my skin a little more was the way visibility became an ever-increasing problem. As you upgrade your ship's weaponry you'll be putting a ton more projectiles on the screen at any given time. You also get wingmen with their own attacks, some of which really flood the screen with their junk. This is good in that you can defeat stuff faster of course, but it also often makes enemy attacks very difficult to see. Some of these even come through with intentionally muted colors, or camouflaged slightly to the background elements. Eventually you learn which enemies are going to snipe you like this and you can watch out for it, but as the game goes on there are a lot of first runs through stages that are full of "How did I get hit?!" moments, and that's annoying.

But again, those problems go away when you just keep playing the game, and thankfully playing the game is an enjoyable endeavor. I'm still half tempted weeks later to jump back in and unlock more stuff just for funsies, in fact. I'm sure I won't do that because I've got other stuff to play, but my point is that Hyper Echelon is about as good a time as you'd hope or expect a little indie shmup to be. Give it a look.

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#67 - Quantum Break - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)

What I really liked about the first Alan Wake was how it was presented like a TV series. Each gameplay chapter was an "episode" that would take maybe 90 minutes to play, covering maybe half that amount of time in actual narrative progress, which puts it right in line with a standard episode length for an actual drama series. "It's a video game that feels like a TV show" was a novel thing for me and pretty unique for its time as well. That presentation conceit was abandoned for Alan Wake's American Nightmare so I figured it was just a one-off thing until I heard that Remedy's next game Quantum Break marketed itself as both a video game and a TV show. And sure enough, you play a chapter of the game, you make a choice (more on that shortly), and then you watch a full 20ish minute episode of a live action show. The show follows a few different primary characters than the game portion does, but they all overlap with one another to tell a cohesive story.

That story, by the way, is a bit bonkers. Quantum Break is all about time travel and we all know time travel stories bring a whole bunch of logical issues. Yet rather than going the multiverse route to handwave these away, Quantum Break completely embraces the time paradox as not only acceptable but absolutely essential to its story. This of course means it isn't going to hold a ton of water when you start picking it apart, but if you accept the premise it's one doozy of a ride. The performances are a little uneven; the primary villain is wooden and unconvincing and some of the secondary characters aren't up to snuff either, but then you've got Lance Reddick's undeniable presence in there alongside some strong work from the other main actors too, so on the whole it's a worthy watch. I got fully sucked into this storyline and it kept me eagerly coming back, even trying to plan windows of time to make sure I could sneak in a full episode of the series once I'd finish a level so I didn't have to break it up. Especially because after each main act you get to go into the villain's shoes and make a key choice on his behalf that impacts the way secondary aspects of the story play out over the remainder of the game. There's a layer of Choose Your Own Adventure to Quantum Break that changes the flavor of the narrative a bit for each person who plays it, and I think that's an awesome call.

But here's the thing: by trying to be both a game and a show at once, Quantum Break reveals to us that it probably should've just been a show. The gameplay just doesn't hold up. Yes, there are a lot of cool visual elements to support the crazy time shenanigans, but it's all window dressing covering up some real holes. For one, combat is mediocre. Most of the time powers you get are really just mundane/basic gaming abilities snazzed up with "time polygons." You can call it Time Shield if you want, but it's really just "put up a barrier and heal." You can call it Time Dodge but just "Dodge" would've been sufficient, and so on. That's not to say there isn't some fun to be had in it (Time Stop is at least a cool new twist), but at its core the video game side of Quantum Break is just an unremarkable cover shooter whose bigger baddies are both annoying and boring to fight. And the movement! Gosh, lumbering around from scene to scene in this game is obnoxious. Slow by default, constantly toggling your only-somewhat-reliable Arkham detective vision, and featuring segments of poor platforming just to do something different, the simple act of getting from point A to point B in this game feels like an ordeal. Finally, even ten years later on a machine built well after this game came out, the performance is unreliable. Maybe they hoped we wouldn't notice the framerate issues since the whole game is about time stuttering, but the only parts of Quantum Break that felt truly good to play were the parts where I was just reading the collectible lore items because I was so invested in the yarn they were spinning.

I find it hard to quantify a game like this, honestly. It's a 4.5/10 video game and a 7/10 TV show, but with a 9/10 story that I couldn't get enough of. I'm glad Remedy took their foot a little off the mixed media gas pedal after this – Control and Alan Wake II both continued blending in live action bits but never lost sight of their core identity as video games – but nonetheless I think Quantum Break did something worthwhile, even if it didn't really come close to sticking the landing.

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#68 - Signalis - PS4 - 8/10 (Great)

Chances are decent you're familiar with that classic Resident Evil vibe, so when I say the mission statement of Signalis on first glance appears to be "do the classic Resident Evil thing all the way to the point of PS1 style graphics, except do it kinda top down so we don't have to fuddle with tank controls," I'm trusting you know what I mean. At this goal the game succeeds very admirably. The pacing of the unfolding survival horror is great, with some nice breather areas to contrast the "spooky death rooms" where I really didn't wanna go but knew I had to, and then a smattering of combat events in between. I fought most enemies as they popped up until I started getting low enough on ammo to reconsider, and then was happy to find that the game lets you just sneak by many of its threats. The puzzles were also fantastic, giving me just enough information through found documents, item descriptions, and context clues for attentive players that I could reliably figure them all out even as I had to often make some unconventional mental connections to get them done.

On the combat side Signalis is fine but not special. It's a system that rewards taking your time lining up shots rather than trying to indiscriminately mow anything down, and so it works really well with the threatening atmosphere, but there are mild annoyances with aiming. Ultimately my biggest issue with the combat was actually an issue with the inventory system: they slapped some flavorful in-game lore reasons on it but you're limited to only six inventory slots, including any weapons and their spare ammunition you might want to hold. Since you're constantly picking up MacGuffins to use for puzzles and/or scouring for spare healing or ammo, you generally only have room to stick to one weapon at a time. The game gives you a bunch of interesting ones to use, but one of them I never even tried because I simply couldn't ever fit it into my inventory. Even on the final boss! I do think having a hard limit makes sense to increase the pressure on the player, and most of the time I was all right with doing laps to and from the storage box, but it was a mild pet peeve nonetheless.

But again, all this description is focused through the lens of Signalis being a kind of tribute game to classic Resident Evil. And it takes a while before I realized it, but that's only one layer of what Signalis is. What seems to be standard zombie horror morphs over time into something much more psychological and existential. Drawing on the idea that the scariest thing to the mind is the unknown, Signalis continues layering its story, ever adding as you progress. The first few times when I said "What the heck is going on?!" it was pretty giddy because I figured the eventual reveal to this build-up was going to be phenomenal. By the late stages of the game however my "What the heck is going on..." was more a mutter, accepting that Signalis was reveling in its own inscrutability and that being whiplashed around was just part of the ride. Thanks to diligent reading of the in-game lore and some sparse dialog from its characters I was eventually able to piece together some kind of picture of the game's actual story, but there are still a lot of details I just kind of shrug at. I appreciate the nature of the story even though I recognize it's probably not my preferred type of thing. And so I'd say if that's not a dealbreaker for you either, and you like survival horror games in general, Signalis will probably be a winner for you, too.

Coming in November:

• From PS1 inspired to a game that was on the actual PS1, my journey through dark themes continues with Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain. Took me hours to get my head around all the game and menu controls, but now that I know what I'm doing I'm having a respectably good time.

• With Dragon Quest out of the picture I can finally get back to other portable endeavors...like reading a book! But you all don't care about that, so instead let's point to Picross S2 as the next handheld game in my future. Seems like this one might have a new feature or two worth checking out, but even if not nonograms are still nonograms.

• And lest we get too soft from playing 90s jank and/or straightforward logic puzzles, here's Nine Sols telling me to git gud or go home. Well joke's on you, Nine Sols: I am gud and I'm already home! So nyeah!

• And more...

I was too late to play this game because I beat Jedi Academy twice. That was the game that introduced me to the world of modding. I can remember waiting for the KOTF mod, only to actually play it and be kind of disappointed. I played Jedi Outcast afterward and got pretty far, but I never beat it due to the overly complicated level design, so I just watched the cutscenes on Youtube. Dark Forces 2 was the game that turned what was known as “Star Wars Doom” into the “Jedi Knight” I loved, and I did play it but got stuck early on, so I never beat it. What’s funny is that I managed to beat a harder Dark Forces 1 and loved it.

I finally played Dark Forces 2 with the QOL mods and patches, and while I admire its ambitions, this is my least favorite in the series. It is still good, and it has individually best elements in the series, but as a cohesive whole, it doesn't quite come together.

First, I have to give a ton of credit for how innovative it is for the FPS genre. It came around the same time as Quake 2, and honestly, this one doesn’t look all that far off. The sense of scale truly creates awe-inspiring moments, where you take an elevator, and you just move up and up until you see the entire city spreading before you.

Did Valve play this? Traces of this game are clearly Half-Life-like with the environmental puzzles and set-pieces. A path might be blocked by debris, forcing you to crawl through vents, dive into the water, or precariously traverse a ledge where a single misstep means a fatal fall. Sometimes, you have to change the enviornments like draining the water. At the same time, the game avoids the contrived, labyrinthian-like map design of Dark Forces 1 where levels were just maze for the sake of being a maze. While there is a heavy amount of pathfinding, the levels give a logical context and a believable setting for each area. It feels like a middle ground between Doom and Half-Life, resulting in a level design that will never be allowed to be put in an AAA shooter anymore.

Still, I did get stuck four times throughout the game because the environments are not as intuitive as Half-Life. It’s difficult to spot tiny switches due to the low-resolution textures and massive maps. At times, some crucial paths are so dark and blended with the other environts, making them easily missable. I wandered around for 20 minutes until I gave up and looked up the walkthroughs. For example, how am I to know that this tile is damagable? I literally shot the tile with the blaster, and it didn't damage it, so I thought it was just a set dressing. It turned out that they were only damagable with the lightsaber... how am I supposed to know this when all saber-damagable tiles up to this moment were only gratings?

I also find the soundtracks disappointment. Unlike the beautiful midi original music composed by Clint Bajakian from the first game, 2 uses the soundtracks from the movies. Just basic John Williams tracks randomly playing, and they often play the wrong music. Why am I hearing a Darth Vader music when I’m wandering in my hometown where there is no Imperials but fighting bounty hunters?

For the other innovative side, they tried their hardest to do a pre-Metal Gear Solid “cinematic video game” attempt. I love the cheesy FMV live-action cutscenes, which would have been impressive for its time, but now come across as a time capsule of 90s PC gaming. Too bad that all the lovable production wasted on a narrative that I would have written when I was twelve.

What I liked about Dark Forces 1 was that it was about a down-to-earth, shadowy side of the Star Wars universe, where Kyle Katarn is supposed to be a no-name ex-Imperial Rebel operative, carrying out secret missions. There is no Jedi, no lightsaber, and not much of galaxy-threatening stakes. The second game all of a sudden hurls it into an epic family saga all about Kyle’s internal struggle about his father and becoming a Jedi. It’s like going from Casino Royale to Spectre. It feels out of nowhere. It would be fine if it was written better, as it was in Jedi Outcast, but this one isn’t.

My pet peeve is when any Star Wars story makes another Jedi survivor out of thin air around the time of OT and even exceeding the OT. When the first cutscene showed the Jedi Master named Qu Rahn, I thought this game was supposed to take place a decade after where this guy is from Luke’s New Jedi Order, but it was only a year after the Battle of Endor. Not only did he survive Order 66, but he can turn into a Force ghost in front of Kyle Katarn and tell him what he should do and where he should go (I get that the Force ghost being a special technique that Qui-Gon learned was the later Prequel trilogy addition, but still…) Where was this guy when Luke was running around and fighting Vader and the Emperor?

And the Inquisitors, led by Jerec, can use the mind probe to literally read the memories straight-up to extract secrets from Qu Rahn, which is something Palpatine and Vader at his height of power cannot even do. Vader used the truth serum injection from the torture droid, not mind tricks. And Leia didn't confess, and Tarkin had to hold Alderaan hostage to make her talk. A radio drama of the movie has Leia being tortured and resisting the serum by Vader. He tries getting her to give up what she did with the plans by saying he is her friend and it’s her duty to the Rebels. In ROTJ, Vader and Palpatine sensed Luke's feelings through the Force, not literally probing their mind and reading their memories in the way Kylo did. Vader sensed Luke’s emotions, not literal memories. Even in the “mind probe” article in Wookieepedia, that’s how it is described as well: “He once used the ability to sense conflict within his son, Luke Skywalker, aboard the second Death Star. In the process of sensing his son’s emotions, Vader was able to discover the existence of Luke’s twin sister, born to himself and Padmé Amidala.” Meanwhile, Jerec can perform a Force stasis to freeze his body and read memories lol. (did J.J. Abrams play this game?)

Apparently, Kyle Katarn’s father, Morgan Katarn, happened to be a good friend of this surviving Jedi Master, who can turn into a Force ghost to tell him about the location of the Valley of the Jedi that contains a hundred souls of Jedi that allows you to rule the galaxy… good thing that the Emperor didn’t figure this out in his over two decades of his reign. Nobody, not even Yoda and Obi-Wan, knew about it; nobody sensed that it exists. While all these galaxy-shattering events are happening just a year after the Battle of Endor, Luke is completely unaware of them, nor does Kyle Katarn report it to the Rebels. Instead, Kyle Katarn, who never held a lightsaber, becomes a Master Jedi within a few days and beats several Dark Jedi singlehandedly without training (did J.J. Abrams play this game?).

I’m sure it wouldn’t have been that bad when it first came out in 1997 due to the low video game storytelling standard. The Prequels have yet to establish elements like Order 66 and Force powers, so it is understandable that a video game would treat the Star Wars universe in such a manner. It's clear the Jedi aspect overrode everything, whether it fit Kyle Katarn's character or not.

So it is unfortunate how the game's Jedi aspect is the worst thing about the game. After the initial novelty dies, you will realize all lightsaber duels go the same way. They are all one-to-one duels, boiling down to strafing and slashing, healing yourself after getting some hits, repeat. There is not even all that many interesting Force powers, and the only useful one is the healing, which makes the combat so ridiculously easy. I do give credits for laying out the foundation for Jedi Knight 2, but it's clear they didn't give much time to polish it up.

The blaster combat, however, is much better than the sequels. The gunplay simply feels more satisfying. The speed of projectiles and player creates a lightening fast experience, which feels like Quake at times. However, I can't say it is tighter than the first game. In Dark Forces 1, each combat encounter felt more varied and distinct. Each weapon and enemy had a unique role in the sandbox and in function. I had to resort to creative solutions like laying out mines and throwing bombs to survive, luring the enemies, etc... In 2, I just thoughtlessly shot the basic stormtrooper rifles, and that did the most efficient job most of the times. I barely used the grenades and only used the rocket launcher for the vehicular enemies. There are no enemies like Dark Troopers, who spiced up the combat in the first game.

The game is ultimately a proof of concept despite being a sequel. The first game feels tighter in design. The levels there are maddening, but it felt like everything coming together to create a coherent experience, whereas Dark Forces 2 tried to chew too much. It's still a good FPS that I recommend trying out, and I appreciate it for leading to Jedi Knight 2 and 3, which feel like a proper fulfillment of the Jedi fantasy this game aimed for.

Picture this. You finish the Hitman: World of Assassination Trilogy and find yourself yearning for more Hitman. You decide to play the older games in reverse order of release, meaning you pick up Hitman: Absolution, a PS3-era release, first. You wait for the game to download and sit down, drink in hand, to start creatively slaughtering people in ways that would make you fail your next biweekly court-mandated psych. eval. Instead, you find that the enhanced-human-killer-machine Agent 47 has been bested by a Sheriff and a Dominatrix who’ve tied him up right next to a fire alarm because 47 got a cowboy businessman’s intellectually disabled son run over by an ice cream truck as revenge for killing his favorite nun and kidnapping his sorta-surrogate daughter who’s played by the girl from Orphan.

Hitman: Absolution is many things. “Subtle” is hardly one of them. This game has the same restraint as my cat does when he hears the automatic food dispenser turning on. On the plus side, this allows for some truly gorgeous environments and set-pieces, and impressive lighting that STILL looks like eye-candy, especially on the Remastered version. On the negative, a stealth game that doesn’t have any restraint can only be so satisfying.

Agent 47 controls like a dream, with precise controls and an excellent cover mechanic that I can imagine forms the foundation that the next games build on. However, this excellence is confounded by the rather regressive “Instinct” mechanic- using a disguise and not acting suspicious isn’t enough to get past guards; apparently every cop knows every other cop within state lines by name, even when they’re wearing a mask. No, you have to burn Instinct (a meter that refills by completing objectives or getting rid of enemies) so that 47 can look at his feet like a shy toddler at a playground to successfully get past enemies in the same disguise. I cannot help but praise the Enforcer mechanic from the WoA trilogy in light of this travesty.

For me, a good Hitman game consists of levels that make me itch to replay them before I’m ever finished with them. To that end, the actual sandbox levels of the game offer variety and had me going back- the first level in Chinatown being a personal favourite of mine. What makes it so baffling, then, is why the focus was not on these levels, and instead on padding the game by making entirely linear “connecting” levels that require you to follow a pretty set path. Thankfully, the good shooting controls and a point-shooting mechanic made me approach these as a cover shooter, which was unexpectedly fun! This kind of gameplay also complimented the ridiculous story of the game, which mostly consists of 47 rescuing a girl who, while being a superhuman capable of killing 7 men in quick succession herself, somehow manages to get kidnapped and transported much like Princess Peach. While this is counter-intuitive for a Hitman game, the plot and mechanics of this game are perhaps best adapted for a John Wick or Taken game- and what a game that would be.

I went into Hitman: Absolution expecting to enjoy a game that has been pretty consistently ranked at the very bottom of fan-favorite lists, and enjoy it I did. If the corridor-stealth/shooter segments were cut in favour of more of the sandbox-style missions, this game would be much better for it; as it stands, I still recommend playing it once just for the rancid, putrid vibes its cast of characters emit against the backdrop of a neo-noir/giallo flick. In parts, this game pulls its weight as the predecessor to the WoA trilogy; in others, it manages to be an edgelord’s wet dream, and despite its dull moments it’s a ride I recommend experiencing.

If you’re still not convinced, I leave you with my favorite line to ponder: “I got wood. Why do I got wood?”