After finishing Night in the Woods, my wife and I still wanted to play some games together, so we decided to hit this up. A shorter game we’ve had on our list to play together for a while (as we’re both big Stanley Parable fans), this made for a great end for the evening on a cozy Saturday. It took us about 80 minutes or so to play through the whole game.
The Beginner’s Guide is a story about video games. Narrated by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable (which this was released a couple years after, he leads you through a series of short games made by a friend of his, Coda. Coda was a game creator that Davey knew years back, and he’s showcasing their library of work in hopes to show them that people do like it, and that they should come back to making video games again. Much more linear and straightforward than The Stanley Parable, this game is undeniably less memorable than that, but it’s still absolutely cut from the same cloth. Seeing the lengths our fictionalized version of Davey Wreden goes to try and reach out to this friend of his is an interesting look into the creative process of video games, sure, but it’s simultaneously a strange and often surreal experience that at times borders on outright horror. I don’t really want to give away any more than that, really, as it’s something much better experienced yourself than simply told to you, but if you enjoyed The Stanley Parable, you’re bound to enjoy this too. The gameplay and aesthetics are pretty straightforward too. The gameplay is all simple walking simulators put together with Source Engine (as the narrator himself is quite frank about), and the aesthetics are similarly very Source Engine in flavor. It’s not entirely default assets or anything, and the game does a good job of working with both level design and environmental design to really aid in its storytelling, but this is nonetheless a game whose gameplay and aesthetic features are more functional than standout in any other way (and that’s just fine with me). Verdict: Recommended. If you’re into narrative-focused walking simulators, then this is a fun one! It’s super short, sure, and I don’t really think it can hold a candle to how novel and clever its big brother The Stanley Parable is, but if you can pick it up on sale, it’s an interesting and funny time you’ll probably enjoy~.
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This, much like Celeste and To The Moon, is another narrative-focused indie game that I’ve had on my radar for AGES. Tons of people I knew loved it, and I really didn’t have any reason to think I wouldn’t love it too, but it was still a task of getting off my butt and actually playing it XD. In my recent binge on a bunch of PC games, however, I finally made it to playing it (yet another game I got for free on the Epic Game Store at some point). It was a lot of fun playing it alongside my wife (for whom is this a favorite) over the course of a couple days off we both had~. It took me 10~12 hours (I had a lot of idle time, so hard to be sure exactly) to play through the English version of the game while doing every side activity I could possibly find.
Night in the Woods is the story of Mae, a 20 year-old on her way home from university. She’s not sure university is actually for her, so she’s decided to come back to her home town for a bit to clear her head about things and hang out around old familiar faces, and there are a lot of old familiar faces to see! Her best friend Gregg and his boyfriend Angus, her friend Beatrice, her parents, and a whole community await her in the sleepy Appalachian town of Possum Springs. This is another game where I honestly hesitate to give much more plot summary than that (at the risk of making the game sound a bit boring), because so much of NitW’s appeal is just how well done the writing is and how well paced the story is. NitW is a story about individual issues, but about communities big and small too. It’s a story about how life just kind of sucks, that no matter how ready or unready you are, at any moment you can just get thrown a curve ball that throws everything into disarray, and you’re just expected to deal with that. From Mae herself to her friends to people she barely knows, NitW is very concerned with showing tons of different angles of how people deal with how things change, and especially how things just kinda keep getting worse. And why are things getting worse? Capitalism. I had no idea about it going in, but I was very delightfully surprised at just how fiercely anti-capitalist this game’s narrative is. It does an incredible job of painting a picture, from a single person up to the entirety of the town, of how our modern society simply does not care about those not immediately valuable to the almighty dollar, and will readily leave behind in the dirt those who cannot fend for themselves. This is a story with a lot going on and a lot of layers to dig through, and I’m sure people much smarter than me have already spilled tens of thousands of words on the larger and smaller themes of this game, and honestly it’s not hard to see why. It’s honestly hard to only write about the story this little myself XD. At any rate, I’d heard this game was written super well, and it absolutely lived up to the hype for me in that regard. The gameplay is a side-scrolling action/adventure game, but it’s far more on the adventure side of things. You go around town day to day, ending every day sleeping at your house, and you can platform around town as well as side activities with Mae’s super jumping powers. The general way you make days progress is by picking either Gregg or Beatrice to hang out with, but there are times that you need to engage in other things as well when the plot needs it. In the meanwhile, you can do all sorts of other activities with the denizens of Possum Springs if you take the time to get to know them. Walking past the same familiar faces and striking up conversations slowly helps bring Possum Springs to life for the player as Mae is filled in on the two-ish years of stuff that’s happened while she’s been gone. You don’t have to do most of that stuff, of course, but I’d certainly argue that exploring around town day to day is one of the most fun parts of the adventure, or at least it was for me~. While I honestly have no complaints anywhere about the writing, I have some very minor complaints with the gameplay design, and its largely in the more game-y parts of things. This is a game that loves dark environments, like in the dream sequences, and on both my monitors (but especially my main one) there were lots of times where I could genuinely not see anything beneath me and I was platforming in effective total darkness. That won’t be a problem for everyone, sure, but given that the game has no internal gamma adjustments and changing the brightness of either monitor did nothing, it made already kinda pointless-feeling platforming segments feel even more frustrating. Another thing to that point is the game’s insistence on a diegetic pause menu. Mae’s journal will fill up as she does various activities, and of course she can’t pull it out in her dreams or in a cutscene because that makes no sense. However, your options menu is reached via that journal, so if you’re trying to say, put the game back in windowed mode so you can drag it to your other monitor to make this dream sequence perhaps easier to see in, you’ll need to quit out of the game back to the main menu (resetting all your current progress in the area) to do it. Again, that’s a very me-issue, but it was enough of a problem that it’s hard to just completely pass it by here. The aesthetics of NitW are very pretty. The colorful shapes and styles that the world and characters are drawn with almost give the game the look of a picture book come to life. Characters are delightfully expressive in both gestures and facial expressions, and it was very easy to see how so many of my friends love the cast of this game so much. The music is also very good too. Whether it’s the music underscoring a dream sequence or the song played during one of your band practice mini-games, all the music is fantastic, and it underscores the action at hand beautifully. Verdict: Highly Recommended. While I may’ve had a couple small issues with how the game itself is designed, that didn’t stop me from enjoying the hell out of the final product. From its setting to its characters to its themes, this is a story that encapsulates so well so much of the struggle of the times we live in, and it does it masterfully. This is absolutely not a game you can afford to miss out on if you’re a fan of narrative-driven games. Another game I got free on the Epic Game Store at some point, I vaguely remembered hearing this was a fun game, and I needed something to fill the rest of my night because LOVE had been so short, so I ended up checking this out. I’d actually had no idea how long a game this was at the time, but I ended up beating it in about 3 hours after doing just about every side quest I could find.
Pikuniku is the story of a little island and the money man running rampant over it. Mr. Sunshine is here with his robots, and he’s gonna give you free money if you just let him take all that unimportant seeming stuff lying around! Just let his robots take what they want, and you’ll be flooded with free money! Its in the middle of all of this money giving that you, Piku, wake up in your cave. After escaping with the helpful advice of a random ghost, you emerge to a world that is certainly drowning in money, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Mr. Sunshine isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. The writing in Pikuniku is really fun! I had no expectations going in, but it’s a game I found delightfully silly and funny, with some really fun dialogue writing in particular. The game also really wears its politics on its sleeve as well. It’s not exactly Disco Elysium, but it’s a pretty aggressive anti-capitalist work of satire, and it’s a very fun one at that. Perhaps it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea in regards to its humor, but I enjoyed it very much~. The gameplay is a relatively linear side-scrolling action/adventure game. There are several large hub areas where you have a main objective to complete, and there are often some side quests you can engage with as well. Piku can jump and kick, and that’s about it, but the platforming in this game is quite satisfying, although it’s also thankfully usually optional if that sort of thing isn’t something you really enjoy. A lot of the adventure stuff and action too are really here to enhance the engagement of the story, and I’d say they do quite a good job of that. Aesthetically, Pikuniku is as whimsical and weird as you’d expect a title published by Devolver Digital to be, really. Lots of bright colors, funky music, and strange yet simple characters populate the island, and they all have their own weird and funny ways of acting and moving. The weird silly walking style that just about everyone (especially Piku) have is one of the stand out highlights, as odd as that may sound. It’s a joke that could easily get worn out if the game were longer, but I think just how straight the game plays it makes it an enjoyable bit of fun that underscores every cutscene. Verdict: Recommended. It might be a bit short for some, but this is a really good time! The writing is super fun, and the platforming is too (though it can perhaps be a bit too hard for its own good at times). If you want a weird and wacky action adventure game to spend an afternoon with, then this is an excellent choice for you~. This is a game so tiny that I debated whether or not to even write a review here for it, but it DOES have its own entry and such on the Epic Game Store (where it's one of many games I've gotten for free over the years), so I figure it's only fair to write a review for it like I would anything else. It took me about 30-ish minutes to play through the arcade mode and the extra levels beyond that.
LOVE is a little precision platformer with no story and no premise beyond just "do it as well as you can". In level select, you can play any level you want (of course) including 10 levels not in the arcade mode, and arcade mode itself is 100 lives and unlimited checkpoints to beat 16 levels. You can jump with A and place (depending on the mode) infinite checkpoints with B or X, though if the checkpoint gets killed by an obstacle, it disappears, and you're going back to the start of the level when you next die unless you place a new one. It's a neat little formula, and while I wish your hitbox was a bit more clearly defined (as there were many times I thought my little fella's legs made him wider than he was and I ended up falling to my death), but other than that, it's a well put together little thing. The graphics are simple but effective, and the music is jammin' too, so you've got a great atmosphere to do your platforming in, at the very least. Verdict: Recommended. This is like a $3 game if you didn't already get it for free like me, and it's well worth your time if you like precision platformers like Meat Boy or such things. It's hardly a must play, sure, but it's a very well put together thing for what it is, and I understand this developer's other work to be similar in both genre and quality as well~. This is a game I've owned for over a decade now (I checked! XD), after buying it ages and ages ago after hearing it was great, but then just never getting around to playing it. However, my wife recently played through the latest entry in this wider series, as it so happens, and we decided it'd make a fun date night for her to watch me finally play through this first entry myself (and it was~ ^w^). It took me about 4-ish hours to play through the main game, and then the two post-game mini-episodes took about half an hour or so each. I played the game in English with an Xbone controller on my PC.
To The Moon is a story about Niel and Eva, two doctors who work for a company that specializes in helping near-death patients greatest wish come true. They go into the memories of the individual, and they basically give them new memories that result in fulfilling that greatest wish. This particular story, as the title suggests, involves fulfilling a dying man's wish to go to the moon. The two post-game mini-episodes are just little glimpses into the larger world that they live in, and the main game is where the really meaty storytelling lies. To The Moon may be just an RPG Maker game made in 2011 (and it sure looks like it too), but it's an incredibly well told and heartfelt story about grief, regret, and the complicated, flawed people that tragedy and trauma can nonetheless turn into people you'd never guess have a thing abnormal about them at all. This is the sort of game you could easily write an essay about the greater and smaller themes of, which I'm not going to do here, but I will conclude this section by saying that this game is a masterclass of drama in a limited medium. It accomplishes what it sets out to do spectacularly, and I'm honestly glad I waited this long to play it, because I don't think I would've had the perspective (or narrative analysis ability <w>) to really appreciate everything this game goes for had I played through it right when I bought it at age 17. Gameplay-wise, there's honestly not a ton to talk about. There are some *very* light puzzle mechanics here and there, and there's a joke battle relatively early on, but despite being an RPG Maker game, this is much more a straightforward adventure game than anything else. That's fine, and honestly the game uses its medium very well to give you just enough interactivity in what's going on to help you get that much more invested in the story, but this is much closer to a visual novel in actual content than it is to another notable RPG Maker game like Lisa: The Painful is. Aesthetically, this game obviously oozes the whole RPG Maker style if you even so much as glance at it, but it's a deceptively meticulously put together experience regardless. There are some nicely done CGs, the music is excellent (particularly the vocal track), and I found so many little subtleties in the original character designs that I just loved. How a character moves their hands, looks their eyes to the side, tons of little things that inform about the people these characters are with all the deft you used to see in old SquareSoft 16-bit games. It's all excellently done, and it compliments the storytelling beautifully. Verdict: Highly Recommended. If you're a fan of narrative-focused games, you've honestly probably at least already heard of this series, if you've not played it yourself already. Regardless, if this has somehow slipped your notice, you owe it to yourself to be like me and finally get off your butt and play it. Despite what the very RPG Maker graphics may suggest otherwise, this is an incredibly well told and constructed story, and easily one of the best bite-sized narrative experiences I've played. This is a game I actually learned of via a Twitter account I follow that posts old Japanese video game commercials. This is a licensed tie in for an OVA series from around the same time, CB Chara Go Nagai World (with the “CB” being read “chibi”), and the footage from that used in the commercial was eye catching to say the least. It looked like a fun enough game from the brief amount of footage I looked up of it, and while it wasn’t a super common game online, it was thankfully one that I was able to score for cheap, at least. It took me a bit over 5 hours to complete the game on original hardware with extensive use of a guide video to show me where to go next.
The story is original from the OVAs, to the best of my knowledge, but it’s a very silly super-crossover of Go Nagai franchises nonetheless. You (the heroes, Devilman and Mazinger Z) are informed that laughter has suddenly disappeared from the world, and everyone is going mad (quite literally) as a result! This can only be due to the sudden vanishing of the mysterious power known as “Gag”, and it’s your job to get it back and bring peace and laughter back to the world! It’s a story as unserious as it is silly, and that’s all it really needs to be. It’s a fine enough reason as any to get a bunch of Go Nagai created characters interacting and being weird with each other, and it does a perfectly fine job at that. The mechanics, on the other hand, do something significantly less than a perfectly fine job of anything. They’re so borked, frankly, that it’s difficult to even pick a place to start talking about them, but I suppose starting with the overall gameplay design is a good a place as any. The game is an action/adventure game, and a sort of Mystical Ninja (Ganbare Goemon) clone of sorts, with beat’em up-style 3D-ish sections intermixed with more traditional 2D side-scrolling sections. There is virtually no signposting of any kind, which is unfortunate (especially in the increasingly massive and maze-like later half of the game), but not unheard of for the time. Sure, it was becoming much rarer on the Super Famicom to have a game like that compared to how common they were on the Famicom, but it’s hardly an inexcusable design decision for the time (despite how vexing that kind of thing can be either way). The big thing that makes this so much worse of a problem than it already is, however, is that the game controls *terribly*. Movement is very stiff, and having an unused face button while nonetheless requiring a double-tap to run is something I’m quite famously not a fan of. On top of that, the delay on your inputs is very noticeable, particularly for your attacks. You have a punch button and a kick button (with the jump button being only adjacent to the punch button, making jump kicking very awkward), and the delay for the punch is bad, but the delay for the kick is nearly twice as long as that. This makes the at times quite tricky platforming very annoying and awkward, sure, but it also makes combat utterly miserable. Enemies are very fast and are very tanky. They can also nuke your HP down VERY quickly, and you get staggered almost immediately from virtually all attacks, which means you’re usually taking *three* hits before you actually get any invincibility frames. The game has a real problem with luxury animations on your already terribly delayed punching, kicking, and ducking, but just how long the animations are for when you toddle around after taking damage make already frustrating and unsatisfying combat a really miserable slog. All isn’t completely lost, however, as this game has vaguely River City Ransom-like stat upgrades you can acquire by using consumables you pick up throughout the game. Even if, in an interesting albeit somewhat annoying twist (given how awful combat feels even when you’re winning), bosses are actually immune to your attack upgrades and take just as many hits to kill no matter how much power you have, grinding up some stats can make normal enemies far less of a burden, at the very least. However, of course, this can’t be anything simple or fun. You, the player character, actually can’t carry any money. Instead, the game has a minion system, where killing a certain special type of enemy will recruit them as one of your minions. You can then send them as a gofer to go buy you an upgrade or healing item, or you can send them on a part time job to go earn some money to buy yourself upgrades at shops. There are various types of minions, with different ones having different multipliers on how much money they earn as well as different amounts of starting cash, but not much of that matters given that their main mechanic is waiting for them to come back. Your minions won’t stay bossed around by you forever, and unless you’re blowing a lot of cash on giving them food to keep them happy, they’ll buzz off after a job or two. You actually have no wallet yourself, so that’s their cash you’re blowing, and there isn’t really a great way to keep your minions both useful and happy, so the best strategy I found was just using them until they left, and then going to one of their spawn points to pick up more minions. Shops and minions get increasingly hard to find and access as the game goes on, though, and my winning strategy was just to grind up 20+ kick power (it’s the most common kind of attack upgrade vs. punch power ups which I found to be much rarer) and 24+ defense power (enough that even the final boss will only be doing 1 pip of damage at a time) and some 18-ish max HP right at the start of the game. However, as mentioned earlier, all you can do while they’re gone is just wait for them to get back. I reckon I spent some 2 hours doing almost nothing right in the start of the game simply getting strong enough to take on the rest of the game, and with how tough the challenges that followed actually turned out to be, I was happy I took the time to do it! This brings me to frankly the most difficult to excuse part of the whole game’s design. While the game mercifully has infinite lives & continues, and dying just brings you back to the start of the room you’re currently at, this game isn’t particularly short. This is a game that has a ton of grinding for stats, a fair bit of difficult/annoying platforming, and a lot of wandering around totally lost looking for where to go next if you’re not using a guide (all while trudging through the dreadful controls and combat). Keep in mind that it took me over 5 hours to beat this game even WITH using a guide on where to go next at every given opportunity, and I’m far from a novice at action games or platformers. Despite all of this, this game lacks any way to actually continue your progress after turning the console off. There is no save system, no passwords, no nothing. You beat this game in one sitting, or you don’t beat it at all. Even with how bad everything else is, this is some incredible insult to injury, as it would’ve made playing this even back in the day an awful chore, and it deserves complaining about now just as it would’ve back then. Aesthetically, at least, the game is up to the standards of what I’ve come to expect from licensed early SFC games. The graphics are very nice realizations of the chibi characters they’re meant to be. Even as someone only really familiar with the super robot connected side of Go Nagai’s work, it was still always fun seeing just how a new character would be portrayed. Sure, there aren’t many animation frames, and those which are here are sometimes unwanted (like the luxury frames as you wind up a punch or a kick), but the sprites and environments look very nice for the time, and they still hold up well now. The music is also fairly good. There’s nothing super special to write home about, granted, but it fits the action well and it was never annoying to listen to, even in my hours standing around the first area waiting for my gofers to get back. Verdict: Not recommended. If you hadn’t predicted what the verdict of this review would be by the end of it here, I have done a very poor job of explaining just how awful it so often is to engage with this game’s systems ^^;. This is a game I only really beat out of a feeling of obligation given that I went through the trouble to buy it physically, but the only real fun came from managing to overcome the BS it so often throws at you. I’d struggle to recommend this to even the biggest Go Nagai fan, as even then, I’d say it’s much more worth your time to just watch a longplay on youtube rather than actually subject yourself to the game itself. One of the main reasons I actually played through the original Celeste last weekend was because I had heard of this little game’s release and was really interested to try it (but didn’t want to just skip the original game, particularly when I already owned it XD). I’m a sucker for 3D platformers, and a free one that was getting rave reviews was obviously too good a prospect to simply ignore. It took me about dead-on an hour and a half to get all 30 strawberries and reach the place where this game’s equivalent of credits are without using any guides using my Xbone controller (and died 149 times in the process <w>).
This is very much a bite-sized freebie of a game rather than a full-fledged game, and it’s got a similarly bite-sized story to go with it. It’s been a good few years since Madeline climbed Mt. Celeste, but she’s paying a visit back there to meet up with old friends and work through anxieties she’s going through now that she’s taken on a new major challenge in her life. There’s not much more to it than that to say outside of literally relaying all of the game’s dialogue, really x3. Regardless, for fans of the original game and its story, it’s a very cool epilogue and it’s fun to see old faces again and what they’re gotten up to in the time since the original game ended. Mechanically, that’s what this game is all about. As a way to celebrate the game’s sixth anniversary, the dev team threw this together in “a week(ish)”. What we have as the end product is the second world of Celeste reimagined as something akin to a Super Mario Odyssey level, with 30 different strawberries (acting as our moon-like collectible) scattered throughout the stage to try your hand at collecting. There are cassette tapes here and there as well, though instead of leading to whole new versions of stages, the B-sides of the original Celeste, here they lead to little self-contained platforming challenges (much like Mario Odyssey and Mario Sunshine do with their Cappy-less and Fludd-less challenges), and if you want all 30 strawberries, the game’s biggest challenges lie in those tape dimensions. Celeste’s main mechanics are just about all here as much as they can be. While more technical things like wave dashing and wall bouncing are (mercifully) left out, Madeline absolutely has her jumping and dashing to aid her in this, and it translates very oddly to 3D. Now they made this in a week, so I’m not gonna be too harsh on it for not being the most polished thing in the world, but even still, it really takes some getting used to for how this game controls compared to the original game (or most 3D platformers, for that matter). Your movement is VERY heavily dependent on where the camera is facing compared to most games because of the relatively 360-degree movement you have (between your normal movement and your directional dashes), and getting used to your turning circle as well as just how generous your dashes can be are the bulk of the learning curve, so far as I experienced. I actually originally found the game really frustrating, and I was going to call it quits with less than 10 strawberries as soon as I’d found the credits, but I stuck with it a little longer out of curiosity and found myself enjoying it more and more as I got my sea legs better established. I’m not sure you could really turn this into a larger game, at least in its current form. Compared to how much the original Celeste was a very “easy to learn, hard to master” kind of experience in 2D, its 3D iteration here has much more of a vibe of “starts hard, gets harder”. That’s not to say that this game is bad for being hard, but it’s likely going to be off-putting to even seasoned 3D platform fans with just how mean its level design can feel at times. A lot of Celeste 64 involves navigating 3D spaces with little in the way of markers around you to help indicate where you are in physical space. You mercifully have a marker-line underneath you to help you platform in these harder bits, but even with that, the learning curve to go from awful to decent is a steep one. Again, it’s a game they made in a week(ish), so I’m not gonna say it’s inexcusable that it’s so unpolished, but the game we have is the game we have, and whether or not you’re going to actually enjoy the design here is going to depend at least a bit on how willing you are to put up with learning the unintuitive ways this game expects you to find your way around its world. The aesthetics are absolutely delightful. The original Celeste already had a lot of clear inspiration from Mario games (both 2D and 3D) in its gameplay design as well as its aesthetic direction, but this game makes that even more clear for anyone who was somehow still in doubt about such things by the nature of the game’s title XD. The graphics do a great job of replicating the feel of old N64 graphics (with the character models in particular being very fun versions of the characters we knew so well in 2D from the original). The music also leans *very* hard into paying homage to Mario 64, going so far as to even mimic its sound font for the handful of tracks in this game (all of which are really good, especially given the brief time in which they were written). Verdict: Recommended. This is a game that’s a bit too hard to recommend to everyone like I could with the original Celeste, but it’s still really fun! It’s short and it’s completely free, so the barrier to entry is incredibly low as long as you’ve got a controller to play it with. If you’re a fan of 3D platformers, especially if you enjoyed the original Celeste, this is absolutely one you don’t wanna miss out on as long as you don’t mind a bit of a challenge. This is a game I’ve owned on PSN for absolutely ages via my PS3, but the one time I tried to play through it years ago on that, it crashed like 30 minutes in and I had to give up XD. I got it free on Steam some time ago, so it’s been something I’ve been meaning to get to for a while, and it ended up being what I decided to do with the rest of my evening that Sunday night. It took me a little under 5 hours to beat the English version of the game using an Xbone controller.
Hell Yeah is the story of Ash, the skeletal rabbit that’s the prince of hell. After a paparazzi scandal catches him in a compromising position and he sees that there are 100 whole hits on it online (2012 was truly a different time XD), he vows to just go out and kill 100 demons, thereby *certainly* getting rid of everyone who’s seen the photo. It’s a very silly game that feels like a NewGrounds game that got an unlimited budget, and it absolutely drips late-era XBLA energy from every pore. Despite some references and such in the comedy being a bit dated (as one would expect in a comedy game from over a decade ago), I was very surprised at just how well the game’s comedy has aged. It’s a bit graphic for the sake of it, of course, but nothing that made me too uncomfortable, and I’m usually a huge baby about that kind of thing (so it must be fine XD). I was shocked to learn that it was made by a French studio, since it’s such a funny game in English I thought for sure that it must’ve been written by native speakers, but it’s a really cool and fun thing to be wrong about~. It’s a delightfully quotable game that sets out to be irreverent and ridiculous, and it accomplishes that fantastically as far as I’m concerned. Gameplay-wise, Hell Yeah is a pretty darn competent action/adventure platformer too! It’s not quite a metroidvania, as even though you’ve got upgrades slowly throughout the game and do return to some areas later, the whole experience is very guided and linear. Even returning to areas is laid out to you explicitly, so it’s not something you need to remember to do or anything. Ash has his blade wheel/jetpack he rides around in and a whole bunch of guns to kill demons and monsters with, and boy is he excited to do it! These demons are something between mini-bosses and environmental puzzles (depending on the demon), and you always execute them with a WarioWare-style micro game (that you take damage from if you mess it up). The level design is super varied despite the overall simplicity of the controls, so it remarkably never gets boring despite how much of a similar thing you’re doing from area to area. It’s a few weird ideas that end up coming together remarkably well, and I was delighted by just how far above my expectations that this game ended up hitting. It’s not a terribly hard game, but it’s not exactly easy either. I found it to be a nice challenge, which means it’s probably on the harder side given that I’m pretty comfortable with this sort of thing, but at least you have super grenades and a few other nasty tricks you can grind a bit of cash for to help you out if you hit a particularly nasty roadblock of a demon. The presentation is really fun! Everything has a very 2012 Flash Game vibe to it, but with the presentation of a proper (even Sega published!) XBLA indie game. There are a ton of weird, wacky characters to run into, and they clearly had a ton of fun thinking up all of the areas and demons you encounter along your adventure. The music is also very fun, and it makes for a great backdrop to all the silliness and mayhem (with my particular favorite being the fake Euro-beat club song that plays in the club level x3). Verdict: Recommended. It’s not a super incredible, must-play experience, but it’s really good fun as far as action games go! While not everyone will love the humor or the zaniness, if this sort of absurdity is your jam, there’s a lot to enjoy here. If you’re a fan of action platformers and absurdism with a bit of reference humor thrown in for good measure, this is one game that can make for a really fun weekend romp~. This is a game that’s been on my radar for a looooong time. I’m a big fan of precision platformers like this, having enjoyed a lot of games like Knytt and Super Meat Boy when I was younger, and it was really just a matter of having too much other stuff to get to that I already owned that was keeping me from getting to this (a game I knew I’d really enjoy). However, the Epic Game Store gave it away for free a while back, and it’s also a favorite of my wife’s. I was a bit burned out on RPGs after finishing SaGa 3, and my wife had the weekend free just like I did, so it seemed like an obvious choice to finally sit down and play through this while she could watch me~. It took me about 5.5 hours to beat the English version of the normal game (getting 149/175 strawberries and dying 661 times), and then I spent another 6 or 7 hours doing just about all the B-side levels, chapter 8, and as much of chapter 9 as I could manage (it’s very very tough <w> ).
Celeste is the story of Madeline, a woman who has taken it upon herself to journey out to the wilds of Canada to climb the titular Mount Celeste. It’s a strange and mystical place, and the climb is said to be incredibly treacherous, but she refuses to back down regardless. On her journey up, she encounters a strange old woman who lives on the mountain, a similarly strange spirit who haunts the deserted buildings, and a fellow climber named Theo. The actual beat-by-beat happenings of Celeste aren’t terribly interesting to list off (without getting into super spoiler-y territory), but it’s an incredibly well put together story, just as I’d heard it was. While the humor is a little dated in places (you will never forget that this game came out in 2017 XD), the story itself is as strong as ever. It’s a really well told story of self-discovery, self-doubt, and self-realization. Yes, there are a lot of indie games out there that are platformers that deal with significant themes of mental health, this is true. Nonetheless, Celeste stands out from the crowd as a truly impeccable example of just how great this type of game can be. The story is great, sure, but Celeste being a really tightly designed and well constructed platformer is also a significant feather in its cap. With very forgiving checkpoints and a well put together accessibility system with its Assist Mode options, platforming veterans and newbies are given the best chance they’ll have to get through the 7+ chapters of this game. Madeline has the ability to climb, wall jump, and normal jump, but she’ll gain (and lose) other abilities depending on the stage, and each of the game’s chapters does a really good job of using its particular focuses to make something that feels different from all the others. There is also a fair bit of optional content in each stage, and that’s where the strawberries and B-sides come in. There are also some special (and often quite difficult) puzzles to solve for special heart collectibles, and the cassette tapes you’ll find unlock harder “B-sides” of chapters that you can challenge as well (and even C-sides for the truly daring), but the more common strawberries are only there for bragging rights (as the game very openly states). Celeste is a very well put together precision platformer, yes, but I believe that its dedication to being accessible to all those who want to tackle the climb is a very meaningful part of its design that has led in no small part to just how popular it’s become over the years. The aesthetics of Celeste are also very well done. The music is excellent, and the pixel art graphics make each chapter come to life in unique and interesting ways that help add to their unique character just as much as their respective design focuses do. Another thing I loved a lot were the character portraits. There isn’t a *ton* of dialogue in Celeste, but just how expressive and numerous the faces that the characters get helps them all stand out and be memorable in their own ways so well that I couldn’t help but fall in love with it. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Honestly, if you’re the kind of person who knows me well enough to be reading this, you probably already know what Celeste is very well given what a popular game it is. Even still, if you like platforming and/or story-focused experiences, then this is absolutely not one to pass up. Celeste’s reputation as a stand-out excellent game is completely deserved, in my opinion, and it’s one absolutely worth checking out yourself too~. Still very much in the mood for old RPGs after SaGa 2, I got right to work on completing the last of the GameBoy SaGa games. I bought this collection on Switch well over a year and a half ago, and I figured it was high time I actually finished the darn thing x3. I didn’t know much about this game going in other than that it wasn’t really a SaGa game beyond the title. The creator of SaGa had already been pushed on to Romancing SaGa by this point, so the team that put this together were largely the team that would go on to make Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest, and this game was something of a prototype for that game in many ways with how much they share mechanically. At any rate, after all of the wikis I’ve needed to consult and countless stats I’ve needed to keep track of playing other SaGa games recently, I was honestly happy to have something more straightforward to play XD. It took me around 15~20 hours to beat the Japanese version of the game via the Switch SaGa collection over the course of a week (without using the collection’s speed up features).
SaGa 3’s story is very involved and complicated right out the gate. Years ago, a large pot appeared in the sky and began to pour water and monsters out into the world. Within a couple of decades, the world was completely submerged underwater and monsters had destroyed anything that was left afterwards. In a hope to prevent this awful fate, three young heroes were sent back in time to train for the day they’d be able to try and save their doomed world. Their leader, Dune, is our main character, and our story begins on the day their training is complete and they set out on their quest. The story honestly goes tons of weird places after that, and there are tons of other named NPCs and places throughout the story that you’ll need to keep track of throughout your time-hopping and dimension-hopping adventure. Heck, the other three player characters all have names and roles as well! That said, none of it really matters much. The story is quite complicated compared to the previous SaGa games on GameBoy, sure, but not to much end. It’s a story where a ton of Stuff (TM) occurs, but it’s mostly just for the sake of giving the player a Next Location to progress on to. A decent deal of it is probably me playing this in Japanese rather than English, but I found the story quite difficult to follow, myself, though I gave up caring all that much about it pretty quickly. The dialogue writing is pretty flat, and beyond that, it’s a pretty bog-standard good vs. evil story that happens to have a somewhat novel setting for the time. While that’s not exactly a point against it, it’s not really a point in its favor either. The mechanics are indeed much more straightforward than a typical SaGa game, and they’re downright nearly as simple as they could possibly be, quite frankly. You’ve got a party of four members, two physical attack-focused and two magic-focused, and you gain experience points from leveling and a level up will give you a general boost to your stats. It’s damn near as simple as a turn-based RPG like this comes, honestly. There are some annoying nuances and lacking of information regarding what strengths weapons actually have, but nothing terribly unique for the time. To give the game at least a little credit, however, it does try to have *some* SaGa-y mechanics by adapting the monster system from the previous two games. While you can’t have any monsters in your group like you could in SaGa 1 and 2, you can instead have your human and esper party members eat meat or use robot parts dropped by defeated enemies to transform into monster hybrids and cyborgs respectively. Eating the opposite type you currently are will turn you back to normal, and there are some dedicated purification spots to do it at as well if you’re having trouble with that. Becoming a monster or cyborg makes your equipment act differently as well as gives you some special abilities (that are different from spells) depending on what you’ve turned into, and they even shift around your base stats to boot. Neat as all that is, it’s a pretty poorly implemented system that I never engaged with much. Even if you don’t eat more meat or equip more cyborg parts, you can still shape shift after a random battle into a new form, meaning you can’t reliably maintian a particularly useful monster or cyborg form should you find one. It makes your party plagued with unreliable side-grades and down-grades in how it affects your stats and max HP, and I found it a perfectly viable strategy to just ignore that stuff the entire game and stick with a more stable normal form party. I’ve got to give a little bit of credit where credit is due for implementing such an involved system in the game, but I really wish they’d gone through the extra effort to make the stuff actually feel like it was worth using at all. The presentation is, at least, quite nice and doesn’t let down its predecessors. The music compositions aren’t quite as nice, in my reckoning anyhow, but it’s still another GameBoy RPG full of good music. The graphics are also quite nice, and while there weren’t any as stand-out memorable as there were in SaGa 2, there were still a lot of neat, silly bad guy sprites to fight along the journey. Verdict: Not Recommended. This isn’t a bad game, per se, but it’s one I find basically impossible to recommend you spend your time with. The story is dull, the mechanics are bland, the signposting is quite bad, the difficulty is quite easy, and it’s not particularly outstanding in its presentation either. You might not have a bad time with SaGa 3, and the mechanics might frustrate you a bit less than SaGa 1 and 2 on the GameBoy did, sure, but at least SaGa 1 and 2 (for all their faults) were novel and interesting in many ways. SaGa 3 may’ve been perfectly acceptable when it came out, but I think it’s very hard to justify spending time with in 2024 unless you simple must experience every SquareSoft game that’s out there out of pure intellectual curiosity. |
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AuthorI'm an avid gamer who likes to detail their thoughts about what they play in the hopes it might aid someone else's search for a game to play. Archives
April 2024
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