iyellatcloud
1998
I never enjoy giving a well-regarded game a lukewarm review, and I promise I'm not doing it to be contrarian, but... have you ever experienced that "oh, crap" moment playing a strategy game like Civilization when you move your club-wielding cavemen to attack another player only to find yourself faced with tanks and fighter jets? That's kind of like how Jazz Jackrabbit 2 feels like.
It's a much more competently-made game than the original, free of its most egregious flaws (less slippery momentum, less screen crunch, enemy placement that is tricky but has less instances of "gotcha!"). It has plenty of the same virtues - nice visual design with a good variety of level aesthetics, nonlinear-ish level layouts with a good amount of secrets to discover, and a great soundtrack. The selection of guns are probably the gameplay's strongest suit - from the pitifully short-range flamethrower which is effective against erratically-flying enemies because the flames linger in the air slightly longer, to the motion-controlled bombs which are great against bosses because they allow you to damage a boss while you're safely on the other side of the screen, every weapon has at least a fringe use.
...it was also released in 1998. (for reference Klonoa came out in '97!)
I'm not saying that every game needs to break new ground, but if a game is treading familiar territory then I'd at least hope for it to be polished. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has plenty of rough edges - its visual design is confusing, and it's hard to tell which platforms can be landed on and which are part of the background. The final level has the most egregious example of this - a floor that appears to be made of flowing lava but can be walked on like a normal floor! The controls are inconsistent, particularly in the execution of Jazz's ear propeller and Spaz's double jump. There's a pretty sizable catalogue of bugs - I softlocked myself multiple times, mostly by clipping into walls, but I also (twice) used the motion-sensor bomb and blew a boss clear out of the screen, with no choice but to reload an earlier save!
I do see that this game filled a very specific niche when it came out; in an era where developers were throwing out plenty of bathwater (and some babies) in their rush to cash in on the 3D craze, a functional old-school mascot platformer from a niche franchise scratches a very specific itch. But as someone without an emotional connection to this game, it comes across as an anachronism - archaic by 1998 standards, but not refined enough to count as homage.
It's a much more competently-made game than the original, free of its most egregious flaws (less slippery momentum, less screen crunch, enemy placement that is tricky but has less instances of "gotcha!"). It has plenty of the same virtues - nice visual design with a good variety of level aesthetics, nonlinear-ish level layouts with a good amount of secrets to discover, and a great soundtrack. The selection of guns are probably the gameplay's strongest suit - from the pitifully short-range flamethrower which is effective against erratically-flying enemies because the flames linger in the air slightly longer, to the motion-controlled bombs which are great against bosses because they allow you to damage a boss while you're safely on the other side of the screen, every weapon has at least a fringe use.
...it was also released in 1998. (for reference Klonoa came out in '97!)
I'm not saying that every game needs to break new ground, but if a game is treading familiar territory then I'd at least hope for it to be polished. Jazz Jackrabbit 2 has plenty of rough edges - its visual design is confusing, and it's hard to tell which platforms can be landed on and which are part of the background. The final level has the most egregious example of this - a floor that appears to be made of flowing lava but can be walked on like a normal floor! The controls are inconsistent, particularly in the execution of Jazz's ear propeller and Spaz's double jump. There's a pretty sizable catalogue of bugs - I softlocked myself multiple times, mostly by clipping into walls, but I also (twice) used the motion-sensor bomb and blew a boss clear out of the screen, with no choice but to reload an earlier save!
I do see that this game filled a very specific niche when it came out; in an era where developers were throwing out plenty of bathwater (and some babies) in their rush to cash in on the 3D craze, a functional old-school mascot platformer from a niche franchise scratches a very specific itch. But as someone without an emotional connection to this game, it comes across as an anachronism - archaic by 1998 standards, but not refined enough to count as homage.
1984
Look, this game came out in 1984 so the chances of it being a deep and realistic racing simulation are exactly nil. But it still manages to deliver a cool experience!
There's a deceptive amount of skill to be put to the test here, from leaning backwards to avoid tumbling over speedbumps, to tilting your bike in the air to maintain speed when you land, and multitasking to make sure your engine doesn't overheat. And while the game's rudimentary physics aren't the most satisfying, it still manages to be a very compelling "chaos simulator" thanks to the sheer amount of stuff happening onscreen at once, with the wack collision physics meaning that at least one racer is taking a spill at any given time. The difference between winning and losing spectacularly is often mercurial and seemingly down to blind luck, yet losing is... still kinda fun actually!
The game's structure embraces this emphasis on fun - you can select any track to race on at any time, with no content walled behind any arbitrary skill checks! And you can design your own tracks, as seriously or as terribly as you want!
If you play this game trying to win it you'll probably end up frustrated (I could never finish the 5th level myself). But if you treat it as a fun little playground, it's pretty good!
There's a deceptive amount of skill to be put to the test here, from leaning backwards to avoid tumbling over speedbumps, to tilting your bike in the air to maintain speed when you land, and multitasking to make sure your engine doesn't overheat. And while the game's rudimentary physics aren't the most satisfying, it still manages to be a very compelling "chaos simulator" thanks to the sheer amount of stuff happening onscreen at once, with the wack collision physics meaning that at least one racer is taking a spill at any given time. The difference between winning and losing spectacularly is often mercurial and seemingly down to blind luck, yet losing is... still kinda fun actually!
The game's structure embraces this emphasis on fun - you can select any track to race on at any time, with no content walled behind any arbitrary skill checks! And you can design your own tracks, as seriously or as terribly as you want!
If you play this game trying to win it you'll probably end up frustrated (I could never finish the 5th level myself). But if you treat it as a fun little playground, it's pretty good!
2005
"They always feel new - constant, but constantly surprising. They become part of your private autobiography and every time you [play] them a new layer of memory is added to the bond between you. Each performance is a collection of the experiences you have had together. Not many friendships last so long - I suppose the unchanging nature of the music simplifies the dynamic between you - but what would be an unhealthily one-sided affair in your personal life provides a great deal of comfort throughout your professional one. It is even richer if you can always remember the initial naivety, wonder, and thrill that accompanied your first 'date'."
This is a quote from an orchestral conductor about his evolving relationship with great pieces of classical music, but I suspect it's pretty easy for many of us to substitute a couple of words and apply it directly to our experiences with our favorite games. And in the case of RE4 it was a first date to remember.
It was the late spring of 2005, my friend had just bought the game, eight of us crammed into his dorm room at midnight, turned the lights out and the volume up as we played through the first 3 chapters more or less blind. The idea was that we'd pass the controller around whenever the player died, but the first guy somehow stayed alive all the way until chapter 3-2! Us seven spectators had one of the most intense watch-sessions ever, alternating between "AHHHH!" and "EWWWW" and "LOLOL Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks".
Two years later, I bought the Wii version - now I could shoot a Ganado in the leg and then in the face a split second later! It was so damn addictive that I completed the game (for the first time) in one single 16-hour sitting. A friend picked me up to go to a party right after, and I spent the entire time in a hazy half-asleep stupor hovering between RE4 and reality. And while I don't remember this, he said (while laughing his ass off) that at one point I stood in front of a vase and swiped my right arm back and forth in the "break vase" Wiimote gesture for a few seconds.
I've returned to Resident Evil 4 at so many different seasons of my life - playing quick rounds of Mercenaries mode with a warm bottle of milk in my lap waiting for my infant daughter to start fussing, doing a handgun-only pro run when COVID lockdowns first started - that it has to be a five-star game for me. It's not just that I have plenty of memories of it; it's that the game was addictive and fantastic enough that I kept coming back to it to make those memories in the first place, and that's something that no amount of plot contrivances or anticlimactic final acts can take away from it.
Plenty of reviews have waxed lyrical on this game's virtues better than I can, but I wanted to point out how impressed I am with how the iconic village brawl really teaches the new player how to play the game. It establishes from the outset that unlike the zombies from previous games, these guys are capable of running, moving intelligently to flank you, and following you up stairs and through windows. And through a mix of its large enemy swarms, the presence of sloping terrain which means that you will eventually hit an enemy in the face even if you just spray and pray, and the fact that enemies sometimes stagger forwards when hit in the face, and you've created the conditions for even a complete newbie to discover the melee options by accident. And the melee options are part of the extraordinarily robust but viscerally simple gameplay loop that has sustained my interest in this game through countless playthroughs.
I know that this represents the start of the shift away from survival horror that culminated in the all-action RE6 (that's a review I'm kinda dreading to get to) - but taken as it is it's a blockbuster in all the right ways. It looks and sounds fantastic even today, is exceptionally refined in execution, is a bundle of scares on the first run and then unadulterated fun on subsequent playthroughs, and... it's just good, man. Play it!
This is a quote from an orchestral conductor about his evolving relationship with great pieces of classical music, but I suspect it's pretty easy for many of us to substitute a couple of words and apply it directly to our experiences with our favorite games. And in the case of RE4 it was a first date to remember.
It was the late spring of 2005, my friend had just bought the game, eight of us crammed into his dorm room at midnight, turned the lights out and the volume up as we played through the first 3 chapters more or less blind. The idea was that we'd pass the controller around whenever the player died, but the first guy somehow stayed alive all the way until chapter 3-2! Us seven spectators had one of the most intense watch-sessions ever, alternating between "AHHHH!" and "EWWWW" and "LOLOL Chuck Norris roundhouse kicks".
Two years later, I bought the Wii version - now I could shoot a Ganado in the leg and then in the face a split second later! It was so damn addictive that I completed the game (for the first time) in one single 16-hour sitting. A friend picked me up to go to a party right after, and I spent the entire time in a hazy half-asleep stupor hovering between RE4 and reality. And while I don't remember this, he said (while laughing his ass off) that at one point I stood in front of a vase and swiped my right arm back and forth in the "break vase" Wiimote gesture for a few seconds.
I've returned to Resident Evil 4 at so many different seasons of my life - playing quick rounds of Mercenaries mode with a warm bottle of milk in my lap waiting for my infant daughter to start fussing, doing a handgun-only pro run when COVID lockdowns first started - that it has to be a five-star game for me. It's not just that I have plenty of memories of it; it's that the game was addictive and fantastic enough that I kept coming back to it to make those memories in the first place, and that's something that no amount of plot contrivances or anticlimactic final acts can take away from it.
Plenty of reviews have waxed lyrical on this game's virtues better than I can, but I wanted to point out how impressed I am with how the iconic village brawl really teaches the new player how to play the game. It establishes from the outset that unlike the zombies from previous games, these guys are capable of running, moving intelligently to flank you, and following you up stairs and through windows. And through a mix of its large enemy swarms, the presence of sloping terrain which means that you will eventually hit an enemy in the face even if you just spray and pray, and the fact that enemies sometimes stagger forwards when hit in the face, and you've created the conditions for even a complete newbie to discover the melee options by accident. And the melee options are part of the extraordinarily robust but viscerally simple gameplay loop that has sustained my interest in this game through countless playthroughs.
I know that this represents the start of the shift away from survival horror that culminated in the all-action RE6 (that's a review I'm kinda dreading to get to) - but taken as it is it's a blockbuster in all the right ways. It looks and sounds fantastic even today, is exceptionally refined in execution, is a bundle of scares on the first run and then unadulterated fun on subsequent playthroughs, and... it's just good, man. Play it!
Random thought: I played Hollow Knight a month ago, and Cornifer and Iselda are basically Torneko and Tessie as bugs. No, I will not elaborate.
Anyways, I've previously played all of what I consider 'classic DQ' (the original versions of the first seven games), and this marks my first foray into the DS remakes. I like the game a lot, but it also solidifies my distaste for the series' combat in general. It's not so much that the game is grindy, but that it boils down to praying hard to RNGesus only to find out that he's RNSatan instead. As an example, an early-game boss can either do a normal attack for 30-40 damage, an AOE attack for around 20, or a different AOE attack for 40plus. He also sometimes gets two actions per round. And if you think about it, him doing an AOE twice at the end of a round, then following it up with the same thing at the start of the next round (which happened to me more than once) is such monumental overkill that it will wipe your party even if you're overlevelled. Random lategame mooks do this as well. Some bosses will instakill a character if they get a critical hit - which would be tolerable in a game where you have ready access to reliable methods of resurrection, but not here! This all adds up to a game which is so random that it kills almost all attempts at strategizing in favor of relying on luck, and simply doesn't come across as fun for me (or maybe it's a skill issue? So many people enjoy the combat so I might be missing something).
The game does have updated graphics and better QoL than the NES original - as expected - but I do need to complain about how they added one of my biggest pet peeves: Xenogears-style camera angles. I feel like controllable camera angles are good for immersion if you have interesting locales that are set up like actual real-world locations, but if your towns and dungeons are set up in a rigid grid and the only thing that separates them from 'traditional' JRPG towns are the fact that the doors of houses are not all facing the same direction, then all you're doing by adding a controllable camera is adding tedium to getting around!
My star rating above should spoil that there are enough things I like about the game to balance out my biggest gripes, and really it's just the fact that... well, this game is Dragon Quest, man. Like every other game in the series I've played, the NPCs are charming, the vibes are cozy, and it really nails the sense of exploration by being nonlinear enough that everyone's journey of discovering the world in Chapter 5 will be uniquely their own. The more modern hardware and more polished translation render the dramatic moments of the original - like your childhood friend's willingness to protect you, and the villain's origin story - far more effective. And as one of the not-many who adores Koichi Sugiyama (the composer, not the person), the updated orchestration does his work a lot more justice; as a purist who writes very much in a traditional classical style, the more 'accurate' instrumental samples represent a huge jump in quality over the tinny midi of the original.
One last thing I need to mention is that the Party Chat function - which adds a ton of characterization to your party (and even the guest members!) - is inexplicably dummied out of the Western release. For a game with such a colorful cast of characters this is a massive miss!
In the end, this is a great way to play one of the strongest entries of the series in a more 'modern' medium. Fittingly for a series which has been often described as 'RPG comfort food', you know exactly what you'll get - if you like the other games in the series, I'd recommend this!
Anyways, I've previously played all of what I consider 'classic DQ' (the original versions of the first seven games), and this marks my first foray into the DS remakes. I like the game a lot, but it also solidifies my distaste for the series' combat in general. It's not so much that the game is grindy, but that it boils down to praying hard to RNGesus only to find out that he's RNSatan instead. As an example, an early-game boss can either do a normal attack for 30-40 damage, an AOE attack for around 20, or a different AOE attack for 40plus. He also sometimes gets two actions per round. And if you think about it, him doing an AOE twice at the end of a round, then following it up with the same thing at the start of the next round (which happened to me more than once) is such monumental overkill that it will wipe your party even if you're overlevelled. Random lategame mooks do this as well. Some bosses will instakill a character if they get a critical hit - which would be tolerable in a game where you have ready access to reliable methods of resurrection, but not here! This all adds up to a game which is so random that it kills almost all attempts at strategizing in favor of relying on luck, and simply doesn't come across as fun for me (or maybe it's a skill issue? So many people enjoy the combat so I might be missing something).
The game does have updated graphics and better QoL than the NES original - as expected - but I do need to complain about how they added one of my biggest pet peeves: Xenogears-style camera angles. I feel like controllable camera angles are good for immersion if you have interesting locales that are set up like actual real-world locations, but if your towns and dungeons are set up in a rigid grid and the only thing that separates them from 'traditional' JRPG towns are the fact that the doors of houses are not all facing the same direction, then all you're doing by adding a controllable camera is adding tedium to getting around!
My star rating above should spoil that there are enough things I like about the game to balance out my biggest gripes, and really it's just the fact that... well, this game is Dragon Quest, man. Like every other game in the series I've played, the NPCs are charming, the vibes are cozy, and it really nails the sense of exploration by being nonlinear enough that everyone's journey of discovering the world in Chapter 5 will be uniquely their own. The more modern hardware and more polished translation render the dramatic moments of the original - like your childhood friend's willingness to protect you, and the villain's origin story - far more effective. And as one of the not-many who adores Koichi Sugiyama (the composer, not the person), the updated orchestration does his work a lot more justice; as a purist who writes very much in a traditional classical style, the more 'accurate' instrumental samples represent a huge jump in quality over the tinny midi of the original.
One last thing I need to mention is that the Party Chat function - which adds a ton of characterization to your party (and even the guest members!) - is inexplicably dummied out of the Western release. For a game with such a colorful cast of characters this is a massive miss!
In the end, this is a great way to play one of the strongest entries of the series in a more 'modern' medium. Fittingly for a series which has been often described as 'RPG comfort food', you know exactly what you'll get - if you like the other games in the series, I'd recommend this!
2021
Early on in my playthrough of Inscryption I made a fatal rookie mistake: Leshy, the deranged and creepy card-opponent-slash-dungeon-master filled his side of the board with birds, and in a moment of panic I sacrificed my Mantis God (which was actually the perfect card in this situation because of its multi-hitting attack) in order to cast a Grizzly (which was a higher-cost card with better stats but ill-suited to dealing with a Zerg Rush-style assault). This one learning experience actually sums up my experience with the entire game, but perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself.
The opening of Inscryption - a roguelike/deckbuilder/escape room game - is about as compelling as any game can possibly get. The vibes are immaculate, flavor and mechanics both score a windmill dunk out of ten, and there is enough randomness in map layouts and events that every run feels different and forces you to think on the fly, but not so much that progression feels gated behind pure dumb luck. If there were one nitpick I could have with it, it's that some mechanics and puzzles are too obtuse for my liking - I get that it goes well the game's mysterious vibe, but there's a bit of a clash between its deliberately cryptic elements and the fact that it's a roguelike that relies of optimal decision making and autosaves all your decisions. Still, nearly everything about it is chef's kiss.
Keeping this as light on spoilers as possible, the game then undergoes a few changes, and to put it kindly... the back half (or even longer, depending on your playstyle) becomes the world's longest instance of "the priest fainted. and then everybody clapped!" I was about to say the game design was confused, but that's not quite right. The writers and designers made exactly the game they wanted to! But while it's admirable how much balls they showed by sticking to their original vision, I also find it painful that they had to sacrifice such a strong opening act in order to build their 'meta creepypasta' narrative, and even sacrificed a proper gameplay climax in favor of a denouement that only serves to tease the player on what could have been. The combination of such a strong opening with such wasted potential (keeping in mind that the wasted potential was a deliberate artistic decision!) is what makes Inscryption possibly one of the hardest games for me to put a star rating on.
But perhaps I should conclude by explaining the anecdote at the start of the review. As I told you
The opening of Inscryption - a roguelike/deckbuilder/escape room game - is about as compelling as any game can possibly get. The vibes are immaculate, flavor and mechanics both score a windmill dunk out of ten, and there is enough randomness in map layouts and events that every run feels different and forces you to think on the fly, but not so much that progression feels gated behind pure dumb luck. If there were one nitpick I could have with it, it's that some mechanics and puzzles are too obtuse for my liking - I get that it goes well the game's mysterious vibe, but there's a bit of a clash between its deliberately cryptic elements and the fact that it's a roguelike that relies of optimal decision making and autosaves all your decisions. Still, nearly everything about it is chef's kiss.
Keeping this as light on spoilers as possible, the game then undergoes a few changes, and to put it kindly... the back half (or even longer, depending on your playstyle) becomes the world's longest instance of "the priest fainted. and then everybody clapped!" I was about to say the game design was confused, but that's not quite right. The writers and designers made exactly the game they wanted to! But while it's admirable how much balls they showed by sticking to their original vision, I also find it painful that they had to sacrifice such a strong opening act in order to build their 'meta creepypasta' narrative, and even sacrificed a proper gameplay climax in favor of a denouement that only serves to tease the player on what could have been. The combination of such a strong opening with such wasted potential (keeping in mind that the wasted potential was a deliberate artistic decision!) is what makes Inscryption possibly one of the hardest games for me to put a star rating on.
But perhaps I should conclude by explaining the anecdote at the start of the review. As I told you
1994
I was about 10 when I first heard about Jazz Jackrabbit from my friends - never played it though (perhaps that's for the best, as I was just the right age for Eva Earlong's low-cut dress to have made a furry out of me). But so many of my PC-gaming friends loved this game - the PC library at the time heavily leaned towards slower and more strategic titles, and to my friends Jazz Jackrabbit felt like a statement of intent that showed the PC could pull off mascot platformers just as well as the consoles could. And to that I say... were we playing the same game?!
To be fair, I can kind of understand the fan hype around this game; if you owned a PC and didn't play Sonic all that regularly, Jazz Jackrabbit certainly looks the part. While the limited DOS palette means it doesn't look as good as its console contemporaries, it has an anthropomorphic animal with 'tude (and a gun!) running around themed levels, each with their own unique gimmicks and a nice nonlinear structure with ample secrets to discover. Also, a real head-bopping toe-tapping soundtrack!
Unfortunately, actually sitting down to play the thing quickly reveals that this doesn't have the open-ended flashiness of Sonic CD or the polish of the first half of Sonic 2 - this is 3 and a half hours of Metropolis Zone. The haphazard and cheap enemy/hazard placement is certainly an issue, but it's exacerbated by lots of weird quirks like oversized hitboxes and Jazz immediately jumping after landing if you hold down the jump button for too long. Perhaps the worst part of the game feel is how Jazz hits full speed and momentum after moving in a direction for less than a second, and combined with the obscene screen crunch this forced me to slowly and painfully inch my way through every level by tap-tap-tapping the arrow keys.
There are some good mechanics here (different weapons with subtly different firing arcs add a bit of nuance), and the beginnings of good level design (which I hope the sequel built up on). But the frankly junky game feel means that Jazz Jackrabbit is a 'nostalgia goggles only' play.
To be fair, I can kind of understand the fan hype around this game; if you owned a PC and didn't play Sonic all that regularly, Jazz Jackrabbit certainly looks the part. While the limited DOS palette means it doesn't look as good as its console contemporaries, it has an anthropomorphic animal with 'tude (and a gun!) running around themed levels, each with their own unique gimmicks and a nice nonlinear structure with ample secrets to discover. Also, a real head-bopping toe-tapping soundtrack!
Unfortunately, actually sitting down to play the thing quickly reveals that this doesn't have the open-ended flashiness of Sonic CD or the polish of the first half of Sonic 2 - this is 3 and a half hours of Metropolis Zone. The haphazard and cheap enemy/hazard placement is certainly an issue, but it's exacerbated by lots of weird quirks like oversized hitboxes and Jazz immediately jumping after landing if you hold down the jump button for too long. Perhaps the worst part of the game feel is how Jazz hits full speed and momentum after moving in a direction for less than a second, and combined with the obscene screen crunch this forced me to slowly and painfully inch my way through every level by tap-tap-tapping the arrow keys.
There are some good mechanics here (different weapons with subtly different firing arcs add a bit of nuance), and the beginnings of good level design (which I hope the sequel built up on). But the frankly junky game feel means that Jazz Jackrabbit is a 'nostalgia goggles only' play.
2013
I love the concept of this game. As neither the most skilled nor the most patient nor the most competitive gamer, I tend to steer clear of most Doom mods that dial the difficulty way beyond what the base game intended - but a Doom mod with pirate-hat-wearing imps, eyepatch-wearing demons and revenants that shoot homing parrots? Count me in!
Pirate Doom is apparently heavily inspired by the Monkey Island games (note to self: check this series out ASAP!) and its new tilesets and graphical changes bring a unique and slightly lighthearted mood to the table. There are plenty of unique coding tricks and truly strongly-designed maps too! My personal favorite is the circus: a brightly-lit series of setpieces that include having to slowly walk across a tightrope while taking out enemies that spawn on both sides, a giant trampoline sequence that adds an element of chaotic verticality unlike any other map I've played, and a 'freakshow' segment which uses coding tricks to create weird monsters like a two-headed imp.
Unfortunately, Pirate Doom suffers a bit from 'Plok syndrome', where an otherwise-excellent game takes its most obnoxious element and then iterates on it and doubles down on it. Pirate Doom overuses darkness to create difficulty, with certain encounters taking place in nearly pitch-black rooms. It's a baffling design decision at odds with the brighter palette and more colorful tilesets, akin to applying the lighting and cinematography of the Battison movie to the 1960s Batman show. And it only got worse as I went on, with sometimes entire levels being so dark that even with brightness turned up I couldn't see enemies standing right next to me!
Some of these levels were long, sprawling, nearly impossible to navigate, and had me being hit by enemies that I couldn't even see - this might have been effective in a horror-themed wad or 'challenge mod', but Pirate Doom doesn't come across as either. It's just an unfortunate quirk that brought my enjoyment level of the game from 4 stars (after the opening few levels) steadily lower and lower as I played. Which is a shame, because the good maps are really really good!
Favorite maps:
45 - Barnacle Bar
46 - Circus
50 - Lost City
57 - Grog Factory
Pirate Doom is apparently heavily inspired by the Monkey Island games (note to self: check this series out ASAP!) and its new tilesets and graphical changes bring a unique and slightly lighthearted mood to the table. There are plenty of unique coding tricks and truly strongly-designed maps too! My personal favorite is the circus: a brightly-lit series of setpieces that include having to slowly walk across a tightrope while taking out enemies that spawn on both sides, a giant trampoline sequence that adds an element of chaotic verticality unlike any other map I've played, and a 'freakshow' segment which uses coding tricks to create weird monsters like a two-headed imp.
Unfortunately, Pirate Doom suffers a bit from 'Plok syndrome', where an otherwise-excellent game takes its most obnoxious element and then iterates on it and doubles down on it. Pirate Doom overuses darkness to create difficulty, with certain encounters taking place in nearly pitch-black rooms. It's a baffling design decision at odds with the brighter palette and more colorful tilesets, akin to applying the lighting and cinematography of the Battison movie to the 1960s Batman show. And it only got worse as I went on, with sometimes entire levels being so dark that even with brightness turned up I couldn't see enemies standing right next to me!
Some of these levels were long, sprawling, nearly impossible to navigate, and had me being hit by enemies that I couldn't even see - this might have been effective in a horror-themed wad or 'challenge mod', but Pirate Doom doesn't come across as either. It's just an unfortunate quirk that brought my enjoyment level of the game from 4 stars (after the opening few levels) steadily lower and lower as I played. Which is a shame, because the good maps are really really good!
Favorite maps:
45 - Barnacle Bar
46 - Circus
50 - Lost City
57 - Grog Factory
2021
The problem with the Rat Race is that even if you win, you're still a rat.
I remember reading this aphorism frequently growing up, most frequently on boomer chain-email threads, but it seems truer than ever today as corporate culture gets ever more toxic and exploitative. So an indie video game with an anti-corporate message (like this game, or the excellent Going Under) is something I can get behind. I can't deny that the premise of this game - an intern making a huge splash by shouting the previously-forgotten word 'no' at his superiors - is entertaining. The writing is generally sharp and witty, and (without getting into spoiler territory) the narrative is heartwarming and inspiring in moments, though it can also come across as shallow and overly-idealistic.
The game's main flaw is in how its simplistic mechanics stretch an already-streamlined experience very thin. You can switch stances to say 'no' in different tones of voice, charge up the volume and intensity of your 'no', and even do stuff like clap sarcastically to confuse people before saying 'no' to them... but barring one or two exceptions, almost none of those options make any difference to the outcomes of your interactions. All the different ways to say 'no' are entirely cosmetic, and it feels like the optimum way to play the game is to delay saying 'no' as long as possible, giving each character the chance to say all their lines and giving the good writing more of a spotlight.
However, going with this approach, it strikes me how much the entire game just comes across as one long interactive cutscene, in the vein of stuff like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (brrrrr!) And while Say No! More is far better than that unholy abomination, and I daresay nearly as good as a game of its type can possibly get... the problem with comparing 'interactive cutscene' games is that even if you win, you're still an interactive cutscene.
I remember reading this aphorism frequently growing up, most frequently on boomer chain-email threads, but it seems truer than ever today as corporate culture gets ever more toxic and exploitative. So an indie video game with an anti-corporate message (like this game, or the excellent Going Under) is something I can get behind. I can't deny that the premise of this game - an intern making a huge splash by shouting the previously-forgotten word 'no' at his superiors - is entertaining. The writing is generally sharp and witty, and (without getting into spoiler territory) the narrative is heartwarming and inspiring in moments, though it can also come across as shallow and overly-idealistic.
The game's main flaw is in how its simplistic mechanics stretch an already-streamlined experience very thin. You can switch stances to say 'no' in different tones of voice, charge up the volume and intensity of your 'no', and even do stuff like clap sarcastically to confuse people before saying 'no' to them... but barring one or two exceptions, almost none of those options make any difference to the outcomes of your interactions. All the different ways to say 'no' are entirely cosmetic, and it feels like the optimum way to play the game is to delay saying 'no' as long as possible, giving each character the chance to say all their lines and giving the good writing more of a spotlight.
However, going with this approach, it strikes me how much the entire game just comes across as one long interactive cutscene, in the vein of stuff like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties (brrrrr!) And while Say No! More is far better than that unholy abomination, and I daresay nearly as good as a game of its type can possibly get... the problem with comparing 'interactive cutscene' games is that even if you win, you're still an interactive cutscene.
1997
Star Fox walked so Star Fox 64 could run. ...or it might be more apt to say that Star Fox flew so Star Fox 64 could fly at a playable FPS. While this reboot is obviously technically superior to the original, it's a whole host of other details that make this the definitive Star Fox experience; for one, the addition of the charged shot and aiming reticle make the simple act of flying around and shooting things feel much better and less random. The addition of Saturday morning cartoon style voice acting - with just the right mix of scenery-chewing and earnest emotion - adds enough personality to both your wingmen and your enemies to ease you into the role of Fox.
However, it's one change in particular that elevates Star Fox 64 from 'excellently-done game' to 'one of my favorites'. The game's structure is far more organic than the original - rather than a preset 'easy' 'medium' and 'hard' path through the game, SF64 dynamically moves you between the various paths depending on how you do in each mission, creating a multitude of possible routes to the final stage (which itself has two variations). This variable difficulty keeps the player on their toes and rewards aggressive play with progression to the more interesting and higher-dopamine missions of the 'medium' and 'hard' routes, making Star Fox 64 a greatly-replayable score-attack game. If you manage to get to the 'harder' variation of the final sequence, hearing the increasingly-panicked enemy radio chatter as you punch through their final lines of defense makes you feel like an absolute badass, and you know what? You earned it.
Speaking of the missions, they all carry enough of a unique twist to keep the rail-shooter formula from getting stale - from an Independence-Day style level where you need to shoot down a mothership to protect a base, to a mission over a molten planet where the heat continuously drains your shields and the only way to stay alive is to destroy background objects for health pickups, to intense free-flying dogfights, to (shockingly well-done!) land and sea levels in alternate vehicles, there is so much imagination that went into these.
I'm aware that the fanbase is pretty split on the music - quite a few players prefer the soundtrack of the original Star Fox for being more eclectic and unique, but you know what? Koji Kondo's soundtrack is more 'standard' but I love it more, the same way I prefer all of Alan Menken's Disney soundtracks to any of the modern stuff. It just stirs my heartstrings and makes me want to go out there and do stuff.
To sum up: great game, absolutely essential playing as a representative of both the N64 library and of rail shooters in general. Highly recommend!
However, it's one change in particular that elevates Star Fox 64 from 'excellently-done game' to 'one of my favorites'. The game's structure is far more organic than the original - rather than a preset 'easy' 'medium' and 'hard' path through the game, SF64 dynamically moves you between the various paths depending on how you do in each mission, creating a multitude of possible routes to the final stage (which itself has two variations). This variable difficulty keeps the player on their toes and rewards aggressive play with progression to the more interesting and higher-dopamine missions of the 'medium' and 'hard' routes, making Star Fox 64 a greatly-replayable score-attack game. If you manage to get to the 'harder' variation of the final sequence, hearing the increasingly-panicked enemy radio chatter as you punch through their final lines of defense makes you feel like an absolute badass, and you know what? You earned it.
Speaking of the missions, they all carry enough of a unique twist to keep the rail-shooter formula from getting stale - from an Independence-Day style level where you need to shoot down a mothership to protect a base, to a mission over a molten planet where the heat continuously drains your shields and the only way to stay alive is to destroy background objects for health pickups, to intense free-flying dogfights, to (shockingly well-done!) land and sea levels in alternate vehicles, there is so much imagination that went into these.
I'm aware that the fanbase is pretty split on the music - quite a few players prefer the soundtrack of the original Star Fox for being more eclectic and unique, but you know what? Koji Kondo's soundtrack is more 'standard' but I love it more, the same way I prefer all of Alan Menken's Disney soundtracks to any of the modern stuff. It just stirs my heartstrings and makes me want to go out there and do stuff.
To sum up: great game, absolutely essential playing as a representative of both the N64 library and of rail shooters in general. Highly recommend!
1996
(A sequel to Jumping Flash! , which I reviewed here)
I don't know what to be more surprised by: that a 3D game released inearly 1995 1996 had such good camera work, or that said camera work didn't go on to define the genre and spawn numerous copycats! Having a traditional FPS-style camera view that then flips downwards to aim at the ground whenever you double or triple jump is absolute genius; it allows for fair precision platforming elements in an early 3D game, and is also a really smooth way of giving the player their bearings in a large 3D space.
I guess what works againstJumping Flash! Jumping Flash 2 is that it feels very much like a proof-of-concept rather than a fully fleshed out game. The camerawork is brilliant, but the poor draw distance and less-than-helpful radar system turn the collectathon levels into a bit of a chore. Very often I would find myself wandering aimlessly around looking for the final jetpack muu to progress to the exit; and while it would eventually reveal itself on my minimap once the timer got too low, the time spent in the interim didn't feel that interesting thanks to the level design.
I feel likeJumping Flash!'s Jumping Flash 2's levels suffer, on a very micro scale, from what people complain about in open-world games nowadays. As sprawling and open-ended as they are, they would obviously lack the kind of carefully-curated thrills that a more linear experience would bring, but there's not enough going on in them to make up for it. In other words, the stages feel large but otherwise empty; not helped by a majority of enemies that simply frolic around and fart in your general direction.
Mind you, I find it impossible to dislikeJumping Flash Jumping Flash 2 - it's a cute, pleasant, comfortable experience with a game engine that perhaps would be better suited to a game with more high-voltage pacing. If anyone knows of other games with a similar engine to this, let me know! But its lack of many new things to say (the final boss is pretty much a reskin of the previous game's final boss!) and the fact that it doubles down on the same weaknesses present in the first game means that it wastes most of its sizable potential.
I don't know what to be more surprised by: that a 3D game released in
I guess what works against
I feel like
Mind you, I find it impossible to dislike
1994
Missed playing this when I was growing up by virtue of being a Genesis kid, and it's pretty hard to believe that this is the first platformer starring Donkey Kong; Rare got a lot right straight out of the gate!
If I had to describe Donkey Kong Country in 3 words it would be "Rayman done right". Even though the games aren't related, this has a lot in common with Rayman: the well-done graphics and animation, the quasi-overworld screen that allows you to return to previously-cleared levels and search for secrets you missed, the hard levels combined with easy bosses, and the iterative level design that introduces harder and harder variants of simple gimmicks that are clever at best and trial-and-error at their worst.
DKC is a much smoother experience, though, because the difficulty level is nowhere near as obnoxious; with Rayman I literally had to remap the save/load state keys because I was using them nearly as much as the 'jump' button, but I managed to finish DKC on original hardware. It has its moments of bullshit, but it comes across more like good-natured trolling (like the physical comedy Donkey and Diddy Kong inflict on each other at the credits screen) than pure sadism. It helps that the cleverly-hidden secrets are entirely optional, adding some incentive to replay and explore the game more thoroughly but without gating the ending behind some arbitrary completion percentage.
If you're looking for a nice classic platformer and haven't given this a try, I'd say why not? It doesn't do anything exceptional with its level design or mechanics, but it's a joy-filled romp through and through, with the excellent animation and soundtrack the icing on the cake.
If I had to describe Donkey Kong Country in 3 words it would be "Rayman done right". Even though the games aren't related, this has a lot in common with Rayman: the well-done graphics and animation, the quasi-overworld screen that allows you to return to previously-cleared levels and search for secrets you missed, the hard levels combined with easy bosses, and the iterative level design that introduces harder and harder variants of simple gimmicks that are clever at best and trial-and-error at their worst.
DKC is a much smoother experience, though, because the difficulty level is nowhere near as obnoxious; with Rayman I literally had to remap the save/load state keys because I was using them nearly as much as the 'jump' button, but I managed to finish DKC on original hardware. It has its moments of bullshit, but it comes across more like good-natured trolling (like the physical comedy Donkey and Diddy Kong inflict on each other at the credits screen) than pure sadism. It helps that the cleverly-hidden secrets are entirely optional, adding some incentive to replay and explore the game more thoroughly but without gating the ending behind some arbitrary completion percentage.
If you're looking for a nice classic platformer and haven't given this a try, I'd say why not? It doesn't do anything exceptional with its level design or mechanics, but it's a joy-filled romp through and through, with the excellent animation and soundtrack the icing on the cake.
1996
A very disappointing follow-up to the clunky but excellently-directed Clock Tower on the Super Famicom. I'm not referring to the wooden voice acting or the blocky graphics, which are par for the course for an early PSX game - there are other more fundamental issues where this drops the ball.
The original Clock Tower took place entirely in one location, allowing the spooky vibes and storytelling-through-contextual-clues to shine. This sequel takes place over several days with multiple scenarios and multiple locations - it tries adding more of a plot to string the setpieces together, but this just shines an unwanted spotlight on how threadbare the plot is and how weak the writing is. After scissorman appears and terrorizes Jennifer, butchering several security guards in the process, why does a single guard outside her home keep her safe? How does one of the characters go from hearing a passing mention of a castle that used to belong to the same family as the mansion in the first game to "let's round up 10 people, including two traumatized minors, to go on a field trip to this scary castle in another country"?
To me, the different playable characters and 'levels' feel like a band-aid over the fact that this game seems to have a lot less content than its predecessor. The levels are a lot smaller and generally less interesting than the mansion in the first game, which felt like a character in itself. And it misses the opportunity to at least provide some nice worldbuilding through flavortext, with the player character rewarding exploration of the environment with insightful gems such as "this is a couch."
I think I'd be much easier on this if I played it when I was younger - the tension of being a slow-moving defenseless waif who needs to evade a relentless pursuer is worth a few good scares - but without nostalgia goggles this comes across as a far weaker game than both its iconic predecessor as well as its survival-horror contemporaries.
The original Clock Tower took place entirely in one location, allowing the spooky vibes and storytelling-through-contextual-clues to shine. This sequel takes place over several days with multiple scenarios and multiple locations - it tries adding more of a plot to string the setpieces together, but this just shines an unwanted spotlight on how threadbare the plot is and how weak the writing is. After scissorman appears and terrorizes Jennifer, butchering several security guards in the process, why does a single guard outside her home keep her safe? How does one of the characters go from hearing a passing mention of a castle that used to belong to the same family as the mansion in the first game to "let's round up 10 people, including two traumatized minors, to go on a field trip to this scary castle in another country"?
To me, the different playable characters and 'levels' feel like a band-aid over the fact that this game seems to have a lot less content than its predecessor. The levels are a lot smaller and generally less interesting than the mansion in the first game, which felt like a character in itself. And it misses the opportunity to at least provide some nice worldbuilding through flavortext, with the player character rewarding exploration of the environment with insightful gems such as "this is a couch."
I think I'd be much easier on this if I played it when I was younger - the tension of being a slow-moving defenseless waif who needs to evade a relentless pursuer is worth a few good scares - but without nostalgia goggles this comes across as a far weaker game than both its iconic predecessor as well as its survival-horror contemporaries.
1996
Gonna save time and go straight out of the gate by saying that this is probably the worst-feeling FPS I've ever played. Not all of it is the game's fault given that it's a pre-dualshock console FPS, but a lot of it comes across as sloppy and amateurish even by the standards of the era.
No feedback/recoil on fall damage (you walk off the side of a ledge, teleport onto the floor and suddenly you're down x health), non-hitscan bullets that travel at about the speed of a brisk jog, diabolical aiming (your bullets travel over the heads of facehuggers and one second later they keel over dead. wat), no enemy infighting despite the fact that there is no reason for the aliens to not go after the Weyland goons, enemies getting mercy invincibility which negates the strength of your rapid-fire weapons... every single element just coalesces perfectly into some of the worst game-feel I've experienced in recent memory.
I fumbled around through twelve levels of flaccid gunplay and dimly-lit joylessly-designed maps, and finally came up against the alien queen! And I very quickly realized that thanks to being a large target with a rather slow 'getting hit' animation, I was able to stunlock her in that animation and won the fight without taking any damage. What an anticlimactic final bo... wait, there's more levels? I pulled up a guide, found out I was only a third of the way through, and closed the game.
I'm somewhat OCD about trying to experience as much of a game as possible (even if I'm not vibing with it) in order to give it a fair shot, but I think I can safely wave the white flag here and be reasonably sure I'm not missing out on much.
No feedback/recoil on fall damage (you walk off the side of a ledge, teleport onto the floor and suddenly you're down x health), non-hitscan bullets that travel at about the speed of a brisk jog, diabolical aiming (your bullets travel over the heads of facehuggers and one second later they keel over dead. wat), no enemy infighting despite the fact that there is no reason for the aliens to not go after the Weyland goons, enemies getting mercy invincibility which negates the strength of your rapid-fire weapons... every single element just coalesces perfectly into some of the worst game-feel I've experienced in recent memory.
I fumbled around through twelve levels of flaccid gunplay and dimly-lit joylessly-designed maps, and finally came up against the alien queen! And I very quickly realized that thanks to being a large target with a rather slow 'getting hit' animation, I was able to stunlock her in that animation and won the fight without taking any damage. What an anticlimactic final bo... wait, there's more levels? I pulled up a guide, found out I was only a third of the way through, and closed the game.
I'm somewhat OCD about trying to experience as much of a game as possible (even if I'm not vibing with it) in order to give it a fair shot, but I think I can safely wave the white flag here and be reasonably sure I'm not missing out on much.
2017
"Because it's there." - British climber George Mallory, when asked why he wanted to climb Everest (also me, when my wife asks me why I want to finish the burger and all the fries when I'm no longer hungry)
It's no Everest, but the world of Hallownest is huge, intimidating, and wondrous; in a game where the 'plot breadcrumbs' style of storytelling means a general lack of narrative thrust, the mere existence of Hallownest is reason enough to want to explore it. Hollow Knight is sensationally good at worldbuilding through level design, and even through the so-called "slow start" I found myself wanting to get down and dirty exploring every nook of the game world; it helps that a huge portion of the world is almost immediately accessible without extra movement abilities, meaning that my journey of discovering Hallownest for the first time felt unique by virtue of how Hollow Knight seems more open-ended than other Metroidvanias.
Better writers than me have discussed the mechanics in much depth, but I do have to mention them anyway. Combat and movement is tight, consistent, and refined - this is evident in the sheer depth that your relatively small moveset brings to the boss fights, but also in how each new movement option adds more fluency and expressivity in how you traverse each area, bringing a joy to exploration that even the game's slight over-reliance on 'gotcha' hits cannot extinguish.
The 3.5 score at the top of this entry is probably a spoiler that there is a pretty big caveat to my praise above, and that comes in the form of something seemingly inconsequential to anyone who hasn't played the game: the benches (reload points) are on many occasions placed so far from bosses that it feels borderline spiteful. My issue here isn't that the game is hard; I think the difficulty level of the bosses is perfect and it really makes you earn your victories! But punishing failure with 5 minutes of backtracking so you can try again, only to get your ass kicked in 30 seconds, only to repeat the process ad nauseam, is a really frustrating way to git gud. It doesn't help that a fair few of the pre-boss 'gauntlets' are rather unengaging (the tunnel mazes before facing Nosk, or waiting for the series of elevators leading up to the Soul Warrior + Follies).
And much like the affliction that has spread to even the furthest reaches of Hallownest, this 'little' issue of bench placement has infected many other aspects of the game. The bosses are one of the big highlights of Hollow Knight but the bench placement makes the process of learning how to beat them more frustrating than it needs to be. And even the exploration is not spared - backtracking from bench to boss reduces the wonder of charting a living breathing world to a perfunctory and linear commute through a series of rooms I've seen dozens of times before, its effect on my play experience not unlike a long unskippable cutscene in the way it kills my momentum.
It would be easy for me to sum up my experience as thus: Hollow Knight is an otherwise-nearly-perfect game which was tarnished by one small flaw. And yet it's not that simple either! After completing the game and watching the end credits, I found myself experiencing not relief (as I usually do on finishing long games I'm ambivalent on) but profound melancholy. I watched excerpts of speedruns. I watched some videos on the the lore. I reloaded my save and tried some of the challenges that I previously decided were not worth my time cough White Palace cough. Tried and failed, but still. It's hard for me to leave it behind and move onto the next game - there's something alluring about the ruined world of Hallownest and I feel it will occupy my mind for some time.
Because it's there.
(101% completion, standard ending)
It's no Everest, but the world of Hallownest is huge, intimidating, and wondrous; in a game where the 'plot breadcrumbs' style of storytelling means a general lack of narrative thrust, the mere existence of Hallownest is reason enough to want to explore it. Hollow Knight is sensationally good at worldbuilding through level design, and even through the so-called "slow start" I found myself wanting to get down and dirty exploring every nook of the game world; it helps that a huge portion of the world is almost immediately accessible without extra movement abilities, meaning that my journey of discovering Hallownest for the first time felt unique by virtue of how Hollow Knight seems more open-ended than other Metroidvanias.
Better writers than me have discussed the mechanics in much depth, but I do have to mention them anyway. Combat and movement is tight, consistent, and refined - this is evident in the sheer depth that your relatively small moveset brings to the boss fights, but also in how each new movement option adds more fluency and expressivity in how you traverse each area, bringing a joy to exploration that even the game's slight over-reliance on 'gotcha' hits cannot extinguish.
The 3.5 score at the top of this entry is probably a spoiler that there is a pretty big caveat to my praise above, and that comes in the form of something seemingly inconsequential to anyone who hasn't played the game: the benches (reload points) are on many occasions placed so far from bosses that it feels borderline spiteful. My issue here isn't that the game is hard; I think the difficulty level of the bosses is perfect and it really makes you earn your victories! But punishing failure with 5 minutes of backtracking so you can try again, only to get your ass kicked in 30 seconds, only to repeat the process ad nauseam, is a really frustrating way to git gud. It doesn't help that a fair few of the pre-boss 'gauntlets' are rather unengaging (the tunnel mazes before facing Nosk, or waiting for the series of elevators leading up to the Soul Warrior + Follies).
And much like the affliction that has spread to even the furthest reaches of Hallownest, this 'little' issue of bench placement has infected many other aspects of the game. The bosses are one of the big highlights of Hollow Knight but the bench placement makes the process of learning how to beat them more frustrating than it needs to be. And even the exploration is not spared - backtracking from bench to boss reduces the wonder of charting a living breathing world to a perfunctory and linear commute through a series of rooms I've seen dozens of times before, its effect on my play experience not unlike a long unskippable cutscene in the way it kills my momentum.
It would be easy for me to sum up my experience as thus: Hollow Knight is an otherwise-nearly-perfect game which was tarnished by one small flaw. And yet it's not that simple either! After completing the game and watching the end credits, I found myself experiencing not relief (as I usually do on finishing long games I'm ambivalent on) but profound melancholy. I watched excerpts of speedruns. I watched some videos on the the lore. I reloaded my save and tried some of the challenges that I previously decided were not worth my time cough White Palace cough. Tried and failed, but still. It's hard for me to leave it behind and move onto the next game - there's something alluring about the ruined world of Hallownest and I feel it will occupy my mind for some time.
Because it's there.
(101% completion, standard ending)
2019
This game is a clear case of 'exactly what the title says'. The word "Dungeon" refers to the one single cave you venture into dozens of times in the course of a playthrough; its mysterious and ever-changing interior laying the narrative foundation for 28 floors of procgen-roguelite goodness. The word "Dreams" refers to the town-building side of the game; whether drawn by adventure, money, or plain excitement, individuals have congregated around the mysterious dungeon and the aggregation of their dreams has formed the town of Ecallia - a community which you eventually become an inextricable part of.
And the fact that the first letter of both words stands out by being bright yellow shows that this is a harem game where nearly every character... has Double Ds. (groan!)
Me trying to be funny aside, I think that's a pretty accurate way of summing up the premise of Dungeon Dreams. This roguelite-townbuilding-dating sim is clearly inspired by Azure Dreams but is a lot more complex: four-member parties, ATB combat, job systems and skill trees, cooking/crafting, and a metric ton of optional sidequests mean a good amount of content! It also means that - since this whole thing is largely the work of one guy spending thousands of hours on RPGMaker - the whole game's back groans and creaks under the weight of its buxom ambition. Not every facet of the game works well with the others, and nearly every one of them can be summed up as "nice, but..."
Take Exhibit A: the town-building and romance sections. I feel this is the stronger half of the game: having the entire story take place in one town means that there is ample time to get to know Ecallia's residents on a deeper level than your average NPCs. As you - an outsider at the start - immerse yourself in the community and start forging friendships and gaining respect, you learn that everyone has a story and hidden depths... yes, even the pompous womanizing bully the game seems to be going out of its way to make you hate! The game introduces new friends to you at a steady clip, which in turn unlocks new areas of the town, new quests, and new services (like an alchemist who synthesizes monster drops into more useful items), so you always feel like you have something new to discover when you walk around the town. Romance is not bad as well; while the dating conversation topics are not varied enough and tend to repeat, I like that it's not a 'harem' game in the literal sense of the word. Girls will get pissed off at you if you start dating someone else and you can't end up together with everyone like in Azure Dreams, so there is a more meaningful choice here in who you choose to end up dating (and possibly marrying).
All of the above, however, comes with the pretty big caveat that the writing is kinda clumsy. English might not be the developer's first language - and if so then he did an admirable job anyway! - but some of the dialogue does come across as cringe, and some of the puzzle solutions feel unintuitive thanks to the language barrier. The main plot and backstory - which consists of threads from different subquests and needs to be pieced together by the player - is needlessly muddled thanks to the writing.
I've avoided talking about it for long enough, because the bread-and-butter of the game (the procgen dungeon) is actually the weaker half! The combat is more than passable and the job/skill system is nice, but the actual dungeon crawling itself suffers from a structural flaw. One thing I see in the best roguelikes/roguelites is a sense of randomness that transcends whatever meta-progression you're making - some runs you might find a really overpowered piece of loot that carries you until you get complacent and lose, other runs your equipment and feats don't synergize in any way and you just keep treading water hoping that the next room yields a tool that brings it all together, and other runs you get a perfect storm of all the right tools that helps you go much further than you have any right to at your level.
Dungeon Dreams' flaw is that the balance is skewed too far in favor of meta-progression that it no longer feels like a roguelite. When you exit the dungeon, you keep all your skills, all your job points, and all your levels, and if you use a wind crystal (which is so plentiful that I ended the game with 60 of them in my inventory) you get to keep all your loot too! This means that there is very little variance between runs, treasures are greeted not with a "yes!!" but with a "ah, I already have twenty of this sword", and the gameplay loop is less "roguelite" and more "long tedious grindy JRPG with one long-ass dungeon". There's generally enough new content spread across the dungeon and the town that the game is still fun to play - but in the lategame the sidequests slow to a trickle and you really start to feel it become a chore. In my case, roughly a third of my total playtime was spent trying to romance and marry Fiona to unlock a unique DPS-heavy class - the trigger to get her father's blessing was entirely random, and by that point of the game there were very few new quests and I spent the longest 20 hours of my life doing largely uneventful runs into the dungeon waiting for the random event to trigger.
My thoughts on this game definitely seem to skew slightly negative, but this is obviously a passion project that I can't bring myself to be too hard on. There's a sequel in early access, and I'll be watching it eagerly - a more focused vision (and perhaps outsourcing some of the writing) would be very much welcome!
And the fact that the first letter of both words stands out by being bright yellow shows that this is a harem game where nearly every character... has Double Ds. (groan!)
Me trying to be funny aside, I think that's a pretty accurate way of summing up the premise of Dungeon Dreams. This roguelite-townbuilding-dating sim is clearly inspired by Azure Dreams but is a lot more complex: four-member parties, ATB combat, job systems and skill trees, cooking/crafting, and a metric ton of optional sidequests mean a good amount of content! It also means that - since this whole thing is largely the work of one guy spending thousands of hours on RPGMaker - the whole game's back groans and creaks under the weight of its buxom ambition. Not every facet of the game works well with the others, and nearly every one of them can be summed up as "nice, but..."
Take Exhibit A: the town-building and romance sections. I feel this is the stronger half of the game: having the entire story take place in one town means that there is ample time to get to know Ecallia's residents on a deeper level than your average NPCs. As you - an outsider at the start - immerse yourself in the community and start forging friendships and gaining respect, you learn that everyone has a story and hidden depths... yes, even the pompous womanizing bully the game seems to be going out of its way to make you hate! The game introduces new friends to you at a steady clip, which in turn unlocks new areas of the town, new quests, and new services (like an alchemist who synthesizes monster drops into more useful items), so you always feel like you have something new to discover when you walk around the town. Romance is not bad as well; while the dating conversation topics are not varied enough and tend to repeat, I like that it's not a 'harem' game in the literal sense of the word. Girls will get pissed off at you if you start dating someone else and you can't end up together with everyone like in Azure Dreams, so there is a more meaningful choice here in who you choose to end up dating (and possibly marrying).
All of the above, however, comes with the pretty big caveat that the writing is kinda clumsy. English might not be the developer's first language - and if so then he did an admirable job anyway! - but some of the dialogue does come across as cringe, and some of the puzzle solutions feel unintuitive thanks to the language barrier. The main plot and backstory - which consists of threads from different subquests and needs to be pieced together by the player - is needlessly muddled thanks to the writing.
I've avoided talking about it for long enough, because the bread-and-butter of the game (the procgen dungeon) is actually the weaker half! The combat is more than passable and the job/skill system is nice, but the actual dungeon crawling itself suffers from a structural flaw. One thing I see in the best roguelikes/roguelites is a sense of randomness that transcends whatever meta-progression you're making - some runs you might find a really overpowered piece of loot that carries you until you get complacent and lose, other runs your equipment and feats don't synergize in any way and you just keep treading water hoping that the next room yields a tool that brings it all together, and other runs you get a perfect storm of all the right tools that helps you go much further than you have any right to at your level.
Dungeon Dreams' flaw is that the balance is skewed too far in favor of meta-progression that it no longer feels like a roguelite. When you exit the dungeon, you keep all your skills, all your job points, and all your levels, and if you use a wind crystal (which is so plentiful that I ended the game with 60 of them in my inventory) you get to keep all your loot too! This means that there is very little variance between runs, treasures are greeted not with a "yes!!" but with a "ah, I already have twenty of this sword", and the gameplay loop is less "roguelite" and more "long tedious grindy JRPG with one long-ass dungeon". There's generally enough new content spread across the dungeon and the town that the game is still fun to play - but in the lategame the sidequests slow to a trickle and you really start to feel it become a chore. In my case, roughly a third of my total playtime was spent trying to romance and marry Fiona to unlock a unique DPS-heavy class - the trigger to get her father's blessing was entirely random, and by that point of the game there were very few new quests and I spent the longest 20 hours of my life doing largely uneventful runs into the dungeon waiting for the random event to trigger.
My thoughts on this game definitely seem to skew slightly negative, but this is obviously a passion project that I can't bring myself to be too hard on. There's a sequel in early access, and I'll be watching it eagerly - a more focused vision (and perhaps outsourcing some of the writing) would be very much welcome!