Killa Penguin
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Fort Triumph is a miserable, uninteresting slog until you manage to level up a team of characters, which makes one wonder why their deaths are even an option in the first place. I can’t help but wonder how the devs squandered their time in early access. Why did it take so long to release something so rough?
Billion Road‘s local and online multiplayer modes capture that mercurial Monopoly spirit that’ll have someone flipping the board over and storming off in no time.
This is a bullet hell game for people who aren’t sure that they can get into bullet hell games. The difficulty curve is so gradual that it could open up the entire genre to newcomers.
You play as The Mage, a guy with magical powers who awakens to a world he and others failed to save. The only other living beings left hanging around are monsters, most of which are mute, so the dialogue that plays between levels consists of him talking to himself. Ancient Enemy‘s story is basically just a march back to the mysterious force that destroyed and corrupted the world. Needless to say, it’s an incredibly lonely and grim journey, and while some of the things The Mage has to say border on profundity, the near-absence of other characters robs the story of the development needed to anchor and back up those statements.
How many other games can keep you glued to the screen for 20 minutes while a little cartoon guy chops away at a crystal? At the same time, the tendency of some to ascribe brilliance to media tinged with novelty is misguided. Any meaning that runs deeper than the shallow concepts directly addressed in-game will be more a case of your imagination running amok than the game trafficking in deep ideas. The Longing definitely won’t be for everyone, but as an interesting departure from what ordinarily constitutes a “game,” I’d say that it’s worthwhile for the most part. Just be aware going in that it can run out of steam long before you’re finished.
Half Past Fate can be an incredibly sweet game, and the way even its minor characters reappear so that you can track how their lives change (or don’t) can be incredibly fulfilling. Rarely, though, the good intentions of characters can cause some of this sweetness to feel a touch contrived and unbelievable. Still, the story comes together in a really nice way, and the game’s simple mechanics rarely get in the way.
At its best, Ori and the Will of the Wisps has the area design and pacing of an unforgettable platformer, and the ways it improves on its predecessor are every bit as welcome as they are subtle. Every so often, however, it forgets how to keep that momentum up and instead throws a gimmicky chase sequence or annoying area gimmick into the mix to slow you down.
Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight isn’t a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. Still, I can’t wrap my head around why it’s considered superior to Minoria. The absence of a leveling system and rarity of mandatory enemy encounters make this a faster game to complete, and the smaller player character makes it feel like you have more room during boss fights, but I continually found myself missing Minoria‘s interesting movement techs and stun-based combat.
Hypergalactic Psychic Table Tennis 3000, or as I came to know it, “that game I’m totally going to copy/paste the name of because there’s no way I’m not screwing up such a mouthful at some point,” is a game that answers a question that gaming has left unaddressed for almost 50 years: what if a Pong paddle could enter into shallow Mass Effect-style romances with its opponents and experience an existential crisis? This is a game that takes Pong, throws some interesting mechanics on top like magical abilities and paddle durability, and then goes so completely bonkers with its writing that it’s impossible not to respect it.
While wasp swarms didn’t prove crucial to the gameplay like I expected they might, being able to domesticate them with hugs is nevertheless a handy metaphor for Dwarrows‘ gameplay—a little painful, but so charmingly weird in its positivity that it’s easy to overlook some rough edges that break puzzles and cause your town expansion to grind to a halt.
All 9 levels are paced well, being superbly balanced so that they’re doable but difficult, and the combination of Project AETHER‘s ubiquitous leaderboard and numerous short challenge levels allow it to last longer than you’d expect given its relatively brief campaign length. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows, however; there are a fair number of bugs to contend with, and some of the stages have backgrounds that are a dull orange or red that obscures enemy projectiles in an annoying way.
It’s only once all of the ill-advised puzzle and platforming mechanics have been introduced and enough time has passed for you to become comfortable with them that things begin to click, by which point you’ll also have extra attacks that help to paper over the inconsistent context-sensitivity and frequency with which you become stuck in the floor. Even then, Darksiders Genesis can go horribly awry—boss fights are weirdly unbalanced and gimmicky, and it’s often impossible to differentiate between platforms and decorations that cause you to void out and take damage—but there’s an underlying charm that almost makes it worth it.
Despite looking like a management-style game and bearing many of the signature elements of such a game, the goal isn’t necessarily to follow the rules. In fact, there isn’t really a set “goal” that you’re aiming for, as bad endings can be every bit as amusing as good ones, and you’re mostly figuring out how much you can get away with before experimenting with killing and sparing people based on coin flips, the voice of Grim’s conscience that sometimes confronts you in the mirror, and whatever capricious whims strike when reading a short synopsis of a person’s life. There aren’t any bad decisions, after all: just ones that can accidentally wipe out the human race.
LUNA The Shadow Dust is an excellent example of this genre when most everything clicks, with its room-by-room structure and clever puzzles complementing the slower movement speed rather than feeling hindered by it. There are also some downsides to be aware of, among which a final puzzle that stretches LUNA‘s wordless insistence that you figure out the rules to each puzzle to its breaking point, but they do little to diminish the charm.
Even if Skellboy ran at a smooth 60 frames per second (which it most definitely does not), its underlying issues would be enough to make it an easy game to pass on. All of gaming’s cardinal sins are present here: unskippable fight intros that play every time you die to a gimmicky boss and try again, a paucity of checkpoints, slow movement speed that doesn’t mesh well with all of the mandatory backtracking, and a story so self-satisfied with its lore that it forgets to tell itself in a natural way and ensure that the dialogue always fits inside of the text boxes.
The gameplay here is deceptively simple, with the goal of the game’s 20 stages being to reach the staircase and/or defeat a boss while enemies who fall in one blow (unless protected by armor) stand in your way, but the way these simple mechanics intersect creates a great deal of depth and potential strategy. Iris and the Giant is the kind of strategy that I appreciate, and there’s little in gaming more rewarding than wiping out an entire screen of difficult opponents as part of a several-turn-long strategy.
Characters come and go, the underlying significance of their very existence seemingly shifting between acts, no doubt a consequence of the years it took to finish these acts; people change over time, and as Kentucky Route Zero limps—sometimes literally—toward a half-hearted and barely coherent conclusion that’s more of a misery-flavored Rorschach test than an understandable sequence of events driven by people worth caring about, the storylines that start to splay every which way suggest that the developers kept changing their minds about the game’s underlying meaning. Or maybe it simply shifted out from under them. Either way, Kentucky Route Zero is a game that’s ultimately meaningless, a meandering mess of pretentious nonsense that wields its (arguably undeserved) “art” status as a shield in order to protect itself from the pointlessness of the journey and the blandness of those journeying.
For the most part, 7th Sector breaks down into a decent first half where you play as a ghost traveling almost entirely along wires as a shining point of energy, bridging gaps and powering machinery through puzzle-solving in order to progress, and a second half that sees you possessing various types of robots and fighting through some ill-advised action sequences. There’s a complete and utter refusal to explain what the puzzles are asking of you that can be refreshing at first—if only because so many games hold your hand—but this charm wears off as a direct result of the finicky action sequences.
It’s frustrating because I really like Ether Loop. I hate starting with that weak laser gun every time, and I find the RNG and vagueness about how everything works (what do items that “increase luck” actually do?) incredibly aggravating, but I still played for 7 hours, which is how long it took me to beat the game. Procedural generation can be a blessing in certain circumstances, but never when it’s depriving you of the tools you need to stand a fighting chance.
It’s easy to feel like every single mid-to-late-game map in Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark is soul-crushingly awful, but in reality, only around half of them are. That’s still far too much gameplay that’s held back by busywork, especially since the explosion of status effects that most often bogs down Fell Seal‘s gameplay can cause the bad maps to last 2-4 times longer than the good ones, but there are glimmers of potential that shine through all the way through to the end. It’s just hard to give the game credit for the things it does right when the things it does wrong are so egregious.