Jake Arias's Reviews
Everyone is selfish, and this is baked into the game to a certain degree—even a story in which the choices were clear and I was able to wrap things up in a less-selfish way was still plagued by flashbacks in which all of the characters acted in unreasonably selfish, egocentric ways. When I went to try and help someone, only for the game to interpret my aid attempt as an attempt to humiliate them, though, I mentally checked out of the entire experience.
Sadly, One Eyed Kutkh isn’t very good.
To put it bluntly, this is a game that completely loses its pull once you figure it out because there’s only one efficient way of succeeding, and while you can technically engage in some of the game’s superfluous, almost decorative mechanics, there’s no real reason to do so.
Much of this game is simply bad—the platforming is bad, the puzzles are bad, the combat is passable at best, and even the graphics manage to create real problems. That’s to say nothing of the minigames and boss fights, either, which range from trivial to outright infuriating. Sometimes you’ll play a game and notice it fraying at the edges, but Crossing Souls is in a more advanced state of disrepair.
When Candleman first released as an Xbox One exclusive in January of 2017, it ended suddenly and without warning on a seriously depressing note entirely at odds with the whimsical tone it had maintained up to that point. You can still find comments about this in reviews of the time. Flash forward ten months and it received a free expansion called "Lost Light" that not only added several more levels, but also continued the story so that it ended on a much more uplifting note. Having now played through the "Complete Journey" version for PC that includes both the base game and Lost Light's content, I can't help but suspect that the original ending was the result of the developer or publisher rushing the game out to meet a deadline. It's incredibly difficult to imagine the Lost Light expansion not being an originally planned part of the game given how much more naturally it ends the story, but if it truly was something tacked on to address concerns about the bleakness of the original ending, then its quality is laudable in its own right.
By the time you reach the final 150th stage, you’ll have died thousands of times, and not all of those deaths will be your fault. Again, this is typical of a Game Boy game, but misleading hit boxes and miscellaneous eccentricities that cause you to instantly die minutes into a tedious level are the type of cheap difficulty best left in the past, and this cheapness has a way of overshadowing all of the good things Madcap Castle does.
A book could be written about the numerous meandering, intermittently functional conversations that at first seem to exist solely to create needless drama, but quickly pivot to take on a confessional tone. It’s ironic for a game that pushes oppressive-religion themes so vigorously to eventually devolve into what appears to be a self-pitying writer vicariously self-flagellating using their stand-ins, denying anyone real closure or redemption because everyone is written to be deserving of punishment. At the end of the day, though, it just makes me tired. This game is draining in all the wrong ways.
All I knew going into the Xbox One version of Flying Tigers: Shadows Over China was that it was an arcade-style flying game originally released for the PC, and one that Steam’s user reviews were decidedly split on for whatever reason. A significant number of the complaints seemed to be focused on various errors impeding the ability to play, however, or invoked other arcade-style flying games (which is generally code for “I went in expecting something different and this thumbs down doesn’t actually reflect anything but those original expectations”). I always relish the opportunity to drill deep into unfamiliar territory and figure out which criticisms are valid and which aren’t, and right off the bat, the fact that I finished the campaign in something like 3 hours suggests that those centered around Shadows Over China’s length have merit.
The story and characters are on the thin side, but nevertheless a step up from Pirate Queen’s Quest. The mechanics, meanwhile, are interesting, but the usual Shantae endgame difficulty spike (this has become a pun over time as each endgame incorporates more and more literal instant-death spikes) pushes them further than they can comfortably go.
A Walk in the Park is a slightly hesitant but undeniably enjoyable step in a direction the burgeoning genre has yet to explore, and one that hopefully sends a message that games like this don’t need to be crushingly dark (tonally and visually) to be enjoyable.
Originally released in October of 2017 for the PC, it’s now making its way to the Playstation 4/Vita, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, but I’m reviewing the PC version because it allows for a broader range of useful review experiences. Also, I was immediately struck by the art style, and in a flurry of naked enthusiasm, requested a key for it without doing my usual exhaustive research. You may notice that those two reasons are mutually exclusive, which might lead you to think that one of them is a lie or exaggeration, and I can think of no better way of explaining this game’s vibe than that; this is a game where all roads lead to something horrible and some mysteries are never resolved, but one in which such outcomes are consistent with the state of the world.
It feels like Ayo was so concerned with establishing itself as a game and gradually ramping up the difficulty that it forgot to ensure that all of the things it does to those ends are fun and fair.
It starts to feel similarly passive-aggressive in the way it does things, too, including a fake ending that plays out countless hours of busywork prior to the real ending. That means we’re dealing with pacing issues in a game that, like its predecessor, still agonizes fruitlessly over how it can best pay homage to Chrono Trigger’s legacy while blatantly ignoring the things that were actually good about that game.
Hey, speaking of legs, this is a game where enemies can remove yours, leaving you to flail around helplessly as a torso in a desperate bid to fend off enemies with whatever crazy weaponry you have. Of course, that’s assuming that your arms haven’t been removed by a dinosaur, because that’s also a possibility, and you’re not going to be shooting anyone without arms. The fact that such sentences can be written in complete seriousness speaks to the utter absurdity of Tower 57, but it should also be mentioned that the game isn’t so wrapped up in craziness that it doesn’t do anything else.
Then there’s Bubsy: The Woolies Strike Back, a game that breathes fresh life into the series in the same sense that characters being ripped to shreds in a zombie movie before returning as members of the undead technically have fresh life breathed into them. This is an abomination, and that’s coming from someone who could be considered a bit of a Bubsy apologist.
The reason I bring this up is that the same thing seems to happen every so often with modern developers, leading to surprising, quality games that are instantly familiar and yet totally unique. That’s Battle Chasers: Nightwar in a nutshell.
Pirate Queen’s Quest has redeeming elements, such as a great final boss fight and some Risky hijinks that subtly manage to pull her back a bit from the uncomfortably senseless malice she showed in the base game (which felt wrong after the events of Pirate’s Curse), and the upgrade mechanics really allow you to break the game in an entertaining way, but the chest placement and overall lack of an interesting plot or story resolution hold it back in a big way. If you’re already crazy about the series, this is an obvious “buy” regardless. If you’re not, it’s probably best to wait for a sale.
[G]ames are my preferred method of avoiding people, and my view of games like this is generally that they exist as bait for the kind of Youtubers whose video thumbnails consist of them making a ridiculous face, so it’s saying something that I found myself holding my controller in a white knuckle grip and getting mad at little pixel art cartoon guys.
Pyre is a (Super)giant waste of time, energy, and money featuring gameplay so irrevocably interwoven into trends of its time that history is unlikely to treat it as kindly as Bastion and Transistor.
One minute I was steamrolling my way through levels on the first try with a few boss-type exceptions that required a bit more effort, and then an annoying earlier boss was suddenly doubled up and the entire screen was awash in bullets that most of my paltry skills were helpless to do anything about. The few that helped had cooldown timers that ensured that I was stuck without them for the majority of the fight on each of my ~30-40 attempts, each preceded by the same 5-minute level.