Killa Penguin
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Some people can tolerate vague metaphors in the name of artiness, but what frustrates me so much is that GRIS managed to provide me with a real attachment to a minor companion character over the course of 10-15 minutes.
I played FutureGrind until my thumbs were so bruised from the controller that my fingertips remained numb for several days, and a game inspiring that kind of in-the-moment tension and compulsion to improve is always a sign of something great.
Thea: The Awakening is one of many games that ended up slipping through the cracks around here for one reason or another, meaning the Nintendo Switch release is my first real experience with it, but all of the talk I’d heard about how it incorporates a number of totally different genres without becoming defined by any of its disparate elements was 100% accurate. Chatter about Thea: The Awakening‘s PC version being superior to its console counterparts also ended up having some substance behind it.
I managed to make it through my first playthrough with only relatively minor bugs posing a problem, but my second attempt was so fraught with technical issues and crashes that finishing it proved impossible. Robothorium is built around a single autosave, and certain configurations of levels crash 100% of the time, meaning you can find yourself saved into an unwinnable situation.
Arcade Spirits is a game about working in an arcade while striving to balance practicality with idealism, but more importantly, it's also a celebration of gaming and all of the distinct but nevertheless overlapping subsets of gamers it inspires, articulating all sorts of familiar little joys and fears and motivations that are bound to reverberate with many—if not most—of us. This isn't even as heavy-handed as one might expect; Arcade Spirits' preoccupation with bizarre humor provides enough distractions that you'll rarely see emotional moments coming, and they never outlast their welcome.
All of these elements coalesce into something unexpectedly coherent and interesting, and while there are some minor performance issues to contend with on the Switch, Airheart‘s gameplay loop and general oddness make it a good fit for the platform.
Degrees of Separation is a charming puzzle-platformer, though that charm occasionally gives way to devilishly challenging puzzles designed to prey on your expectations and force you to think outside the box. It’s easy to respect the amount of effort that went into the constantly varying puzzles and puzzle mechanics on display here, even if one or two gameplay twists end up being more trouble than they’re worth.
The truth is that you never know when a game will change your mind about a gameplay style, and I had high hopes that this would be the case here. If anything, though, Wargroove solidified my distaste for this flavor of attrition-friendly turn-based strategy.
There’s not a huge amount of variance, but that’s to be expected of a game with 4 worlds, and it allows Overcome to be a very tightly-paced experience—I ended up finishing the game a couple minutes shy of 1½ hours, while I could see someone more at home with difficult platformers finishing in 30 minutes to an hour. Average players, on the other hand, might end up needing 2-3 hours.
The story is vanilla to a fault, the mechanics are clumsy and imprecise, and the methods used to ramp up the difficulty aren’t always fair (or even fair-adjacent), but Eternity: The Last Unicorn has that nebulous spark of magic often referred to as “heart” burning beneath it. As always seems to be the case with such games, that means that there’s a 50/50 chance that you’ll either love it or hate it.
Claybook is a racing game, a physics platformer, and a resource management game at different points, existing as a kind of playground for numerous different experiences of wildly varying quality, but all of this evens out into a “jack of all trades, master of none” type of game that’s surprisingly easy to walk away from.
Unit 4 demands consistency and precision from the player, but sports unpredictable mechanics that often kill you through no fault of your own. This is a game about careful movement where maneuvering is a total crapshoot.
As desperately as I wanted to love Grimshade, it’s a broken game—its mechanics are a mess, popups that explain how things work are either needlessly vague or outright empty, bugs lurk around every corner, and it’s difficult to understand what’s happening at any given point because the dialogue is filtered through a prism of typos and wrong portraits/names that make it impossible to tell who’s speaking during conversations.
Of course, the way you move from left to right is by manipulating a giant contraption through a series of buttons that you have to manually run around and press, relying on a sail and the release of steam built up by its engine to maximize your speed and distance while minimizing the amount of fuel that you use. It’s a bizarre concept that ends up being incredibly entertaining, and while FAR: Lone Sails may only last 2-3 hours, it’s filled with more than enough memorable moments to be worthwhile.
Tomb Towers is a game that I’ve been quite fond of since I first played through it in its Early Access incarnation 11 months ago, and that time allowed me to totally lose any gameplay skills I may have once had and experience it as though for the first time. That’s important, too, because Tomb Towers is a deceptively difficult game; all movement snaps to a grid, and the difference between success and failure often comes down to engineering a near-miss that sees spikes or an enemy come within a single grid space from instantly killing you. Add timing elements into the mix, and you have a recipe for something truly tricky. Still, the bite-sized approach of its rooms helps to keep this from becoming so rage-inducing that you’re inclined to quit, and the absence of lengthy solutions also benefits the pacing, providing you with a constant sense of forward momentum.
I enjoyed the original game greatly, but its sequel surpasses it in almost every way; whereas the original game was a highly enjoyable distraction, One Finger Death Punch 2 quickly becomes an addiction that you can lose huge chunks of time to without noticing. This is simply a bigger, more complex game sporting more moving parts, and while its changes take a little getting used to at first, it’s such an improvement that the original pales in comparison.
Save Koch‘s surprisingly interesting setup is worn away somewhat by its non-random events and absurdly specific requirements for success, however. For example, winning against a certain government official requires sending a very specific character after him, as sending others will automatically result in his death and trigger a military action that serves as an insurmountable game over. Meanwhile, each restart has you retreading the same ground as you receive the same phone calls at the same times, and while the clues you’re accruing in the process are potentially different, it’s possible to win a game and unlock nothing new.
Bizarrely, Witch Thief is a bullet hell game where bullets are the least of your concerns; a sudden freeze can leave you with a single frame to react to a fireball (and you don’t move fast enough to get out of the way even if you have the reflexes to respond appropriately), while other times you find yourself hit by objects that are either behind you or obscured thanks to the camera’s refusal to cooperate.
Yes, you can interact with some of the animals in minor ways and use trees to give yourself a burst of forward momentum. Yes, you can throw seeds down to create trees. Yes, you can create bridges and wander around a handful of different biomes while the scenery grows around you. Without a goal driving you, however, this carries the same amount of weight as being lost in a supermarket.
[T]he moment-to-moment gameplay is actually remarkably solid when everything is working as expected, and the underlying brilliance of the gameplay systems and their numerous tactical possibilities shines through even when it isn’t. With some rebalancing, quality of life improvements, and bug fixes, Zombotron could be quite the special game.