MysticWonder
This review contains spoilers
Aaaaah okay here we go... Another Crabs Treasure is a good game - full stop. But lend me an ear and let me tell you why I also think it is an unfocused mess that's in the wrong genre and really could have used an extra month or two of development to iron out.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.
2019
Armortale is a game with a lot of charm, that unfortunately struggles a bit with its execution leaving me with a middle-of-the-road rating.
You play as a nameless character that has the ability to switch between four different sets of armor all with different abilities. You have the Golem armor, which makes you immune to spikes, and gives you an up-attack, at the cost of a little bit of movement speed. The 'Hero' armor, which lets you move a bit faster, hang from ceilings, and do a spin-attack that reflects projectiles. The Bomber armor, which lets you throw, well, bombs - blowing up specific kinds of blocks. And finally, the Wing armor, which increases your jump height and lowers your fall-speed.
Credit where credit is due, these armors are really well designed. I was constantly finding myself swapping armors, and every time I found myself struggling with a section of a level I would stop and ask "Is this really the best armor for this situation?". It's what the game set out to do, and I think it did it well. I will say that the Hero armor and the Golem armor feel like the most consistent by far, though it could be related to the fact that those are the first two you acquire.
The visuals of the game are also pretty good. There's a very clear art-style, and though some of the bosses look a bit.... off, the environment and character art are good. I love the extra touches put in as well, like the goblin animations where they run away in fear, or get angry and bash each other on the head.
What unfortunately brings the game down for me is the level design and the sheer lack of mid-points in the levels. Let me explain: The game plays through Mario-style or old-school Kirby-style. You select a level from the map, and play it through to completion, often with a boss at the end. These levels are considerably long for a game of this type, and often times there is only one mid-level checkpoint. While this isn't a problem normally, what you'll primarily be dying to in the game are not Enemies, but from pitfalls and spikes. These are insta-kills, and because of the aforementioned level-length you will be losing a lot of your time to unfortunate deaths.
There were many times I simply wanted to put the game down because I have to play through 5 minutes of an easy level with a difficult 2 minute section over and over and over again. It's very unforgiving, but not in an interesting way, just a frustrating way. Mario or Kirby games fix this by having more midpoints, shorter levels, or even just designing in mechics that give more chances to not die like mushrooms or fire flowers - but Armortale doesn't have any of those it just has armor and hp. The final level of the game has multiple checkpoints and was the only level that felt like the length between checkpoints was 'okay'. Not great, just okay.
Putting all of that aside though, there are other parts of the game that don't work so well either. You'll be collecting one of two currencies in Armortale, Witch-Tokens and Gems. Witch-Tokens are coins - collect 100 and gain another life. Gems are currency that you can use at the Witch-Tower to get slight powerups. The powerups are a bit lackluster and definitely not worth grinding levels to purchase. The biggest problem with them is that they are per-life upgrades so if you die once you lose them.
You can get a little bit of extra health, a potion you can use mid-level to heal yourself, a one-up (which I never bought, what's the point if game-overing doesn't matter?), a leaf shield that rotates around you and also can break when it does enough damage, and a bird. The bird is by far the best powerup, because it's cheap and does it's own thing without any effort on your part. But again, die once and you've basically burned that cash. On the other hand, there's nothing else for you to spend gems on, so just buy the bird over and over. Birds Bros 4 Life.
Really though when you get down to it, for a one-person passion project, it accomplished what it set out to do. I think the game is fine, an attempt at a retro 2D platforming game that maaaybe fell a little bit short of expectations from me. It's pretty cheap on Steam, and it's worth the 4 hours I spent trying to beat it. With a few tweaks I think it could really shine, and I hope I can play more from this dev in the future.
You play as a nameless character that has the ability to switch between four different sets of armor all with different abilities. You have the Golem armor, which makes you immune to spikes, and gives you an up-attack, at the cost of a little bit of movement speed. The 'Hero' armor, which lets you move a bit faster, hang from ceilings, and do a spin-attack that reflects projectiles. The Bomber armor, which lets you throw, well, bombs - blowing up specific kinds of blocks. And finally, the Wing armor, which increases your jump height and lowers your fall-speed.
Credit where credit is due, these armors are really well designed. I was constantly finding myself swapping armors, and every time I found myself struggling with a section of a level I would stop and ask "Is this really the best armor for this situation?". It's what the game set out to do, and I think it did it well. I will say that the Hero armor and the Golem armor feel like the most consistent by far, though it could be related to the fact that those are the first two you acquire.
The visuals of the game are also pretty good. There's a very clear art-style, and though some of the bosses look a bit.... off, the environment and character art are good. I love the extra touches put in as well, like the goblin animations where they run away in fear, or get angry and bash each other on the head.
What unfortunately brings the game down for me is the level design and the sheer lack of mid-points in the levels. Let me explain: The game plays through Mario-style or old-school Kirby-style. You select a level from the map, and play it through to completion, often with a boss at the end. These levels are considerably long for a game of this type, and often times there is only one mid-level checkpoint. While this isn't a problem normally, what you'll primarily be dying to in the game are not Enemies, but from pitfalls and spikes. These are insta-kills, and because of the aforementioned level-length you will be losing a lot of your time to unfortunate deaths.
There were many times I simply wanted to put the game down because I have to play through 5 minutes of an easy level with a difficult 2 minute section over and over and over again. It's very unforgiving, but not in an interesting way, just a frustrating way. Mario or Kirby games fix this by having more midpoints, shorter levels, or even just designing in mechics that give more chances to not die like mushrooms or fire flowers - but Armortale doesn't have any of those it just has armor and hp. The final level of the game has multiple checkpoints and was the only level that felt like the length between checkpoints was 'okay'. Not great, just okay.
Putting all of that aside though, there are other parts of the game that don't work so well either. You'll be collecting one of two currencies in Armortale, Witch-Tokens and Gems. Witch-Tokens are coins - collect 100 and gain another life. Gems are currency that you can use at the Witch-Tower to get slight powerups. The powerups are a bit lackluster and definitely not worth grinding levels to purchase. The biggest problem with them is that they are per-life upgrades so if you die once you lose them.
You can get a little bit of extra health, a potion you can use mid-level to heal yourself, a one-up (which I never bought, what's the point if game-overing doesn't matter?), a leaf shield that rotates around you and also can break when it does enough damage, and a bird. The bird is by far the best powerup, because it's cheap and does it's own thing without any effort on your part. But again, die once and you've basically burned that cash. On the other hand, there's nothing else for you to spend gems on, so just buy the bird over and over. Birds Bros 4 Life.
Really though when you get down to it, for a one-person passion project, it accomplished what it set out to do. I think the game is fine, an attempt at a retro 2D platforming game that maaaybe fell a little bit short of expectations from me. It's pretty cheap on Steam, and it's worth the 4 hours I spent trying to beat it. With a few tweaks I think it could really shine, and I hope I can play more from this dev in the future.
2024
They weren't lying, there really do be animals in this well.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
I'm actually genuinely surprised at the high ratings this has. This game is quite bad, and somehow aged worse than the other two games before it. I have no clue what happened between Chamber of Secrets and this one but it's such a step down in quality and quantity.
For one thing, the visual fidelity is an absolute mess. In the two years between games, they somehow managed to double the texture size, but leave the model's poly count the same. This means you still have trees that are two planes but now they're higher texture quality ~ooooooo~. You get a lowpoly rabbit and a lowpoly dragon, but now their textures are high rez without any shading and it looks horrible. It's like they expected the game engine to fill in the blanks with shading, but forgot to actually add any normal maps or something. The outside of the castle took the biggest hit here, it looks like a brutalist sculpture with a mushy brick texture that hasn't aged well at all. It's a massive downgrade from the second game.
The character models and animations are so strange. Everyone moves and talks like a robot, but occasionally Hermione will just whip out a sick fully-realized talking animation that gives me whiplash every time it happens. It reeks of crunch and rushed deadlines.
But ignoring the visual problems, the game just doesn't work as a collect-a-thon anymore.
They give you almost no free time to explore the castle during the story of the game. No joke, they introduce you to Fred and Georges shop in hour 1 of the game, and you are basically unable to go back to it until you've completed the whole rest of the fucking game, it's ridiculous. The Buckbeak minigame is especially hilarious for the same reason, since cannonically he shouldn't even be around after the main story is over. But sure enough, that's the only time I could go back and finish it!
There are things to 'collect' for sure, but it's really just a chore most of the time. I was halfway through the game and I had 2k beans just jangling in my pocket and nothing to spend it on because I couldn't go back to Fred and Georges shop. The Wizard Cards make a much needed return, but sadly they made the stupid mistake of making some of them limited-time-only so if you accidentally completed a level without checking every corner for secrets you may be unable to actually get to the credits screen!
The new spells are kind of interesting, but don't actually add anything to the game. Carpe Retractum is just Spongify except more limiting. Lapiforse and Draconicorse (I don't care to look up the actual spelling of those) are cool on paper, but the controls of both the dragon and the rabbit are horrible and I'm shocked that it made it through the design phase unchanged. Glacius feels completely niche too, only really being used on the ice-slide set pieces that are sprinkled here and there. It's really jarring to be exploring a place and then 'oh cool here's 100 yards of ice slide, i guess it's that time again'.
None of these spells ever makes an appearance outside of the class trials and the story events, meaning unlocking these spells doesn't let you explore any new areas of the castle (not that it matters since the game doesn't let you do that in the first place).
The secrets take a massive downgrade in this one too. Apparently 'secret' went from finding a hidden door to a secret room, to, finding a skull on a shelf somewhere and hitting it. (Side note: Wtf is with the skeletons in this game? It's Harry Potter, not fucking Dungeons and Dragons, what were you thinking?) It gets even worse because most of the secrets in the castle have been replaced by special portraits that require you to purchase a passcode to access. Nothing screams 'secret' like extremely-noticable-mural-of-some-dude on the wall. And again, you won't get access to it until the game lets you go buy the passcode from Fred and George, so... yeah.
Combat's a joke too: They really want you to take it seriously but like the last two games there isn't anything hard about clicking on an enemy. They keep putting chocolate frogs here and there as a reward to replenish health but I would literally have to stand up and walk out of the room before anything in this game ever killed me. In Hermiones case, I literally did that during her class challenge and the green flumper-head-lookin-thing failed to do anything but spin around like a disco ball. The only thing that is at risk of dealing 2% of your health bar on occasion are the imps that throw wizard-crackers at you, and that mechanic deserved to stay in the first game for a reason.
It's also laughably short. Shorter than the first game, and though it hits all the storybeats it feels more like a themed ride than a game. Two and a half hours in, and I was already at the tail end of the story of the game, like wtf even happened?
And then there are the mini-games. There are three of them in here, and two of them (the Monsterous Book of Monsters and the Pixie Infestation) are click-on-the-enemy-simulators. They are copy-and-pasted encounters, with the models swapped out, and a minor behavior tweak. They didn't even bother to re-color the projectiles that the enemies shoot, it's fucking shameless. The last one is the Buckbeak minigame, where you get to fly through rings, with the same horrible controls that the dragon spell has. It's unnecessarily hard, and really just a pain in the ass but I had to do it to get all of the wizard cards.
What really gets me is that the rings you fly through on Buckbeak are comprised of a particle effect that is inexplicably made out of bats. Fucking..... BATS?! Sir, this isn't Batman this is actually a Harry Potter game I mean -- OWLS ARE RIGHT THERE!!! Yeah, so, that's a bit of a nitpick but, after seeing them do almost everything else in this game wrong I have to bring it up.
Exploration has taken a back seat to spectacle and combat. But the spectacle is boring, and the combat is horrible. So what do you have left? A game that's only gotten worse with age. Yikes.
For one thing, the visual fidelity is an absolute mess. In the two years between games, they somehow managed to double the texture size, but leave the model's poly count the same. This means you still have trees that are two planes but now they're higher texture quality ~ooooooo~. You get a lowpoly rabbit and a lowpoly dragon, but now their textures are high rez without any shading and it looks horrible. It's like they expected the game engine to fill in the blanks with shading, but forgot to actually add any normal maps or something. The outside of the castle took the biggest hit here, it looks like a brutalist sculpture with a mushy brick texture that hasn't aged well at all. It's a massive downgrade from the second game.
The character models and animations are so strange. Everyone moves and talks like a robot, but occasionally Hermione will just whip out a sick fully-realized talking animation that gives me whiplash every time it happens. It reeks of crunch and rushed deadlines.
But ignoring the visual problems, the game just doesn't work as a collect-a-thon anymore.
They give you almost no free time to explore the castle during the story of the game. No joke, they introduce you to Fred and Georges shop in hour 1 of the game, and you are basically unable to go back to it until you've completed the whole rest of the fucking game, it's ridiculous. The Buckbeak minigame is especially hilarious for the same reason, since cannonically he shouldn't even be around after the main story is over. But sure enough, that's the only time I could go back and finish it!
There are things to 'collect' for sure, but it's really just a chore most of the time. I was halfway through the game and I had 2k beans just jangling in my pocket and nothing to spend it on because I couldn't go back to Fred and Georges shop. The Wizard Cards make a much needed return, but sadly they made the stupid mistake of making some of them limited-time-only so if you accidentally completed a level without checking every corner for secrets you may be unable to actually get to the credits screen!
The new spells are kind of interesting, but don't actually add anything to the game. Carpe Retractum is just Spongify except more limiting. Lapiforse and Draconicorse (I don't care to look up the actual spelling of those) are cool on paper, but the controls of both the dragon and the rabbit are horrible and I'm shocked that it made it through the design phase unchanged. Glacius feels completely niche too, only really being used on the ice-slide set pieces that are sprinkled here and there. It's really jarring to be exploring a place and then 'oh cool here's 100 yards of ice slide, i guess it's that time again'.
None of these spells ever makes an appearance outside of the class trials and the story events, meaning unlocking these spells doesn't let you explore any new areas of the castle (not that it matters since the game doesn't let you do that in the first place).
The secrets take a massive downgrade in this one too. Apparently 'secret' went from finding a hidden door to a secret room, to, finding a skull on a shelf somewhere and hitting it. (Side note: Wtf is with the skeletons in this game? It's Harry Potter, not fucking Dungeons and Dragons, what were you thinking?) It gets even worse because most of the secrets in the castle have been replaced by special portraits that require you to purchase a passcode to access. Nothing screams 'secret' like extremely-noticable-mural-of-some-dude on the wall. And again, you won't get access to it until the game lets you go buy the passcode from Fred and George, so... yeah.
Combat's a joke too: They really want you to take it seriously but like the last two games there isn't anything hard about clicking on an enemy. They keep putting chocolate frogs here and there as a reward to replenish health but I would literally have to stand up and walk out of the room before anything in this game ever killed me. In Hermiones case, I literally did that during her class challenge and the green flumper-head-lookin-thing failed to do anything but spin around like a disco ball. The only thing that is at risk of dealing 2% of your health bar on occasion are the imps that throw wizard-crackers at you, and that mechanic deserved to stay in the first game for a reason.
It's also laughably short. Shorter than the first game, and though it hits all the storybeats it feels more like a themed ride than a game. Two and a half hours in, and I was already at the tail end of the story of the game, like wtf even happened?
And then there are the mini-games. There are three of them in here, and two of them (the Monsterous Book of Monsters and the Pixie Infestation) are click-on-the-enemy-simulators. They are copy-and-pasted encounters, with the models swapped out, and a minor behavior tweak. They didn't even bother to re-color the projectiles that the enemies shoot, it's fucking shameless. The last one is the Buckbeak minigame, where you get to fly through rings, with the same horrible controls that the dragon spell has. It's unnecessarily hard, and really just a pain in the ass but I had to do it to get all of the wizard cards.
What really gets me is that the rings you fly through on Buckbeak are comprised of a particle effect that is inexplicably made out of bats. Fucking..... BATS?! Sir, this isn't Batman this is actually a Harry Potter game I mean -- OWLS ARE RIGHT THERE!!! Yeah, so, that's a bit of a nitpick but, after seeing them do almost everything else in this game wrong I have to bring it up.
Exploration has taken a back seat to spectacle and combat. But the spectacle is boring, and the combat is horrible. So what do you have left? A game that's only gotten worse with age. Yikes.
This game goes so hard for no reason. The first game was just alright, a serviceable tie-in game that loosely followed the plot of the first game while being a decent 3D Collect-a-thon.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
It's a bit of a strange tie in game, but it's alright. It completely fuckin blows over the story of the first book but it hits the story beats in an abridged sort of way.
2001 Hagrid is a joy to look at, and honestly some of the environments hold up pretty well.
Some of them also look like dogshit, but hey it was 2001 and this game had to be ported to god damn toasters for consoles so I'm giving it a pass.
2001 Hagrid is a joy to look at, and honestly some of the environments hold up pretty well.
Some of them also look like dogshit, but hey it was 2001 and this game had to be ported to god damn toasters for consoles so I'm giving it a pass.
2022
Splatoon is a weird franchise. I honestly didn't get the hype for the first two games. It always had this 'baby's first fps' kind of vibe that turned me off of them. The idea seemed promising but I couldn't get behind the weird 'squid' music and it all just seemed so childish to me. I completely ignored them and stuck to my hardcore tactical shooters like Apex Legends and Rainbow 6 Siege that I knew and loved and let Nintendo's weird newest IP pass me by.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
2019
God damn it Pathway I really wanted to like you.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
Okay so for context I played Halfway, the first game made by these guys, earlier in the year and enjoyed it despite its flaws. After finishing it, I saw that they made a rogue-like turn based strategy game and I was sold! Maybe they could learn from Halfway and make something really cool!
So, 5 years later, what have the fellas over at Robotality got for us?
Pathway is, like I mentioned earlier, is a top-down rogue-like turn based strategy. It's like if FTL, watched an Indiana Jones movie, while playing XCOM. The game takes place in a alternative timeline of World War 2, with your stereotypical adventure set pieces for that time.
Undead zombies, witch doctors, vast dry deserts, possibly alien's(?), and of course: Nazis. A whole lot of Nazis.
The pixel art style is done really really well here, and is a definite improvement on Halfway. The narrator coming in to kick off and close each mission also really sold me on the vibe that this was supposed to be some sort of grand adventure. Very very Indiana Jones. I wish they had spent that extra time to narrate the entire game as well, I think it would have done a lot of good.
Because the rest of the game is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
Okay so the game is divided up into different missions or chapters. You select from a roster of a number of big-personality characters and go off to save a friend, fight nazis, etc etc. You proceed through a map FTL-style, going from node to node trying to make it to the objective.
Okay so Combat and Game Time:
So the first issue is that the maps are too big for this kind of game. Unfortunately, by design, combat in a turn based games are s l o o o o o w w w w. FTL gets away with this sort of map progression because, assuming that the player is doing well, fights in FTL are between 2-5 minutes. In Halfway, these combats can be double or triple that amount, which leads to the SHORTER runs being close to one to two hours long. I emphasize SHORTER because the second mission I unlocked was secretly THREE MAPS IN ONE, exploding the run time massively.
I feel like this should go without saying but rogue-likes are not meant to be a put-down-and-finish-later kind of game. When was the last time you quit half-way through a run of Hades or Binding of Isaac? By the time you come back, did you say 'hey yeah I'll finish this' or did you come back and immediately end the run to start a new one because that's what you were excited about?
Okay, so outside of combat, what are the rewards like:
Well, you typically get Fuel, which is required to traverse the map. If you have no fuel, your run is basically dead in the water. Without fuel you're trekking barefoot through the desert, and your entire party takes damage per tile traveled. If you don't stumble across fuel quick you're fucked.
Another resource you get is Gold, which can be used in-run to buy items from (weirdly) rare shop tiles on the map or can be used outside-of-run to upgrade your jeep and storage. We'll talk about the issues with gold and shops in a bit.
Lastly it is possible to get new weapons, but they're weirdly rare, and suffer like every other game in the genre from being boring as shit. They're your generic take on decades of RPG weapons you've seen before. A Sniper Rifle that can hit things far away, an SMG that lets you fire a lot of bullets, Knives that let you do more melee damage. And they're all tied to an MMO style rarity system so you know you're just going to sell the one you have later down the line when you find a better one.
Okay so what else is there?:
There are two other kinds of tiles you'll find outside of encounters and combat, and those are Shops and Campsites.
Campsites let you turn another resource, food, into a full heal for your team. These are a staple of these kind of games, so its inclusion shouldn't come as a surprise. Food is a resource that you never have to worry about, because outside of a select few special events, you will never need to manage it. It's a default reward for many combats and serves no usage outside of Campsites, so if you keep your parties health high you'll basically never need to worry about it.
Shops, I mentioned earlier, let you pay gold for resources and items. Unfortunately, I end up seeing shops as a 'fuel' tile because I only ever buy fuel from them and pass up on the items/weapons. There seems to be some sort of balancing issue with Shops in that they are not weighted towards the characters in your party.
The shops really like to try to sell you stuff you're often already using, instead of an upgrade to what you have. Additionally, sometimes they'll sell you items that nobody in your party can use. If you have a full party, which you will 99% of the time, this is a dead shop option. Worse still, sometimes you'll pull into a shop and they'll be selling you a primary weapon that can only be used by a character you haven't even unlocked yet. I don't know if this was meant to be some sort of 'tease' for future character unlocks, but it really killed any desire to go to shops outside of the fuel options.
And all of this is exacerbated by the fact that this is basically the only reason to hoard gold for your run. If the shops are garbage then gold has no in-run usage, and can only realistically be used to upgrade your jeep or storage.
It's also worth noting that, unlike other games in the genre that use this traversal design like Slay the Spire, the game does not mark these tiles on your map ahead of time. This means that planning your route from the start of the map to the end, is largely just which route is the shortest. You can't play around these tiles, and expecting to run into one on chance is a risky endeavor.
So why does it all fall apart?:
I intentionally this out earlier, but there is actually a third kind of resolution to traversing an event tile and that is: Running away. A surprising amount of encounters that would normally turn into combat can just be completely ignored by picking the "Fuck Right Off" option.
Okay, let me spell this out real quick. Your characters health does not reset after combat ends. Your run ends if all of your characters die. You have a limited amount of Fuel, and you can see exactly how many tiles you need to traverse to get to the end of the run. There is also no in-run progression, meaning that the team that you start a run with, if well equipped enough, can easily beat the final level of any run.
So the dominant strategy to winning a run in Pathway is: Get enough fuel to get to the end of the map, and make a break for it. Don't do any combat that you're not forced to, and don't investigate any event tile no matter how tempting the reward is. This is a surprisingly easy strategy to pull off, and though it's boring as hell, you'll win games with it. But this strategy also HAS TO EXIST because the design of the game is fundamentally flawed.
Because your characters health does not reset between tiles, because the only resource that matters in-run is fuel, because you HAVE to traverse the map to win the game, because you can't see where Shop and Campsite tiles are ahead of time, and because any amount of any other reward is largely useless, the game rewards you for taking the absolute least amount of risk possible.
Why participate in combat? All it does it hurt your characters, and you might not get a campsite this run. Why take the risky option in a special event? If the reward isn't fuel, you've just hurt your party members and made it harder to win the final encounter. And I think this kind of game CAN work, it just seems like every single design decision made, whether intentional or not, negatively impacts the players willingness to take risks in this game. Without taking risks, what's even the point?
The out-of-run progression isn't that much better either. It took two runs with the same team for one of my characters to 'level up' and unlock new abilities. In Pathways defense, these abilities ARE interesting. I AM compelled to continue playing the game to unlock them, but unfortunately they take too long to acquire, often multiple runs with the same character. They also happen to be entirely combat centered so, paradoxically, you won't be using them too much in a run.
So that's Pathway. Runs take to long because the maps too big. Combat varies in difficulty but ultimately you don't care because the dominant strategy is to not engage with the games core gameplay loop at all. And lastly the meta-progression is too slow to acquire, and to centered around combat to matter greatly in a run.
What's such a shame is that I think with a number of tweaks this could have really been a banger game. Add some critical tiles on the map and hide the objective tile until you visit one or all of them to make you actually plan a route. Mark shops and campsites on the map so you can plan around them, or lose the persistent HP mechanic all together. The presentation of the game is great - it's easily the best part of the game - there just isn't a game worth playing underneath it.
1980
I donno man.
I get that it's from 1980, but maybe if your control scheme requires 'R' and 'r' to do completely different things, your game might be suffering from a UX problem.
Outside of that, the game is just -- okay.
You move around and beat shit up. You go to the next floor and move around and beat more shit up. There are items to help you beat shit up, and items that help you get not beaten up. It's not exactly hard to get.
Oh but don't get me wrong, the game is definitely challenging. But it's challenging in the tedious way. The 'oh my run ended because of some bullshit' way. The 'oops I guess I ran out of the food' way. The 'oh is that the fifth enemy with a stun ability in a row' way.
Couple all of that with such interesting minute to minute gameplay as:
Walking!
And you'll see why I'm not exactly raving to play more.
Like, I see why it was a hit for the time, but after decades of iteration on the formula, there remains nothing terribly interesting about the game now besides the challenge.
I get that it's from 1980, but maybe if your control scheme requires 'R' and 'r' to do completely different things, your game might be suffering from a UX problem.
Outside of that, the game is just -- okay.
You move around and beat shit up. You go to the next floor and move around and beat more shit up. There are items to help you beat shit up, and items that help you get not beaten up. It's not exactly hard to get.
Oh but don't get me wrong, the game is definitely challenging. But it's challenging in the tedious way. The 'oh my run ended because of some bullshit' way. The 'oops I guess I ran out of the food' way. The 'oh is that the fifth enemy with a stun ability in a row' way.
Couple all of that with such interesting minute to minute gameplay as:
Walking!
And you'll see why I'm not exactly raving to play more.
Like, I see why it was a hit for the time, but after decades of iteration on the formula, there remains nothing terribly interesting about the game now besides the challenge.
Okay, I almost never review a game that I haven't completed but I have so many strong feelings about Penny's Big Breakaway from my time spent playing it that I really want to get down on paper while I'm thinking about them.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
2024
This little ditty gave me 45 minutes of joy. Sometimes that's all you need!
2023
Hellcard is great! It's a rouge-like deck builder that you play with friends with a number of different playstyles and challenges to overcome. I played it with two of my other friends to death last year, and we had a pretty good time every time we brought it out.
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
2015
I have only a handful of games that I consider 'Must-Plays', for anyone who likes video games. It's not a hard game. It's not even a particularly impressive game. But it is one of the best games of all time none-the-less, and you should play it.
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the final entry in a five game series by (mostly) solo indie developer RDein, and man it's really fuckin hard to rate. I've fiddled with the star rating at least 10 times while writing this review.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
2014
Wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Halfway is an XCOM-like. It's a difficult turn based strategy rpg set on a space ship that is mysteriously under attack from uncertain outside forces. You scavenge weapons and ammo, recruit and rescue colorful characters, and face down an ever changing cast of enemies in a fight for your lives.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.