Killa Penguin
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Feeling jerked around by a quest chain? Sidestep the entire thing by stealing the quest item you need from the character who won’t hand it over. Not enjoying the combat anymore? Create a stealthy build and sneak your way through the entire story without fighting a single enemy. Want to destabilize a faction? Craft or buy explosives, activate the bomb timer, then use your pickpocketing skills to plant the explosives on their leader. That was one of my favorite things to do in Fallout, and it’s arguably even more fun to do here.
Lake can be an entertaining game, but only if you’re looking to burn some free time and don’t mind being railroaded.
The original Psychonauts hasn’t held up extraordinarily well, but time will likely prove to be far kinder to Psychonauts 2. This is the kind of rare, memorable game that’s as polished and well-paced as it is unapologetically weird.
Hades is a hack-and-slash dungeon crawler roguelite with a simplistic gameplay loop, some complex perk combinations reminiscent of Transistor, and a reactive story that sees characters react to just about anything that you do. The problem is that all of the things that you can do are limited to picking perks and killing things in the same four floors of the same dungeon, and the story drags its heels in such an egregious way that you have to finish this same 20-40-minute dungeon something like 50 times to reach the actual ending.
There are glimmers of an interesting, entertaining game here; the comic stylings and panels are reminiscent of Comix Zone and Framed, and the characters and world are decently interesting. That’s a double-edged sword, however. When I spent another 4 hours replaying the game from the beginning to get the secret ending only for it to end up being a couple of lines that have little to do with anything, the only reaction I could muster was frustrated fury. In a way, though, this is representative of the way Foreclosed consistently refuses to offer commensurate payoff for your troubles.
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.
How much of the bigger picture you’re capable of piecing together matters, with the fate of your job and the lives of numerous different characters hanging in the balance. Lacuna is a well-written, wonderfully reactive game where many of your decisions make a very real difference.
It’s very possible to enjoy Aerial_Knight’s Never Yield despite these issues, especially given its stylish visuals and entertaining soundtrack, but the gameplay needs a few tweaks to make obtaining better times more comfortable and fair.
Legend of Keepers released into early access a little over a year ago, and I liked it. The final version is even better; whenever you see the name Goblinz Studio, you know that regardless of whether they developed or published the game, it’s all about numerous interlocking, straightforward mechanics from which a great deal of complexity can arise. Legend of Keepers is perhaps the best example of this to date.
Luckily, I managed to find enough time to blow through Donut County after seeing multiple Steam reviewers compare Rain on Your Parade to it. Untitled Goose Game, Donut County, and Rain on Your Parade serve as a kind of cutesy meme-game trinity, though there’s a clear hierarchy. Donut County falls between the okayish but massively overhyped goose game and the more varied and creative Rain on Your Parade.
Mamiya‘s writing style is difficult to describe, meandering through slice-of-life mundanities before something odd occurs. These strange occurrences eventually pile up, giving the more upbeat “normal” parts of the storytelling a shadowy, wrong-feeling counterpart that leaves you feeling like someone’s stuck their fingers through your eye sockets and started tickling your brain.