I fucking LOVED this. The gameplay loop was so cool, the level designs were varied, well paced, and cleverly designed, and even the flying sections were actually quite neat, after a while.
Is it a Doom game? Not sure. But by god, it really did make me feel like a God at times, and I think that it made so many of the right moves constantly. I loved it.
It’s going to be up there, I haven’t enjoyed a campaign this much in years. Years.
Monster Train 1 was a skillful and somewhat cynical mash of ideas ripped from various other card games at the height of their craze at the turn of the decade, and Monster Train 2 is skillful and somewhat cynical enough not to tamper with this formula. You still have to guard your engine against waves of increasingly tough enemies with the monsters and magic you pick up along the way, and your train is still split into three segments that your enemy must travel through, lending the action a tower defence vibe. The only difference is a general tightening up of the mechanics, with all the lessons learned from the previous game integrated to create a slicker, more satisfying experience. It definitely retains that lovely limit breaker feeling, where you happen upon a combo which is insanely powerful, and you find it dragging the rest of your messy hodgepodge of a deck to glorious victory. I would say its finest achievement is realising this is the real allure of card games, and setting you up to achieve those highs in a satisfying fashion more regularly.
Despite that, a few things feel off balance-wise. The game really wants you to try moving the enemy and your own troops between floors more this time, but it feels fiddly and pointless to do, with the one deck leader dedicated to the concept a complete waste of time. On the other side, there’s one boss that is almost certain to end your run unless you brought a card that can force them forwards. It’s not guaranteed they’ll show, it’s just there so you must have pull/push somewhere in your deck whether you like it or not, and that really rubs me up the wrong way. Meanwhile, there’s one deck revolving around sprouting mushrooms which is far better than anything else. Game’s a complete push-over once you unlock that. And surprise! None of its cards revolve around movement.
The game’s aesthetics and tone are pure mid-noughties WoW-esque kitsch, delivered with the sincerity of a group of devs who are certain you care about this absolute twaddle as much as they do. I found that rather charming. Your mileage may vary.
I can see why these were released together. Chapter 3 is much more of a side thing - another fun adventure in one of the more inventive self-contained Dark Worlds, full of mini-games inventively applied into the JRPG-ish battle system. Unusually, it didn’t really end with a proper Normal World section like the previous chapters did - and so chapter 4 kind of gives you that bit of equilibrium at the beginning.
It also gets you into a whole lot of the story, expanding on a lot of the interesting mysteries set up by the previous chapters and starting to get a little bit more into that subtle edge of horror. I keep saying this but Toby Fox, for all that his games are also defined by a really daft sense of humour, knows how to get under your skin about four-thousand times more effectively than any straight through the line horror game dev. The juxtaposition between how goofy these games can be and then how corrupted and strange his world can become (and then back again and back again and back again, etc.) is so so so so so up my street. Mechanically as well, this one introduces new little ways of engaging with its JRPG-influenced systems - I think like with Kentucky Route Zero, I would recommend playing these episodically just for how each episode is its own little game, with its own identity, its own set of mechanical interests, and its own mysteries to pore over if you’re that way inclined (i.e. a bit obsessive, i.e. Manches).
The story is at the half-way point now, and I can’t recommend it enough, frankly. I don’t know if you’d necessarily need to have played Undertale to enjoy these - it’s not strictly a sequel or prequel or anything, it’s one of those strange situations though where there are so many deliberately recontextualised things / bits of lore. It’s one of the more interesting “franchises” in games for that reason and the closest the medium has got to a Twin Peaks / Twin Peaks: The Return situation afaic.
Mario Kart World - I mean, I’ve done the grand prix and some of the knockout tournaments…but for me it just isn’t as good as 8. The intermission tracks are pretty dull, and the free roam is just such a missed opportunity. So for me it’s quite a disappointment.
However, it is my son’s first game he is playing on the regular, and he loves it. It brings me a lot of joy seeing him enjoy playing as all the characters, using the modifiers to let him keep up in the races. It’s just fun to watch him find pure joy in it just because it’s so new and fun. The game wasn’t for me, but I’m glad it was made for my son
Still playing - Clair Obscur: Expedition 33: I’ve been playing this over two months now on and off when I can find time. Deffo think it’s going to be my favourite game this year unless it really messes itself up by the end, but in the middle of Act 2 and I have no qualms so far.
I got this for Christmas and ended up only completing it this week. I’m not sure why it took so long but there was something odd about it that I can’t put my finger on. At it’s core, the game is an excellent Metroidvania style platformer. The mechanics of running round the map work really well and crucially movement feels extremely fluid. I bounced off Metroid Prime last year and along with those stupid fucking sections where you go one to one with a robot, the movement not feeling quite right was a big part in that.
Here though, I could never stick with the game for more than half an hour at a time. I’m not sure what it was about it but that addictive hook didn’t seem to be there. Maybe my problem was the story. While it wasn’t my favourite, you also seemed to spend quite a long time just hopping and dashing about the place without much story progression which made me care about it less and less every time we got to a cut scene.
This is probably a sign I’m getting old too, but about half way through, the boss battles got much, much harder. In the end I just started putting the difficulty down to the lowest to get through them. The forest woman with the giant floating tiger and the rhythm based sections really killed my enthusiasm for the boss fights stone dead.
I enjoyed the game most when opening up a new area or gaining a new special power. Getting access to new places and uncovering new areas and secret parts of the gigantic world map was the best thing about the game. All the environments have their own unique features and designs and exploring each one was really fun.
In Dredge you control a little boat out on the high seas, a new fisherman in an area called The Marrows. At very everything seems pleasant as you reel in your first few catches, but then you catch an aberation or stay out on the water a little too late after dark and suddenly you’re in Lovecraft world, baby.
I was really loving this one for most of my playthrough. There was always an upgrade to unlock or a new fishing spot to try out and I got quite addicted to it, stealing 15 minutes here and there when I wasn’t able to play for longer. Eventually though, the core mechanic got old and my enjoyment dipped a bit towards the end. It was frustrating that the story was so slight too as at the start of the game when you were putting the pieces together that all was not what it seemed, I really wanted to drive on and uncover the next little crumb but once you get into the main quest of finding the five central items, it all dried up. The ending too felt really dashed off and a bit of a let down. Overall though, it was a fun ride and short enough that it’s easy to overlook it’s failings.
I’ll start this off by saying what I thought, for the entire game, would have been a really interesting use of this same premise. So: basically, this game follows the protagonist from the first game. In that first game, Max has the power to rewind time and uses it to save an old friend from being murdered: however, this creates a sort of temporal storm leaving her with the key choice at the end of that game. Does she let the town be destroyed by the storm so that she can continue life in the world she’s curated with her childhood friend? Or does she let things go as they originally had and live with that loss and with the uncertainty of the future?
In this game, Max finds herself faced with another traumatic murder; and she finds she has another supernatural power. This time she can flit between the world in which her friend died, and a parallel world in which the murder didn’t take place - in doing so, she can piece together what happened, and hopefully try to save her friend in the parallel world. NOW, MY IDEA WOULD HAVE BEEN that there could have been a degree of jeopardy with these two parallel worlds – the game asks what choice you’d made in the first game, and I had decided to save the town from the storm, SO I thought that the parallel world would also be a world in which she hadn’t saved the town and where her friend was still alive.
In the early episodes, I felt like they might have been setting something similar to this. Even though the first Life is Strange was very clumsily (and at times, just downright badly) written; I loved how sincere it was, and I loved how earnestly it explored the character’s deep anxiety about the world and the future - showing how her powers could be both a fantasy / remedy to that, but also a dangerous means of denying the world and its multitudes. Similarly, I thought this parallel universe power would be a way of reflecting on the trauma of the first game’s decision and the natural thoughts of “what if I had acted differently?”
Instead, the use of the first game’s protagonist feels kind of pointless for the most part. The story is mostly unconnected to the first, and (worse than that) mostly unconnected from those more interesting emotional themes as it goes on. It just kind of sets up loads of twists and just ends with some full-on science-fiction stuff that’s just a bit up its arse.
Gameplay-wise, it’s broadly similar to the others - for better and for worse; and because the story gradually droops into Fahrenheit territory, I was more and more aware of those series-wide flaws as the game progressed. The insistence on hand-holding through every puzzle, the “THIS CHOICE WILL HAVE CONSEQUENCES” message that never fails to completely wreck the illusion of freedom, the overuse of the same-old same-old locations and assets. There are a few instances as well where your choices don’t seem to be taken as into consideration as you’d like - there’s a bit in Max’s journal that alludes heavily to a love triangle, despite the fact that I shot down one of the romance options at every available opportunity (because he genuinely seemed like the worst twat imaginable).
A few fun moments of jank in there, though, as per usual for this series. Most notably, when Max takes a photo - you get to take the photo, and set up the framing and even make a double exposure and all that. But the photo that you take seems to have no impact on anything: there’s a point early on where she posts a picture you take with the caption “I can never get a candid of Safi” despite the fact that you can (and I did) get a pretty natural looking of Safi. Funnier still, towards the end of the game, you have to take photos of people to free them from being possessed or whatever. On almost every occasion, I shifted the frame away and took a picture of like a tree or a bin. And the story progressed every time. Never stopped being funny.
But yeah, disappointing overall. This series kind of suffered a bit early on - the first game was so popular, and the fan community seem incredibly intense and had a muted response to the second game trying to do things differently. (I liked the second game, but it being so buggy that it deleted my save mid-way through having played the episodes as they came out didn’t help matters). And so the games have been in a bit of a limbo since then - True Colours was good, but felt a bit like Life is Strange on autopilot (indie vibes, teen drama, light supernatural-ness) and then this feels like they’re trying to go big without straying from a set formula.
It’s such a good feeling when something feels like it made was for you. It’s not the case of course (and this game does end up going into the theme of becoming too attached to art at some point), but when something hits it’s such a joy.
I was always looking forward to Clair Obscur - modern day turn-based RPG with a unique art style, wow! What I didn’t expect was a really nuanced story about grief, what art means to an individual, how creativity can bind us as well as allow us to ignore reality. It really hit me in a profound way I won’t forget soon.
It’s also fun as hell to play. The turn based combat is so active and the build crafting gets ridiculous by the end, it’s just a tonne of fun. Reminded me of a blend of Final Fantasy 10 and Lost Odyssey, two RPGs which hold a special place in my heart.
The open world too, oh boy I love an explorable over world, and this is one of the best ever. It’s beautiful, strange and otherworldly. It follows the classic FF way of opening up the map through new and fun traversal techniques. Secrets, super bosses, weird easter eggs. They even do static areas that come across as homages to the pre rendered screens of RPGs past. It is just wonderful.
It brought me back to my childhood wonder of games, what is going to happen next? What secrets can I find? How do I find out everything about this world?
It’s a rich game of such specific artistic intent, I adored every second. I really implore anyone who has a love of old school turn-based RPGs to play it. It has instantly become an all timer for me that I won’t shut up about now. Just beautiful to love something so much.
Just finished Technobabylon and it might be the game with the best dialogue and story I’ve encountered. Genuinely impressed with how good a job they did.
Good god man, no. It’s a text game. There’s a cabin in the woods, and in the basement of the cabin is a princess. You have to slay her, otherwise she will end the world. I recommend it.
One of my indie favs, this. Thought it a bit heavy handed with the political parallels on release but given what happens these days it seems entirely plausible.
From a game that kind of represents the weakest attempt to create a contemporary adventure game (Life is Strange: Double Exposure’s combination of borderline insulting hand-holding puzzles with a story that runs out of things to say just as it gets going), The Rise of the Golden Idol kind of represents a real high-point for me. It smoothens out the more artsy experimentalism of something like The Return of the Obra Dinn - turning those game mechanics into something pretty compulsive and iteratively repeatable and almost casual (this is a game you can drop into for ten minutes while cooking dinner or whatever), but without losing what can make this kind of game really interesting.
I found the puzzles and mysteries challenging but never really got stuck - and I thought the evolution on the first game was really interesting. Iirc, that first one had the self-contained episodes followed by the “boss” scenario that had you finding clues in previously completed ones, whereas this one has little chapters comprising of three or four scenarios with one final bit that has you delving into those for clues to put everything together. And more than just being just a nifty game mechanic (I’m rarely interested in nifty mechanics on their own, personally), I found it a really cool way to tell a story non-linearly. In this regard, The Rise of the Golden Idol feels a little bit like the lighter end of the “adventure game as perfect vehicle for Pynchon-influenced stories” thing I won’t fucking shut up about - it weaves a sprawling who-dun-what-and-when-and-furthermore-fuckin-how story across a number of years, with characters drifting in and out and with their intentions emerging slowly in bits while you’re sifting through these lovingly convoluted little dioramas.
Really liked it. Might be tempted to get the DLCs at some point, but - as with the first one - I complete the main story and don’t have much inclination to return to this routine for a while. Not helped by the fact that the PS5 version is a bit presentationally buggy and wouldn’t really show me the ending scene until I quit and reopened the game and found it on the little menu board.
Enjoyable! I’m thinking Expedition 33 next - see what all le fuss is about
First game I’ve properly played front-to-back with my eldest, and he proper loved watching every second. Made the whole experience extra wonderful. But even without that, it’s just an excellent game, the best kind of Nintendo magic. It felt a bit too manic at first, but once I settled into it’s rhythm I found a truly great collectathon platformer for a new generation. Also, there is something that happens at the end of the game that has me giddy with glee. So happy this surpassed my expectations so much.
Been on a real set of bangers with 1000xResist, Clair Obscur and DK - no idea what to play next
It is a cycling open world racing game, but mechanically it might as well be a car. There is very little different really. Story is you wake up, a ghost skull says we need to do the great shift, and you then have to ride around a series of areas unlocking races, defeating the rides, add Rep, to them claim back what has been stolen.
The gameplay loops is cute and short, and for the most part the riding is well designed. But once a certain twist takes place, you start going up against much harder foes and, with a few mechanics added - namely cars and small tracks - it becomes very fucking frustrating to get wins at the rate needed consistently.
However I loved my time with it! Really enjoyed the moment to moment exploring. It does feel like a little unabititous at times, as there is a real lack of side quests bar some tokens, and the economy is fucked - I never bought anything, the won bike parts were enough.
And whilst I think it was a little short on ambition, the loop as it is was great. Looks and sounds great too.
A contender for the top five at the end of the year, I think.
I loved dredge and it’s doom ladeness. The noise it made when you reeled in an abomination was great, I want my laptop to make that noise when I get an error
Well, I don’t think a game has ever affected me as much as that, and frankly I don’t think anything will. £4 on the eShop, and barely a game, but I don’t think the story could have been told in any other medium as well as it is.
Spoilers literally break the game so do not read them. I’m not even going to post them here.
It’s an hour long, and it’s an hour that I will be thinking about for probably the rest of my life? Yeah. Wow.
