mustangaf
24 reviews liked by mustangaf
Stacklands
2022
Too many legibility issues, too much make work, and too much randomness to make the core game loop - which is neat! - stick. It’s fun to build little engines, unlock new card recipes, and gradually expand your understanding of the world, but when you find yourself just micromanaging berries and apples for an entire play session, it’s time to call it quits
Koji Igarashi returns to deliver a spiritual successor to the Castlevania series, but the end result is a re-tread of overly familiar territory that doesn't add anything new to the genre he helped create.
Bloodstained feels like a combination of Castlevania and Bayonetta, but plays closer to something like Valkyrie Chronicles or Shantae. The game does some work to set itself apart as a legally distinct IP for the advertising, but spends far more effort on homage and pastiche to make sure you know it's related the moment you start playing. You aren't a vampire, you aren't a dude, and you aren't fighting Dracula, but it is very much a game about gothic era heroes fighting demons using swords and sorcery in a gothic castle. All of the most fundamental aspects of the game are borrowed and recycled in a 'copy my homework' kind of way while failing to deliver anything meaningfully original.
Gameplay is clearly trying to evoke memories of Symphony of the Night but ends up feeling far too clunky and slow by comparison. Symphony was defined by it's flowing movement, attacks without interruption, a variety of interesting mobility options, and a subtle nuance to its simple combat design. Bloodstained meanwhile has attacks that interrupt movement, basic speed improvements locked behind late game equipment, mobility options that are highly circumstantial and inconvenient to use, and a slew of 1 dimensional enemies (some of which feel oddly sci-fi or just don't mesh with the setting at all). As beautiful as the levels are no thought has really gone into how you move through them and enemies are positioned just as arbitrarily, requiring the same attack / dodge / attack pattern until you can just tank and mash.
There's a very shallow streak that runs through bloodstained that leaves every sub-system feeling underdeveloped. Much of the game's design revolves around % drop shards and materials. The shards are unique to each monster and grant a different game mechanic while materials fuel the incredibly tedious crafting system. Both of these are designed with quantity over quality in mind featuring close to 120 shards (about 5 are required to beat the game) and over 120 materials used to craft a staggering number of weapons, items, equipment, and food, but the majority are redundant. In both cases you'll be fine to pick one damaging shard and one type of weapon to serve you, just swapping out to whatever does the most damage at the time. None of the enemies or levels require you to switch tactics or make any meaningful choices leaving all of these 'options' inconsequential.
Much of the game's design, then, feels vestigial. Only the strongest attack really matters, you have 10 types of weapon each with different special attacks to unlock but never a reason to use any of them. You can use magic or melee but neither meaningfully affect gameplay or challenge. Even the feature that makes managing your equipment easier is itself tedious to constantly update as you unlock and change equipment during a playthrough. All of the most practical ability and gear unlocks are saved for the very end of the game when there's barely any game left to use them on, and of course all the late game achievements involve unlocking every weapon, armour, item, and shard which would be fine if looking up items, monsters that drop them, and where they are wasn't also somehow designed to be a slow annoying process of going through 3 different menus each time you want to look something up.
It's stunning to me how the person who created a game as genre defining as Symphony could end up making a game that misses the mark on every aspect that made the original so fun. Bloodstained emulates the visuals, music, and character, level, and combat design of better entries that came before it. It is a game in structure alone and fails to ever really capture a sense of 'fun'. Its features are shallow and there is no interaction between magic, melee, and movement options, nor any enemies that might inspire you to experiment with them. The variety that exists is superficial padding to a bare bones platformer that adds nothing to the genre and does nothing that hasn't been done before. You'd be better off just playing the classics than playing a game that wishes it was them.
Bloodstained feels like a combination of Castlevania and Bayonetta, but plays closer to something like Valkyrie Chronicles or Shantae. The game does some work to set itself apart as a legally distinct IP for the advertising, but spends far more effort on homage and pastiche to make sure you know it's related the moment you start playing. You aren't a vampire, you aren't a dude, and you aren't fighting Dracula, but it is very much a game about gothic era heroes fighting demons using swords and sorcery in a gothic castle. All of the most fundamental aspects of the game are borrowed and recycled in a 'copy my homework' kind of way while failing to deliver anything meaningfully original.
Gameplay is clearly trying to evoke memories of Symphony of the Night but ends up feeling far too clunky and slow by comparison. Symphony was defined by it's flowing movement, attacks without interruption, a variety of interesting mobility options, and a subtle nuance to its simple combat design. Bloodstained meanwhile has attacks that interrupt movement, basic speed improvements locked behind late game equipment, mobility options that are highly circumstantial and inconvenient to use, and a slew of 1 dimensional enemies (some of which feel oddly sci-fi or just don't mesh with the setting at all). As beautiful as the levels are no thought has really gone into how you move through them and enemies are positioned just as arbitrarily, requiring the same attack / dodge / attack pattern until you can just tank and mash.
There's a very shallow streak that runs through bloodstained that leaves every sub-system feeling underdeveloped. Much of the game's design revolves around % drop shards and materials. The shards are unique to each monster and grant a different game mechanic while materials fuel the incredibly tedious crafting system. Both of these are designed with quantity over quality in mind featuring close to 120 shards (about 5 are required to beat the game) and over 120 materials used to craft a staggering number of weapons, items, equipment, and food, but the majority are redundant. In both cases you'll be fine to pick one damaging shard and one type of weapon to serve you, just swapping out to whatever does the most damage at the time. None of the enemies or levels require you to switch tactics or make any meaningful choices leaving all of these 'options' inconsequential.
Much of the game's design, then, feels vestigial. Only the strongest attack really matters, you have 10 types of weapon each with different special attacks to unlock but never a reason to use any of them. You can use magic or melee but neither meaningfully affect gameplay or challenge. Even the feature that makes managing your equipment easier is itself tedious to constantly update as you unlock and change equipment during a playthrough. All of the most practical ability and gear unlocks are saved for the very end of the game when there's barely any game left to use them on, and of course all the late game achievements involve unlocking every weapon, armour, item, and shard which would be fine if looking up items, monsters that drop them, and where they are wasn't also somehow designed to be a slow annoying process of going through 3 different menus each time you want to look something up.
It's stunning to me how the person who created a game as genre defining as Symphony could end up making a game that misses the mark on every aspect that made the original so fun. Bloodstained emulates the visuals, music, and character, level, and combat design of better entries that came before it. It is a game in structure alone and fails to ever really capture a sense of 'fun'. Its features are shallow and there is no interaction between magic, melee, and movement options, nor any enemies that might inspire you to experiment with them. The variety that exists is superficial padding to a bare bones platformer that adds nothing to the genre and does nothing that hasn't been done before. You'd be better off just playing the classics than playing a game that wishes it was them.
Jeanne d'Arc
2006
This review contains spoilers
Jeanne D'arc is a game that's been bouncing around in my mind for over a decade now. I played it at a friend's place on his PSP when I was little, but never got back to it until this April. I always thought that the game had neat systems from what I remembered, and Fire Emblem Engage's release brought it back into the spotlight for me due to similar mechanics in some ways, so I thought hey, what the hell, time to give it a shot after all this time.
Starting with the positive, from the perspective of a Fire Emblem player mostly when it comes to SRPGs, this game has a few very interesting mechanics. The bracelet transformations are similar to the engage mechanic, but more and less limited at the same time. They last less turns and cannot be used on turn 1, which is weaker, but they also give Godspeed (take another turn every time you land a killing blow) for those turns, which is about as strong as it gets. They also give huge stat bonuses and access to unique skills to boost your damage output. The final difference is that it can only be used once per map, per gem that your bracelet has, which is locked behind story and free quest progress. It's a pretty neat system, and I really like how strong it is since it ties into the gameplay pretty well. Bracelet holders are meant to be insanely strong, and not only is the act of transforming powerful, it also gives you an incentive to get a bunch of finishing blows with those units, giving them a level lead which further feeds into the whole "they are your strongest units" thing.
The mana system is IMO better than anything Fire Emblem has ever come up with for combat arts. While in those games you are either trading HP (easily recovered with a heal from a different unit) or weapon durability (literally just money, who cares) for a boost in power during battle, in this game you are trading the finite resource that is your mana. While in theory you could wait an extra turn to gain more mana back, because every map has a turn limit, you really do not want to do that if you can help it. There are items that let you gain MP back, but you'd waste one of the unit's turn to get it back, since there is no dedicated mana transfer type character. At best, you'd waste someone else's turn to use one such item, but then again, these items are limited so you don't want to use them if you can help it.
A lot of the maps in this game are pretty good. Making you walk up a fortress while being pelted from archers from the top, chasing down a boss who spawns enemies until you kill his first phase, escaping past enemies on a desert plain, and so on. But despite this, if I had to give it a ratio, I'd say it's around half of the maps being pretty good, and then the other half are unremarkable at best. I've never really had a map that made me go "Aw man, this map stinks, I hate this, I never want to play this game again because I'd have to play this map again", but just... Nothing maps. Where you go through the motions, clear enemies out, and finish the map without really thinking too hard about it.
Lastly, moving on to the story, I actually quite like it. Jeanne's characterization is really the highlight here, and this is where spoilers start. She's a commoner. She knows very little of the war. She knows that the English are bad, that they kill her countrymen, massacre her village, and have been invading France since before she was even born. Of course they're the enemy, of course she wants them dead, and of course she is more than eager to put herself in harm's way to fight them off. Anything else would be improper. And for a while, this works out pretty well for her. Until she learns the truth behind the war. The English nobility is nothing but an offshoot from French nobility, which makes this a petty family feud for control of France. It is nothing but a conflict between rich men vying for control of the country, making the common folk suffer for their own benefit. She supported the dauphin, yes, but this war isn't nearly as righteous as Jeanne believed - it is nothing more than a territory dispute, and killing her fellow man over it is a tragedy, one that she has been outright eager about for a while now. Her worldview is shattered, and it's just a pretty great character arc.
Likewise, I like where they went with Liane, her friend. At some point, Jeanne took a dive off a cliff and Liane ends up replacing her as Jeanne, pretending to be her to be held up as a figurehead to continue rallying the French behind. However, Liane is not Jeanne, and in trying to be her she ends up being ruthless, aggressive, vengeful, amplifying all of Jeanne's bad traits as she tries to be her. She is credited with the failed attack on Paris, and is the one who is captured in Jeanne's stead and burned at the stake. Seeing her go from meek village girl to this was likewise a fun arc.
These two just carry the story for more or less the entire game. I don't necessarily care about the plot all that much in itself, "Hundred years war but with demons/fantasy elements" and slight changes don't appeal to me that much in reality, and those fantasy elements feel undercooked, but I don't care all that much about that when Jeanne herself is there to carry everything. She works really well as a protagonist.
Moving on to the bad, then, and to why this game is "shelved" rather than "Completed". I decided to take a break from this game around chapter 27, but these issues started to show up a little earlier than this. While this game can be beaten with no grinding, and having peeked ahead at the endgame, my units are nearly leveled up enough for it just off of natural exp thanks to the generous amount of rubberbanding the exp curve affords you, it's also starting to feel like a slog. Enemy HP values have skyrocketed, and some of their defense stats have as well. The deployment limit is inconsistent, and this means that you'll often end up deploying underleveled units due to them having been benched for a few maps. If you don't grind free quests, or at least do a couple, you'll end up having a 6th or 7th unit that's just woefully underwhelming as a result. If you're the kind to do grinding maps, then this is probably fine, but for me it kinda took the wind out of my sales because I treated them similarly to how I would treat skirmishes in Fire Emblem - entirely optional, only if you want to grind. On a future run, I'd definitely do at least every grinding map once just to get the bonus reward once and keep up in levels on more units that way.
Next up, the game is frustratingly unreliable at times. By this I mean the reliability of your strategizing can be thrown into chaos due to random chance. I'm not saying the RNG is bugged, but rather that there is too much variance. While I haven't looked behind the curtain to see what kind of RNG the game uses, it feels like it uses the actual displayed chance (as opposed to lying to you like Fire Emblem), but those chances in themselves are not as high as I'd like them to be, particularly when fighting bosses. Bosses are already HP sponges as it is, so having to choose between hitting them with a normal attack for 150 damage, or having a 50/50 of missing the big special skill from Jeanne's bracelet that does 400 damage, it's just frustrating to have such low reliability where you're either guaranteed to do meh damage or likely to miss . While there are abilities with guaranteed hit - spells - they also don't hurt nearly as much, and are limited by mana, not to mention some units just not making very good mages. On top of that, the game has inherent damage variance, so if you read for instance 50 damage on attack 1 and 50 damage on attack 2, for a total of 100 damage for an exact kill, if one or both roll under the 50 damage listed, you'll miss your kill. If this messes with godspeed, it can be incredibly frustrating. Bare minimum, it'd be nice to be able to see the entire range. Instead of showing 50, she me 45-55, or whatever the variance actually is.
Actually, just in general, this game lacks a way to preview enemy damage. While you can verify their standard attack damage by attacking them and seeing how much damage they do on the counter, there's no real way to verify the damage they'll do to you if you can't reach them to preview the forecast, and even less so if they have a skill they're using on you like helmsplitter. How much damage does helpsplitter add? Who knows!
Next up is the skill system. I don't really care for it. I think it's nice that you get more slots over time, and having to choose from the high amount of skills with the small amounts of slots you have can be nice, but the actual way that you obtain skills is a little annoying to me. Most skills are earned through killing enemies, and then you can get ahead of the curve by fusing them, but you can't know what it'll give you utnil you make a fusion, and the actual way to fuse them UI wise is bad. You need to select one skill, then scroll through the entire menu, all 4 menus in fact, to see if it has a combination with something else. Then, when you cancel the fusion to pick the next skill, it'll keep your cursor where you ended rather than go back to the start, so you need to go back to where you were, select the next, then keep going. It's just a little too tedious to check everything, and the only thing saving this system is the existence of a guide that lists the fusions. It's still a flaw within the game itself, though. A potential solution would be to only show possible fusions rather than your entire skill list once you select one of your stones.
My last major complaint is with the game's run speed. It feels incredibly sluggish at times. Not only does the game encourage ball of death strategies through enemies that are so strong that you need to gang up with nearly your entire party, but the actual act of moving your units is just sort of slow. Rather than have animations in their own screen for full fancy animations, and then fast on-map animations if you turn off the fancy ones, this game only has on-map animations that are not particularly fast. Coupled with death animations, loot dropping animations, enemy fading away animation, the actual slow movement over the map, and it can just feel somewhat tedious to move your units to where you want them to be, especially if you have to move through a stretch of empty map which has happened to me a few times.
All in all, this is a very interesting game. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. It had a lot of moments that I really loved, but that was balanced out by tedium in the late game and in some of the systems. The skill system particularly feels worse as the game goes on, as you get more and more options for fusion which makes the flaws appear more obvious. If nothing else, it was a memorable game to revisit, and I really enjoyed the story, so I'm still shelving this game with a positive mindset. Will I continue from this save? Will I play it from the start and just do free quests a few times to smooth out level curve a bit? I'm not sure, time only will tell, and hopefully I have a better time on the replay now that I'm more familiar with the systems and quirks of this game. I'd definitely recommend at the very least giving it a try, especially if you like me are willing to drop a game once it outstays its welcome.
Starting with the positive, from the perspective of a Fire Emblem player mostly when it comes to SRPGs, this game has a few very interesting mechanics. The bracelet transformations are similar to the engage mechanic, but more and less limited at the same time. They last less turns and cannot be used on turn 1, which is weaker, but they also give Godspeed (take another turn every time you land a killing blow) for those turns, which is about as strong as it gets. They also give huge stat bonuses and access to unique skills to boost your damage output. The final difference is that it can only be used once per map, per gem that your bracelet has, which is locked behind story and free quest progress. It's a pretty neat system, and I really like how strong it is since it ties into the gameplay pretty well. Bracelet holders are meant to be insanely strong, and not only is the act of transforming powerful, it also gives you an incentive to get a bunch of finishing blows with those units, giving them a level lead which further feeds into the whole "they are your strongest units" thing.
The mana system is IMO better than anything Fire Emblem has ever come up with for combat arts. While in those games you are either trading HP (easily recovered with a heal from a different unit) or weapon durability (literally just money, who cares) for a boost in power during battle, in this game you are trading the finite resource that is your mana. While in theory you could wait an extra turn to gain more mana back, because every map has a turn limit, you really do not want to do that if you can help it. There are items that let you gain MP back, but you'd waste one of the unit's turn to get it back, since there is no dedicated mana transfer type character. At best, you'd waste someone else's turn to use one such item, but then again, these items are limited so you don't want to use them if you can help it.
A lot of the maps in this game are pretty good. Making you walk up a fortress while being pelted from archers from the top, chasing down a boss who spawns enemies until you kill his first phase, escaping past enemies on a desert plain, and so on. But despite this, if I had to give it a ratio, I'd say it's around half of the maps being pretty good, and then the other half are unremarkable at best. I've never really had a map that made me go "Aw man, this map stinks, I hate this, I never want to play this game again because I'd have to play this map again", but just... Nothing maps. Where you go through the motions, clear enemies out, and finish the map without really thinking too hard about it.
Lastly, moving on to the story, I actually quite like it. Jeanne's characterization is really the highlight here, and this is where spoilers start. She's a commoner. She knows very little of the war. She knows that the English are bad, that they kill her countrymen, massacre her village, and have been invading France since before she was even born. Of course they're the enemy, of course she wants them dead, and of course she is more than eager to put herself in harm's way to fight them off. Anything else would be improper. And for a while, this works out pretty well for her. Until she learns the truth behind the war. The English nobility is nothing but an offshoot from French nobility, which makes this a petty family feud for control of France. It is nothing but a conflict between rich men vying for control of the country, making the common folk suffer for their own benefit. She supported the dauphin, yes, but this war isn't nearly as righteous as Jeanne believed - it is nothing more than a territory dispute, and killing her fellow man over it is a tragedy, one that she has been outright eager about for a while now. Her worldview is shattered, and it's just a pretty great character arc.
Likewise, I like where they went with Liane, her friend. At some point, Jeanne took a dive off a cliff and Liane ends up replacing her as Jeanne, pretending to be her to be held up as a figurehead to continue rallying the French behind. However, Liane is not Jeanne, and in trying to be her she ends up being ruthless, aggressive, vengeful, amplifying all of Jeanne's bad traits as she tries to be her. She is credited with the failed attack on Paris, and is the one who is captured in Jeanne's stead and burned at the stake. Seeing her go from meek village girl to this was likewise a fun arc.
These two just carry the story for more or less the entire game. I don't necessarily care about the plot all that much in itself, "Hundred years war but with demons/fantasy elements" and slight changes don't appeal to me that much in reality, and those fantasy elements feel undercooked, but I don't care all that much about that when Jeanne herself is there to carry everything. She works really well as a protagonist.
Moving on to the bad, then, and to why this game is "shelved" rather than "Completed". I decided to take a break from this game around chapter 27, but these issues started to show up a little earlier than this. While this game can be beaten with no grinding, and having peeked ahead at the endgame, my units are nearly leveled up enough for it just off of natural exp thanks to the generous amount of rubberbanding the exp curve affords you, it's also starting to feel like a slog. Enemy HP values have skyrocketed, and some of their defense stats have as well. The deployment limit is inconsistent, and this means that you'll often end up deploying underleveled units due to them having been benched for a few maps. If you don't grind free quests, or at least do a couple, you'll end up having a 6th or 7th unit that's just woefully underwhelming as a result. If you're the kind to do grinding maps, then this is probably fine, but for me it kinda took the wind out of my sales because I treated them similarly to how I would treat skirmishes in Fire Emblem - entirely optional, only if you want to grind. On a future run, I'd definitely do at least every grinding map once just to get the bonus reward once and keep up in levels on more units that way.
Next up, the game is frustratingly unreliable at times. By this I mean the reliability of your strategizing can be thrown into chaos due to random chance. I'm not saying the RNG is bugged, but rather that there is too much variance. While I haven't looked behind the curtain to see what kind of RNG the game uses, it feels like it uses the actual displayed chance (as opposed to lying to you like Fire Emblem), but those chances in themselves are not as high as I'd like them to be, particularly when fighting bosses. Bosses are already HP sponges as it is, so having to choose between hitting them with a normal attack for 150 damage, or having a 50/50 of missing the big special skill from Jeanne's bracelet that does 400 damage, it's just frustrating to have such low reliability where you're either guaranteed to do meh damage or likely to miss . While there are abilities with guaranteed hit - spells - they also don't hurt nearly as much, and are limited by mana, not to mention some units just not making very good mages. On top of that, the game has inherent damage variance, so if you read for instance 50 damage on attack 1 and 50 damage on attack 2, for a total of 100 damage for an exact kill, if one or both roll under the 50 damage listed, you'll miss your kill. If this messes with godspeed, it can be incredibly frustrating. Bare minimum, it'd be nice to be able to see the entire range. Instead of showing 50, she me 45-55, or whatever the variance actually is.
Actually, just in general, this game lacks a way to preview enemy damage. While you can verify their standard attack damage by attacking them and seeing how much damage they do on the counter, there's no real way to verify the damage they'll do to you if you can't reach them to preview the forecast, and even less so if they have a skill they're using on you like helmsplitter. How much damage does helpsplitter add? Who knows!
Next up is the skill system. I don't really care for it. I think it's nice that you get more slots over time, and having to choose from the high amount of skills with the small amounts of slots you have can be nice, but the actual way that you obtain skills is a little annoying to me. Most skills are earned through killing enemies, and then you can get ahead of the curve by fusing them, but you can't know what it'll give you utnil you make a fusion, and the actual way to fuse them UI wise is bad. You need to select one skill, then scroll through the entire menu, all 4 menus in fact, to see if it has a combination with something else. Then, when you cancel the fusion to pick the next skill, it'll keep your cursor where you ended rather than go back to the start, so you need to go back to where you were, select the next, then keep going. It's just a little too tedious to check everything, and the only thing saving this system is the existence of a guide that lists the fusions. It's still a flaw within the game itself, though. A potential solution would be to only show possible fusions rather than your entire skill list once you select one of your stones.
My last major complaint is with the game's run speed. It feels incredibly sluggish at times. Not only does the game encourage ball of death strategies through enemies that are so strong that you need to gang up with nearly your entire party, but the actual act of moving your units is just sort of slow. Rather than have animations in their own screen for full fancy animations, and then fast on-map animations if you turn off the fancy ones, this game only has on-map animations that are not particularly fast. Coupled with death animations, loot dropping animations, enemy fading away animation, the actual slow movement over the map, and it can just feel somewhat tedious to move your units to where you want them to be, especially if you have to move through a stretch of empty map which has happened to me a few times.
All in all, this is a very interesting game. I don't hate it, but I don't love it either. It had a lot of moments that I really loved, but that was balanced out by tedium in the late game and in some of the systems. The skill system particularly feels worse as the game goes on, as you get more and more options for fusion which makes the flaws appear more obvious. If nothing else, it was a memorable game to revisit, and I really enjoyed the story, so I'm still shelving this game with a positive mindset. Will I continue from this save? Will I play it from the start and just do free quests a few times to smooth out level curve a bit? I'm not sure, time only will tell, and hopefully I have a better time on the replay now that I'm more familiar with the systems and quirks of this game. I'd definitely recommend at the very least giving it a try, especially if you like me are willing to drop a game once it outstays its welcome.
way better than its predecessor but weirdly overrated in the fandom imho. edgeworth's "dilemma" is the definition of trying to squeeze blood from a character stone, and everything takes about ten times longer than it should.
Cocoon
2023
This review contains spoilers
At the risk of being more rude than it really deserves, Cocoon feels like an award bait indie game.
It's a puzzle game that wants to suggest its abstract alien environments are part of a fully formed universe. Yet it's blindingly obvious every object you interact with was placed there to craft a puzzle for the player and not to be a part of a coherent world. Why is this switch here? Why does this door function this way? It's not because you're going through a world that was lived in by people like in a Myst or Machinarium. It's because the player must have puzzles in their way. There's nothing more underwhelming to me than seeing a really cool alien shape that looks important and mysterious only to find out a few hours later that it's a glorified on/off switch for some arbitrary components of the world.
It's a game that is so terrified of you getting lost or confused, it will constantly put up barriers everywhere to keep you on the one correct path. It feels scared of being too complex. Every new mechanic it introduces rigidly interacts with the world in dedicated spots for that mechanic. You can use the green orb to move up and down specific incidental green elevators. You can use the orange orb to walk on incidental orange walkways. You can use the silver orb to shoot a bullet but only on dedicated shoot spot and only to flick a specific type of environment switch. I think at some point they forgot the purple orb existed because its gimmick is used in one short segment and then never again. Or maybe they hated making puzzles for it.
It's all so binary and inorganic. Puzzles only ever have as many moving parts as you need to solve them. You can deduce how to solve most by the fact that you will have to interact with all components. It lacks the organic interactive building blocks of a Baba is You or a Chip's Challenge to be challenging. It lacks the narrative cohesion between puzzle and environment to feel like you're walking through a coherent world in the way a Myst game would. The only couple times I ever got stopped by a puzzle was because it used a player interaction I did not know existed.
It's a game that suggests it will ramp up to some mind blowing revelation about the nature of itsworld and then it kinda doesn't really. Or well, I guess it does, but it's done in such a guided way that it doesn't feel like you figured it out on your own and you can barely play around with it. Then, having barely explored the puzzle potential of its central premise in the final hour, it just kinda stops. Roll credits.
It does looks cool and minimalist though, just like Journey or Monument Valley. That's all you need really.
It's. fine.
It's a puzzle game that wants to suggest its abstract alien environments are part of a fully formed universe. Yet it's blindingly obvious every object you interact with was placed there to craft a puzzle for the player and not to be a part of a coherent world. Why is this switch here? Why does this door function this way? It's not because you're going through a world that was lived in by people like in a Myst or Machinarium. It's because the player must have puzzles in their way. There's nothing more underwhelming to me than seeing a really cool alien shape that looks important and mysterious only to find out a few hours later that it's a glorified on/off switch for some arbitrary components of the world.
It's a game that is so terrified of you getting lost or confused, it will constantly put up barriers everywhere to keep you on the one correct path. It feels scared of being too complex. Every new mechanic it introduces rigidly interacts with the world in dedicated spots for that mechanic. You can use the green orb to move up and down specific incidental green elevators. You can use the orange orb to walk on incidental orange walkways. You can use the silver orb to shoot a bullet but only on dedicated shoot spot and only to flick a specific type of environment switch. I think at some point they forgot the purple orb existed because its gimmick is used in one short segment and then never again. Or maybe they hated making puzzles for it.
It's all so binary and inorganic. Puzzles only ever have as many moving parts as you need to solve them. You can deduce how to solve most by the fact that you will have to interact with all components. It lacks the organic interactive building blocks of a Baba is You or a Chip's Challenge to be challenging. It lacks the narrative cohesion between puzzle and environment to feel like you're walking through a coherent world in the way a Myst game would. The only couple times I ever got stopped by a puzzle was because it used a player interaction I did not know existed.
It's a game that suggests it will ramp up to some mind blowing revelation about the nature of itsworld and then it kinda doesn't really. Or well, I guess it does, but it's done in such a guided way that it doesn't feel like you figured it out on your own and you can barely play around with it. Then, having barely explored the puzzle potential of its central premise in the final hour, it just kinda stops. Roll credits.
It does looks cool and minimalist though, just like Journey or Monument Valley. That's all you need really.
It's. fine.
Chants of Sennaar
2023
Had high hopes for Chants of Sennaar (CoS) due to its similarities to other games I like but almost everything it attempts to do is done far better by said games.
The translation puzzles are most mechanically similar to Case of the Golden Idol (CGI) and Return of the Obra Dinn (ROD). In each of these games, you are presented with evidence and must make logical guesses to identify people/places/things/words. The way guesses are validated in CoS is essentially the same as ROD/CGI: If you have enough items correctly labeled, then the game just outright verifies your labels. However, in contrast to ROD/CGI, the puzzles in CoS take hours to ramp up in difficulty and no puzzle is ever as difficult or as satisfying as those of CGI or ROD. Further, CoS has much more 'downtime' than CGI/ROD. I think this helps CoS to mask just how simple the puzzles are. Whenever I was stuck, it wasn't because a translation puzzle was tripping me up, it was because I didn't interact with everything in the rooms available to me. This meant that I spent a lot of time just wandering each of the rooms making sure I had interacted with everything. It is quite disappointing since the game could have explored strange language structure in much greater depth, but instead everything is kept very simple. Ultimately, I think the game fails to capture the highs of CGI or ROD while not really offering anything else mechanically interesting.
CoS is, in my estimation, obviously inspired by Journey both for its aesthetics and story. That said, Journey and CoS are opposites when it comes to language. CoS is largely focused on language while Journey is devoid of it. Perhaps this is why Journey is forced to communicate its story in a much more compelling way. Even though you discover the meaning behind each symbol throughout a playthrough, ultimately, the story is still delivered through english written by the developers. The story could have been more interesting if the labels written by the player weren't validated and overwritten by those of the devs. Each player's interpretation of the story would have been a bit different this way, and it would have made me much more engaged to understand the story. As it is now, the story is very similar to any other text-based game. By the end of CoS, I felt unmoved by its story/themes.
Taking inspiration from great works can backfire; nothing in CoS is better than the sum of its individual, heavily inspired parts. Further, these parts are better realized in their original forms (namely from CGI, ROD, and Journey). All of this makes Chants of Sennaar difficult to recommend.
The translation puzzles are most mechanically similar to Case of the Golden Idol (CGI) and Return of the Obra Dinn (ROD). In each of these games, you are presented with evidence and must make logical guesses to identify people/places/things/words. The way guesses are validated in CoS is essentially the same as ROD/CGI: If you have enough items correctly labeled, then the game just outright verifies your labels. However, in contrast to ROD/CGI, the puzzles in CoS take hours to ramp up in difficulty and no puzzle is ever as difficult or as satisfying as those of CGI or ROD. Further, CoS has much more 'downtime' than CGI/ROD. I think this helps CoS to mask just how simple the puzzles are. Whenever I was stuck, it wasn't because a translation puzzle was tripping me up, it was because I didn't interact with everything in the rooms available to me. This meant that I spent a lot of time just wandering each of the rooms making sure I had interacted with everything. It is quite disappointing since the game could have explored strange language structure in much greater depth, but instead everything is kept very simple. Ultimately, I think the game fails to capture the highs of CGI or ROD while not really offering anything else mechanically interesting.
CoS is, in my estimation, obviously inspired by Journey both for its aesthetics and story. That said, Journey and CoS are opposites when it comes to language. CoS is largely focused on language while Journey is devoid of it. Perhaps this is why Journey is forced to communicate its story in a much more compelling way. Even though you discover the meaning behind each symbol throughout a playthrough, ultimately, the story is still delivered through english written by the developers. The story could have been more interesting if the labels written by the player weren't validated and overwritten by those of the devs. Each player's interpretation of the story would have been a bit different this way, and it would have made me much more engaged to understand the story. As it is now, the story is very similar to any other text-based game. By the end of CoS, I felt unmoved by its story/themes.
Taking inspiration from great works can backfire; nothing in CoS is better than the sum of its individual, heavily inspired parts. Further, these parts are better realized in their original forms (namely from CGI, ROD, and Journey). All of this makes Chants of Sennaar difficult to recommend.
Chants of Sennaar
2023
Even the most enthusiastic reviews of Chants of Sennaar seem to feel obliged to mention the forced stealth sections as a weakness of the game. Depending on the critic, these portions are either labeled as an irritating diversion from the core gameplay or a negligible shortcoming in an otherwise novel and accomplished experience. While I definitely agree that the stealth is by far the shallowest element, I also found it to be symptomatic for a deeper problem that unfortunately affects even the best aspects of the game’s design. For a title about deciphering foreign languages, Chants of Sennaar is far too concerned with translating its encounters with the unfamiliar into all too familiar frameworks of video game tropes.
The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.
Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.
Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?
Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.
Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.
As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.
Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.
Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.
__________________
More puzzle game reviews
Cocoon
Hitman GO
Mole Mania
The game is at its most engaging at the start of each chapter, when you encounter a lot of still unknown signs of a new language at once and in various contexts, without any one of them offering conclusive evidence to their exact meaning. You observe the same symbols appearing in different combinations: there in a dialogue between two other NPC’s, here directly addressed at your character, and yet another time as part of a title for a painting on the wall, for instance. The comparison between the respective utterances sometimes leads you to more or less educated guesses about the meaning of individual words. This approach is greatly encouraged by the game’s single best system, which lets you write down your interpretations in an in-game notebook. These hypothetical translations then appear every time you encounter the corresponding sign from that point onward. You type in your definition and return to the same situations to see if they make more sense now. Some dialogue might suddenly transport a meaning that lets you infer even more translations, while other texts appear to be off just ever so slightly which forces you to adjust your hypothesis.
This simple gameplay loop is the beating heart of Chants of Sennaar and it would have been more than enough to sustain the whole game. That’s because the process of translating any given word is rarely just a matter of choosing the right or wrong answer to a question. Sometimes, there may be several possibilities that all make sense in every example available to you. At other times, there perhaps is no single completely accurate translation for the language you are playing the game in, or the meaning itself might vary, depending on the specific context of usage. None of the five languages in the game may seem very complex with only thirty-something words each to decipher, but ambivalences and ambiguities arise naturally when these symbols are transferred into your own language and its almost infinite semantic complexity.
Things get even more interesting when you start to translate between the in-game languages. Despite their limited vocabulary, the game introduces several layers of deviation that go beyond a mere terminological equivalence of all languages. It starts with small differences, such as the indication of plural forms, but later on new languages will have entirely different sentence structures, making it almost impossible to translate them word by word. Even in cases of denotative correspondence, the terms still can hold opposite connotations. For example, the Warrior’s term to refer to the group of the Devotees carries a strictly pejorative meaning.
In general, the process of learning a new language always provides insight into the culture of the respective group. If only the Alchemists have a decimal system in their vocabulary, then because they are the only ones who frequently need to operate with exact figures. This distinction is further underlined by the fact that their words are usually composed of abstract geometric shapes, while other groups like the Devotees use a more figurative sign language. Also note how every language is taught you to differently, according to the speaker’s culture. It makes perfect sense that you learn the language of the Devotees by their religious teachings, while the Warriors mainly communicate through orders, or that the Bards express their concepts in theatre plays and the Alchemists in scientific formulars. If you stay attentive to these indicators of social structure, you’ll find that there are conversely multiple ways to decipher the languages. Every written language follows its own inherent visual logic, which usually makes it possible to differentiate between different types of words prior to knowing their exact meaning.
Chants of Sennaar deserves most of the praise it is getting for how much sophistication it creates with its simple translation mechanics. I want to make clear that these qualities are not simply outweighed by its faults before diving into the next paragraphs full of criticisms. In fact, my main frustration with the game stems from how much other stuff was added, even though it contributes almost nothing to the experience. Basically, every element that is not directly linked to the act of translating remains awfully underdeveloped, and there is surprisingly much of it. Throughout the adventure, you’ll encounter block puzzles, several labyrinths, platforming, even scripted chase sequences and some embarrassingly misplaced horror moments. The real problem with the stealth sections therefore becomes that they are only the most prominent sample of a much wider array of poor gameplay segments throughout the whole game. Why in the world is there a Flappy Bird mini game in here?
Besides being a distraction from the game’s strengths, these components also sometimes work against them. Despite language being the central feature of the experience, the world is, for the most part, curiously devoid of its presence. Instead of creating a series of dense and intimate social spaces to explore, Chants of Sennaar tries way too hard to give your adventure a grandiose sense of scale of Babylonian proportions. As a result, you mostly traverse through wide, empty spaces with only a few scraps of text to be found each area. Far too much time is spent by just walking from one point of interest to the next, and the whole layout of the tower quickly becomes so confusing that it actually discourages you from revisiting old areas to test out your hypothetical translations, regardless of the fact that this method is incentivized by the mechanics.
Above all, the bloated emptiness and stuffed gameplay features for the sake of variety make apparent a certain lack of confidence by the developers in their own genuine systems, which shines through in the design of the core mechanics as well. I completely understand the reasons behind the decision to give official, “correct” translations to every sign, especially from a practical perspective. Periodic tests of your knowledge that gradually verify the meaning of each word were probably necessary for the steady pace of progression the story aims for, without running the risk of some players getting hopelessly lost in translation at some point. The tests themselves also mostly avoid the trap of giving away the answer too easily by making you translate multiple signs at once. Yet the drawings used to illustrate the supposed “proper” sense of the corresponding word are themselves the perfect illustration for why this correspondence between signifier and signified is itself impossible.
As individual sketches, these drawings are usually inept to represent the whole range of a sign’s meaning, especially if they are meant to visualize abstract concepts. To merely criticize this, however, would miss the point that the drawings do not actually attempt to provide a definition themselves, but to facilitate the process of translating the in-game languages into your own. In fact, the use of drawings sidesteps the much more rigid method of a direct verification through your own native tongue. If the game would ask you to formulate the translation directly, it would need to account for many possible “correct” inputs from the player. Even something as seemingly simple like the sign for “I” could also be translated with words such as “me”, “myself”, “my”, “oneself”, “selfhood” etc., depending on the sentence in which it was used. The options only multiply when you take more than the English-speaking audience into account. Instead, the drawings try to be consistent with all your possible hypotheses about the specific meaning of a sign, before arbitrarily deciding the “true” translation once you associate it correctly with the drawing. These official translations remain somewhat flexible, as the game will for example conjugate verbs according to the context of a sentence.
Yet despite every precaution taken to make it less restrictive, this system still asserts clarity and plainness where there was ambiguity and complexity before. No matter how different the process of translation was for each player, Chants of Sennaar makes sure that everyone arrives at the same conclusion at the end. The price of this approach is that once any sense of ambivalence about a word’s meaning is resolved, your translations stop being a tool you use creatively to understand unknown signs, and simply start to replace the foreign language, which in turn ceases to matter once it becomes “solved”. The goal is not really to learn a previously unknown language, but to reinstate the transparency of your own language into the world. Understanding a language has little to do with being able to find correspondences between another one already familiar to you. True understanding can only be reached inside the language itself.
Of course, this process takes years with any language in the real world and might seem like a tall task to ask for a puzzle game that only takes a couple of hours to beat. But I’d argue that games have been remarkably good at making you learn to think in ways that even make almost zero sense outside the experience. Think of Portal’s catchphrase “now you’re thinking with portals”, which is another way of saying that you have become a fluent speaker in the use of portals. Every good puzzle game adheres to this core design principle in its own way. They are never simply about solving a series of well-designed problems; they also gradually augment your way of seeing and interacting with its world in a way that make these problems solvable in the first place. In comparison, Chants of Sennaar is oddly reluctant to let you use the languages you learnt for yourself. The game could have linked progression to successfully communicating with the natives, or by acting as a translator between them. While the latter is in fact the penultimate and certainly most rewarding challenge the game presents, it is also inexplicably demoted in its entirety to a side quest to reach the “true” ending. For the most part, Chants of Sennaar wants you to learn its languages not to understand or use them yourself, but rather to enable you to understand its other mechanics, even though these are already so derivative of other games that they should require the least explaining of all.
__________________
More puzzle game reviews
Cocoon
Hitman GO
Mole Mania
Fall Guys
2020
You're telling me that two years after this game was unceremoniously shoved into its "Former Game of the Week"-themed grave, we're trying to bring it back? I won't stand for it.
I would've assumed that a game like this needs a hook, that the minigames need to actually be good, but after two years you can now play Tip Toe with friends and I'm not really convinced that that's enough to redeem the experience. Winning is still primarily the consequence of lucking out and not getting griefed into the sun, rather than a reward for actually doing anything right during the course of the minigames.
Maybe I just hate fun? Definitely a possible answer, but I'm mostly tired of streamers as tastemakers. I don't care about the latest Free-to-Play battle pass, no matter how many Hatsune Miku cosmetics or Lebron Jameses you put in. Release my friends, demon, I want to play games with them again.
I would've assumed that a game like this needs a hook, that the minigames need to actually be good, but after two years you can now play Tip Toe with friends and I'm not really convinced that that's enough to redeem the experience. Winning is still primarily the consequence of lucking out and not getting griefed into the sun, rather than a reward for actually doing anything right during the course of the minigames.
Maybe I just hate fun? Definitely a possible answer, but I'm mostly tired of streamers as tastemakers. I don't care about the latest Free-to-Play battle pass, no matter how many Hatsune Miku cosmetics or Lebron Jameses you put in. Release my friends, demon, I want to play games with them again.
Olija
2021
Not a fan of this one. My playthrough of this was forgettable and uninteresting. I'd say there's plenty here that's competently made, by that doesn't mean much when none of it vibes with me.
I'm apathetic to the tone and atmosphere of this game. There was nothing of value for me narratively {The Olija interactions felt especially pointless}.
The gameplay's the strongest part... and it's fine. This does a great job of making you feel powerful, but the fights lack depth and meaningful challenge. You just pretty much use your arsenal and go to town on enemies. Sometimes the enemies will join the festivities and be a bit choatic but never in a way that's actually interesting. Your combos can be satisfying, but it's an empty satisfaction made just out of game feel not mastery. When I first started moving around in this game, I took a liking to the leap that requires you to jump on landing, but that didn't end up being a notable form of movement
In fact, the main form of movement with the harpoon is pretty cool. Probably the most interesting part of the game, I'd rather play a game that went all in with the way that makes you move and fight {like the way dandara is designed around it's directional leaps between surfaces}. The harpoon here is definetly underutilized potential.
There's a boss fight where you chase someone through a tower which is almost cool and the final boss feels like what should have been the starting point for how you incorporate teleportation into combat. Unfortuantely the final boss also just sucks. It feels pretty unfair, {it's pretty easy to get hit by explosvies you didn't even see), it's boring,long and repetetive. I don't have the lifespan to grind out stuff like this, so I dropped this game at the final boss and looked up the ending.
The game's almost on to something once you have two different weapons that are capable of teleportation. It's neat to give yourself a get out of jail free in combat or use that aggresively {although this game doesn't truly give me the feeling of going "nothing personel kiddo"} . All the puzzles and environmental traversal in this game feels like the bare minimum starting exploration of these mechanics and never that signature progression on an idea that a game designer's supposed to show me. It's really cool that you can instantly teleport between screens, i wish the game used that mechanic {and didn't randomly remove a teleport weapon that you purposefully left a few screens behind} ! The way other screens are still loaded while you're fighting in one is super cool and feels like an incredibly underutilzed aspect of the game
The health system sucks. Mostly because you don't have any means of healing (unless you wear a a certain hat) aside from enviornmental pickups/rest spots. The real cursed part is that the game saves your health at every checkpoint, if you die you respawn with exactly that much health. Try not to have the audacity to make it to a checkpoint at low health or you'll be locked into fighting the next room with only a sliver of health.
It's satisfying to build up the town, but there's no significant progression system you engage with. Also the town and boat rides between areas likes to waste a bit of your time. For how much this game likes to do moody and vague cutscenes some of the gameplay popups can feel jarring.
I'm apathetic to the tone and atmosphere of this game. There was nothing of value for me narratively {The Olija interactions felt especially pointless}.
The gameplay's the strongest part... and it's fine. This does a great job of making you feel powerful, but the fights lack depth and meaningful challenge. You just pretty much use your arsenal and go to town on enemies. Sometimes the enemies will join the festivities and be a bit choatic but never in a way that's actually interesting. Your combos can be satisfying, but it's an empty satisfaction made just out of game feel not mastery. When I first started moving around in this game, I took a liking to the leap that requires you to jump on landing, but that didn't end up being a notable form of movement
In fact, the main form of movement with the harpoon is pretty cool. Probably the most interesting part of the game, I'd rather play a game that went all in with the way that makes you move and fight {like the way dandara is designed around it's directional leaps between surfaces}. The harpoon here is definetly underutilized potential.
There's a boss fight where you chase someone through a tower which is almost cool and the final boss feels like what should have been the starting point for how you incorporate teleportation into combat. Unfortuantely the final boss also just sucks. It feels pretty unfair, {it's pretty easy to get hit by explosvies you didn't even see), it's boring,long and repetetive. I don't have the lifespan to grind out stuff like this, so I dropped this game at the final boss and looked up the ending.
The game's almost on to something once you have two different weapons that are capable of teleportation. It's neat to give yourself a get out of jail free in combat or use that aggresively {although this game doesn't truly give me the feeling of going "nothing personel kiddo"} . All the puzzles and environmental traversal in this game feels like the bare minimum starting exploration of these mechanics and never that signature progression on an idea that a game designer's supposed to show me. It's really cool that you can instantly teleport between screens, i wish the game used that mechanic {and didn't randomly remove a teleport weapon that you purposefully left a few screens behind} ! The way other screens are still loaded while you're fighting in one is super cool and feels like an incredibly underutilzed aspect of the game
The health system sucks. Mostly because you don't have any means of healing (unless you wear a a certain hat) aside from enviornmental pickups/rest spots. The real cursed part is that the game saves your health at every checkpoint, if you die you respawn with exactly that much health. Try not to have the audacity to make it to a checkpoint at low health or you'll be locked into fighting the next room with only a sliver of health.
It's satisfying to build up the town, but there's no significant progression system you engage with. Also the town and boat rides between areas likes to waste a bit of your time. For how much this game likes to do moody and vague cutscenes some of the gameplay popups can feel jarring.
Little Nightmares
2017
I have to admit that I've never cared much for "Limbo-likes"—I thought Gris was just okay, I thought Inside was worse, and Little Nightmares (hi!) was bad enough that I bounced off it 1 hour into its 2-hour long runtime about 2 years ago. Last night, I felt like I was finally at the point where I could return to Little Nightmares with an open mind. Maybe I was just too harsh on it! But Little Nightmares is bad in so potent and specific a way I feel the need to place it among my narrow list of 1/10s, mostly as a symbolic venture. This is partially because I hated my time with this game, and partially to hit both "Art Games" (Not artsy games. I love artsy shit. I am talking about games which make "being art" the end goal) and "Game Theory/YouTuber Games" (games made primarily to be consumed secondhand, through lets plays and theory videos) with one fell swoop.
These sorts of cinematic platformers strike me as particularly emblematic of a certain era of games which proliferated in the early-to-mid 2010s. Around the end of the 2000s, Roger Ebert alongside some other well-respected art/film/whatever critics I can't remember now got into a lot of gamer's heads with their proclamations that "Video Games are not only not art, but can never be art." Clearly, some of these gamers were also gamedevs who quickly got hell-bent on proving them wrong. What this brought was the Art Game™—games which cared first and foremost about being unquestionably, without a doubt, “art.”
The problem with Art Games™ is both that they’re compromises, and that they're bundled with implications that Not all games are art, just the artsy ones. You will never convince someone that video games are art if you just show them a movie or a painting with menial gameplay stapled to it. As much as I like narrative-heavy walking sims, they’re a pretty shit argument for Video Games being art—anyone who may be convinced by its quality can just as easily continue to write off games by calling walking sims “interactive fiction” or some other label.
The best arguments for Games as Art are games which utilize the medium they’re in instead of trying to copy something else. Back when film started truly rolling in the early 1900s, tons and tons of early works were just adaptations of theater pieces (and many more stuck one static camera past the fourth wall and did nothing else with it)—but the films that are remembered in the annals of history are the ones which chose to use the medium to its fullest. Games have been going through a similar growing period for decades—you can go back pretty far and find good examples of intertwined gameplay and story, but we still see plenty of games obsessed with being movies instead of games. Team Silent nailed the concept of “frictional gameplay” as early as the turn of the millennium (intentionally or not), but it probably wasn’t too much of a crazy idea to say “hey, let’s take the camp out of Resident Evil and use this weird clunky gameplay to do more than amp up the scares!” I guarantee there are more examples even earlier on, but you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with pre-PS2 games, I just haven't tried much from then aside from platformers and JRPGs.
I’m getting off track, but my point is that the worst time for these sorts of games which placed their express priorities on "Being Art" above all else, was in the early 2010s, and that period of time left us with the popularization of at least a couple of genres. One of these being the aforementioned “Limbo-like”, which is just one specific style of a genre which has come to be known as the “cinematic platformer” (a name which feels just a little bit self-incriminating). I’ve yet to play Ico or Oddworld or any of the ones that came before Limbo and Journey, but my current opinions of the genre are not very high. Gris controls better than most, and its music and environments make it a place that is at least neat to exist within, but its representations of depression are pretty passé. Stray is predictable at every turn, but at least it has the novelty of controlling a cat. For a while I considered Inside to be my least favorite—sluggish and, generally, “Not Fun” movement extending basic puzzles far past their needed length was really bad, but at least the last 15 or 20 minutes of that were kinda cool. As of now the only Cinematic Platformer I have had a pretty good experience with was J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, but that’s probably because most of its story is told through text logs, which is pretty nonstandard with how "show don't tell" these "cinematic platformers" often are.
I have nothing positive to say about Little Nightmares. The movement here is even worse than it was on Inside, and the puzzles are even more trite, generally just consisting of finding an object and bringing it to some place. I have almost always hated stealth in games when it’s included (since it’s always just “go sit in this corner or in this shadow and wait for this guy to slowly walk past as you feel the minutes left on your life slowly draining away”), but stealth is here too!
One could argue that this is intentional, that this is being done to enhance the dread and horror, but I’m sorry, this game is just not scary. It’s scary enough for YouTubers to react to it and pull grossed out faces into their webcams. It’s scary enough for JackSepticEye to play and scream “Oh My God!” When an arm pops up when you’re in a vent. But anyone even marginally acquainted with some of the canonized Creepypastas will find basically everything here overplayed. The stakes are not established and it simply uses existing horror imagery with the hopes that your memory of something similar scaring you in a different work will continue to scare you this time. And again, even if it was scary, the problem a lot of horror games face is the inability to instill a fear of death once you die once. More complicated games can take your items or ramp up the difficulty to make dying a real and continuous threat, but Cinematic Platformers are far too simple for that, and the most they can do is waste a bit of your time. And waste your time Little Nightmares does! Every time you die, you have to watch a slow respawn cutscene, which serves as the only real punishment for failure. This is not threatening, this is annoying. If you try to run on a thin beam, (which the game has you do a couple of times), chances are you will fall off and have to do it again. You cannot shmove your way past enemies, you must stealth them. Which again, is fine for the sort of game this is, but only if it’s scary! Playing the same stock horror strings literally everything else in the world uses over an ugly caricature moving in a weird way is not scary! This can work with more context, context about who you are and who these enemies are, but this is not given—the chefs are about as well-developed as the Goombas in a Mario game. It doesn’t matter. None of this shit matters.
And all of this, ALL of this--I could excuse if there was a point behind it. Kane & Lynch 2 sucks to play and you can't root for anyone and it crashes all the time but I love it because it has something to say, and the miserable experience of attempting to play it in the first place adds to that, intentionally or not. The extent of what Little Nightmares has to say, is the same as any other forgettable YouTuber horror game. I mean, at least Sonic.EXE and Garten of Banban are fucking quick! Both of those, in and out within 10 minutes. But Little Nightmares has no good scares and nothing interesting to say, and it meanders around for 2 or 3 hours while doing it. It's vague enough that plenty of people have Rorschach'ed their way into thinking they know what it means (just on this page, I've seen someone thinking it's about Capitalism), but Little Nightmares shrouds its self in abstractions and vague details because it has nothing to say. It is made in a post-Game Theory era, where artistic intention is not embedded within a text, but vague indicators leading towards intention are left for theory videos to pick up. I think they just made a creepypasta game, man.
Little Nightmares has nothing of interest to say, and no interesting way of communicating it. It is not fun, or scary, or entertaining, or interesting. There was not a single minute when I was playing Little Nightmares where I was not irritated, or bored, or feeling like my time was being wasted. I have to admit that I've never cared much for "Limbo-likes"—but Little Nightmares is without a doubt the worst one I have ever played.
These sorts of cinematic platformers strike me as particularly emblematic of a certain era of games which proliferated in the early-to-mid 2010s. Around the end of the 2000s, Roger Ebert alongside some other well-respected art/film/whatever critics I can't remember now got into a lot of gamer's heads with their proclamations that "Video Games are not only not art, but can never be art." Clearly, some of these gamers were also gamedevs who quickly got hell-bent on proving them wrong. What this brought was the Art Game™—games which cared first and foremost about being unquestionably, without a doubt, “art.”
The problem with Art Games™ is both that they’re compromises, and that they're bundled with implications that Not all games are art, just the artsy ones. You will never convince someone that video games are art if you just show them a movie or a painting with menial gameplay stapled to it. As much as I like narrative-heavy walking sims, they’re a pretty shit argument for Video Games being art—anyone who may be convinced by its quality can just as easily continue to write off games by calling walking sims “interactive fiction” or some other label.
The best arguments for Games as Art are games which utilize the medium they’re in instead of trying to copy something else. Back when film started truly rolling in the early 1900s, tons and tons of early works were just adaptations of theater pieces (and many more stuck one static camera past the fourth wall and did nothing else with it)—but the films that are remembered in the annals of history are the ones which chose to use the medium to its fullest. Games have been going through a similar growing period for decades—you can go back pretty far and find good examples of intertwined gameplay and story, but we still see plenty of games obsessed with being movies instead of games. Team Silent nailed the concept of “frictional gameplay” as early as the turn of the millennium (intentionally or not), but it probably wasn’t too much of a crazy idea to say “hey, let’s take the camp out of Resident Evil and use this weird clunky gameplay to do more than amp up the scares!” I guarantee there are more examples even earlier on, but you’ll have to forgive my lack of experience with pre-PS2 games, I just haven't tried much from then aside from platformers and JRPGs.
I’m getting off track, but my point is that the worst time for these sorts of games which placed their express priorities on "Being Art" above all else, was in the early 2010s, and that period of time left us with the popularization of at least a couple of genres. One of these being the aforementioned “Limbo-like”, which is just one specific style of a genre which has come to be known as the “cinematic platformer” (a name which feels just a little bit self-incriminating). I’ve yet to play Ico or Oddworld or any of the ones that came before Limbo and Journey, but my current opinions of the genre are not very high. Gris controls better than most, and its music and environments make it a place that is at least neat to exist within, but its representations of depression are pretty passé. Stray is predictable at every turn, but at least it has the novelty of controlling a cat. For a while I considered Inside to be my least favorite—sluggish and, generally, “Not Fun” movement extending basic puzzles far past their needed length was really bad, but at least the last 15 or 20 minutes of that were kinda cool. As of now the only Cinematic Platformer I have had a pretty good experience with was J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories, but that’s probably because most of its story is told through text logs, which is pretty nonstandard with how "show don't tell" these "cinematic platformers" often are.
I have nothing positive to say about Little Nightmares. The movement here is even worse than it was on Inside, and the puzzles are even more trite, generally just consisting of finding an object and bringing it to some place. I have almost always hated stealth in games when it’s included (since it’s always just “go sit in this corner or in this shadow and wait for this guy to slowly walk past as you feel the minutes left on your life slowly draining away”), but stealth is here too!
One could argue that this is intentional, that this is being done to enhance the dread and horror, but I’m sorry, this game is just not scary. It’s scary enough for YouTubers to react to it and pull grossed out faces into their webcams. It’s scary enough for JackSepticEye to play and scream “Oh My God!” When an arm pops up when you’re in a vent. But anyone even marginally acquainted with some of the canonized Creepypastas will find basically everything here overplayed. The stakes are not established and it simply uses existing horror imagery with the hopes that your memory of something similar scaring you in a different work will continue to scare you this time. And again, even if it was scary, the problem a lot of horror games face is the inability to instill a fear of death once you die once. More complicated games can take your items or ramp up the difficulty to make dying a real and continuous threat, but Cinematic Platformers are far too simple for that, and the most they can do is waste a bit of your time. And waste your time Little Nightmares does! Every time you die, you have to watch a slow respawn cutscene, which serves as the only real punishment for failure. This is not threatening, this is annoying. If you try to run on a thin beam, (which the game has you do a couple of times), chances are you will fall off and have to do it again. You cannot shmove your way past enemies, you must stealth them. Which again, is fine for the sort of game this is, but only if it’s scary! Playing the same stock horror strings literally everything else in the world uses over an ugly caricature moving in a weird way is not scary! This can work with more context, context about who you are and who these enemies are, but this is not given—the chefs are about as well-developed as the Goombas in a Mario game. It doesn’t matter. None of this shit matters.
And all of this, ALL of this--I could excuse if there was a point behind it. Kane & Lynch 2 sucks to play and you can't root for anyone and it crashes all the time but I love it because it has something to say, and the miserable experience of attempting to play it in the first place adds to that, intentionally or not. The extent of what Little Nightmares has to say, is the same as any other forgettable YouTuber horror game. I mean, at least Sonic.EXE and Garten of Banban are fucking quick! Both of those, in and out within 10 minutes. But Little Nightmares has no good scares and nothing interesting to say, and it meanders around for 2 or 3 hours while doing it. It's vague enough that plenty of people have Rorschach'ed their way into thinking they know what it means (just on this page, I've seen someone thinking it's about Capitalism), but Little Nightmares shrouds its self in abstractions and vague details because it has nothing to say. It is made in a post-Game Theory era, where artistic intention is not embedded within a text, but vague indicators leading towards intention are left for theory videos to pick up. I think they just made a creepypasta game, man.
Little Nightmares has nothing of interest to say, and no interesting way of communicating it. It is not fun, or scary, or entertaining, or interesting. There was not a single minute when I was playing Little Nightmares where I was not irritated, or bored, or feeling like my time was being wasted. I have to admit that I've never cared much for "Limbo-likes"—but Little Nightmares is without a doubt the worst one I have ever played.