WAKE!

A great and absurdly overwritten, overdesigned & ploddingly paced game. Gratuitous exposition beating you down & down & down until Garth Marenghi (Wake) can escape the darkplace, a dim Mauve Zone/Silent Hill analog. Drawing from Twin Peaks: The Return, The Night House, True Detective & a little bit of Vanishing on 7th Street(?!!), Sam Lake is so buried under the weight of his influences that he rarely finds his own voice.

Contained in here is an efficient, stripped-down survival horror game, full of winding paths, plenty of fleshed-out re-visitation of areas that make Bright Falls a real sick Place to be by the end. Saga’s mindplace asks you to build your evidence to produce your own objectives (often to an insane degree of detail, where you find out you must speak to someone, as you are in that very moment standing in front of them). Rendering every objective and clue a physical, tactile object does align the player with the characters - who are (especially Lake) idiots.

Remedy have inverted the small puzzle-intermissions from Control into the entire structure of this game, all winding, looping, shifting architecture (a trope they indulge in here with glee). Enemies are relatively bland but encountered infrequently enough it was almost a non-issue (compared to the excessive waves of Control). Many of the kitsch FMV sequences were underwhelming, but it was where they were layered directly into the world that it worked for me, transparent membranes of Max Payne’s Lake/James McCaffrey in silhouette just hanging out and talking complete nonsense (I love him).

Honestly this is a case where the energy, humour and confidence of this overwhelming mess tips into endearing. Not to mention the absolutely beautiful soft, dimly-lit spaces in here that I'd be happy living in (especially the retirement home and Nu York apartment). Between this, Death Stranding & recent RE titles I begrudgingly accept that sometimes photorealism is valid & not just dull marketing for graphics cards. WAKE

Edit: RIP James McCaffrey! <3

Such an incredibly impressive feat for a first time modder. The levels here are massive, trap-filled temples that still manage to feel tightly designed with shortcuts that lead back to previous areas. Even if these shortcuts weren't strictly necessary—this isn't exactly a Souls game, right—they make these levels feel more like coherent spaces where the end and the beginning are reachable from each other. It goes a long way to making this feel distinct from its inspirations; it's got its own original design ideology inspired more by action/adventure games than retro shooters.

Every episode also has unique weapons for each slot, helping to reinforce their individual settings. And, boy, are each and every one of those weapons a blast to use. The sprites and animations are great, the shooting chunky and satisfying.

This is a great one. If this isn't the developer's final mod—and I sure hope it isn't—then I look forward to seeing what they do next.

Mario is BACK! Nintendo is BACK! In the midst of the final dying gasps of their accursed Switch, they've decided to make good games again!

There isn't really a whole lot to say here, honestly, but that's a good thing. Rock-solid 2d platforming at 60fps, with a very pleasing, clean aesthetic. I hadn't expected the Wonder Flower aspect to be as prevalent as it is, either. There's some wacky gimmick in every level, and it keeps things feeling fresh all the way through.

The badge system mostly functions as a handicap, and I think if you're familiar with platforming games you're better off not using them except when necessary, as they can trivialize many areas when the game doesn't provide a lot of challenge to begin with.

Minor complaints: the "Search Party" levels are awful, but there are only 4 or 5 of them. The talking flowers can also be grating. It's fine when they comment on what's actually happening, and those can be pretty funny, but I don't need to hear them repeat "HI!" and "I BELIEVE IN YOU" or their many variations on "well, THAT just happened!!!".

Excellent game, and so far frontrunner for my GOTY. But it's about to get some stiff competition...

Bonk's Adventure is a very simple platforming game. Some other people remark that there isn't that much platforming to it, and that's true—you are mostly moving from left to right without much jumping or challenge. Don't play this game expecting Mario. The pleasure of Bonk's Adventure comes from its "game feel" — the way the cartoony animations tie so closely to your button presses. It's a great feeling game, even if it isn't a unique or interesting one in its level or enemy design.

Though I was honestly initially put off by the art and unholy character style, which is chibi-esque but vaguely Western animation inspired—which is to say, ugly. I ended up being really charmed by Bonk, and it all comes from little touches. The way Bonk peacefully lays on his back like he's in a coffin when he runs out of health, waiting for you to spend a credit to revive him, made me laugh every time. His maniacal Bart-ish transformation when he's biting a wall to hold onto it and climb it is hilarious, and the way he shakes slightly upward as you repeatedly tap the jump button, until he finally leaps into the sky—it feels excellent.

Bonk's unique feature is right there in his name. Like all of us, Bonk is what he does—and for Bonk, that's bonking. For purposes of this review, bonking refers to smashing paradoxically diamond hard yet infant shaped head against things. There's the standard Bonk attack, where, after a slight satisfying Castlevania-esque wind-up, Bonk moves forward with a headbutt. There's the up-bonk, where Bonk jumps from underneath something to headbutt it from below. Then there's the divebonk. Unlike Mario, Bonk will get hurt if he lands leg first on an enemy—rather, he must land headfirst. The dive bonk triggers from a jump, and travels forward in an arc, and landing it always feels great. Bonk gets a little bounce from a successful dive bonk, and it is little. You can chain your up bonks into dive bonks, and after landing a dive bonk, chain that into more dive bonks. You can also continously juggle enemies with your various Bonk attacks—dive bonking them to send them into the air, up bonking to bounce them again, and so on. Sometimes juggling enemies will spawn a meat, which Bonk's power up. When you eat a small meat, Bonk's skin gets darker (?) and he can freeze enemies by dive bonking on the ground around them. Eating a large meat, or two small meats, will cause Bonk's skin to grow even darker, (?) and he will enjoy a brief period of invincibility.

The enemies are mostly no great shakes, though my favorite were the Bonk-like dinosaurs that have your same moveset; I love these kinds of fights in Dark Souls games and Zelda games, and they were just as fun here. There are some other interesting ideas, like the flowers that usually spawn point giving fruit sometimes turning into an enemy when jumped on. Where Bonk shines as a game is in its boss fights, where you will be searching for the perfect dive-bonk opportunities to whittle down your enemies health. These are built around giving you opportunities for dive-bonk combos, and pulling them off always felt good. There's a boss rush at the end of the game, and it was fun to fight them all again after having more bonking experience under my belt.

I'm looking forward to playing more Bonk. I love the feel of Bonk, but I don't think this first game really uses him or its ideas to their full potential. I hope they develop them in later games.

I played through Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in co-op with a friend and had a lot of fun. Gauntlet is an arcade top-down shooting game with a few extra mechanics—bump attacks, heavy melee attacks, blocking, special moves, and a variety of item power ups—on top of this there is a leveling up and gold system, which can be used to buy items or stat upgrades. There are a number of character classes, and each one has a different set of starting stats—the knight is slower but more powerful, the wizard has stronger magic attacks, the jester, who I chose, is faster but starts weaker. As you level up your character across the game, each character becomes more and more like the other. Since you can buy stat upgrades—which I did almost every chance I got, in leuie of buying health items between mission—you have some say in how your character develops. By the late 70s or early 80s level, my jester had their speed and strength all the way maxed out.

The game is pretty economical. There are different enemy models for each world, but there are only a few different character classes that have more damaging tiers—rushing enemies that blow up, long range enemies, short range melee enemies, commander style enemies, and small type enemies that can be overwhelming in large numbers. Then there are unique minibosses like golems, grim reapers, and dragons that take and do more damage than the usual enemies.

The basic loop is working your way through a series of themed levels finding collectibles and keys. You unlock different worlds through finding colored stones, and can move between worlds at any time from the hub area. Each world will have a special item in it that will do major damage to the boss of another world, so you're incentivized to explore the available worlds before taking on the each world's bosses. My favorite levels were the jester levels, which are all fantastical and dreamlike, EC Escher inspired. I also liked the Doom-inspired flesh-wall/blood level.

The game is mindless fun, but I wish there was just one more layer of something to it. What I really felt was missing was a way to avoid damage. Taking damage in regular levels is usually pretty harmless, but since boss fights have a ton of moves you can't dodge, they mostly feel like rote HP checks—can you dish out enough damage before dying? Usually, you can. But I would have liked a dodge roll or a stronger block move or something like that, which could have made the boss fights feel a little more active.

I had a good time playing through this—it took about 11 hours. It made me curious about the earlier Gauntlet games.

I played through Supermassive Games's cinematic horror game The Quarry with my wife. We picked our characters at the start and passed the controller back and forth throughout. It was a pretty fun experience. The game is primarily "cinematic" gameplay like QTE sequences, and long cut scenes where you may make a choice or two for dialogue or the action your character takes. To break these up, there's also exploration sequences, where you can guide your character around surprisingly large spaces, though often these spaces are pretty empty. The last mode of gameplay is brief third-person shooting segments. My wife isn't a non-gamer, but she's not used to third person shooting, and she ended up fumbling at a crucial moment that led to a character's death—it was one of those rare moments of failure driven ludonarrative consonance. It really made me laugh.

Definitely a good time for a few people who like shitty teen horror movies. I do wish the option to rewind was available from the start. I'm not really interested in replaying whole sections, especially after finding out the epilogue sequence just lists who lived and who died.

They did it. After 6 years (has it ONLY been 6??) of obscenely long games, they made a new Assassin's Creed that can be completed by people who aren't suffering from crippling depression. A nice 20-hour full completion. That's the stuff!

The game? It's alright! A throwback to the first one (still one of the best, if you ask me), it retains a few elements of the Origins Era games: You have your scouting eagle, and a few too many unnecessary equipment slots. There are numbers on your swords and daggers, but they don't really matter much, and you're not picking up loot anyway. There are skill trees, but they contain about 20 skills total instead of the absolutely insane, byzantine webs of Odyssey and Valhalla. It also retains Valhalla's strange obsession with barred doors/windows, and throwing objects through gaps to open them.

Most interesting is how it's janky in almost exactly the same ways as the original games. The platforming can be just as clunky as in 1/2/Bro, when Origins had mostly solved that and featured a marked increase in fluidity. This is probably a result of making the climbing more deliberate again, as opposed to "hold up and A" that the accursed Revelations introduced via its Hookblade (remember -- the hookblade consists of two parts: the hook, and the blade). It still works pretty well overall, but there were definitely parts where I was wondering what in the holy fuck Basim was doing.

The throwbacks to AC1 don't end with the traversal, either. Throwing knives are still insanely OP. Guards are still complete idiots who won't notice if you stab someone 2 feet to their left. You can still hide in hay bales or... Whatever those booth things are, whistle at guards, and kill them one by one, stuffing that cart full of so many bodies that you could smell it from a mile away. All of these things are stupid in a way that I enjoy.

Basim's story is fine. You're out to kill the Order of the Ancients, which I guess are a precursor to the Templars, or an allied faction, or something. You are mentored by an Assassin voiced by Shohreh Aghdashloo, who has always had a distinctive, gravelly voice, but in 2023 she sounds like the AI from Godard's Alphaville. You investigate the various members of the Order, and can do so with a surprising degree of freedom, and work your way to the Big Cheese. Progression is gated by certain events, but it's essentially divided into halves, and you can go back and forth between investigation targets at your leisure.

Anyway, at the end, it links into the overall Assassin's Creed Lore, whatever the hell that is at this point. I've completely lost track of it, and I don't even know what happened here. There are no modern day segments, but there are holograms of ancient aliems, and Basim's dreams being haunted by some stupid fuckin mummy that's also related to them, I guess, and then you get a [MOVIE TITLE REDACTED] montage at the end for something that was hilariously obvious.

It don't matter. None of that matters.

Quick note on performance: On XSX, there were mild frame pacing issues throughout most of the game. It wasn't enough to be a major problem, except in a few places: there are some areas where the game outright chugs. It seemed like it happened mostly in more complex indoor areas, oddly, but for whatever reason, Damascus Prison and especially the Postal Bureau were slideshows at points. I heard the Postal Bureau played their whole album at Riot Fest, by the way.

If you've been missing the old AssCreeds, something that I'm sure none of us thought would happen during the dog days of Unity and Syndicate, Mirage is for you! It's hard to believe the series is only 15 years old, because it feels like an eternity since I heard some underpaid voice actor screaming "MAHNEY, MAHNEY, MAHNEYYYY". I hope that guy's doing fine, wherever he is.

7/10

Dipped back into Control to do the Wake DLC, after putting it down in February 2021. Without realizing it, I only had two missions/levels left in the game to go, so I finished them as well. Like in replaying Alan Wake, I kind of got tired of the sheer number of fights, but there's so much more here to play around with. The fights are a lot of fun but it feels like they can turn in the enemies favor frustratingly quickly, and I found myself repeating fights an annoying number of times. Granted, I returned to endgame content after two years of not playing it at all, so maybe I'm playing it wrong, or I've invested my ability points wrong, but Jesse is such a squishy character, as powerful as she is. Still I had a good enough time that after finishing it I wanted to start the game on a current gen version. I finished the PS4 version, which looked good and played well enough on my PS5; I did encounter one annoying bug which is that button prompts, or half of them, would randomly stayed glued to the screen until they disappeared just as randomly. If there's a way to move the last gen saves to the upgraded version, I could not find it. The action is very strong and a lot of fun, and the game essentially has infinite content if you want to keep plugging away at it. What's most attractive to me about this game is its vibe and characters, and it was really fun to see Jesse interact in the usual dreamlike way with Alan Wake. Really looking forward to AW2 later this month.

Tower of Druaga is probably the first great social game; and like the first week of Pokémon Go, like long offline MMOs, it's impossible to play Druaga the way it was meant to be played: at an arcade with other players, swapping tips, theories, or ideas as to how to get to the next floor in the tower of Druaga. It's no wonder this didn't catch on in the States, where you play arcade games with your friends, if you play them with anyone at all.

As it is today, Tower of Druaga is, genuinely, a fun combat puzzle game. I'm a fan of NES The Legend of Zelda's combat, and that same simple swordplay is here almost verbatim, though there's a little more friction here; the item-based puzzle/combat loop of Zelda clearly starts here (Miyamoto is an outspoken fan of this game). The puzzle solutions are fun to do, even if the solutions themselves are complete insane. To find treasure chests, you will rotate your joystick three times; you will swing your sword from your starting spot, but first you will turn your character so they're not facing the outside wall so when you do you don't also destroy your crucial pickaxe; you will pass through one enemy and then and only then kill three of a different enemy type.

I had a good time playing up the tower, sincerely marveling at its tricks and what it asked of you. Really worth playing for a while to see whats so special about it. Don't even feel bad using a guide. For a game like this, the guide isn't cheating so much as it is an analog to that social experience that's impossible to get today.

I played some of the first Blasphemous, a game that's part search action and part soulslike, but not really committing to either. I found it directionless and lost interest fairly quickly.

Blasphemous 2 decided to go (almost) full Troid, and it's a far better game for it.

There are still minor Souls elements, though it can be argued (and I will!) that Souls games themselves aren't too far from search action games to begin with. It's really most apparent here with the healing flasks, and the various somewhat obtuse side quests you can find.

A neat twist on the familiar formula is that your weapons are what gate your progress for the first half the game, and you choose which one you want at the beginning, which will completely change your routing early on. It gives the game some nice replay value in that respect. I started with the big ball and chain, because it had a similar feel to a Casslebania whip, and I never switched off of it except when necessary. Combat feels fine, though sometimes enemies can stunlock you and it feels cheap. Those skelly-men with the candelabras are ass holes.

This becomes less of an issue as you progress, as it also features the classic SOTN inverse difficulty curve. By the end, if you're playing this Correctly, you're going to breeze through most of the bosses, with the exception of the second-to-last one, who's relatively tough. He took me a few tries, but it was mostly just annoying because he has an unskippable cutscene between phases. The last boss is piss-easy. I guess that's a Souls tradition.

A mechanic I really liked is that, in addition to rosary beads that increase your resistance to various elements, you have an "altarpiece" apparently worn on your character's back, and you collect figurines to place into it. These offer various expected buffs, but can also sync together if put in specific configurations to create unique effects, like stopping time when you use a healing flask.

Of course, I have to mention the game's art, which is incredible across the board. Some of the best pixel art I've ever seen, with lovingly detailed and gruesome death animations for every enemy type. My favorite one is the old witches, who after being clubbed to death, are torn apart by their own ravens for some reason. I also think it's really funny how the healing flask use animation is your character smashing it into his face. I guess that's on-brand.

By the way, I have absolutely no idea what's happening in the story of this game. It seems to assume you played through the first one and are deeply familiar with its Lore, because it has zero interest in explaining a single thing. Something about a Miracle, which I gathered was a Bad Thing like the eclipse in Berserk, or... I dunno. It don't matter. I'm not here to get theological, I'm just here to club skellingtons. And let me tell you, I clubbed HELLA skellingtons.

8/10