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The newest chapter in Senua’s story is powerfully told but feels like it’s missing a few pages.
But it’s a credit to the Simogo team’s incredibly sharp writing that however obtuse the game’s puzzles may seem at times, they never feel unsolvable. As noted in one of the many bits of sumptuous flavor text scattered about the Hotel Letztes Jahr: “Getting stuck is one of the key parts of the process.” And in holding true to the manifestos of the artists at the heart of the story, Lorelei and the Laser Eyes manifests puzzles as art, requiring the proper interpretations of mixed-media sculptures, paintings, and more. It’s all one unexpected thrill after another as you go deeper and deeper into a maze of memories, metaphors, and magic.
Despite its litany of tricks, though, Animal Well is a relatively simple game at its core, with little in the way of an overarching mystery or narrative to push you along. And while the lack of long-term hooks sometimes makes the game feel a bit slight, the single-minded attention to the in-the-moment pleasure of the gameplay creates a focus that is meditative rather than expansive. Animal Well isn’t some grand adventure or sweeping artistic statement. It’s just a boatload of tiny interconnected puzzles, woven together to form an almost unimaginably intricate web.
Had Eve been a character with agency and personality, who actually responded to the drooling and leering that she’s meant to embody, well, she’d be Bayonetta. If her emptiness was hiding deep existential secrets that the game revealed with patience and empathy, she’d be 2B. Instead, Eve is a busty, long-legged cipher of a doll who has no idea just how far up her hind quarters the game’s camera is designed to go, and seems somehow quite comfortable wearing sci-fi heels that make her feet look like horse hooves. Perhaps it’s unfair for this to be the sole focus for some players, but, unfortunately, there isn’t a whole lot else going on to draw their gaze away from it.
One gets the sense that adding that little bit of extra context might’ve made Neurodiver feel more Phoenix Wright than the folks at MiniBoss intended. But that wouldn’t have necessarily been a bad thing given that the game always feels as if wants for, well, more context. It’s a testament to the work that was done by MidBoss that the game’s characters, their history with the various conflicts of the world, and the specific psychic damage being done to the Golden Butterfly’s victims that Neurodiver will leave players wanting more. There are just far too many moments where wanting to know more crosses the line into “the game isn’t providing enough.”
Above all, Cryptmaster suffers from you having too many words to learn and there being far too few chapters in which to do so. Even if players are Wheel of Fortune savants, unlocking every word for each character requires hours of retyping the same combat commands. Even an actual zombie would beg off after piecing together words like PARADIDDLE and AMBERGRIS for such meager rewards as another scrap of backstory. This is especially so in the last level, a straightforward corridor that strips away the illusion of exploration provided by the more elaborate mazes and NPC quests that preceded them. By then, you’ll have long come to the realization that this game designed around words should have chosen them more carefully.
The game does include a functional and robust multiplayer mode, where groups of up to 30 online players can dive together, but to what end? As the gameplay itself is so simplistic and the sessions poorly emulate real diving, the cooperative experience is fairly inane. Outside of enlisting others to hasten the progress of unlocks, there’s very little to this mode, and the same can be said of most everything that Luminous has to offer.
Given the sheer amount of hints and instructional text plastered all over its environments, Crow Country is tuned to be approachable and readily digestible. You’ll never find yourself desperate for resources or racking your brain over a fiendish puzzle. Even the old-school tank controls are optional, mapped to the D-pad just in case any players feel compelled to experiment before going back to the analog stick. These decisions are hardly out of step with the pleasantly nostalgic presentation, but they also ensure that the game succeeds far more as a puzzle object than as a horror freak-out. For better and for worse, Crow Country goes down smoothly.
Rise of the Ronin’s story is still good enough to keep players hooked, effectively luring them into the gameplay loop, which does have plenty of its own merits. But it’s dubious whether the various iniquities of the game are good enough to justify where it goes, especially knowing that all that effort can’t change which way the wind is blowing for Japan by the end.
The game’s quirky sensibility lends amusing irony to its critique of modern industry’s environmental destruction. Where item descriptions in the Dark Souls series and its ilk flesh out the esoteric lore of their settings, here they offer a crab’s-eye view of life on the surface. “Residue of a painful venom lines the outside of this armor,” reads the blurb about the nozzle of a hot sauce bottle that Kril can equip as a shell. As Another Crab’s Treasure conjures a universe in which the vast horde of trash sunk carelessly into the sea might have its benefits, the game pokes countless holes in its fantasy, letting reality flood in: No amount of make-believe can render humankind’s impact on the Earth anything but poisonous.
That narrative undercurrent makes Tales of Kenzera: Zau’s mechanics and direction less about lack of ambition than accessibility. At a mere 10 hours, this is a game whose brevity is by design. After all, its story is, ultimately, about letting go, about accepting life’s harsh limits, and finding meaning in the time you have. Even as short as Tales of Kenzera is, it speaks in meaningful ways about things that audiences have needed to hear for a long time.
Beyond its prolonged final third and iffy difficulty scaling, Children of the Sun isn’t done any favors by its dialogue, which is too gauche (“I just killed a man, now I’m horny”) or too sappy (“Soon the sun will start shining through a bullet-shaped hole in your head”) by half. But it soars whenever you’re planning an action that’s brought explosively to fruition, and luckily that’s the order of the day here. And as you marvel at this self-assuredly suave bullet-play, it’s easy to imagine Suda Gôichi out there taking notes on what Rother has accomplished.
Ultimately, Harold Halibut’s abundance of charm doesn’t translate to the game being charming, and in the end, while there’s plenty to see here, there’s just nothing to do.
Dragon’s Dogma 2 is such a profoundly strange and inventive game at so many turns that its occasional stumbles are largely forgivable. For one, there are a few too many side quests that leave you stuck in town, some of which lean on woefully underbaked stealth sequences. The technical performance is also far from perfect, with unsteady framerates and clear graphical errors popping up frequently. In total, though, these come across as the drawbacks of a game whose reach exceeds its grasp, which is better by far than a game with no reach at all.
As a whole, BIOMORPH doesn’t live up to the unique promise of its killer creature designs.
All that said, Showtime! is relentlessly charming, and its short, relatively uncomplicated plays will probably kill with a younger demographic. In fact, the setting also plays to the game’s favor whenever secret areas are too obviously telegraphed: Being able to see the strings, like the ones holding up Kung Fu Peach’s martial-arts marionette rival, is a part of the overall aesthetic and performance, not a mark against it. In the end, and perhaps above all, it’s just peachy to see such love given to the arts, with Darkle foes dispatched as much by dazzlingly synchronous ice skating and “the power of song” as by lassos, katanas, and a properly parrying kick.
Despite being occasionally funny, the game is never fun.
The story might initially come off as a letdown too, with its pedestrian fantasy setting and mostly ordinary character arcs. But sometimes stories in games simply serve to set the mood, as a kind of backdrop against which you experience the main event—the play itself. Few complain, for instance, that Mario games aren’t surprising enough in their narratives. In much the same way, Unicorn Overlord’s predictable plot beats hang out in the background, unoppressive, so that you’re free to let the rush of its expertly crafted systems wash over you unimpeded.
Coupled with the rest of the game’s failings, it becomes apparent that whatever more complex aspirations Alone in the Dark might have wanted to realize, it didn’t have the resources to achieve them. Its greatest achievement is that, rather than releasing in some broken and clearly unfinished state, it has managed to reach the level of being merely bad instead.
Given that it can be comfortably completed within a few days, even with the heightened difficulty of later levels, Mario vs. Donkey Kong can’t help but feel like a featherweight experience. That, though, is consistent with my experience of the original Game Boy Advance version, a sturdy-for-its-time puzzle-platformer whose set of issues prevented it from approaching greatness. Playing the remake, it’s easy to rue that the developers missed the chance to enhance and expand upon the original. This, along with other glaring deficiencies like the lack of substantive new material outside of two new worlds, proves that the transition from handheld to home console has done Mario vs. Donkey Kong little to no favors.