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Risk of Rain winds up feeling as insubstantial as its pursuing Wisps and free-floating Jellyfish. It looks small to me not because it takes such a wide view, but because I was given such a minor stake in it. The tiny figure of my Bandit character doesn't stand in for the sum of my decisions, or my engagement with rewarding systems of movement and attack. He doesn't begin to represent anything. He's a piece of the landscape, not part of a game.
The creators of Pac-Man CE 2 had the difficult task of remixing a game that has already been expanded upon and reworked to the point of refinement, and they chose to pile on the complexity anyway. The result is a Frankenstein’s Pac-Man—a mess of features and modes that, despite all the power pellets and fruit and ghosts, still left me feeling hungry.
The game’s graceless combat was once tolerable. But as the game progressed, that fact faded into a distant memory. It became a common occurrence to find myself frantically flinging arrows at the speedier robots sprinting my way, while praying that the slower, stronger ones didn’t reach me in time for more tedious hack-and-slashing
the end, it's kitsch. It's a Soviet-themed Lego set that renders a monumental socio-political phenomenon into little else but a toy. And an exceptionally boring one at that.
Had the realization of that universe been more fully fleshed out—expansive and deep rather than restrictive and boardgame-like—Spaceships could have found success as a kind of post-human strategy game. Instead it feels lifeless. But not in the existential, gazing-into-the-void-of-space way. More in the way that an aging child realizes that her blanket is just a blanket, and promptly stops caring about it.
The Dark Below, and Destiny in a wider sense, specifically exploits the player's relationship to its systems. Like the processes of neo-liberalism that have clearly, through intentional design or not, been the inspiration for its various systems, Destiny asks one thing of players—that they are more productive. Through both reward and limitation, the game is constantly encouraging the player to commit more work and time to its processes, demanding constant attention.
Wheels of Aurelia sputters onto the race track
[Y]et the most frustrating thing about Heroes is that the problem it addresses doesn't even need to be solved. Zelda's solitariness isn't lonely. It's directly in line with the tradition of the epic (if somewhat scaled back for our postmodern skepticism of metanarrative).
So much of Bound by Flame induces boredom or irritation that it seemed the best recourse to seek out a style of play that facilitated, if not outright enjoyment, at least an absence of hostility. Well, better that an aggravating game permit you to play around its points of aggravation than to force you to suffer them in earnest. In the case of Bound by Flame, I merrily sheared away until nothing remained.
"Winners don't do drugs," the game tells me as it cycles through its scroll of finite messages for the third time as I inch my way toward the light, the way out of limbo. I can hear Linda growing tired, her breathing laborious. Soon I'll have to slow her to a walk so she doesn't deplete her stamina, the length of which I can only guess at. Mine's just about gone.
Windforge feels unnecessary and indulgent, with few, brightly shining moments of fun interspersed. Like those who consider steampunk to be nothing but a fashion aesthetic, the game exploits the genre simply because it can and because it looks pretty. Ultimately, you will sacrifice playability for art style and unfinished ideas.
Playing Albino Lullaby, you'll begin to feel like so many of the people you may have tried to convert into understanding the surrealist media the game so desperately wants to evoke; you'll raise an eyebrow, and think "that's it?"
Submerged is skeletal and unoiled. It is damned by competence: a short story that checks the boxes, but in doing so leaves no mark. I fell asleep twice while playing it, shaken awake by Miku's worsening cough, just looking to fix up Taku and motorboat out as fast as possible. It's a game that has no ambition and says nothing, and through that, quietly stumbles, erodes, and disappears, leaving no impression, no haunting memories.
I don't know that I'd be disappointed by a game like this if it didn't bear the weight of Halo moniker. That's the double-edged sword of cashing in on name recognition. Spartan Assault is an installment of a venerable franchise whose technical savvy and artistic flair are marred by missed the spectre of missed opportunities. Even as a dumb college kid I couldn't have played this game for hours, because you just can't lose yourself in a shooter where all there is to do is shoot.
Look closer and the connections between "the daily grind" and this form of "play" multiply, spiral out, form fractals.
Slain! reveals itself almost immediately as a demo tape with a splashy cover, a composition in progress that carries a spark of potential buried in the mix. It does not live up to the promise of its visuals, instead merely keeping pace with its influences white not daring any attempt to surpass them.
Void & Meddler is a headgame, like a lot of good cyberpunk. What is actually happening to Fyn? What is real and what is not real? Is her experience one long narrative of a night of suicidal ideation? So little is revealed in this first chapter that it's difficult to say. And in its stubborn refusal to adhere to convention or basic narrative, Void & Meddler lags significantly.
More isn't bad just for its faults and repetitions. It's worse than that: Bloodborne was pure—and The Old Hunters dilutes it.
This JRPG asks us to do nothing except buy into its synthetic religion of scale. You are big, Xenoblade Chronicles X. You are big because big is good. It's like stroking a dead Aibo—an Aibo that was never alive in the first place.
As a game, Star Fox Zero isn't so much broken as deeply and disappointingly lacking in inspiration. Shiny but not smooth, it's a game about a space-faring fox in a spaceship that turns into a chicken without any sense of joy, and that might be the biggest disappointment of all.