Jake Arias's Reviews
The Ascent feels like two very different games. One of those games is an enjoyable aRPG in an over-the-top cyberpunk world where you find new equipment, upgrade your weapons and abilities, and take on odd jobs in an attempt to better your character’s situation. In many ways, this feels like a combination of the canceled Prey 2 and what a lot of people mistakenly expected Cyberpunk 2077 to be like, all filtered through a world that combines the alien-rich population of Mass Effect with Blade Runner‘s rainy dystopia. The other game is the one that undermines that first one.
I remembered developer Wooden Monkeys from Save Koch, their entertainingly ambitious (but confusingly unwieldy) previous game that similarly featured a character stuck in a room, and I was interested in seeing a more mature take on that concept. Song of Farca ends up being a massive improvement. By dropping Save Koch‘s randomly assigned villain and giving the player more agency, the story is able to zoom in on a small cast of interesting characters and develop in a surprisingly compelling way.
Cris Tales bills itself as an “indie love letter to classic jRPGs.” Instead, it so completely misunderstands what makes them great that it comes across like a creepy kidnapper letter composed out of letters cut from various magazines. This is a game that looks fantastic while doing everything at least a little wrong; entire mechanics are outright broken, bugs can strike and render certain battles unwinnable, and stats randomly see massive rises and drops that make it impossible to tell how powerful your characters actually are. Add in Cris Tales‘ slow movement speed and insistence on making you run around doing busy work and you have a recipe for a truly painful experience.
This is a game that gets a lot of things right—things that bigger teams often struggle with. At the same time, the game’s smaller scope results in a paucity of content/secrets and an overabundance of filler opponents who sabotage the pacing. I enjoyed my time with Guild of Darksteel, but it ultimately feels like a third of an incredible game let down by its limited scope.
Going Under is an exhausted groan of a game. It looks and sounds great and the characters are amusing for the most part, but the mechanics clash in weird ways, and it just feels bad to play.
The single positive thing Dungeons & Dragons: Dark Alliance does is end, though sadly, not nearly soon enough.
Somehow, these two negative qualities balance out and allow Minute of Islands to tell a story about obsession and stubbornness that’ll resonate strongly with people predisposed to those traits.
This is the ultimate “easy to learn, difficult to master” tRPG, being made up of a few basic stats that are easy to keep track of. That’s in addition to numerous more subtle mechanics that occur behind the scenes, and these can be safely ignored or manipulated for an even greater advantage over your opponents. Wildermyth‘s difficulty curve becomes incredibly uneven toward the end of its fourth campaign, however, and the fifth and final campaign’s difficulty arises primarily from a number of annoying mechanics that exist to waste your time. Still, Wildermyth is great. It feels like it’s one balancing patch away from becoming one of the best tRPGs on the market.
Everything about it is clearly inspired by Final Fantasy VI—one of the games from my childhood that I know front to back—and yet all of the features and priorities that made that game work have been watered down and replaced with gimmicks that appear to have been designed solely to waste as much time as possible. Octopath Traveler‘s dialog drags. Its story meanders aimlessly. Its characters are dull tropes. Its mechanics never evolve. There’s very little to recommend here.
Biomutant is briskly paced but also a drag at certain points. It’s frequently overwhelming and somehow deceptively simple. Most of the time, it exists in this superposition of contradictory states where its successes and failures coexist and commingle, which lends an undeniably singular quality to a game that, at a glance, doesn’t stray too far from the open-world mold. I haven’t played anything quite like Biomutant before and neither have you. Not everyone will be able to look past the price tag and a parade of minor flaws to appreciate that uniqueness. Regardless, I’m glad that this exists.