Computer, generate a niche game.

If you've ever played one of those "make-your-own-game" games like Game Dev Story or Game Dev Tycoon or Mad Games Tycoon or any of the millions of fucking Kairosoft knock-offs out there, you're familiar with how the real-world game design process tends to be abstracted into gameplay. In order to keep things from getting too complicated, these tycoon games usually have a design pipeline which asks the player to combine a "genre" tag with a "theme" tag. The more "appropriate" the combination of tags, the better your fictional game tends to sell. Mixing "action" with "shooter" is almost universally a safe pick, as is something like "simulation" with "motorsports". Where you'll fall into the weeds, however, is when you decide to get experimental; making an "action farming" game or an "extreme sports RPG" tends to guarantee little more than poor sales and middling reviews. I played Game Dev Story a lot growing up, and it always annoyed me that what I thought were the most interesting and unique combinations always resulted in something that capped out around mediocre. I had game dev aspirations of my own — among other ideas, like being an astronaut or a lawyer — and I vowed that on the day that I could start running a studio of my own, I would never turn down even the wildest of ideas. I would play them, and support them, and make sure that everybody knew how good they truly were.

And I don't especially enjoy this horse-racing solitaire game.

My biggest gripe just comes down to the fact that what we have here is a fairly uninteresting horse racing game standing alongside a fairly uninteresting solitaire game, and the two exist in distinct and separate layers like how oil sits on water. Racing the horse seems to be the primary gameplay element — you can fail to full-clear the solitaire minigame and it doesn't count as a loss, with wins and losses instead coming down to the result of the actual race — but the horse's performance being abstracted into the solitaire minigame really doesn't feel as though it accomplishes much. There's no harmony between these systems. You do solitaire to make the horse run faster and more efficiently, but you could slot any sort of minigame in here and nothing would change. If this was Pocket Sudoku Racer or Pocket Slide Puzzle Racer, the core of racing the horses would remain wholly untouched. How close you got to finishing the minigame before the timer runs out or your deck empties gives you a boost or a penalty, but there are a dozen different games you could substitute in here without noticing a difference. The solitaire game and the horse racing game are hardly reliant on the other, nor does one make the other shine; they just exist together, each acting as an interruption of whatever the last mode of gameplay was.

Of course, Pocket Card Racer isn’t bad, but I don’t believe it to be especially good. The solitaire minigame is decent enough for an hour or two, and the raising of the horses implies that there’s going to be a lot more depth to the racing than there actually is, and it’s all okay. It’s a vehicle to play solitaire as filtered through the lens of being a jockey who’s whipping a horse named Nintendo Biggs on the final stretch of the track. There are far better and far worse ways to play golf solitaire. Grab a deck and imagine a horse running in your mind while you do it. Put on one of the tracks from the game to really immerse yourself, because they’re bangers. You’d get a comparable experience and save yourself some cash.

This is the kind of game that’s going to hit at an exact intersection of what an incredibly small group of people have been begging for all of their lives.

https://i.ibb.co/6vLDK1S/Screenshot-2024-02-26-at-12-44-02.png

not morally egregious per se but rather a depressing culmination of two centuries worth of design trickery and (d)evolving cultural/social tastes and otherwise exists as insipid casinocore autoplaying bullshit that leaves you feeling the same way as you did moments after blasting rope to that fucked up mmm ice cream so tasty thing you found in the middle of a reddit doomscroll. this game should come with a contractual agreement binding its devotees to never speak prejudicially about mobile games or musou or vampire survivors or people whose lives have been ruined by industrialised gambling practices. you seen that casinos have RFID wristbands now that let you re-ante by just waving your hand across the slots? goes great with the simulated day/night lighting and complementary alcoholic energy drinks. endless hours of fun! fuck the review man let's talk the end of the world in the comments below

As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with subways. Whenever my family and I traveled to a new city, my immediate fixation was not the city’s many attractions but rather the intricate infrastructure linking all these various locales. While my family handled the destinations, I handled everything in-between. I wanted to know the most efficient way to get from point A to B, if there were any loopholes or special conditions necessitating an off-the-beaten-path itinerary, and most of all, I kept tabs on any planned changes regarding the evolving transportation so I could make notes of where to adjust and prioritize for future trips. I never realized it back then, but there was a certain satisfaction to memorizing every station and optimal route and running the simulations in my head that eventually led me down the path of engineering.

Mini Metro is essentially my childhood fascination with subways conceptualized as a video game. It’s super easy to pick up thanks to its minimalist design and intuitive controls; passengers are depicted with geometric symbols headed to corresponding symbolic destinations, distinctly colored subway lines are constructed by dragging your mouse between stops, and you can easily manipulate existing lines without disrupting progress by simply clicking and dragging sections of a line to new stops. At the same time, it can quickly become challenging, but this skill ceiling feels fairly approachable because the game is less about memorizing specific formulas and more about understanding implicit guidelines. For example, having a line that hits every stop in the area sounds appealing, but what’s less appealing is how much more time is subsequently spent traveling and loading/unloading passengers; you can at least somewhat account for this by toggling specific stations as “no-stop” to create express lines. The AI is fairly predictable and will always calculate the shortest path to the corresponding destination, but this also means that there’s real potential for them to overload the capacity of certain stations while in-transit between different lines. Alongside this, the game is great at organically iterating upon its basic formula to escalate difficulty by introducing more stops, altering the shape of stops to create more unique passengers and necessitate different routes, and increase the system’s load with more passengers while forcing the player to juggle their already limited number of lines, cars/carriages, and tunnels/bridges as also dictated with newly unlocked maps. At its core, it’s a game that’s great at subtly teaching players how to recognize bottlenecks and micromanage individual elements to fully understand how minor changes can quickly ripple across the fully intertwined system.

My only real nitpicks are that picking apart subway loops can get a bit annoying since you can only fiddle with one exposed end at a time while in loop form; it’s a minor complaint considering that you can pause the game at any time to more carefully reconstruct lines, but adding extra steps to reconstruct common subway loops is fairly noticeable considering Mini Metro’s elegant interface. Also, I do wish that there was a way to construct slightly longer paths along rivers instead of automatically building across them between certain junctions and using up my already limited supply of tunnels and bridges. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that this last gripe is mostly personal, and I think this game absolutely delivers upon its premise with precise execution. With so many different maps and daily challenges to boot, there’s plenty of content to exhaust within the game, and if one finds the basic experience too stressful or is more interested in sheer experimentation, then they can simply turn to endless and creative modes instead. For an accessible yet deceptively deep management game that gives great bang for your buck, I’d say Mini Metro is a fantastic entry point into the world of optimization simulators that more than holds its own against its more daunting peers.

of course the presentation is beautiful-- the animated storybook style and sound design is where this game really excels. the narrative is good too, and I am always happy to see more games about Real Life. I'm torn on the cooking, though. on one hand, there's a lot I liked. I really enjoyed learning about different dishes and how they are made, it was fun to put my outside knowledge of cooking into figuring out the logic of the recipes, and by the end, cooking as Kavin was narratively impactful. on the other hand, a lot of what makes cooking a challenge is glossed over in order to make it possible to make a dish with no previous knowledge and incomplete instructions. of course, it wouldn't be preferable for Venba, after fucking up her idlis, to say, "well, honey that was the batter, sorry, no lunch for you today", but the cooking feels stuck between wanting to be a puzzle and wanting to be breezy and enjoyable and winds up feeling pretty strange in my opinion. the fact that these cooking segments are so quick, too, makes it feel a bit like food tiktoks or those subway ads where they show the supercut preperation of a dish in 15 seconds. however, the final cooking scene, even removed from any narrative weight, works great. the lower stakes of screwing up one dosa (compared to like, burning your families dinner), the fast pace of cooking on high heat, and the repetition of making variations on the same dish all contribute into making it into a simulacrum of the act of cooking. its execution makes its role in the narrative work even better.

Mario & Sonic: Wonderstars: Part 2: What a Wonderful Super Mario World

Super Mario Bros Wonder is a great game, no need to tell you that. But from my reaction to the game at first I wouldn’t have expected that let me tell you. When the game was first announced I had the exact same apathetic reaction I had with Sonic stinkerstars. Meaning that I did not care for the game at all, thinking it was just another 2D Mario game, the art style wasn’t my thing and nothing it really showed me while looked cool wasn’t anything that was gonna change my mind.

Then the direct hit.

The direct basically sold me on Wonder despite having a few gripes from what I was seeing. Nintendo had let the game cook and simmer for as long as it needed and we’re proud with what they made both from interviews and the game itself. Of course being proud of a game doesn’t mean anything if it isn’t any good but the fact they had no deadline and could do whatever they want with the game with anything showed me incredible promise.

And they did deliver.

I’m gonna structure this review slightly differently from the rest, I can easily say that “GOODS, THEN BADS” which would sell my thoughts on the game sure but I feel I want to go the extra mile and talk about the initial gripes I had with the game first then detail if they still exist or not. So without further ado, Let’sa go!

Wonder Problem 1: The Gentrification of Mario

It’s no secret why everyone went crazy over Wonder both post release and especially pre release was that it was breaking the New Super Mario Bros shackles of the same exact world theming, backgrounds actually looked detailed, they’re using advantage of the artstyle and all that jazz. For some reason when it was first revealed I didn’t like it, I found the artstyle was doubling down on the platiscally look the NSMB games coined essentially and the environments looked kinda the same but the bare minimum. Can I give myself a slap on the head from the past?

Super Mario Wonder feels fresh. It sorta does the same thing as Odyssey where each world theme isn’t super out of the ordinary for Mario, but it is enhanced both in terms of theming and the context of the world, which you can even see in the story. It’s nothing too out of the ordinary again but they went a lot further then I expected. Gone is the plot to rescue Peach or anyone for that fact, we’ve gone back to the Super Mario Land 2 era where we need to save stolen property. Each world has a contextual problem you need to solve after Bowser plans his “Big Wonder” after he turns into a castle. It’s not much but the extra unneeded touch makes Wonder more complete that it had any right it needed to be. It’s not as muc as Odyssey nor is it a game that actively tries to be a comedic story but it was charming, especially with the talking flowers.

That’s how I’d describe the game’s presentation, charming. Things that were just so straightforward in previous games such as going into pipes, doors, enemies hitting you etc now have so much life injected to them. The game’s environments and artstyle, while not my ideal and in terms of environments that could have gone further into the weird, are incredible. Gone are the boring samey backgrounds and now nearly everything single stage has a unique background and environment. In terms of music while I wouldn’t it’s the best of 2D Mario but it is still great, it definitely gets slightly repetitive with the Wonder flower theme playing almost nearly everytime and the athletic theme being used even more than the main defining theme, but I think even just the sound design which is completely different from other games and is excellent shows how this is, for better or worse, a big overcorrection of the New Super Mario Bros series, and that can be perfectly seen in my next pre Wonder problem

Wonder Problem 2: Variety Variety Variety!

One initial problem I had seeing the trailer was the Wonder flower, this gimmick to me seemed like variety for the sake of it instead of crafting actual good challenging platforming you can have some weird mini game intrusively tuning the flow of the game, like for instance later Yoshi games and how they’d abused the transformation gimmick, and even when the direct hit of me having a slightly more optimistic look on the game I couldn’t help but feel that variety was favoured of good level design and challenge especially with the new badge system , and I was kinda right but also insanely wrong.

First things first, the Badge system, You see, Mario Wonder only had 6 Power Ups, the 3 you’ve come familiar with like the Mushroom, Fire Flower and Star, with the new ones being the Elephant Apple which turns you into an Elephant which I’m sure is gonna spark an sexual awakening with a few people basically being a great melee weapon and can hold water, The Bubble Flower which is the Ice Flower but with Bubbles (Personally prefer the Ice Flower) and the Drill Mushroom which drills into the ground. I don’t think the Item game is particularly strong in this game or bad but it’s clear that the Badge system takes precedence.

You can equip one badge from three categories. Action Badges which basically add an additional movement option or enhance an ability, Boost Badges which basically make the game easier with more power-ups, a way to find hidden items and even a rhythm badge where you jump to the beat, which gets my Hi-fi Rush part of my brain go happy. Finally, you have the Expert Badges where there’s only four in the entire game but make the game harder, my preferred ones being the spring jump and Jet run. I think the Badge System is really only a cool idea that needs refining, I don’t think having say, two more Badge slots would hurt and maybe having more interesting badges wouldn’t hurt, I would rather have more Power-ups since there’s a lot more you can with that in terms of level design that’s not locked in with specific Badge challenges, but they’re cool.

But anyway, the gimmick of the Wonder Flower is at its core what I theorised, giving some variety and changes to a normal experience, the way they handle it is quite inconsistent, for one in some stages they give it and leave it in the open while others have you try and find it, all of which end by giving you a Wonder seed, the main collectible of the game. I’m happy to report that the Wonder effects never really angered me in my playthrough, not all of them were great but in a game like this where it is so easy to screw up these gimmicks it’s incredible there wasn’t a single one where I could say they sucked which again, surprises me. A lot of these gimmicks include transforming into creatures you’d see in the stage you’re playing akin to Super Mario Odyssey, or a status effect like Metal, P-Balloon, stretching ect. Oddly enough or “normally” my favourite and possibly the laziest one is making the core stage harder by reinforcing the gimmicks in that stage.

At this point, the Nintendo formula of 2D or even just linear stages used in verbatim especially in the New Super Mario Bros series, where a stage introduces a gimmick and that gimmick gradually gets harder and more difficult /involved, especially when extra items/goodies are here in the case of this game with Wonder Flowers, Purple Coins and secret exits. I don’t think this formula is bad per say it’s great when put to use see in the Retro Donkey Kong games and outside of the Nintendo sphere and Ubiart Rayman games but I feel this sorta creeps in the issue with the Wonder flower.

Some stages in this game, are innanely short without the gimmick and even with them they don’t feel, not undercooked but missing something? Like I feel this problem comes apparent in the later two worlds discounting Bowser’s Castle, it feels like this game wanted to do a lot more in terms of it level design which as it is is really good but take a game like 3D World, Tropical Freeze and especially Galaxy 2 for instance, those games feel like with each level they really wanted to fully challenge the player with its gimmicks and level design they both worked hand in hand with each other and it’s not like Wonder doesn’t have that in fact there’s a good attempt here with the Break Time stages which are short challenge stages and especially the Badge challenges, but usually the gimmicks have presendance over the level design in some cases, it’s not enough to make it a major problem but it’s just enough where becomes odd, maybe it’s because the game is quite new but there’s just a good chunk of levels even with the Wonder flower that I completely forget and I don’t care for, which again may be because it’s new but then again, a game like Odyssey, Galaxy 2 or hell even Mario Maker 2’s story mode with limited with spectacle it is for instance I can still remember almost every moment of the first magical of those games but with Winder while moments of those shine, it in cases more than not feels like the New Super Mario Bros games where the levels are of good and but inconsistent quality.

Despite this however, I do think the Wonder flower is a welcome addition to the game, it helps break the pacing of platforming in unique despite a few missteps in making the base level a bit lacking, hell you can even skip most of the Wonder flowers though I probably think that the seed limit maybe damper that tangible goal.

Wonder Problem 3: I Ordered challenge in my Mario Game!

Sadly, while a lot of my initial worries of how the Game’s variety was handled were elevated somewhat, my issues with how the difficulty was handled, was sadly kinda proven right. My worry was that the game wouldn’t be that challenging. HOWEVER, that’s not really a big issue since the game is already interesting enough to keep my attention, but I think being a slight bit harder would have elevated the game a lot, it’s like a spice to me. The food doesn’t need it but it can help a lot by elevating the whole experience.

This is possible due to how the game is structured, the game has a large interconnected world like Mario World but every once and again you return to the Petal Isles, which is a cool idea as a recurring beach location. Hell one of my favourite backgrounds had Bowser just floating there, menacingly. I feel where issues arise are the last two worlds discounting the castle since you can choose what world you want to play, and It kinda just feels like the same level of difficulty throughout the game kinda. Wonder really didn’t have a big rise in terms of challenge unless we’re counting the obvious Special World akin to Mario World, and even that had the super difficult ending level that every Mario game has coined being the first 2D Mario game to have it, but again despite this issue with the challenge, the game does remain fun and interesting throughout, Especially with the break time and Badge levels, then the bosses come in.

Good lord, It felt like apart from the first and last world, every world in this game felt off to end on, like something was missing. We’ve returned back to the Super Mario Bros 1 days of one character being the only boss throughout the entire game, this being Bowser Jr. His bosses are fine but like, feel like Tower bosses which are absent in this game. And I know the criticism of “But the bosses in 2D Mario weren’t ever interesting” comes to light but, that’s not an excuse. Wonder does a lot to fix issues relating to the core 2D Mario formula, why couldn’t bosses be a part of that? Interesting enough the game basically had “We’ll release when we feel it’s ready” approach which is incredibly based but I’m starting to the doubt that notion with the bosses and certain more minor details. Like are you seriously telling me that they couldn’t have figured out any boss ideas for this game when there’s supposedly a trilogy worth of things on the cutting board, even the final boss has the trademark “Nintendo floating head and hands” thing that’s basically become somewhat infamous, it’s a good fight and eaisly the best in the game, but I’m sorry to say that nearly every single New Super Mario Bros final boss apart from DS has it beat out.

In summary, while too me this is sorta Wonder’s biggest issue, it’s and issue that doesn’t really fully effect that whole experience, like I said, it’s the spice of a game and more specifically a platformer to me. Add too much without moderation or a care and it feels trusting or unenjoyable, add too little and it feels noticeably lacking

Wonder Problem 4: Friends with Benefits

The final Pre-Wonder problem I was sensing was multiplayer, both in terms of how it was implemented and how it would effect the wider ecosystem of the game. Each New Super Mario Bros game felt like it had a different effect to the multiplayer, DS didn’t have it and opposed for the awesome Mario Vs Luigi star battle mode, Wii was the first Mario to have 4 Player co-op which sadly while I like Wii hindered it’s potential as a game in both ways, there wasn’t enough precautions to make the multiplayer as chaotic as it was and in terms of a single player campaign, the level design while enjoyable had a ton of empty and large space in a lot of its levels, made Yoshi into a stage only gimmick, bosses being dumbed down to fit all 4 Players. I could go on. 2 focused on 2 players with a camera system that doesn’t make all too much sense since both people have their own screens and discounting that the level design of 2 didn’t feel intended for Co-op do it does feel a tad bit unnatural and U despite being so derivative might have struck an excellent balanace between providing great single player action and multiplayer mayhem which can be extended to 3D World.

Wonder isn’t anything new, the multiple item boxes and crown from 3D World is brought back and now acts as a camera and the bubble system has been replaced with the ghost where players now have to actively save the person. I feel the biggest issue with the slightly revamped system is the lack of collision between players.

You see, if you live in a big family like me where half the people don’t even know what a Mario is and your parents force you to play with them, it’s bound to put you in a bad mood, so you wanna get it done quickly. With every single game discounting the handheld ones (?), Collision was big factor working together or against your perrs. And I really miss it here. A lot of the times in games where a little kid was playing carrying basically allowed you to have a good enough experience while having fun and that being good feels off? Like I’m really wondering if this did influence the design of the levels and game that radically for it to be removed. But other than that, I guess it’s fun, Mario multiplayer wasn’t always a super big deal for me it was more of an neat little add-on.

This would be where this ends if it wasn’t for the fact that Wonder has online! The online led to some cute interactions but was fine overall. Unlike Maio Maker 2 where the multiplayer is fun as hell but is a Russian roulette if it works or not, the online is pretty consistent but definitely not game changing, I think a few more modes and such would have made this at least more worth it to me.

Whoa Mario, That was really Super Mario Bros Wonder

Despite my few gripes with the game, Super Mario Wonder is a damn good game that too me, is similar to Odyssey. It’s a game that gets a lot right and at its core is good, but with a few touch ups and a slight challenge increase could be one of the greats, but both games along with Bowser’s Fury show a promising future ahead for mainline Mario, a genre that was already unnaturally consistent but somewhat lacking, but for what it is, Super Mario Wonder despite not being my favourite 2D Platformer, is an impeccably well made and fun time.

On Friday, January 5th, I got a ping in a discord server consisted of one friend group about an impromptu Fortnite get-together. Since I admittedly regained an interest in playing it, and because said friend server has yet to really do much for several months, I decided to take the opportunity to see how the game has transformed and evolved over the years. Installed the dreaded EGS launcher, got marginally but not totally surprised by the increased file size, and proceeded to log back into my account from years prior. After all, it's only gonna be just for a few days, and then I’m off to uninstall it...

...but things didn't pan out that way. What has happened instead, was a transformation into becoming an Epic Fortnite Gamer. A near 3-week foray, money spent on the Battle Pass and both Gambit and Rouge skins, and grinding my way towards unlocking Peter Griffin's page, all while accumulating levels, Ranked medals, and other knick-knacks along the way. Life really does come at ya fast when you least expect it!

To go more in-depth into my prior experience: I'm very much someone who first played Fornite's at-the-time new Battle Royale format, played a couple of matches - both with my completely separate and no longer in touch friend group and solo - and thought it was kinda neat but really lacking in staying power. I'm uncertain if I was also one of many that thought it was simply gonna be a fad that'll fade away, since this was nearly 7 years ago now, but it matters naught since it's still here, and about as popular as it was since then. There's no need to cover much of what it's about, cause even if you never played it, you certainly know of it and the appeal, so I'm just gonna make this a thorough dumping ground of my thoughts as someone who finally came back to the bus.

Firstly, and more importantly, I'm glad that Zero Build is a mode that can be opted into. Now, I'm not besmirching the mechanic in its holistic entity, but I will admit one of the reasons I fell off pretty quickly originally was because of the gap between people who can build (especially PC players), and people who can't (especially console players). You can be a quickshot all you want, but as long as the other guy can spontaneously build a Jenga tower or a Minecraft fortress to recuperate quickly, your choices are to either eat shit, continue to pester them, or just give up and bolt out entirely. These types of encounters, to me, are fine in doses - the risk-reward allure is just balanced enough that it isn't entirely irritating, and the satisfaction method is incredible! That, however, begins to dissolve into ruin when it occurs ad nauseum, tying itself into state of the loop, and altogether just demotivates my ass since the most I can do is a stairway to heaven and maybe a few walls despite my flicks of the mouse and sensitivity zones. Even with the practice mentality, there's also the fact that, again, it's been 7 years - if you've played any sort of multiplayer shooter in mind, you'd know that there's a good chance that any sort of tech people know about, will inject and hone their craft to it to days on end, and I've seen plenty opponents do some shit that simultaneously leaves me fascinated and discontented. So, just having a mode where there's little frills to that, is appreciated, even if I do tap back into the regular option every now and then.

The other thing is that there's like... actual POIs and side activities now. I recall these being a thing in 2017, but it was a lot more minimalistic and very much in the vein of "we needed something to have players distract themselves and play the game with". Solid enough base, but combine that with the haphazard loop I had before, it again just made the dull grind even more prevalent. That nagging aspect is still present, but it's way easier to tolerate and avoid now. Vehicles, more movement options when doing on-foot roaming, an entourage group to pick off and reap rewards from to better your gamestate, and just the overall map layout is way, way more satisfying to convey and poke around than ever, even if I'm not entirely sure how prior seasons were like. Hell, this also obfuscates the other big critique that was going on at the time, which was how spacious people could become. Rarely has the thought of "man this is kinda boring" occur now since everything feels more fulfilling to explore and do, especially using grapple blades atop various points and just ZOOOOOOOOMING to where I need to go, or just ramming bogeys and guffawing at how high they get launched, or doing dopey motorbike tricks across hilltops. It's neat! It's exciting! It just about upends most of the issues I had to begin with!

I really don't have much else to like, add at this point, aside from some qualms:

- The bots here are on the opposite spectrum end of TF2's Bot Crisis; instead of being hammered down by some flagrant creations stopping any sort of enjoyment I can muster, there's more of an awe factor over how braindead they can be. I'm not quite sure how the system itself operates, but while I know and understand they're a necessity to fill up empty spaces, that becomes highly questionable when I see these guys fuck up easy picks, do some bizarre pathfinding and routine interactions, and somehow overcompensate within a quarter at most of the 100-player pool. This is the least egregious of the three ire I'm covering, but even then it's just... confounding. Not sure what's going on here!

- Aside from BR, there's now Lego Fortnite, Rocket Racing, and Festival. I only used LF briefly cause of an XP exploit, but I did at least put actual time into RR and Festival, and I'm thoroughly unimpressed with both. The former's a really dull and barebones arcade racer that couldn't even compete with some of the more straightforward affairs during the 5th Console Gen Boom, and well, Cold_Comfort goes over the woes of Festival even if I'm not that harsh about it. One could say these can be ignored since the main aspect is BR, but since they're easily visible upon the main bar of the lobby, I feel like it's fair game to expect these to be in a commendable quality - especially since Epic Games have been making big talk about user-generated content and have seemingly been in a stronger push in competing with Roblox.

- Since this is an ongoing season, solidifying and boxing the current meta state is tricky. What I can say for now though is that, with the feel of everything being good on a base level, there's a clear power imbalance. There's absolutely no reason to pick up the Hammer Pump variant of the shotgun, since Frenzy Auto has a strictly higher DPS and can easily mulch people by comparison; same goes for the Enforcer AR, being pitifully outclassed in speed and output by the Nemesis and especially Striker variants; I don't have any major beef with the Lock-On Pistol, due to its four-charge shots contains a slight buffer between each piece + all while leaving the player vulnerable should they be careless (especially to someone who Knows What They're Doing)... but the availability of this is perplexes me. I've gone entire games without either my downed foes or myself finding it, meanwhile I can simply trip across Ballistic Shields, a weapon that sounds about as good as it does while also not being nearly as OP as it sounds or others postulate, despite that being in a higher rarity color. Weird little quirks like that making the fights distinct but also just sort of headscratching as to where they could go. Also, maybe an Issue Of Skill, but I’ve seen instances of a bullet from my sniper shots clearly hitting its mark, but then somehow never registering?

I actually can’t recall the last time a multiplayer game had its pull on me quite like this, perhaps Among Us which had faced similar views. May keep this on for the time being until I actually do procure the Griffin or maybe Solid Snake since he’s close to being unleashed upon the world. I’m not sure where and how this chapter will go next, but if nothing else, it at least pulled me back in after years of inquisitive glances and intrigue. It is also carrying one of the most important mantles of any piece of fiction: having multiple patient zeros that will cajole someone into becoming a furry. Truly, this is a blessed time!

Despite Insomniac using all their technology to make Peter Parker’s face more punchable than ever, Spider-Man 2 still ranks alongside the movie Spider-Man 2 and its tie-in game Spider-Man 2 as one of the most enjoyable pieces of Spider-Man 2 media, improving on the already solid gameplay of its predecessor.

The web slinging is essentially that of the said 2004 tie-in game (if it ain’t broke…etc) but has never felt better on these buzzing haptic controllers - you can feel the weight of each swing. And as if that wasn’t good enough, the game introduces ‘web wings’ that add even more speed and satisfaction to soaring around the massive city. New York has never looked better: the streets and squares feel like they’re bustling with life, highlighted by some neat little photo missions - otherwise it’s easy to miss it all when you’re zooming over rooftops.

I enjoyed the collectibles and side-quests, and even just swinging about aimlessly, so much so that I put off main story missions until they were the last thing to do. In terms of the main campaign, I wasn’t completely averse to playing the novelty MJ or Hailey segments, but the more mundane walking/talking segments could be a bit of a slog, they seemed to exist simply to pace out the build-up to the next actual exciting thing. The boss battles generally had some great set-pieces - lots of trippy Spider-verse-jumping in and out of people’s minds and dimensions like Psychonauts or something - but repetitive in terms of the combat. Despite the variety in combat between the two web-slingers, the boss fights are usually dragged out with health bars replenishing for no reason beyond mere padding.

The story is good fun, has a couple of good dark twists and fun surprises, and while it’s Peter Parker focused, there’s some great moments for Miles too. Kraven is a terrific villain, although somewhat played down a bit for the (SPOILERS) doomy Venom stuff towards the end.

It’s pretty much the first game(s) but bigger, but, even with it’s flaws, Spider-Man 2 is not only the best Spider-Man for the console but probably an essential PS5 game to own, even if just to fall back on for some casual swinging between other, more demanding games.

Glad to say that Ubisoft Montpellier delivered. After resurrecting the Rayman franchise in a spectacular fashion and then being stuck with working on Beyond Good & Evil 2 for years, they came back swing and revived another beloved franchise and ended up creating what I now consider my favorite Prince of Persia game.

The Lost Crown is a visually stunning game that manages to tell a compelling story. The whole gang surrounding main character Sargon consists of fun characters and especially for a metroidvania, a genre that isn't particularly known for good stories, it's really well done.

It seems like the developers tried to rethink some of the genre conventions and focused a lot on quality of life improvements. For example checkpoints are heavily hinted at with a golden glimmer, indicating which direction you need to go for a safe haven and there's the option to instantly restart bossfights if you end up losing, saving you potentially multiple trips.

My favorite mechanic however are the memory shards. I can't count the amount of times I was stuck in a metroidvania game and totally forgot which paths on the map needed a specific ability. In PoP you can just press a button and create a screenshot that shows exactly what 'problem' stopped your progress in an area, making it very easy to check back where to go with your new unlocked ability or gadget.

The abilities are mostly your typical stuff like a double jump and dash but there are also some creative skills that lead to interesting puzzle solving and even found their way into combat. None of the abilities feel restrictive or forced.

Which leads me to the combat, which is ridiculously in-depth for a 2D game. We're talking multiple combos, launchers, sweeps, chargables, animation cancelling, parries ... all that good stuff. There's even a training area that lets you practice combos and tutorials which reveal combat possibilities I myself have not thought of until that point.

Bosses are not always launchable and therefore it's harder to style on them, but due to the fast pacing of combat you barely have any downtime and are able to keep attacking. There are rarely phases where you need to constantly dodge to then get one or two hits in, which I was thankful for. Unlockable super attacks added a nice touch, especially since trying to fill the gauge leads to more tactical risk/reward aspects. Like parrying an attack is harder than simply dodging, but it also fills up your 'Athra' by a decent amount. But getting hit also lets you lose some of it.

The platforming passages feel very fluid and provided a nice challenge. There is even an equivalent to Celestes strawberries in the form of coins you can only collect by safely returning to a safe zone landing on your feet. The platforming might even be my favorite aspect of the game, even though the fights, puzzles and exploration are also great.

I have very little critcism about the game. I think the RPG elements, like upgrading your weapons and amulets (which are just straight-up the charms of Hollow Knight) are not really needed and maybe it could need some more bosses, but it never really bothered me much. Even the length of the game felt fine because I kept unlocking new abilities and areas feel very much different from each other. They knew how to mix things up over the 20+ hours it took me to beat the game. The side quests are also a nice touch that manage to tell some nice stories and are never forced on you.

The worst I can say about the game is probably that it feels like a "best of Metroidvania". There aren't many original aspects to the game and they happily helped themselves to mechanics of other popular games. However, it's all executed very well and never feels shoehorned in.

The 50 bucks feel like a fair price considering the quality and length of the game and it would be nice seeing this game succeed because having Ubisoft develop more AA singleplayer experiences like this would be great.

I just spent a week staying with my parents back in Orkney. It's not accurate to call it my hometown, because my whole family have moved out of the main town of Kirkwall, to a bunch of fields half an hour outside of it. It always makes me a little self-reflective whenever I visit. How things have changed since I left, what I gave up, and why I couldn't picture myself living there any longer than I did.

After years of pitching the idea to my mum, my recently-retired dad has finally purchased an enormous 4K TV. A big 77 inch Sony OLED Bravia thing with HDR, VRR and all the other bells and whistles I couldn't hope to namedrop. No, he hadn't turned off Motion Smoothing, and sitting through a splined version of Kong: Skull Island was quite the ordeal, but I did get up early to tweak all the settings one morning. The Steam Deck can do 4K on older games, and seeing killer7 like that was quite extraordinary (even if I think the game's aesthetic pairs better with a CRT).

Much of my early interest in videogames was shaped by my older brother. I would be his Tails, his Skate, and less enthusiastically, his Gilius Thunderhead. He suggests he doesn't have a lot of time for games these days, but in spite of that, I know has sunk over 500 hours into the Destiny games, and he's spent a lot of money on fancy controllers with backbuttons. I don't fully know what he thinks of my ongoing enthusiasm for games, whether there's an air of "racecar bed" to it, but there seems to be at least a part of him that's a little envious of it. Like that was part of himself that he gave up for a family, financial security and a bunch of high-end home appliances that he doesn't get to use as much as he thought he would. Maybe he's grown up in ways that I haven't. Maybe we've just become very different people. Maybe time has made our differences more apparent. I first noticed it when I got a GameCube, and in spite of all the lawnmowing and housework we'd teamed up on to afford Resident Evil 2 on launchday, he wasn't making plans to try the Resident Evil remake when I told him how incredible it was. He was more focused on going to T in the Park and talking about how into Muse he'd become. [see note]

He was fairly insistent about bringing his PS5 around to our parents' house. I think he'd been looking for a good excuse since our dad got the new telly. He'd even left his braided HDMI 2.1 cable plugged in, in preparation. For all the talk about how he doesn't really have the time for games now, I know he never stopped investing in them. He has owned every PlayStation, and even bought one of those Dual Play 3D TVs that allowed each player to see their own full-screen image when doing multiplayer on Gran Turismo 5. He was pushing me to take the PS5 with me when we visited him on Monday, but it didn't come over until he brought it for the big family day on Saturday.

The PS5 didn't get as much of a look in as I think he'd been hoping. He brought two Dualsenses, and one fancy SCUF controller with the backbuttons, and those were eagerly held by his son and my sister's many, many children. The only local multiplayer game he had was Gran Turismo 7, and I was stuck helping young children navigate Kazunori Yamauchi's middleclass menus, while he sat with his increasingly drunk wife in the neighbouring kitchen. It wasn't even a full hour before they were asking about the new Mario Kart tracks, and my 1080p Nintendo Switch went on.

The following day, I was scheduled to leave. Poor weather conditions lead to my flight being cancelled, and I was driven back to my parents for another night. Everyone was exhausted. It was as if fate was prodding me to further explore the potential of Ultra High Definition.

I remembered my brother hyping up Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart. I hadn't known him to play platformers since the Mega Drive, scoffing at Crash Bandicoot and Croc: Legend of the Gobbos in our subsequent PlayStation library, but I guess becoming a father has pushed him to chase more kid-friendly games, and knowing how enthusiastic I still am for Super Mario, I guess it seemed like a natural recommendation. I saw a digital copy had been installed on his console, and I gave it a shot.

I've been a vocal critic of the shift in direction Sony have taken since the PS3's later years. Shifting their chief base of operations from SCEI Tokyo to the SIE headquarters in San Mateo, California wasn't just a concern for weebs, but it marked a change in the company's values. The PlayStation brand had started as something to bridge the gap between high-end home entertainment and Nintendo-style videogames, with the project originally intended as a SNES with a CD drive, and many of its key developers following that legacy. While games retained the strong standard of mechanical design that had been established on the NES and SNES, they didn't have to follow the conservative family-focused intentions as dictated by Hiroshi Yamauchi. This lead to more adult themes in games like Resident Evil and Metal Gear Solid, but also artier, experimental projects like Jumping Flash and PaRappa the Rapper. That was the PlayStation that I was a fan of, and one that Sony had shifted away from when chasing the surprising success of the Xbox 360. After a tough few years with the expensive PS3 hardware, Sony finally managed to eke out a success with Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, and every project they would invest in afterwards would seem influenced somewhat by its quick-talking, cinematic presentation.

Rift Apart is very much a post-Uncharted 2 Sony game. Nothing ever shuts up, and you never really find yourself thinking about anything. You're constantly force-fed setpieces, with little meaningful user input. Don't play it the way it wants you to, and it won't be long until a character repeatedly pushes you towards the correct answer with a looping instruction. Each environment is enormous, with elaborately detailed buildings and rock structures decorating every location, but they're mere facades. You can only explore what's on the pre-determined route, and there's no meaning to any of it beyond set dressing. Characters attempt to project a fun, wacky presence, but I didn't hear a single funny line of dialogue. The script comes off like a TV spin-off of a Disney blockbuster. There's no sense of sincere passion behind anything. It's just a lot of very talented people doing their job.

There's still a shadow of a real game in Rift Apart. For a lot of the younger players trying it, it's likely their first interaction with a twin-stick shooter, and the warping dodges and weapon options play a little like a kids' version of Returnal. Everything is slick as all get out, and presented attractively, but there's little sense of real depth. If you weren't playing it right, the game would bend itself backwards to put you on the correct path.

Seeing my nieces and nephews over the last week got me thinking about kids' games. The most engaged I saw them was when my 7 year-old nephew was messing around with Google Maps, laughing when he warped through a car that disappeared, resolving that he "blew it up", and finding shitty rundown buildings that he'd joke were my house. It reminded me of how I'd messed around with games and interactive CD-ROMs at that age. I wasn't really interested in how I was supposed to play. Kids don't want to be told how to play. It's instinctive. They try something basic, see the effect, and if it was funny or interesting enough, they dig a little deeper. It's why Minecraft and Roblox have become such massive, dystopian revenue platforms. I don't think games like Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart have a lot to offer them, beyond a distraction. I never thought the Aladdin TV series or Timon & Pumbaa were ever any good, but the familiar characters and constant motion shut me up when they were on.

I think Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart contrasts very poorly against something like Super Mario Odyssey. A game full of fun, surprising moments that truly has a cross-generational appeal. Young kids can have fun discovering rewards from experimenting with every vertex of the levels, and running around the beach with the funny dog, while their weird Mario veteran uncle finds himself emotional at the implementation of the N64 triple jump and the grand celebration of the character's Donkey Kong roots.

Maybe that's it. Maybe my brother just hasn't been playing the right games. Maybe the Resident Evil remake was that Sliding Doors moment that made him the owner of a two-door fridge freezer, and me, the owner of a Steel Battalion controller. It's a little dispiriting to think he might see Rift Apart as the best that a PEGI 3+ can get. How we could have grown up playing the very same copies of games, and lead to such wildly different evaluations of the medium. I love my brother, and I want nothing but the best for him, but suggesting *I* was missing out by not buying Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart makes me very worried about a lot of things.

I put my PlayStation account on his PS5. Maybe he'll dig through my library and download the Resident Evil remake for himself. I think it's far more likely that he'll just keep my profile on there out of courtesy, uncurious about the doors I've opened up, just in case I ever end up playing his PS5 again. I don't expect I will, either. Maybe his son will try the Tony Hawk's I bought, though.


[note - He has not talked about Muse in a very long time, and it was unfair of me to bring this up.]

The perfect simulator of what it’s like to have a pet: they are either asleep or awake, and if it’s the latter you must feed them at every moment and what they ask or prepare to feel their wrath. Not even the likes of Nintendogs dared to replicate the experience so closely.

Back during the first years of the 2010’s, I was really into mobile gaming, like, REALLY into it. Name any game you can think that was big on mobile and tablets during those years and I most likely played it, and hell, I played some stuff I’m not even sure what it was! Plants vs Zombies, Pou, Jetpack Joyride, Zombie Tsunami, Candy Crush, Subway Surfers, Clash of Clans, Carnivores Dinosaur Hunter HD; these are only a couple that quickly come to mind in a sea of games and memories, and believe me, there was a ton of crap in that accursed sea, but I did have my fun with a couple of them and there are even some I still consider to be really well made experiences for what they are. However, it’s a market that was destined to sour on me; to tell the story of how the mobile gaming scene evolved would take at least another 4 paragraphs, so to make it short and personal, my enjoyment of the more short and sporadic gameplay sessions diminished as most games gravitated towards the ‘’free-to-play’’ yet aggressively monetized sphere; I just do not enjoy experiences that require either small burst of monetary investment or that ask patience over small but daily sessions across months or even years, which, come to think of it, may explain also my immediate aversion to life-service games and gachas when those began to gain popularity and a spot on the scene over the recent years.

So yeah, safe from a few tries to Clash Royale back when it released and of course the massive explosion that was Pokémon Go, I never really dabbled into anything smartphone related since, and it probably it would have stayed like that if it weren’t because of my stubbornness; it has been a long ass time since 2016, even if my brain cannot process it yet, and with that passage of time things change, and even if the ‘’free-to-play’’ model is the one to go for many releases to this day, things have change over on the App Store: quite interesting and surprisingly functional ports, really interesting experiences designed for the touch-screen, even companies creating subscriptions that include many more in-depth experiences that don’t require micro-transactions. I’ve been well aware of those changes, and I’ve seen multiple games that actually interest me, but I was still… reluctant to return to that space, to say the list. But wouldn’t you know, one of the companies that does have a compendium of games on the Play Store is Netflix!: I have a Netflix subscription, I have a phone, and after looking at the surprisingly meaty and interesting selection of games, I made my decision…

‘’Fuck it we ball.’’

It’s still pretty surprising that I decided to start with Poinpy tho, it comes from Downwell’s developer, which I do not think is a bad game or anything, but it never clicked with me, I tried it like… three or four times doing multiple runs on each, but it never ended up grabbing me, and this one looked extremely similar to that game’s idea except… you go up instead, I guess. Plus, as I said, Netflix’s catalogue is surprisingly more interesting than I ever expected, so it’s not like I had a shortage of options or anything… I simply saw the game, saw it was a mbile exclusive which seemed like a good way to start my return, it looked pretty nice and so, I gave it a try.

And another one.

And then another one.

And after that yet another one.

And then I kept playing. And playing.

And then I did the puzzles.

And here I am now, 7 hours later. I beat it.

And I couldn’t be happier with my pick.


Poinpy is one of those experiences that is completely designed for mobile, not only because it controls wonderfully with the touch screen, but also because everything about works perfectly both as an experience to put hours on end or to pick up from time to time, and not only that, it’s not that it’s good, it’s good. Of course my goblin brain wouldn’t stop thinking about and so I played it pretty much non-stop, but I can easily see this as a game that many could enjoy by playing a round or two a day. It’s tailor-made for what it’s in, but so are practically all the major phone-releases, that’s not what makes Poinpy special, what makes it so it that it breaks from so many other conventions.

There’s a very clear objective: reach the top, traverse the levels, feed the beast, don’t perish while you do it. Your final goal is always in sight, but it’s not achievable at first; your progress is marked by how well you do it in each of the runs, hoy many exp you can get so you can gain levels and upgrades, maybe collecting golden seeds and getting perks that help you greatly in future runs. Your evolution is steady and immediate, you must earn it, but its always visible, and that’s what kept me coming back, the idea of getting better at the stuff I was doing, both intrinsically and extrinsically, getting even more upgrades and crushing it even more at the next feeding session… well, that and the fact the gameplay fucking rules.

Poinpy doesn’t play with momentary gratification, this isn’t a game about bursts of moments that make you go ‘’Oh I’m doing great!’’, instead, All of it is cathartic; your ascensions are a constant fight for not touching the floor before you have to, you have to think every move quickly, trying to bounce at every wall, at every enemy, every vessel possible just to scratch that extra jump, to get an ever greater combo or to meat the baseline requirement for the juice, it feels incredible, exciting, every fail makes your heart drop and every success is a another reason to not let your guard down and keep going, especially when they begin introducing the fruits that you cannot pick up and break your combo if you do. The bounce, the new mechanics introduced at every new level, like the bubbles for the ice peaks or the cannons for the steam-punk temple; hell, even the sound is amazing, Poinpy is satisfaction at its purest level not because the game is constantly telling you to feel good or because of high-scores, but because you feel it when you are doing good, and it’s just so damn fun, even the optional puzzles that reward you with more golden seeds are a blast to crack open and resolve.

It’s also a super lovely looking game, Poinpy and everything in its world is just so friend shaped, especially the terrible beast, and the colorful scenery and the super fitting music create what I can only describe as eye candy, but a healthy candy, one low on sugar but that still feels super sweet.

I’ts all not perfect in paradise; there’s a level of RNG that I don’t think I enjoy, and if you get really unlucky with fruit or enemy placement you could see your run die in a moments notice; I myself managed to recover from many of these, but they don’t feel designed to generate difficulty, it just feels like I got a bad seed and I got punished for it, which is a shame when everything else is so calculated and works so well.

Poinpy is incredible, it’s fun, it’s colorful, it has ending that’s as mind-melting as it is adorable and sweet, and it has quite the stuff to do, so much so I’ll probably be coming back in the future… tho probably I’ll return just to have fun too.

I’m shocked, I’m happy and overjoyed, this is easily the most fun I’ve had with a mobile game in…. forever, honestly. There’s much phone gaming to be done, I have some ports I really want to check out, but for now, I couldn’t have asked for a better reintroduction.

I love these goobers and the funny thinking emoji pose they make when sitting or dying, now that’s comedy!

EDIT: I originally didn't talk about the Endless Mode in depth since I didn't try it and didn't expect it to be worth mentioning, but after caving in and giving it a shot I ADORE how it's designed, putting you back at the point you started jump-count wise and the only way to get back those orb jumps is to sacrifice valued spaces for perks; an incredibly balanced mode, super smartly designed and an amazing reward for beating the game and an excuse to get even more medals. This game is a gift that wants to keep giving, and I love it.

Like Inside and Limbo, Cocoon knows the world it wants to present and goes for it. I can definitely respect the vision and the approach, but I was let down by the puzzle design.

Cocoon's world is amazing to look at. Insectile doors and winged switches make it clear that everything you are seeing is, at its core, a bug. I love the attention to how things function and the interactions between all these weirdos you have to manage to solve the puzzles Geometric Interactive is presenting you with. I would have expected things to skew more gross than they do, but these buggies are, for the most part, pretty cute.
I do wish there was a bit more in terms of ecological interaction though. The bugs are here to be parts of a puzzle and it is hard to imagine any sort of natural or social structure that would promote their existence. You can imagine a situation where biologists have engineered these puzzle boxes, but the game doesn't have anything to say in that regard, so we are just left with the aesthetic, which IS very cool.

The gameplay here is strictly puzzle solving. You are gathering orbs which at a baseline just power lifts and platforms. In addition, you can enter or exit an orb, taking you inside an alternate space or out to whatever alternate space contains that orb. This eventually becomes recursive and a bit mind-bendy, but a lack of real options (you can only carry one orb at a time and you can only set an orb down in particular spots) and (very) heavy back gating prevents this from ever becoming too much to deal with.
These limitations are what makes the puzzles themselves fall flat for me, unfortunately. For the most part, you just do the only thing you can do and the game is structured such that you will be shunted to the end. There were only a couple of times where I had to think about what was happening and, though these were cool and satisfying, they were far too infrequent to carry the game. The entry and exit from orbs is very cool but the game doesn't do enough to explore them or expand on the ideas they could potentially unlock.

The structure of Cocoon also means that all of the puzzles are about logistics. How do I get the silver orb and the red orb across this chasm at the same time? How do I move this weird bug such that it will open this door for me? You have to understand the mechanics, then run around to execute on them, perhaps failing or realizing something and having to start again. Games can mitigate the inherent tedium in this type of puzzle by using mouse control for faster interaction, through clever level design, or any number of other ways, but Cocoon isn't really interested in this. Paths are circuitous and long, the character is required to physically walk to everything you interact with. The levels and character control are here to show off the art and world -- to the detriment of the puzzle experience.
I am reminded of the dog puzzle in Inside, where you are required to do the same thing over and over, searching for the right timing. The solution is obvious from the start and tedious throughout. It points to design that targets causing problems for the player rather than presenting interesting problems to the player. Cocoon is much the same throughout, though the perspective of Inside (side-scrolling, very limited) makes things less obviously problematic.

All that said, I did like the game in the end. The world of Cocoon is so evocative, creative, and beautiful that if you just chill with it and treat it like a bit of a walking simulator with some lightly interesting puzzles, you can have a good time with it.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.