Killa Penguin
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I found much of the gameplay to be frustrating in a bad way, with plenty of cheap shots and unclear mechanics making the questionable momentum even harder to deal with, and yet I kept playing after unlocking the bad ending. I even kept playing after obtaining the normal ending, spending several hours slashing at random walls in search of the secret switches that have to be activated to get the best ending. Why? The easiest explanation is that the characters—most of whom start out as joke-and-sarcasm dispensers—had grown on me to the point that I wanted everyone to have a good ending. Despite all of my gameplay complaints, Batbarian has a surprising talent for growing on you.
There’s no better way of describing Foregone than calling it a Dead Cells-inspired action platformer that eschews roguelite elements in favor of hand-crafted levels and checkpoints. It is, for better or worse (depending on your viewpoint), a game suited to those of us who have become exhausted by the randomization and permadeath features many indie developers have been using as a crutch over the past half-decade or so.
The prospect of finding another game that cleverly establishes emotion rather than just throwing a sad pianist into the background and bombarding the player with frowny faces was appealing to me, and it lived up to that promise in most respects. Still, I can’t say that I found Spiritfarer particularly touching; the underlying premise of growing attached to a bunch of characters before shepherding them to death’s door (literally) has potential, but in practice, the gameplay is so distractingly repetitive and the writing so wordy that only a third of the passengers made me feel anything but irritation. This is a brilliant 5-hour game that completely loses focus by insisting on lasting for 20+ hours.
Even the gameplay I’d seen praised for its promise ended up being a disappointment, with major performance problems and bugs worsening what would already be a below-average experience. I suspect that what happened is that the monetization and multiplayer grind proved so tedious and horrible for some players that everything else seemed better by way of comparison, leading many to treat the game’s underlying problems with kid gloves. Call it the “ugly friend” effect. Marvel’s Avengers has a decent story, though, even if it’s merely a cynical ploy to trick you into eventually paying.
Wasteland 3 could be an entertaining game if not for its nonstop softlocks, disappearing items, and idiotic pathfinding (I’ll get into that later), but these problems stood in the way of my enjoyment while chipping away at my patience in a way few other games ever have.
Deliver Us The Moon‘s gameplay is trash, with its only challenge coming from timed sequences with decorative oxygen canisters and the fiddliness of its context-sensitive prompts. Its story, meanwhile, is strongly reminiscent of Interstellar at several points but so melodramatic and poorly developed that it becomes a predictable soap opera version that’s worse in every way. Finally, there’s the performance, which is so bad that it puts the lie to the assertion that the Switch version was canceled because of coronavirus. This doesn’t even run adequately on a Playstation 4 while using textures so downscaled that text is borderline unreadable.
Roughly speaking, Paradise Killer is a game about an exiled detective being welcomed back to solve a heinous crime everyone is a little too quick to pin on a lower-class citizen, but that glosses over many of the weird details that make it shine so brightly. I’m talking about aliens, demons, gods, and immortal upper-class residents of a parallel realm who harness the psychic energy of thousands of their slaves in order to resurrect the cosmic beings that they were once thralls to. These extra touches do a lot to separate Paradise Killer from similar games—Disco Elysium, Smile For Me, and Phoenix Wright seem like adequate comparisons once you squint and picture them as nightmarish bizarro versions of themselves—and no charm is lost in the process.
My lack of experience with the Pokemon series’ modern releases makes me unqualified to claim that Nexomon: Extinction is superior to them, but its large cast of adorable goofballs and unexpectedly competent worldbuilding play to the strengths of the classic jRPG genre (which this monster-catching branch of gameplay is derived from) while largely avoiding its pitfalls. This may look like an amusing jaunt in a crazy world, but by the end, you realize that an unexpectedly epic journey has snuck up on you.
“Censorship” is one of those words that always feels oppressive, and yet Aokana – Four Rhythms Across the Blue doesn’t need any of that adult content because it’s not the game’s point; this is an uplifting, frequently hilarious visual novel that succeeds on the quality of its characterizations and the sneaky rhythm of its conversations that makes it possible for deep-seated trauma and dirty jokes to coexist without either extreme being jarring. It’s fantastic.
Many of the mechanics here could lead to an incredible sequel, but more often than not, Mortal Shell feels as lifeless and hollow as the corpses your playable character inhabits.
Methodically wiping out as many spiders as possible in the most excessive ways imaginable is entertaining—how could it not be?—but that would mean little if the rest of the game didn’t hold its own weight. This is where things get interesting; by asking the player to complete challenges in order to reach the real ending, Kill It With Fire suddenly shifts into a puzzle game that requires exploiting its mechanics to overcome seemingly impossible hurdles.
Ghost of Tsushima embraces many of the addictive-but-unrewarding elements endemic to the Assassin’s Creed series while telling a story about characters who are genuinely interesting until their dramatic arcs become cartoonishly melodramatic. It’s a passable, often lovely ride, but poor camera controls, awful physics, and terrible mission design frequently spoil the fun.
This one’s a keeper; the best sRPGs are maddeningly complex while allowing for deceptively simple—but effective—strategies, and Brigandine: The Legend of Runersia ticks both boxes. The gameplay here is unabashedly old-school, and while that can cause some combat encounters (and with them, the overall campaign) to drag on, I continually found myself going back for more.
I decided to track down an original PS2 copy and alternate between the two versions, first playing through the original game before jumping back to the PC version I’m reviewing to get an idea of what’s similar and different. There have undoubtedly been improvements, but there have also been some unnecessary and arguably questionable changes that hardcore purists will find aggravating because of how they alter the gameplay (which is to say nothing of how they contribute to two major difficulty spikes). The original version of Destroy All Humans! was deeply flawed, however, and the remake’s quality-of-life features easily make it the definitive version.
I haven’t made any secret of my disappointment with Fire Emblem entries after Fire Emblem Awakening—even the much lauded Fire Emblem Fates: Conquest is utter garbage in my opinion—but while Fire Emblem: Three Houses indulges in many of the same questionable design decisions, it’s also a significantly better game thanks to its restraint. Where Fire Emblem Awakening paid homage to the series’ characters, Three Houses pays homage to the mechanics that serve as its heartbeat, relegating the fluff to the sidelines.
I’d love to play devil’s advocate, but I hate this game so much.
As someone who has no experience with the series but a large amount of experience with roguelites and other genres represented in Dungeon of the Endless‘ mashup of features, I genuinely expected to love it given how much praise exists for it out in the wild. Instead, the journey evoked unpleasant memories of SYMMETRY—a game all about finding the one approach that works and then never being challenged again—only differentiating itself through its merciless RNG cruelty and unlockables that require oodles of grinding.
ITTA isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination, but I also can’t offer up anything more than a tepid endorsement given all of the trouble I had with its bugginess, reluctance to share information about how the mechanics work behind the scenes, and an odd difficulty curve that ensures that the final boss is less difficult than the very first one you face. ITTA has its strengths, however, such as generous hitboxes and invincibility frames that make it possible to breeze through some fights despite it never being entirely clear which part of your character’s sprite actually takes damage.
This is the first game attached to Square-Enix that’s genuinely impressed me in over 8 years; the amount of detail put into translating the art into something totally different but nevertheless nostalgic is mind-boggling, and it’s possibly more impressive that the team behind this knew which things could be changed/replaced without undermining the entire project. Trials of Mana is how remakes should be done.
Shantae and the Seven Sirens isn’t just a return to form for a series that’s shown a proclivity for unexpected experimentation. Much like how its characters begin the game vacationing on a tropical island that’s hosting a half-genie festival, the game serves as a lighthearted and much-needed break from 2020’s unceasing assault on everything good and decent.