Slant Magazine
HomepageSlant Magazine's Reviews
Beautiful and elegant though it may seem on the outside, Jett: The Far Shore too often lets its stylistic tics drag the experience into varying degrees of frustration.
It’s worth noting that the main mechanical difference between Deathloop and Dishonored is that you can kill without moral consequence here. That’s liberating, but while it’s nice, and hilarious, that kicking enemies into the ocean is such a key part of Deathloop’s gameplay, there isn’t a whole lot that’s interesting about that. For a stealthy FPS that prides itself on the steady accumulation of power and understanding, the game also rarely makes either one feel particularly exhilarating. But, in the end, Deathloop’s almost perversely ironic saving grace is that it’s populated with charismatic weirdos who are just as irked about that as you are.
The randomness of WarioWare: Get It Together! is a clear demonstration of the old adage that when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. You never know what game or character you’ll see next, only that whether you’re temporarily playing as a hover-cab driver who can only shoot to the left or an overgrown kid who can only move by grappling between objects, you can make it something sweet, either in against-the-odds triumph or comic failure. Managing such chaos has always been a core tenet of the WarioWare experience, and in doubling down on the randomness of its microgames, the series has at last gotten its shtick together.
Bridge of Spirits is an old-fashioned adventure game, one that sets you on a very curated, puzzle-marked path. Which is to say that it lacks for the trailblazing go-anywhere spirit of Breath of the Wild. But Kena is, after all, a spirit guide, so you can trust that you’re not missing out on much by sticking to the missions that she calls out on the map. What you’ll get by following that path that she puts you on are the tightest, most compelling pieces of gameplay, those rooted in plot. In fact, seeing as what happens to those spirits who lose themselves along the way, the purest form of Bridge of Spirits is the one that doesn’t wander off.
And because the atmosphere encompasses so much of Sable’s appeal, the technical issues can be absolutely ruinous. When the bike disappears into the ground, when the menus break, or when Sable passes straight through an object that she should be able to land on, the illusion collapses and we’re left not with a vivid sense of place, but with a video game where the mechanics are all a bit of a chore. With its restrained approach toward collectibles and its rudimentary traversal, Sable attempts to depict exploration for the sake of exploration, but in doing so it only clarifies that such a concept is not necessarily as enticing as it sounds.
Thanks to the game’s rich writing, rarely does it feel that you’re just wandering through one luscious environment after another—like the canopy-level walkways of the Gianne Woodland or steep ivied cliffs of the Aureum Falls—so much as you’re being given glimpses of a land well worth fighting for. Even the variety of your party serves a deeper function, suggesting that one person alone, however strong, cannot break down every obstacle.
“Every roll of the dice matters, but not every roll counts,” claims Seemore, the die-restoring pipnician who Even befriends. But this isn’t true of Lost in Random’s gameplay, as the worst penalty for a bad roll is around 10 seconds of the player’s time. Indeed, if you don’t earn enough pips to summon a card, all you have to do is wait to draw a fresh card and re-roll Dicey until you’ve achieved the desired effect. Lost in Random’s narrative about a world where self-determination is suppressed is compelling, but the randomness that characterizes the game’s combat risks pushing those of us who actually have free will to play something else instead.
True Colors already feels closer to an interactive movie than a game, especially in the final chapter. Here, we’re plunged into a series of overly expository flashbacks in which our decisions have already been made for us. There are fewer choices to make and interactions to discover as we’re led toward a narrative twist that’s as convenient as it is messy. You can see the seams in the editing as the game’s engine chooses which of two responses you’re going to get from each member of the town council, depending on how you interacted with them in earlier chapters. Were you ever actually empathetic toward these people, or simply tallying up points to get them on your side? A stronger game might have better concealed this behind-the-scenes scorekeeping, but Alex’s power makes the game’s true colors all too visible.
Despite wearing its influences on its sleeve—Travis drives a facsimile of Kaneda’s bike from Akira and can transform into a Gundam rip-off—No More Heroes III shows no respect for the artistry or cultural context of the pop culture that it pilfers from. In fact, Given its alternately snarky, nihilistic, and condescending opinions of just about everything, you would be justified in feeling that the game doesn’t just dislike the things that it references but even itself.
The fallout of that ending makes what had been a wafer-thin murder mystery with a gimmick into an exercise in psychological sadism, where the player is nauseatingly complicit. Despite the immense pool of talent giving their all to breathe life into these characters, Twelve Minutes is a game thoroughly lacking in humanity, in any sense of the word.
Psychonauts 2 in particular is a game of surprising psychological insight, full of rich, flawed characters at the end of their ropes. If so much of this game is a reiteration of what worked about its predecessor, it functions as a reminder for just how much of the medium is still catching up to Psychonauts.
You could say, then, that Recompile might have benefited from running a final pass on itself, to correct its unbalanced difficulty so that it’s not nearly as hard at first nor as disappointingly easy and anticlimactic in the end.
As for the game’s bosses, they’re most efficiently fought one on one, keeping the other characters out of harm’s way. It’s telling, then, that the game’s final area, the labyrinthine Aldalar Tomb, pointedly separates the three heroes. All that build-up to unite the family, and in the end, Greak: Memories of Azur finds it best to keep them apart.
Further glimpses into this breathtaking universe are often reward enough for exploring the game’s multitude of alternate paths, but even GRIME’s level design is surprising for featuring a world much larger and more complex than it appears as you discover involved platforming challenges and optional bosses. Though GRIME emerges into an almost comically overcrowded genre, its initial familiarity and rigidity belie a world of intricate and formidable imagination.
The Ascent’s savviest move is making the arcology its main character. Trains run on their own schedules, NPCs carry on conversations whether you stop to listen to them or not, and there’s no exposition for concepts like “Escher loops” and “the First Law.” You’re not a hero, only a replaceable employee. The commune of off-the-grid coders aren’t relying on you, and there’s nothing you can do to help a traumatized recent arrival who woke to find that his family of 70 years was merely a cryosleep-induced dream. And so you look, listen, and empathize with the concerns of this vibrant, lived-in arcology. It’s a terrible place to live, and a terrifyingly believable premonition of where we might end up, but a wonderful one to get lost in.
That charming, throwaway exchange is just one of the many ways in which the game’s strong writing and character development help to mitigate the campaign’s tedious final hours. It feels like the video game equivalent of a shaggy-dog joke, and while its narrative is fascinating enough to compel you to backtrack not once, but twice, through areas and boss fights that you’ve long since mastered, it’s hard not to wish that Cris Tales had used a little time magic on itself and sped things along so we could have gotten to the good stuff sooner.
The Forgotten City certainly doesn’t need to answer the philosophical questions that it poses before it’s allowed to examine them in a narrative context, but the ludicrously tidy conclusions to the main story and most side quests feel like substitutes for any deep engagement. The game handily transcends its mod origins and tells an ambitious and thought-provoking story, but it eventually reaches a point where it doesn’t seem sure how to end.
Eventually, each story hurriedly resolves itself, foregoing tidy lessons or ironic endings but still lacking that crucial, elusive sense of lived-in authenticity. For as much effort has clearly gone into voicing and animating these characters within their 3D environments, we never spend enough time to seem like we really know them; quirks of the game’s strict linearity ensure we remain at a distance, observing relationships that are otherwise too thinly sketched to sustain the game’s emotional ambitions. Last Stop eventually arrives at an all-too-familiar game-design destination, hamstrung by its attempts at verisimilitude.
Despite its title’s declaration of intent, though, Rift Apart isn’t willing to stand on its own. That’s most evident in the game’s Anomaly puzzles, where you must interact with physical representations of all of Clank’s and Kit’s dimensional possibilities. This is predetermination in action. There’s only one acceptable route for you to guide these representations, like lemmings, down, and that’s the one that has them marching in lockstep along the same path that has defined every Ratchet & Clank to date. In the end, Rift Apart is a superficially entertaining but deeply unfulfilling adventure—one that, like the latest Star Wars trilogy, mistakes a shiny new coat of paint as reason enough to exist.
The occasional moments of tonal dissonance stick out, but they don’t necessarily hurt the experience. And it can’t be underestimated how great it is to have a game that’s very much an allegory about Asian people fighting to be heard, and with two Asian voice actors actually playing the leads. Still, the episode is titled quite accurately. At five-to-seven hours, Episode INTERmission isn’t quite filler, but it’s also not entirely filling. It’s an appreciable detour on a much longer journey.