Killa Penguin
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There’s a sense of interconnectedness that pervades everything Children of Morta does, and while some of its decisions sometimes result in unpleasant—and arguably unfair—difficulty spikes, the story beats always revolve satisfactorily enough to be worth a little extra trouble.
Disco Elysium describes itself as a “groundbreaking open-world role-playing game,” which is a slightly misleading way of describing a game that feels like the gamebook lovechild of Planescape: Torment and Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines. Its similarity to those classics is its greatest strength, though, keeping it afloat amid an endless tide of irrelevant factoids and a twin pair of mysteries that slowly build up the intrigue, only to fizzle out at the very end in a bizarrely unsatisfying way.
Objects can be picked up and dropped at vast distances while retaining the size that they are in your hand, allowing you to shrink and grow anything you can pick up. Many mechanics only show up for short sequences before being replaced by something even stranger, too, allowing Superliminal to surprise you constantly all the way to its ending.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It’s when you begin to view Fallen Angel as a gameplay-centric game that things begin to click; between the unexpected openness of the world and the new weapons, perks, and melee attacks that are constantly being handed to you, you’re always given more than enough to break the difficulty wide open. And even when you feel absurdly empowered, it’s still possible for Fallen Angel to humble you with unexpectedly close fights.
Morbid: The Seven Acolytes does have some shortcomings that become apparent the first time you get stuck in a labyrinthine mess of dark pixels that make it difficult to tell which areas you can and can’t dodge to without hitting a wall. However, there are also some things that it does significantly better than other games in the soulslike genre, with its story being particularly noteworthy because of the way it combines abstract weirdness with enough actual information about the world and its villains that you won’t need to consult a wiki to figure out what’s happening.
There was a nonzero chance that I’d be so completely engrossed in Speed Limit‘s special blend of “just one more try” masochism that I’d forget to put up a review, and that speaks to what makes it so entertaining.
I still have a small handful of complaints such as the uselessness of the “valor” stat and the arguably questionable balance of stat shifts on the noble route in general, but I spent time exploring different outcomes related to the inquisitor path that I had initially ignored and it ended up being my favorite storyline. The underlying mechanics feel significantly better when you can plan around certain stats required for specific outcomes, too, and now that my blind fumbling isn’t handicapping me, I’ve reached several different endings and realized that there’s more reactivity here than I initially thought.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.