ITT BL reminisces over his entire game library

[Blacklightning]

41 minutes ago, Angyu said:

That said, I agree that Epic Yarn is the most obvious, because it's been stated that it was never meant to be Kirby.

This is more what i was referring to. Kirby's had a lot of spinoffs, sure, but there's usually a substantial amount of its iconography and mechanics intact enough to justify calling it a Kirby game, and it was clear from a glance that they were built from the ground up with him in mind. Without Kirby's face in Epic Yarn, you probably couldn't tell they were related. The mechanics are fine, but they're as alien to Kirby as Doki Doki Panic was to Mario, and it can be kind of a bad habit where Nintendo are concerned.

47 minutes ago, Angyu said:

Have you played Yoshi's Woolly World? You can actually die in that one. xD It's a mix of standard fun Yoshi gameplay, with some yarn elements thrown in from Epic Yarn, and it's great.

It's actually in large part because of the icy reception I had with Epic Yarn that I skipped over them, honestly. Especially because it was drawing the spotlight further from Fluff, who is honestly an interesting character who could stand to be seen and explored more, and because Yoshi didn't really feel like he had a "main" game since the N64 so humouring more of the wooly stuff felt like a bad idea. I dunno, maybe I'll give it a shot eventually, but I have a gut feeling I'd only enjoy it marginally more than i did Epic Yarn.

 

 

 

Aaaaaand with that, the list draws to a close. Today's the last sprite. And honestly, I think I feel a little frustrated more than anything, because this has been a steady habit for almost a year and now I need to find something else to do to occupy my time. Maybe it's about time I thought about time I started trying to actually animate something, cos I started this list with the intention of being able to make a game someday and that intention definitely hasn't changed. Maybe I'll come back to this thread later to give a few awards to certain games, maybe eventually I'll put everyone together into one group picture like I originally intended. Eh, no point dwelling on shit I'll probably end up doing as spontaneously as this project started. So I guess I'll just say thanks to those of you who have been staying tuned all these months, and finish off with:

Hobo (Jazzpunk)

"Comedy" games usually elicit a huge groan from me. It's not uncommon for a game to establish itself as nothing more than a basic concept and a name and try to claim it's funny based on that alone, like what happens every 4-8 years when the internet has a new president to make fun of: "OooOOOooOOO lEt'S pUt ObAmA iN a ZoMbIe SuRvIvaL gAme" and then not doing anything else beyond making a functional zombie survival game that just happens to star an unusual main character. Even games that attempt to tell actual jokes tend to fall flat a lot because as it turns out comedy is a very difficult and subjective that tends to be found fairly rarely in people who program and design for a living. Even when you directly involve people who can make genuine jokes in their own medium, it matters a lot less in a videogame because good videogame humour is told through subverting the expectations its own mechanics create, not just telling it through dialogue and cutscenes, which is something that career comedians in other mediums tend to struggle a lot with. Even Stick of Truth and Fractured But Whole, despite modestly good and honest attempts in weaving the two together, tend to fall flat on delivery a lot bar a handful of honestly brilliant outliers. These are none of the words I would use to describe Jazzpunk.

Jazzpunk is simply put, the funniest god damn game I've ever played. It may essentially be a walking simulator in all but name, but it constantly subverts expectations with all the mechanics and situations it does give you, and is always keen to reward you with more for looking around. You can get all the way through the intro and the first mission in under two minutes if you really wanted to, but you won't because they pack a RIDICULOUS amount of gags into such a tiny space, even going as far as to provide sidequests that don't give any material award and don't need to because the gag is its own reward. Hell, even the way your character interacts with the world on an incredibly basic level can still make for a convenient gag every now and then, such as how your character reacts to falling from a great height. As usual, trying to refrain from giving specific examples here, because genuinely funny games are best experienced with as little context as possible, just like genuinely well written games are, because honestly both are two sides of the same coin anyway.

There isn't a whole lot I can bring myself to complain about. One could say that there's an overall lack of direction, but sometimes the gag is that you can interact with a specific object or NPC at all so honestly, providing any more direction than the game gives you like highlighting interactable objects might end up taking something out of the humour instead. There are occasions where they'll play the same joke more than once over multiple locations in the same level, and as much as I can appreciate the dedication necessary to make a full fledged Quake 3 clone complete with functioning AI for a single gag it definitely left me feeling frustrated that I kept re-opening it over several different places expecting something else to happen. And honestly, your player character could stand to be a lot faster than they are right now, partly because it takes too long to get anywhere and partly because that could have led to other gags of its own. On the whole though, Jazzpunk is consistently hilarious slapstick almost all the way through, and there are very, VERY few games I can say that about. It's definitely a game everyone should play once if they have the ability to, even if it won't bite the same way on subsequent playthroughs. It's just that brilliant at what it does.

 

And that's a wrap!  I'll try to fix the rest of the broken links on previous pages whenever I get a moment, but thanks again to everyone who's been keeping track of this stupid project all the while!

[Guest]

15 hours ago, Blacklightning said:

It's actually in large part because of the icy reception I had with Epic Yarn that I skipped over them, honestly. Especially because it was drawing the spotlight further from Fluff, who is honestly an interesting character who could stand to be seen and explored more, and because Yoshi didn't really feel like he had a "main" game since the N64 so humouring more of the wooly stuff felt like a bad idea. I dunno, maybe I'll give it a shot eventually, but I have a gut feeling I'd only enjoy it marginally more than i did Epic Yarn.

A part of me also says that Epic Yarn was made a Kirby game because, really, how many super-kiddie franchises does Nintendo need? They have relatively few more "mature" ones (Star Fox, Metroid, Zelda, F-Zero maybe, Fire Emblem), and adding another cutesy IP may have been a bit too much. Better to just make it part of something else, is likely what they figured.

If you enjoyed the original Yoshi's Island game (for SNES/GBA), you should love Woolly World. It plays just like it, you can actually die, it has great music, and the 3DS version has lots of fun little extras.

[Blacklightning]

Alright, so I guess I couldn't stay away from this forever. Although the original list is done, there's still some games I wish I could have introduced and addressed and some trends of the industry I still want to talk about, and for the most part that's because they only left an impression on me after I finished it. So you know what? Let's make this an ongoing thing for now. It certainly won't be DAILY updates like this thread was previously, but if a game is memorable and gives me something to think about, I'll do pixels to go with my thoughts. Starting with:

Sunny, Aubrey, Kel and Hero (Omori)

If this game were a part of the original list, my writeup probably would have been much the same as A Night In The Woods's - a recommendation that you play the game with as little context as possible and take my word for it that it's fucking brilliant, because even the slighest allusion to what happens in it can colour the way you personally experience the game. I still recommend that, and if there's one thing I'd to assure people that haven't played this game yet to go do that now and come back to this later, it's that this is the game that upended Undertale for me in its respective indie RPG niche, and that's not something I say lightly for how fucking saturated we are in Undertale inspired games and AUs now. However if you're still not convinced, I decided to challenge myself this time and see how much I can summarize broadly about this game without spoiling its biggest twists.

It's much better presented, for one. Look, I fucking love Undertale, but it's very much unashamedly a game created almost entirely in MSPaint, for the most part by a lone creator just trying to do enough to get by. I respect that, don't get me wrong, and Undertale gets around it either by playing its cheap looks for laughs or by being brilliant enough in other areas that it regularly escapes notice. But Omori is a game that's brilliant for many of the same reasons Undertale is, including a phenomenal soundtrack easily on part with Toby Fox's work, AND still has a wonderful aesthetic going for it, donning character art in its battles that often spans the entire screen and expressive characters in of themselves that change on the fly from the game's signature emotions system. Even in the overworld, where the pixel art was often at its most stylisticly lazy in Undertale, the sprites are still surprisingly expressive and well animated. It doesn't have to do a lot in the technical department to be pleasing to the eye, but I can still appreciate every little extra mile a niche game like this makes to that end nonetheless - because to be totally honest, if I were in their shoes I probably would have just done the same thing Toby did and just get the graphical side of things over with.

Much like the game's mechanics, the narrative of Omori goes through a wide variety of different moods, sometimes with absolutely neck breaking abruptness. You ever hear the term "mood whiplash" before? Yeah, that's a term I would accurately use to describe Omori. It's a game that has a lot of bittersweet if not outright heartwarming moments spread out between the sadder downtimes and the boss fights that feel like they are all competing to be the final boss, and it's honestly quite difficult to accurately represent how harshly things can rise and fall at the apparent drop of a hat without giving any specific examples. So instead, I'll say this: Omori is one of maybe three games I've ever played that opens with a trigger warning.

And the only game I've ever played where said trigger warning is absolutely justified.

The game's cute exterior, incredibly relatable cast and just all around brilliant writing belies something that is, at its core, a psychological horror game. Not some playable roller coaster ride laden with cheap jumpscares, but deep, slow burning dread that gnaws at the player's insecurities and presumptions and laced with a level of symbolism that is absolute theory-crafting gold. Small, otherwise innocuous details that become unexpectedly significant later are this game's asphalt, not so much as Chekhov's Gun as it is a Chekhov's goddamn clusterbomb in introducing things that will only make sense in hindsight. And the ultimate truth of this game, no bullshit, has left scars in people that are still healing. Even I was still thinking some pretty dark thoughts after all the soul damage I'd been through in the end - and in the end, I believe it's equally valid for a game to be memorable for being miserable as it is for being fun and joy inducing, so long as its for the exact reasons they set out to do.

I think that's about all I can elaborate on in good conscience. I would still overwhelmingly recommend playing this game as blind as possible, because it is simply brilliant at what it does - but don't tell me you weren't warned about what to expect this time.

[Zaysho]

Blacklightning DLC edition, let's goooo

[Blacklightning]

Tilo (Ghost Of A Tale)

Stealth games haven't really had a high profile ever since Splinter Cell. Maybe that's part of why I keep getting drawn to niche titles like this every now and then. It has a pretty strong start, all things considered, every bit like like the stealth titles I grew up with to the point that I felt genuinely younger all over again in the first escape sequence. Immediately after that, though, the level design takes a sudden and very drastic shift outwards and upwards in size - not nearly to the point of being size for size's sake like say, a typical Assassin's Creed game, but it's a pretty stark warning that this isn't a level-based affair and a sign of things to come. You're not just trying to escape or get from point A to point B, you have objectives to fulfill and sidequests to find and leads to chase up and you're constantly backtracking all the time for each of them. In hindsight it should have been a red flag, but I was still having a decent amount of fun regardless. It did have that undertone of "where the fuck do I go", but it was nothing that couldn't be overcome by exploring the area and furthering your understanding of it, which is something that open-ended world design should be encouraging anyway.

And then, Ghost of a Tale takes another sudden and MUCH more drastic turn. You're given a problem that simple stealth can't solve - the way out is locked shut, and without spoiling too much, the circumstances that lead there can only be solved by assembling a disguise and taking side quests from the perspective of the guards. And this is where the fun of the game takes a MASSIVE nose dive, because not only does stealth basically not exist anymore, said disguise is a heavy suit of armour that Tilo can't move around very well in, so not only does the game suddenly devolve into an incredibly boring, almost non-gameplay fetch quest you have to endure the added tedium of taking much longer to get anyplace without risking getting caught by the guards, or having to repeatedly unequip or re-equip your outfits whenever you need to accomplish any task that requires some semblance of fucking mobility. It feels very much like a game that was written and designed completely ad-lib, without much thought to how elements of story or gameplay would flow together or whether they were even fun of their own right, and this is like 80% of the entire game from that point forward. What the hell were they thinking?

Regardless, this isn't the reason I decided to give an entry on the list to this game - just a background detail I couldn't afford to omit, because it paints a picture of the grander point that I'm about to make. That being, that this game makes mistakes that tend not to be made unless you don't have a history in videogames, and nowhere is that more apparent than the strange oxymoron that is this game's graphical style. It's evocative of a Wind in the Willows style of design that I haven't seen in goddamn forever (...maybe that's another reason why the opening of this game made me feel so nostalgic), and it would be pleasing at a glance even if it were just that. But it also needs to be said that this game's graphical style is the brainchild of an animator that formerly worked at Dreamworks.

And it shows.

And yet as much as it pains me to say, for all the work that went into an indie product, I really have to say it. That's all this graphical style is: pleasing at a glance. That's where the oxymoron of this all comes into play. It's an artstyle that looks good, but is actually astonishingly crap at its job. You're probably wondering what the hell that means, and for the longest time I was struggling to put that into words myself. Until I found myself rewatching a Dunkey video one day and something suddenly clicked.

Now, even in these more analytical kinds of videos Dunkey still has a habit of goofing off and going on silly tangents and exaggerations, as is his signature style of making videos, so I think you can forgive me if I don't immediately figure out where his emphasis is supposed to be. But for the purposes of this writeup, here's the most important bit: "the background is in the background, and the focus is on the characters". And to emphasize what that actually means, I'm going to use an example from a game that DOES have good graphical design:

Yes, that's right. I'm using a NES game from 1986 to make a point about a game made in 2016. That's how fucking bad this problem has gotten. I know some people are already scoffing at this, but here's the rub - videogame design is all about knowing where the player's eyes should be drawn, and distinguishing objects from one another whenever they have a reason to be. I chose Castlevania for this because they accomplish this with simple, demonstrable colour theory. All the backgrounds in this game follow a theme of either cool or grey colours (blue and green in this case here), whereas most of the tiles you can actually stand on are warmer colours (orange) and the player and enemies are distinguished in a realm all their own through combinations of colour not seen together in either layer. The background is in the background, and the focus is on the characters. Colours aren't the only means by which you can accomplish this, and the best in the business have accomplish much smarter and more subtle means of differentiating these "layers" of gameplay from one another so the player doesn't have any trouble knowing what to do, where to go, what's an enemy and what's something they can collect to use for later, but it's the most obvious means I could use to express this point. Now with all that in mind, let's go back to GoaT:

Look at this picture, and ask yourself "where are my eyes supposed to be drawn to?", and you'll find the graphical style of this game quickly unravel. There's not much in the way of real landmarks, the lighting effects are so bright and beautiful that they're actually distracting and either keep you from focusing on any one thing or actually physically making them harder to see, and speaking of hard to see things the game has an overall palette that frequently devolves into brown, grey and green mush that has a really hard time distinguishing what needs to be distinguished. And it really is telling how much games these days use waypoints as a crutch when you see a game like this without them, because you physically cannot find shit in a game designed like this without them and you practically have to go to the ends of the visible earth in this game to find the shit you need to complete it because reminder, this is a game that quickly devolves into an utterly generic fetch quest and everything looks the fucking same from a distance. It's embarrassing how commonplace this has become in the industry, and how much people inexplicably treasure this style of design instead of loathing it.

News flash: videogames that are designed like movies are actually total dog shit. Why are we still doing this?

[Blacklightning]

Temjin (Virtual On)

This game puts me in an incredibly strange position. It's an arcade one-on-one third person mecha duelling game probably best known for baffling choice of tank controls. Now I'm going to put a lot of emphasis of those controls throughout this writeup, because it's possible you may have misheard of misinterpreted me. I don't mean tank controls just in the sense that your character turns left or right instead of strafing - I mean tank controls in the sense that your character literally controls like a tank, giving you two control sticks and forcing you move them as guiding the individual treads on a tank even though none of the mechs in this game actually run on treads. For example, just to turn around in place you have to push one stick forward and the other backwards. This is a game I really, really debated representing at all because in its purest form, the writeup would be just "mecha game has shit controls lol", but that leads me to two internal arguments I've been having with myself over it - one, these controls are the reason it's made a name for itself to the point that it's iconic and a big part of its identity, and two, why the fuck am I willing to give Killer7 a pass for quirky controls and not this? And there really isn't a simple answer to either of those, so I figured I'd use this as an excuse to air my thoughts out a little more publicly.

I think the first, foremost, really big point I have to make about this is the same point I make about nearly every competitive fighting game in memory, as it's clear and obvious it's the medium it intends to stand up to - the end result is a learning curve designed to be exclusionary above all else. It's already bad enough when traditional fighters abuse cheat codes to the point that they become somehow normalized as a standard part of gameplay - Virtual On instead makes even the basic act of moving around the arena a clunky chore. And competitive games have an incredibly bad habit of making games difficult to play and construing it as "depth", when all that really amounts to is requiring you to put hours if not days of practice into it at a time in order to play the game at the bare minimum level for any given character to be considered viable. Contrary to astonishingly fucking common belief, you CAN make a game with a very high skill ceiling without intentionally obfuscating and janking up your own controls and mechanics in a way that enables only a select few to actually play it. And this is a fact that AM2 were almost certainly aware of when they ported the game to Xbox Live Arcade, because not only did they add an option to control your character with a single stick like any other 3rd person game with common sense, they made it the standard control option to boot.

Okay, so let's say you subscribe to the notion that it's okay for a game to intentionally defy industry trends to stand out. Maybe you like it because it's quirky, or you get a kick out of things that are ironically bad. I'm not judging. The point is, it's not something you can do just for its own sake - mechanics still have to serve a purpose in the grander game, and the game has to actually be designed in a way that accomodates it. I have reservations with the way Killer7 controls, but it was absolutely designed to be a game that functions on a series of branching rails in the first place, and using the A and B buttons for moving and turning ends up making a strange amount of sense before long because it frees up the control stick for aiming. What purpose does it serve for Virtual On to literally control like a tank? Absolutely fucking none. The metagame is effectively to avoid using them as much as humanly possible and just abuse dashes and jumps instead, because they both forcibly turn you instantly towards your opponent and effectively acts as an autoaim. You probably think that's hyperbole, so you're welcome to watch professionals do it instead and judge for yourself:

So in a way, I would actually argue that Virtual On neutered itself long term by being designed in such a way, because although people remember the game for being designed in such a way, it is ultimately only ever remembered as a novelty and not much more. A gimmick even, I would go as far as to say. Which is kind of a shame honestly, because despite the distaste I've expressed for the way Virtual On is made I still believe it has plenty of potential, and I hate it when Sega just sits on potent franchises and does nothing with them every bit as much as I hate it when anyone else does it.

[Blacklightning]

Kazuma Kiryu and Goro Majima (Yakuza 0)

If you've somehow read through the entire thread thus far (or more specifically, the entry for Just Cause 2), you'll probably know by now that I've grown a huge disdain for open world games that boast huge open worlds for no other sake than to have a buzzworld on the boxart. Such realms, though technically huge, tend to be sparse and spread thin because they lack a magic combination of manpower and time to make any part of it worth actually exploring of the player's own initiative, and exceptions to that rule tend to be so few and far in between that I can usually only name one or two of them off the top of my head. Yakuza 0 exists as the antithesis of this idea - not including the gated off areas for story sequences, the game has two maps and you cover the whole breadth of either of them with a scant five minute jog. And yet, this works overwhelming in the game's favour, not its detriment, because all of the content within - story, side missions, minigames, resturaunts, services and collectibles all - is densely compacted together as a result, leaving you with a city that feels all the richer than most other open world games, and to boot cuts out most of the padding of other open worlds which is normally predominantly just walking from place to place and occasionally defending yourself along the way. Really, I don't think there's much point in making a videogame environment any bigger unless you can somehow preserve the same or similar density Yakuza 0 pulls off.

Come to think of it, a lot of my points for Yakuza are anecdotes to things I've already written in the thread - so fuck it, I'm going to lean into that more. Point two: Growl. Unless it's because it directly clashes with the game's own themes (as was the case with, say for example, Lisa), a game should never be afraid to be ridiculous. Ridiculous can be funny, it can be impossibly cool and badass, it can even be terrifying and imposing depending on how you utilize it. But it is NEVER unmemorable. Indeed, many events and sequences in Yakuza in general, nevermind 0, are memorable to the point of being literally memetic simply because of how over the top they are, whether it's heavily tattooed men ripping their shirts off to engage in a protracted boss fight, helping a failing dominatrix get better at their job, running a real estate empire between encounters with the Yakuza or one of the most involved sidequests in the game being an easily missable box car racing minigame right in the corner of the map. And although literally any other time I would frown apon interrupting the player's control for setpiecing, scripted throws/counters and quick time events, they're spectacularly choreographed when they happen, and lead to some of the most amazing and tense moments in the game because of it (although it helps that unlike a lot of other games you can't just button mash your way through them because Yakuza 0 automatically fails them if you press the wrong button at any point). And that really is the only time QTEs should ever be seen as acceptable - if you're going to take away my personal involvement in a fight to show me something, it had better be fucking incredible, and Yakuza rarely fails in this regard.

And lastly, Shenmue. Yakuza is actually a series I namedropped directly at the end of that writeup, and for very good reason - although Yakuza exists largely as a result of the groundwork Shenmue set, unlike Shenmue it has a basic amount of god damn respect for the player's time and initiative. Sure, you can say Yakuza incentivizes going out to clear side quests for their own little benefits, but you're rarely if ever at any point prevented from just making for the main storyline whenever it's convenient and you feel like you're ready for it. Maybe there's a handful of points that require you to pay money to progress, but it's usually to the degree of chump change you could easily raise from random encounters - not only do you not get much if any money from random fights in Shenmue, they outright only happen in a select few portions of the game and by consequence force you to grind a fucking job in manual labour for several real time days when the game arbitarily decides you need to pay a fee of several thousand dollars to progress.

Look, if you're an old school fan of Shenmue and have been sleeping on Yakuza so far, don't pay any attention to what my opinion of it is - I promise that you will fucking love this game. If you're into open world games and have grown sick of how thinly spread they've become in more recent years, you will fucking love this game. If you're a sucker for shonen bullshit and just want to see two grown men beat the shit out of each other in spectacular fashion, fuck it, you'll still love this game - the open world still exists as a nice bonus on top of all that. Actually, fuck it, if you're into beat-em-ups of any kind, just give Yakuza 0 a shot. I doubt you'll be disappointed.

[Blacklightning]

Red (Everhood)

Everhood is a game that's clearly wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, as do a lot of games that were also inspired by Undertale. And that's probably elicited a groan from a few people already, so I'll just come out and say it - no, it's not as good as Undertale. Though I don't think it's a bad game by any means, I think it's important that I be up front about that first of all.

Much like most Undertale analogues, the first thing people tend to hear about Everhood is the obligatory quirky battle system. And it's the thing that tends to put a lot of people off this game on first glance as it did with me, because it's styled after something of a rhythm game. Again, this is something I have to be clear about up front, because this impression is pretty misleading - it's not literally a rhythm game. It takes place on a Guitar Hero esque board and notes of varying colours and shapes sail down towards the bottom in tune with the fight's backing track. That's where the similarities end. Rather than trying to match those notes, your role in a fight is a character that's physically on the board, jumping and weaving around the notes to avoid taking damage from them. Although this may end up reflecting a select few flaws of actual rhythm games - namely, that you'll probably die at least once to most enemies before you have a decent enough idea of how to counter a given enemy's chart because you have no way of seeing a lot of that shit in advance - it's a lot more forgiving than it sounds, particularly if you're like me and literally do not play any actual rhythm games. I think my one actual complaint with the system is that it feels kind of awkward to play exclusively with the arrow keys, especially in the later game when the charts start getting genuinely hectic, and could have benefited from spreading some of the buttons out. Like I dunno hypothetically speaking, leave left and right where they are and move the up and down keys to space and shift respectively, or something. Once you juggle too much shit with one hand and start getting demanding with it, it's a pretty quick trip to crampville.

One edge this DOES give it over Undertale, though, is that while there are no random encounters, it instead makes literally every encounter in the game unique. One could say that many fights are in essence, minature concerts in their own right, spanning a huge spectrum of tempos and genres across its rich and colourful cast and feeding into one another, and it really does a lot of good to flesh out the characters this way in what is already a hugely character focused game, especially when you'll be confronting almost every character in the game more than once anyway. And of course, even in a vacuum the soundtrack is excellent and diverse in a way a lot of games struggle to be, so here's a quick sampling of the less spoilery tracks to help whet your appetite:

Unfortunately while fights are also pretty to look at too, the devs sometimes go WAAAAAY the fuck too far with it, overloading the screen with such visual noise and camera tricks that some fights can be genuinely nauseating, even speaking as someone who doesn't suffer from epilepsy themselves (so lord only knows how the fuck they would feel trying to play this). Supposedly they had the game tested specifically for photosensitivity issues and part of me still doesn't believe it isn't problematic, but I guess there's a setting to disable effects if you can't stand them? I just think it begs the question of why any part of the game was designed that way in the first place, because I don't believe there's a genuine challenge or reason in making it a struggle to discern where the fuck you are in relation to where all of your threats are. I'm thankful at least that the entire game isn't just a constant stream of screen spinning and distortion, but there's definitely at least one fight in the game that will pose an unnecessary roadblock to your progress through it for exactly this reason.

It probably sounds like I'm being harsh on this game. Like most of what I'm bringing up about it is negative and that it should colour your impression of the game accordingly. It's to this point that I'll say that like most games in the higher spectrum of Undertale-alikes, one of its best qualities is its writing, and if you've kept up with how I cover games of this kind before you'll know that it puts me in a very difficult spot - they're games best experience blind, with as little context to their events as possible. All I'm comfortable with revealing in that regard is that Everhood has a very refreshing spin on its themes that are pretty unique to birds of its feather, and will probably give you honest thought about what it means to be a good guy. In every other respect, I'm asking you to just trust me on this - the writing is still good, and well worth enduring the rest of the game's faults for.

[Blacklightning]

Stoat and Leshy (Inscryption)

The fact that this came from the same talent as Pony Island came as a huge surprise to me. The fact that the publishers advertise it as such on the store page never felt like the big boast they probably thought it is - Pony Island to me felt like pretentious trash that plays its hand way too soon, and honestly had such a lack of consistent mechanics that it could almost be called a minigame collection in disguise. The narrative of Inscryption may be cut from very similar cloth, but godDAMN if isn't the best possible version of Pony Island's storytelling devices. The overarching premise of Inscryption is quite simple - you're trapped in a log cabin with a psychotic DM, and forced to humour him in a fictional card game under threat of being turned into a card yourself. What makes this narrative approach interesting is that the plot can unfold both within the card game and without, as Leshy will let you stand up and wander the cabin any time as long as you're not in the middle of a duel. Even a small handful of the actual cards in the game will help you play and uncover mysteries, as they used to be individual people themselves, which is a neat little mechanic that in some ways I wish they'd leaned into deeper. I mean yeah, giving every card in the game the ability to talk would have been kind of extreme, but at the very least it might have been nice to see your previous death cards engage in a small spot of banter based on the way their runs went.

Much like Everhood up above, Inscryption has a similar caveat in that people may be turned by the idea of having to design a functional deck based off the unusual metas that card games tend to follow. Inscryption knows this, and hands players one hell of a life to help stagnant playthroughs out - the aformentioned death cards. Whenever you bite the dust, you're given the chance to create a brand new card by mixing matching a small, random selection of traits of other cards in your deck, even including other death cards sometimes. And there is absolutely no upper or lower limit to how powerful you can make a card this way, so death cards can - and often will - flagrantly break the game in your favour. This can be kind of a double edged sword - while yes, it can keep the game from feeling stagant when nothing feels like it's working, it sometimes goes all the way to the opposite spectrum and makes the game feel like an anticlimax, and nowhere is this more obvious than the fight with Leshy themselves, which feels like it was directly designed to be cheesed rather than fought directly.

It's a little difficult to elaborate further because it concerns some of the many twists this game takes later down the line - and believe me when I say the twists can get fucking WILD - but the one issue I take with Inscryption is that it feels like there should have been more of it, especially when the game's own worldbuilding seems to suggest there would have been if not for another of one of the aformentioned twists. Credit where credit is due, they've expended some effort towards building up the game's lastability by way of Kaycee's Mod, a free and official expansion which could be described as an inescapable, replayable version of the game's first chapter (which was itself enough of a roguelike that I'm shocked that it didn't already have this functionality), but the game's own lore suggests it is about half as big as it should be, and as it stands currently the game instead on a total antclimax without so much as an actual final boss to conquer first. An emotional anticlimax, that much I'll grant, but it almost feels like this ending was cast to meet a deadline for how abrupt it ends up feeling in the finished product.

For what time you DO get with the game, though? Phenominal, easily a standout of the year. One can only hope there are more expansions yet to be introduced besides Kaycee's Mod - the ARG going on in the background still gives me hope that someday, this game could yet live up to its full potential.

[Blacklightning]

Commando (Risk of Rain 2)

First getting into RoR2 is an absolutely mystifying experience. The only context you're given is a vague allusion to the fact that you're investigating the disappearance of a starship from the last game. Beyond that, the game just drops you into a map without a hint of where the fuck you're going, what the fuck you're doing, and really, even a basic sense of how the fuck the game's mechanics work. Most of your first few runs will end before you even make it to the second stage, leaving you incredibly lost and confused. There's good and bad in an approach with this - a game that refuses to hold your hand and lets you accomplish things of your own initiative can be surprisingly liberating, piecing together the game's background story little by little through the logs attached to items and areas, and adapting to the game's tricks and opposition through simple observation and pattern recognition to build you little by little into a certifiable badass. However, what this ultimately means is a LOT of trial and error that only seems to exist to pad the game's longetivity out more than it's really earnt the right to. Isn't this basically the same bullshit Dark Souls games pull? No, serious question, I haven't played any of them but that's the first impression I get from all of them, and that shit honestly never really struck me as decent game design despite what purists of that school of design would have me believe.

Anyway, the point is that you'll die a lot, and a good half of the time it won't feel like your fault. Maybe you'll just get a shit run of item drops and end up physically unable to do anything - because it IS essentially a roguelite at the end of the day, and randomness was always going to play some part in it. Maybe you'll get one hit killed out of apparent nowhere despite items that are in your favour, and find yourself unsure of what either you or they did differently that they were able to deal you that much damage at once. Maybe you're playing the DLC that was just released and ended up dying to the Collapse debuff which seems to automatically kill you just for getting hit at all by certain enemies without a single possible preventative course of action on your part. It's one thing for a roguelite to have random chance as an element to every run, but it's quite another when a run DEPENDS on RNG just to be able to show results at all. It's a very common failing of roguelites in general, but that doesn't mean I'm any more accepting of it as a flaw of the genre - games like The Binding of Isaac have already demonstrated that most runs are perfectly playable even with shitty luck, and that's the distinction I really wish I could hammer in more with this kind of balancing. Even at the worst of times, a bad run should still be PLAYABLE.

Just when it starts feeling like RoR2 is completely unassailable without a lucky draw, one may come across an extremely important lifeline - the Artifact of Command. Simply put, it's a mutator that, rather than dropping items directly, causes them to drop as rarity-tiered essences from which you can simply just CHOOSE which items they turn into, and the Artifact is in no way considered a cheat by the game's other achievements and unlocks. And once you start abusing this to customize your items to your survivor's given strengths, it quickly becomes apparent that the game was unironically designed to be played this way. Commandos don't get anything done without an abundance of syringes, melee classes need focus crystals to thrive, EVERY class benefits from crit chance in ways thay would not have ordinarily, and worst of all, there are items that only function at ALL in synergy with other very specific items, such as the Harvester's Scythe, Predatory Instincts, Death Mark, and worst and most recently the DLC's Pocket ICBM which is a rare item that only has any effect with THREE other means of attack in the entire game, out of an item selection counting 137 and a playable cast counting 13 strong. The point is, item and character synergy plays a very, VERY fucking important part in this game, but because there's no element of choice ordinarily, you're given absolutely no ability to act on that - and if you ask me, that really, REALLY hurts this game's skill floor a lot more than it has any right to.

Even just making every item drop a choice of one item between two or three potential drops and leaving Command as an optional extra would have done so much for this game's wiki-dang-it status. And speaking of that, I haven't even talked about some of the character unlocks yet! There's one unlock where you have to "defeat the unique guardian of Siren's Call", which is one of the game's possible maps, but the game to my knowledge doesn't give you the slightest hint that you have to shatter a bunch of randomly generated eggs all over the map in order to even see it. Another is to "stabilize the cell in the Void Fields", without the slightest hint about what or where either of those things are, much less that it's near the bottom of a fucking bottomless pit with absolutely no indication that it's there. Item unlocks aren't always much better, in fact in some aspects they're even worse. I'm just going to be blunt about this because I've been tired of seeing THIS crop up time and time again ever since Minecraft - if the ONLY way of knowing something exists in your game is by looking up something outside of the game's means, then unless it's some kind of obscure easter egg it's a failing on you as a designer, no matter how tired you claim to be of games that hold your hand and lead you around on a leash instead.

As usual, my tone probably suggests I have some deep-seeded hatred of this game, so let me just take my closing sentence to dispel that - I have 173 hours in it at time of writing, more than any game I've played in over six years, and it definitely wouldn't have gotten that much out of me if there wasn't SOMETHING it had gotten right. I guess it's just frustrating to see flaws like this in a game that's been constantly building on itself for two years and seems stubbornly insistent on not fixing any of them because the subgenre considers them normal. If you love something, you should want it to be the best version of itself.

[Blacklightning]

Dremagen (Sega Heroes)

Much like Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, this is a game I chose simply to make a point. Any number of games, especially these days, could have been chosen to make an almost identical point - the only distinction Sega Heroes gets is that it's the one I played and the one I personally identify with.

That point is that live services fucking suck.

Mechanically speaking, there's almost nothing wrong with Sega Heroes - we know this because as is typical of the state of modern mobile gaming, it's essentially just a reskin of a different famous and functional puzzle game (Bejeweled), regurgitated and repackaged as something of a squad based RPG in which the focus is using the puzzle board to trigger the attacks and special abilities for the hero of the corresponding colour, rather than breaking crystals simply for its own sake to raise a high score. It is absolutely a basic bitch kind of game, and there is nothing wrong with that. Phone games these days largely exist as distractions, vague baby games and busy work to keep the human mind stimulated when you have absolutely nothing else to keep yourself occupied, and if Sega Heroes is unremarkable in any other respect it was certainly good at that specific job. But if you know anything about the state of the mobile market today, you know the story doesn't end there.

At any given time you are liable to be fucking bombarded with ads, both for external content and the game's own internal monetization systems, the latter of which all progression in the game is based around. Oh sure, you can grind unlocks out of the game for free eventually, but the fact that it is a grind is very much intentional, explicitly designed to inspire tedium and frustration in the hopes that their playerbase will eventually get fed up and just pay money to get the thing they want - or more likely NEED - in order to progress. I really don't like pulling a "back in my day" in a context like this, but I read a phrase like "game intentionally pisses its own userbase off" and tend to interpret it as I Wanna Be The Guy, as in "we're doing it because to somebody or from some angle, it's fucking funny", not "we're manipulating these naieve, stupid saps into giving us cash that we weren't owed and didn't perform any kind of work or service for".

"Live service"? What the fuck even IS that? If you're paying them money for content that was already finished, already in the game files and was going to be there regardless of what the publisher or developer did in order to get it there, at what point is it supposed to be considered an equivalent exchange? What is the money supposed to be going towards? Server costs? If it was an MMO, sure, I would understand. If multiplayer still played a big component in it in a way that the experience of the game would be seriously impacted if there were no servers to connect to, like is the case for say, the Destiny series, I would be begrudging about it but I would still understand. But Sega Heroes is a fucking single player game. There isn't a single point in which a server plays a fundemental part of its function - lives, currency, character roster, level progress, all of these are things that can be stored locally on the user's device without changing a single thing about how the game functions, in fact it would work BETTER because the game would not have to wait to connect to a server to get any kind of shit done and run faster as a result. The only time you interact with other human beings at all is summonable raid bosses that a bunch of people whittle down the HP of in three or so minute intervals at a time - YOU DO NOT EVEN FUCKING SEE THEM FIGHTING, IT IS LITERALLY JUST A STUPID FUCKING NUMBER GOING DOWN WHENEVER YOU'RE NOT LOOKING.

It is the most threadbare, nonsense excuse for extracting cash they don't need or deserve from people possible - and if it were as simple as just getting any of the shit you actually paid for, the game still wouldn't be on the list. But no, we have to delve back into loot boxes again, randomized outcomes of a given transaction that only have a chance of giving you a desirable outcome. Now I know someone is going to say "well I'm a responsible spender so that shit doesn't affect me", so allow me to just come out and say it straight: listen here, you unempathetic little shit. Entirely take out of the equation that this outright targets problem gamblers and children, people with poor impulse control that can literally empty entire bank accounts and not even get the character they were trying to gamble towards because the odds are intentionally weighed against them, and it STILL wouldn't change the fact that lootboxes and microtransactions as a whole objectively make games worse for their presence, because they HAVE to be made worse to incentivise people to literally buy their way out of it. Even from an utterly narcissistic, self serving perspective, it makes no sense to simply ignore and tolerate rot like this, much less encourage it.

All of this is building up to one conclusion, which I'll build up further by way of the game's ending:

The events of the game don't even gain any genuine closure - as far as we're aware, the characters, much like their players, simply fight Dremagen forever - because if the player experiences closure, they have a reason to stop playing, and if they stop playing the game loses a potential stream of revenue. And there's a certain dark irony in the fact that when I saw this ending for myself, the servers were shutting down in a week's time. And to this day, the game - which reminder, is single player -  is literally unplayable for no other reason than it has no servers to connect to.

This is the fallacy of the concept of a live service, laid bare - a game designed to be played forever, with the intention of being paid for forever, but for whatever reason feels no obligation to be playable forever, even when nothing about its circumstances or gameplay prohibit it from doing so. And when avarice finally runs its course, it's not the publishers who suffer for it, but the players, running off with absurd amounts of money when all they did to earn it was occasionally drop a single flash animated character into the game at a drip feed pace, and leave the people who actually paid for it with literally nothing. Despicable.

[Blacklightning]

Clown (Space Station 13)

Ask just about any veteran of this game, and they'll tell you that you shouldn't play SS13.

Now there's a few wildly different reasons any individual could tell you that. It could be a misplaced sense of cliquedom and elitism not unlike the fighting game community, who would prefer not to have players in its community flailing mindlessly but gives them no avenue to improve. Maybe it's because of racism - no seriously, many servers for this game are infamous for hosting some of the worst scum of the earth, and I have heard more hard R's through this game than the entirety of my experience with Xbox Live, so it comes as no surprise that said people would prefer their community not be contaminated by quote unquote "normies" that a more popular game tends to foster. The real reason you shouldn't play it, however, is because it is positively arcane to play. Interacting with anything in the world is an insane labyrinth of left clicks, shift clicks, ctrl clicks and alt clicks that are often completely inconsistent between items and objects, and that's on TOP of a toggle for its "Intent" system that can give stuff up to four other functions for every click, and that's just for the absolute most basic elements of moment to moment gameplay - there are aspects of the game that force you to learn even more on top of that, and once again, follow virtually no consistent theme for which buttons do what.

And okay, maybe it's normal for a game of this type to have a LOT of hotkeys - lord knows it's another reason why I haven't dared touch an MMO in decades, but I'm not knocking fans of the genre if it's exactly what that kind of game needs to function. The point is, even then the general purpose of a button bind is still clear, whether it's for attacking or mobility or support or what have you. And much like say, the Bounce Bracelet in SA2, SS13 has a bad habit of putting way too much conflicting shit onto a single button or hotkey - the problem just tends to stand out more because SS13 has a fucking LOT of them. And yet by and large, it's a problem with the game that the community never seems to want to fix, despite most people seeming to disagree that this jank forms most of the game's worst traits. Despite being made on an engine that was invented back when the fucking Genesis was still relevant, most attempts to update and/or streamline it to modern engines and design sensibilities tend to go conspicuously ignored and abandoned, like a cat you let into a room after several minutes of meowing and then immediately wants to leave wants it gets what it wants. And that's the BEST case scenario - because SS13 as a whole is possible mostly because of collective community support, and some programmers are genuinely so fucking petty that they would sabotage the code or leave kill switches built into it than allow some of their favourite classes or mechanics to go through any kind of rework or rebalancing.

And it's annoying, because buried underneath all the jank and toxicity is a genuinely amazing concept of a game, that for some reason never seems to get explored in such depth anywhere else. That being, you're just one member of a crew of dozens assigned a role in keeping the station running and/or working towards a long time goal, whether by mundane ways such as miners, janitors and even the aformentioned Clown, to more specialized professions such as doctors, scientists, botanists and engineers, which all have their own learning curves and mechanics - in some ways TOO many, much like the controls. It's a game of incredibly absurd mechanical depth that lends itself well to roleplaying in character, often to the point that it also becomes an incredible storywriting tool to those keeping track of the events.

What also sets SS13 apart from other social engineering games like say, Among Us, is the layer of uncertainty that surrounds any antagonism you might potentially face while doing your tasks. You don't know what the enemy is going to be - they could be double agents, heretics, cultists, a changeling, a group of nuclear operatives or even a fucking wizard, but you won't know for sure which before a shift starts. You won't know when they show up - besides the fact that many of them operate on stealth and subterfuge, some of them such as the nukies and wizard have their own start up phases where they carefully manage their gear and abilities before they decide to launch their assault, and some antagonists might not even be physically present in the game when the shift starts, spawning later into a game to give the growing list of dead spectators something to do. You don't even know for sure whether a shift will HAVE antagonists - sometimes you might be jumping at shadows the entire game only to realize you were never in fact in any real danger, which I find very strange that more games of this kind don't delve into because this kind of mystery is SO much less effective when you know for a fact that someone is guaranteed to want you dead at some point.

To the best of my memory, the only game off the top of my head that approaches SS13's open ended, subterfuge-based gameplay is Barotrauma, which takes place on a submarine and by consequence, has a much smaller team to work with. And it really is a shame, because I still like the concept of it - I just wish it didn't play like it was made in a jailbroken version of Runescape Classic.

[Blacklightning]

Slum Dweller (Streets of Rogue)

I'm just going to nip this in the bud first of all before anyone has a chance to be let down - despite the namesake, the only real inspiration this game takes from Streets of Rage is its choice of music, and fuck me what a choice it is:

Rather, Streets of Rogue is, as the name might also suggest, a top-down Roguelite instead, passing through procedurally generated floors of a city that are conspicuously stacked on top of one another for some reason on a mission to dethrone the corrupt, oppressive mayor on behalf of an underground resistance and take their place. That's not to say it's just about going from point A to B though, far from it. It's not even to say that every NPC in the game is necessarily hostile to you - nearly everyone you meet in the game is the same class as one of the many playable characters, and have roles and behaviours themed around them. For example, Slum Dwellers will snatch spare change off the ground if it's left lying around too long, thieves will actively attempt to pickpocket you and flee if they think they can catch you off guard, Blahds and Crepes will immediately try to murder one another if they see each other, and many others offer goods and services within several possible buildings in the game like the doctors, bartenders and shopkeeps, just to name a few. I can't think of many other games where the options for players and NPCs are so close together, to the point that even completely antagonistic classes like Cannibals and Zombies are fully playable.

Before you can think about going from one floor to another, you have to do 2-3 missions to do for the resistance before the elevator opens. These missions, as well as their rewards, are random, and can range anywhere from neutralizing a specific NPC, retrieving an item from them or a container in their building, blowing up a generator or just hitting a bunch of switches. And while some characters are better at certain jobs than others - Thieves for example have a lot of tools to make easy work of jobs that involve stealing shit - SoR is absolutely a game that rewards being creative with the options that you do have on hand, which are constantly accumulating over the course of a full playthrough not just in the sense of item rewards (which are usually finite) but also a series of perks you can gain by levelling up, both of which are so mind bogglingly broad and numerous that I genuinely don't believe I can comprehensively cover the scope of them within a paragraph.

You might recognize that as a similar trait to what The Binding Of Isaac has going on, and that I labelled it as a flaw, not a strength - because the more randomized options you add to a game, the less likely you are to stumble apon a combination of traits (or even just one) that will turn a mediocre run into a good one or even carry the run singlehandedly. And while for the longest time it was tempting to say the same of Streets of Rogue, in truth this game has a genius mechanic at its disposal to keep runs from depending on RNG alone to be fun or successsful - the Loadout system. Simply put, you can just outright filter items and perks out of their respective loot pools, rather than allowing literally every item a possibility to appear in a given run. Not only does this mean you can whittle down the item list to a narrower focus of more dependable items and get rid of utterly fucking useless junk (which SoR still has a few instances of, let's be fair), you can even tailor it to the needs of specific playable classes - for example, completely removing firearms from the loot pool and focusing down melee specific perks for characters that are completely incapable of wielding guns. Lord fucking knows I would play Lilith a lot more in The Binding Of Isaac if I could make the game reliably spawn the familiars she depends on to be effective.

Despite that, it's not nearly as game breaking as it sounds - the pools for items and perks still have a minimum number you need to bring in before being allowed to start a game, so you can't just start a run where the only reward is three extra rocket launchers every floor. So you still need to work carefully in respect to the options you have at any given time for a mission, and especially in respect to the character specific side missions, which are incredibly difficult in their own right and often require a good amount of planning and foresight of their own. It's an incredibly rare example of near perfect balance in a roguelite game, where it feels genuinely satisfying to get a character all the way to the end, Big Quest and all, without feeling like the result of such will boil down to little more than luck. So if you're a fan of The Binding of Isaac, or are even one of the people completely fed up with Isaac's rapidly increasing dependence on RNG, I would strongly recommend giving this game a try. The one regret I have with it is that, despite what things seemed on the surface, it isn't a huge bustling city sandbox alight with things to do, so much as a series of smaller, more contained environments with a lot of NPCs wandering the streets randomly.

Which is why it fills me with an awful lot of hope that a sequel is being made for exactly that reason.