Also known as 皆で空機読み (minna de kuuki yomi) in Japanese, this was a game I got on the Japanese eShop a few months back becuase it's like always on sale for about 250 yen. It recently came out in English, to my great surprise, and it worked in English on my American Nintendo Account. It doesn't have a "beaten" state, so far as I can tell, but my sister and I managed to get a perfect run on it, so I'm calling it beaten :b .
"Kuuki yomi", literally "reading the air", is the Japanese phrase for reading a room. The best way to describe this series is "Warioware without prompts". It's got a simple, black and white artstyle, and it puts you (or in this case, the two of you) into odd situations suddenly and you need to intuit the controls and what you should do by the nature of the situation. For example, you're on a train and two people labeled "boyfriend" and "girlfriend" are standing staring at you. The correct "read" is to move over so they can sit together. This particular version of the game has a two-player mode where one character is red, the other is blue, and you need to work together to read the room. You do a gauntlet of a random assortment of 10 (out of 20 or so) mini-games, and it gives you a compatibility score at the end (because of course it does) X3. For example, in one game, one player is a kid in their bed, and the other is Santa. The kid needs to lay down and pretend to be asleep until Santa passes. In another one, the two of you are on an escalator and there's a girl in very skimpy clothing in front of you, and you need to avert your eyelines to not stare at her. The game is very quirky and Japanese, and it is not ashamed of it at all XD Verdict: Highly recommended. For the price, it's a great little Warioware clone with a strong theme. It's not a ton of content, sure, but I've had tons of fun with many family and friends just trying to quickly figure out the game at hand together. It's definitely much more fun with friends, so if you have someone to play with, this is a great little party game you can pull out on your Switch.
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Overcooked was one of my favorite games of the year it came out. So much fun playing it with family over the holidays, and I was super excited when I heard of a sequel coming out. When I first played it, with the same family members no less, I bounced off of it really hard. A combination of an attitude too focused on winning rather than having fun as well as some minor changes in how the game is played really got in my way of enjoying it. I went in with a better attitude this time and ended up loving it a ton, just like the first. It took me and my brother (and sometimes with my sister as a player 3 as well) around 8 or 9 hours (we played it for like, all of one day) to get 3 stars on all the levels in the main campaign.
Largely, Overcooked 2 is more Overcooked. Two to four players go around a kitchen in various immensely hazardous circumstances trying to fill the orders as they come in. One button to pick things up and put them down, and another button to operate machinery (chopping food, pushing a button, etc), a button to dash, and the joystick to move. A game so simple it even has a one-handed mode where you can share the controller with a friend so you can do two players with one controller (although sadly not with the Switch Joycons, those have to be used sideways, much to the annoyance of me and my one-handed friend I tried this with months ago :/ ). There are all sorts of chefs you can be but it's only cosmetic. Some are returning from the last game, some are brand new, but you unlock them by completing more stages, so as long as you're playing, you're unlocking. This should be very familiar to anyone who played the first game. Overcooked 2 makes some important changes to this though. Most importantly, the button to operate machinery also now THROWS food. Anything that isn't a plate or a bowl can be thrown, and many levels require throwing food back and forth between you or at least have their difficulty greatly mitigated by throwing. Another minor but still important change is that the sink is now two spaces instead of one large area. No longer can you wash dishes by standing anywhere around the sink, it HAS to be in front of the basin. Not a huge change in the grand scheme of things, but when washing dishes is so important to serving meals on time, it can impact how your muscle memory works, particularly when you're people who played so much of the first game like we did. I would say overall they aren't bad changes, per se, but you end up throwing food when you mean to chop it a LOT, and I really dislike throwing not being a dedicated button. A lot of the appeal of Overcooked for me is in its easy to learn, hard to master design, and adding more commands you can possibly do detracts from that for me. Verdict: Highly recommended. I would say I still prefer the first game over this one, but Overcooked 2 is still a fantastic game. A free holiday DLC level pack just came out for it, so they're still updating it. I'm not sure if we'll ever see (or need, quite frankly) an Overcooked 3, but I've really enjoyed what we've gotten from this style of hectic, co-operative game. On the trains and planes and automobiles (I did ride a bus and a car or two) I had to take for my vacation to America, I decided to bring my 3DS and try and clear through some of my backlog on it. I brought some really good stuff: The 3rd Chibi-Robo game I was so excited about, Shovel Knight: King of Cards, plenty to keep me occupied. And instead I decided to play through this game I've owned more or less since it came out, and it was a good choice thematically for a year I've given second chances to so many games. Not sure it was such a good choice as far as having fun goes though XD. It took me a little over 4 hours to beat, but just because this was a little "longer" than Metroid Fusion, assuming it was in anyway close to better is a pretty generous assumption XP
This is a metroidvania and was the first in the last decade's series of Shantae revivals (coming out in 2010). All I'd known about it back then was that Shantae was a well-thought of but very rare GBC game, so a new entry in it sounded fun. I picked it up and played it and eventually just got stuck because I couldn't find where to go next. I did manage to get through the rest of the game this time, but the problems I identified ten years ago are all still certainly here. First, in regards to my getting lost, the game has a map that is at best, functional, at worst, confusing. It's a very general overview of the entire world map, but the myriad of caverns and shortcuts between areas aren't on it, and you can't mark anything on it. A lot of knowing where you are is just as much down to your own memory as it is to that map, and if you aren't gonna play through this game in one sitting, you're gonna spend a LOT of time wandering around and backtracking to try and find that one cave that has a necessary power up in it. Of course the game already has a TON of backtracking. The game's map design is really uninspired, at least the overworld. The caverns and three dungeons are mixes of platforming challenges and combat challenges, but the overworld is largely just flat/somewhat flat horizontal side-scrolling levels you'll need to trudge through over and over because the warp spots in this game seem like they go out of their way to be as inconvenient as possible. This game has a lot of padding for its content, and the bad overworld is one of the prime sources of that. The combat and gameplay themselves are alright. I'm glad this game got sequels, because the way spells and your hair-whip attack function are really solid. It's mostly just that they have very little interesting to act in tandem with because the enemies have pretty poor variety despite the few bosses being alright fun. You gain the power to transform into a monkey, an elephant, and a mermaid in order to access new areas and do platforming challenges. They're a pretty good diversion from the tedium of the overworld and they control well too. Even the monkey's wall climbing is more generous and fun to play than it very easily could've been. The story isn't too complex. Shantae, the half-genie hero of Scuttletown, goes to a show where her relic-hunting uncle is unavailing his newest discovery. Risky comes in to steal it, and you need to find the three magic seals (but not the fun, barky kind TwT) in order to get it back. It's nothing special or memorable in and of itself, but the NPC dialogue is really something odd. There are a lot of genuinely good, quick jokes, I got a chuckle out of, and a lot of them are of a nature that makes me wonder how this game got an E10+ instead of a T rating XD The presentation is good for the most part. Animations are pretty and fluid, and it's probably one of the things the game does better than most other things. Music is alright, and the character portraits don't look amazing (and I'm not a huge fan of how sexualized the female character design is in the first place, but that's just me). Verdict: Not Recommended. Maybe this was a serviceable experience for the money back in 2010, but these days there is really no reason to hunt this game down on the couple re-releases it's had since the DSi days. It is a painfully below-average game with TONS of padding that is barely memorable beyond the novelty of being another Shantae game after so so long. There are piles of better Metroidvanias you can get for as much or less money, so there is no reason to waste your time with this unless you just have to see EVERYTHING the Shantae series has been. Still very much in the mood for a walk down Metroid memory lane, I played through Metroid Fusion on my 3DS today. Metroid Fusion was a game I got way later than Zero Mission or Super Metroid. I didn't even know it existed until I happened upon used it in a Gamestop in the early 2010's. Out of the three, it's one I definitely remembered the least about despite having beaten it before. Gunstar was talking in Slack about how it's one of his favorites out of the bunch, so I thought it would be a perfect thing to play through today. My completion time was 3 hours and 50 minutes with a 71% item completion rate.
Compared to other Metroid games (at least at the time), Metroid Fusion has a lot of text and story. On a mission to SR388 (home planet of the now extinct Metroids), Samus is infected by a mysterious life form they later call X. X is basically The Thing (from the titular film), and can consume its host and take its form and memories. Their natural predators were the Metroids, but now that those are extinct, they're free to multiply like crazy on SR388. Samus nearly dies, but is saved by a cure made from a culture taken from the last Metroid when it had been in captivity. Now that Metroids are literally a part of her, she can absorb X organisms harmlessly (and these organisms are your new weapon and health pickups). There's an explosion at the center that treated her, and she is sent back to inspect it and try and solve whatever problem may have arisen. And that is JUST the opening cutscene. From there, the story largely takes the form of your little objective briefings from the AI in Samus' new ship (the old one drifted into an asteroid belt and blew up when she got first infected and fell unconscious) as well as little internal monologues Samus will have with herself between large objectives. If Metroid HAD to have a story with some kind of arc, I think the direction they're trying to take this in is probably one of the better ones they could've taken it. The execution falls soooo flat though. The only time any drama or literal dialogue between Samus and her computer really start happening is in the last little bit of the game, and that is when the game decides to make all of its big reveals and character growth moments and such. It's a ton of "tell not show" that ultimately really comes off flat. It's a nice narrative excuse to give you objective markers (to help solve some of Super Metroid's signposting problems), and it probably would've been fine if they hadn't tried for the big dramatic moments and left it as just something to bring a little levity to the story. But as it is, it's somewhere between a net-neutral addition and a bit of an overall drag as the objective briefings (which cannot be skipped) overstay their welcomes and drag down the pacing. This is a 2D Metroid game, so of course it's Samus going around, collecting suit upgrades both optional and necessary, and fighting big boss battles with your arm beam & missiles. There have been a lot of really smart simplifications made to the Super Metroid formula to get Metroid onto a platform with 4 buttons instead of 6, though, and I would say on the whole this game plays a lot better than Super Metroid. Samus moves quickly, turns quickly, and has a real consistency to her movement so you're never second-guessing if the weird terrain you're in or around will interrupt her current movements. Instead of being a separate power up, super missiles are just an upgrade for your normal missiles that just makes them stronger, and you just hold R to use them or your power bombs instead of pressing select to toggle through a bunch of them. A lot of the mechanical fluff and stumbles that didn't quite work in Super Metroid has been stripped out and it's for the better, as all the platforming and action feel way more fluid and fun to play. This game is also a fair bit harder, as while bosses aren't super difficult, normal enemies hit REALLY hard and can run down your HP really quick. It's well worth hunting down energy tank expansions for more health, because otherwise you're probably going to be dying a lot if you aren't careful. However, not all changes are positive, and most of the issues I had with the game come from the new narrative conceits and tightening up of the signposting. X organisms being your new health and item powerups is neat in a narrative standpoint, but that does a lot to add to the game's difficulty. You only get one power up from an enemy at a time, and the most health you can get from one enemy is 10. Most enemies can deal far more than that with just one hit, and there aren't scads and scads of enemies to farm through, so if you're getting hit by even 1 in 5 enemy encounters, you very well might be taking net-negative HP damage. This is compounded by the fact that enemies revert into X organisms when they "die", they don't disappear into a powerup. That little flying blob will fly around and often try and run away from you, and it'll turn into a NEW enemy to fight if you don't snag it fast enough (with some enemy spawns being scripted to turn immediately into a new enemy and being impossible to grab to prevent that). Additionally, there are tons of objective markers as you progress through the story, and the orbital research facility the game takes place in is divided into a hub with 6 sections. The ultimate execution of this is that the game is very linear compared to Super Metroid or Zero Mission, with almost no sequence breaking possible in it. Wall jumping has been made a lot easier, but easier to the point that it's almost expected, and the world is designed so that you won't be progressing any more than a little bit ahead of where you are if you use it. Bomb jumping has also been removed, so you can no longer defy vertical passageways right off the bat. These two things aren't really negative issues as such, but they make the game feel significantly different than the other two post-8-bit Metroid titles. It makes it feel like this has a lot more in common with the Metroid-y Casltevanias on GBA coming out around this time (although I'd say Fusion is far better than either of the two that had come out by this point). Higher difficulty and more linearity aren't inherently bad things, but it's different in a way that's worth mentioning. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Differences from the series and narrative issues aside, this is still a fantastic Metroid game. I'd put it on equal footing with Super Metroid, personally. Overall, I got the feeling from this game that in 2002, Nintendo really had no idea what they were going to do with Metroid. The perfect representation of this comes near the end of the game when you fight Ridley. You see him in his Super Metroid sprite, but then it morphs into a new sprite much more reminiscent of how he looks in Metroid Prime (which came out right alongside this back then). From the far more linear gameplay to the fairly lukewarm narrative, Nintendo was really testing out the waters to see what Metroid could be. Had this game had a little more nonlinearity or a better narrative, I think it could've seen the success that its sister game Metroid Prime found, but that was not the case. That said, It's still a great Metroidvania well worth your time, even if it is a little on the short side. I still had the Classic consoles hooked up, and I've still got the Metroidvania itch deep in my soul (and I think I always will X3). It's been a looooong time since I've played Super Metroid, so I thought I'd give it a replay. Considering how long its been, Super Metroid is a game kinda amazingly ahead of its time in a lot of respects, and still holds up as one of the all-time greats of the genre (although Zero Mission is still my favorite Metroid game). I seem to recall my last attempt through this game having a similar completion percentage (74% this time), but a longer playtime (5 hours, 19 minutes). Either way, I really enjoyed my time with it ^w^
Y'all don't need me to tell you that Super Metroid is great. Y'all know it controls really well, has great graphics, atmospheric music, the works. It's an exemplary 16-bit game and one of the best games on the SNES, easily. So instead of going on about that, I'll talk more specifically about what surprised me about what the game has (or doesn't) under the hood for a game in 1994. What first surprised me big time is something unprecedented for even modern Nintendo games: Rebindable buttons! You can rebind ANY of the face buttons (other than movement) from the title screen when you pick your save file. Something right off the bat that let me enjoy the game WAY more than I otherwise would've because I didn't need to relearn a control scheme all of a sudden. The other really cool bit is a language selection! I can't think of many other SNES games have have an option for English or Japanese text right from the get-go! Beyond that, lots of the design aspects of the game, whether on purpose or not (it feels purposeful), the levels of fuckery they allow you to commit in this game because of how certain powers work, especially the wall jump and the bomb jump, that allow you to sequence break like HECK almost immediately XD. I made some bad choices and managed to have to fight (and win against! ^w^) Kraid without the Spazer or the Hi-Jump powerups. Lucky for me this was the playthrough I FINALLY sussed out exactly how the wall jump works XD However, parts of the game definitely do make it show its age in ways I didn't remember. Having an auto-completing map in 1994 is freaking awesome and helps the game IMMENSELY, Buttttt going back to play it in 2019, it's really apparent that the map showing entrances to rooms, and not just their location in relation to one another, would've really helped exploration. This adds to the larger problem of the signposting in the game being kinda bad. You can't make marks on your map, objective markers are absolutely not a thing, and you can't see the map of any area but the one you're in. Even though I've beaten the game before, and I was playing it all in one session, I still managed to get lost and forget where I was supposed to go to progress the main game (I found a lot of neat stuff exploring, but beyond that I also did a lot of ultimately pointless wandering hunting for the gravity suit XP). There are also some mechanical aspects to the game that feel a little unnecessary or not as fleshed out as they needed to be. The grapple hook is a neat stop-gap in platforming aids between the hi-jump and the gravity jump, but it always felt awkward to use and not very fun for me. Power bombs are a neat idea for screen clearing, but most of the nastier enemies you'd want a screen-clear for are so mobile (or otherwise immune to the power bomb) that it feels like something only put in to gate progress arbitrarily. It's hard to hold much of what the game doesn't get 100% perfect against it, considering that it's still an incredible accomplishment for 1994 (and the Casltevania games honestly wouldn't get this good until at least Aria of Sorrow), but it's stuff I couldn't help but notice in 2019 and felt are at least worth mentioning here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. Like I said before, we all know the game is great. This was a neat jaunt for me back to one of the first games I picked up on the Wii Virtual Console. It still holds up really well and has some really incredible accessibility features for a console game in 1994. Modern Nintendo could lean a thing or two about rebindable buttons from R&D1 back in 1994, I can tell ya that much for free XD I was in the mood for some more Kirby after finishing Kirby 64, and then I remembered Kirby's Adventure on my NES Classic! It's one of the very few mainline Kirby games I haven't yet beaten (and I think may actually be the last I hadn't beaten), so I thought why not give it a try. I remembered it controlling not so hot the last time I tried it, but I figured that must've just been the mood I was in at the time. I proved to myself it was in fact not the mood I was in at the time, and I didn't really enjoy my time with this game when all was said and done. I'm glad to have the entire mainline Kirby series under my belt now, I suppose, but the 3 hours of this game aren't really ones I'll look back on super fondly compared to the many many hours I spent with the GBA version of this game as a kid.
It's Kirby in his first adventure where he could gain powers and not just suck things up and spit them out. It's a pretty groundbreaking entry for the series, considering the copy ability is one of the things Kirby is best known for these days. There are a good handful of powers, at least on paper, as many of them have very similar or nearly identical effects but different cosmetics. You go through 7 worlds with 7 bosses to eventually fight Nightmare in a special final two-stage boss fight. The level design is alright, even if some levels end up feeling a little short in retrospect. You get to them via a series of hub areas for each world that has both doors to the stages but also doors to mini-games you can play for extra lives, mini-boss arenas you can do for a maxim tomato, or a gallery area where you can get a certain power for free whenever you want. Many of the levels have secret switches hidden in them that will unlock more of these special bonus areas in the hub maps, but some of these switches are SUPER hard to find and are behind nearly or entirely invisible doors. 100%-ing this game without a guide is no easy feat, and I definitely couldn't've done it in 3 hours if I hadn't remembered basically all of them, at least in part, from all my time with this as a kid. My biggest issues with the game are largely mechanical. First off, while the game is very pretty for a NES game, it also means there's a LOT of slowdown, particularly when there are a lot of enemies on screen at once. Next, Kirby has a lot more heft to him than he does in later games, and even compared to Kirby's Dream Land 1 and 2 (the games before and after this one), it feels like it takes him way longer to recover from hits, falls, etc. before he can jump or use a power again. On top of that, while you press B to use your powers and A to jump, A very critically does not fly. Pressing Up on the D-pad flies, and while this is certainly partly my fault for having the muscle memory that later Kirby games have given me, there were a ton of times where I wanted to fly but couldn't, or accidentally started flying when I didn't want to because of a stray command on the D-pad. Lastly, it's always just one hit (instead of how it's almost always several in later games) before you lose your power. The end experience wasn't often very challenging, but it was very often frustrating due to some combination of the above issues. The presentation is nice, as you'd hope a NES game from 1993 would be. Although it does add to the aforementioned slow down, the environments have lots of colors, enemies and Kirby have a lot of animations. The color pallet swaps from stage to stage do a good job of coming off more as stylistic choices instead of hardware necessities. The enemy designs would go on to be reused to countless Kirby games for a good reason: They're really solid and memorable ones, especially the bosses (even though a lot of these guys are lifted from Kirby's Dream Land themselves). The same thing goes for the music, which is as iconic as anything else in this game when it comes to Kirby. Verdict: Not Recommended. I did not enjoy enough of my time with this game that I can't recommend it without tons of caveats. The experience of Kirby has been improved and tightened up so significantly since this, his second outing, that the barrier to entry is already weirdly high for a Kirby game (having to relearn how to Kirby) even if the slowdown issues weren't a problem on top of that. It's an important stepping stone for a series I love, but this is definitely my least favorite among all the mainline Kirby games. I was really stressing out about my driving test yesterday, so I decided to boot up an old favorite to help take my mind off of it. It's been a few years since I've played Kirby 64, but I played it a TON when I was little, and I remember it very fondly~. Part of my love for it is certainly down to nostalgia, but I think it still holds up really well among the increasingly large pantheon of Kirby games. I got all the shards to get the real final boss, and it took me around 5 or 6 hours. I played through the Japanese version, but aside from some very small cosmetic differences, it's identical to its international counterparts.
An evil darkness has attacked a planet of fairies and shattered their giant crystal. One of the fairies, Ribbon, takes a larger crystal shard and is flung to the far off planet of Pop Star where she plummets onto Kirby's head. Kirby quickly agrees to help his new friend and they team up with Waddle Dee, Adeleine the painter, and King Dedede to save the solar system from these evil black blobs. As in the manner of Kirby games before it, the story is told with no words through brief cutscenes that play between worlds. Your friends largely play cosmetic roles, but they occasionally hop in to aid Kirby and add a special section to the gameplay. Waddle Dee provides vehicles for minecart sections (like DKC but nowhere near as brutal), you can hop on Dedede's back for hammer swinging action, and you'll sometimes pass Adeleine and she'll paint a powerup (health or a 1up) that will come to life to aid you. The gameplay otherwise is fairly standard Kirby with some new twists. 22 stages across 6 worlds with 7 boss fights, it's not a super long game, but it's definitely longer if you're going to try and find all the crystal shards to fight the real final boss. There are 3 hidden within each non-boss stage, and they're either a reward for beating a mini-boss, a reward for completing a simple puzzle, hidden in the stage, or hidden behind a colored bit of level that you need a special power or power combo to break. Kirby's animal friends may be gone from the Kirby's Dream Land games, but the main gimmick for this Kirby game is that you can combine powers. You have many mainstays of Kirby, cutter, rock, fire, but you can combine them with themselves or one another to make all new powers! Combining powers just to see what they'll be is still something that makes me smile all these years later. You can either combine a power with another of itself for an upgrade of that power (cutter + cutter = BIG cutter blade) or combine them with other powers for all new stuff (cutter + electric = double-bladed lightsaber, one of my personal favorites X3). This does however mean that most of the powers are just "press B to make power", and most powers have virtually no directional inputs to change how they work (like how powers worked in Kirby Super Star). The presentation is colorful, happy, and very Kirby. Cute enemies, cute powers, cute allies, it's nothing out of the ordinary for Kirby of this era. The music is fantastic though. This is easily one of the best soundtracks on the N64 in my book. The only real negatives I can say about it, other than that the solutions and locations for some of the shards can be a bit obtuse at times, is the lack of any co-op. The co-op in Kirby Super Star is one of the reasons I adore that game as much as I do, and the lack of it here is very unfortunate. There are some multiplayer competitive mini-games you can play from the game's main screen, which are all games I've had good fun with friends with in the past, but it's hardly a replacement for Super Star-style co-op play. The game is also harder than I remembered it was. Newer Kirby games are certainly quite easy, but a lack of tons of healing items in later stages as well as the use of the Kirby's Dream Land 6-hit health bar system means you can't just barrel through a level and probably be okay. You do have to try at least a little XP Verdict: Highly Recommended. One of my favorite Kirby games and always will be. The power combo gimmick is a really strong one that I really wish newer Kirby games had at least tried to experiment with a bit more. Given that this is on the Wii Kirby Anniversary Collection, I'm not sure the game is worth hunting down on its own if you're gonna pay a big bundle for it, but if you're fixin' for Kirby and want a good one, it's hard to find much better Kirby than this UwU A quirky action game, this is very on-brand for Devolver Digital, and I'd heard it bandied about on some GOTY lists, so I thought I'd give it a try on Game Pass. It's a good game, but I don't really think it's for me. That said, I enjoyed the 3 or so hours it took me to beat it on normal mode, even if I don't see myself ever going back to this game.
If you've ever played Hotline Miami, then My Friend Pedro's core conceit should be very familiar. Go through a level doing kills as quickly and efficiently as you can to try and get a high score (or at least finish the level). The twists MFP brings to the table are that this is a side-scroller instead of top-down, you have far more health than the basically one-hit deaths of Hotline Miami, and it has a bullet-time feature where you can slow down time to aim shots better. You can use 5 different types of guns, you can wall jump, kick stuff, make barrels fall onto people, kick a gas canister into their face and then shoot it before it falls onto the ground to make their buddies blow into tiny pieces and then kick the pieces into the face of the buddy who didn't get blown up. There's a lot of silly nonsense you can pull in this game if you get into it enough, and the top scoring runs for this game must look suuuper awesome. The story is neat, but not that important. You're an amnesiac who wakes up in the back of a butcher shop about to be killed, but your hallucinatory banana friend Pedro gives you bullet time powers and helps lead you on your quest to horrible bloody murder (and safety). The world has a very neon, flashy look to it that clashes with a grungy, dirty dystopian flair. It's not the neon super-vomit style of Hotline Miami, and it's not entirely unique, but it looks nice. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. At least for my tastes, this hasn't really come close to replacing Hotline Miami (coincidentally enough also a Devolver Digital game) in my heart. The lower recommendation is almost entirely down to it not really meshing with my tastes and it not really overcoming the quality of Hotline Miami for me. If I had to tell you which of the two to pick, I'd say HM every time, but if you're all Hotline Miami'd out and want something similar but different, this game is something you'll probably like a lot. Still going through Game Pass games that are shorter but look neat, I tried out the coincidentally named Snake Pass today. Yet another 3D platformer (of sorts) in a jungle as an animal, it was a choice between this and Super Lucky's Tale the other day, and I'm glad in retrospect I didn't pick this one XP. Though it took me almost twice as long as SLT to get all the collectibles in (around 8 hours), I enjoyed my time with Snake Pass far less.
If you thought that Super Lucky's Tale had a threadbare and unimportant story, just get a load of Snake Pass! The story is so threadbare it may as well not even be there. Doodle the hummingbird comes to wake Noodle the snake after one of the stones to the warp gate in that area of their forest has been dislodged. Noodle and Doodle then go around from area to area putting the stones back and being given very obvious (and very unskippable) cutscenes of who dun it. Even upon replaying a level, cutscenes (the few there are) are unskippable, and the story is otherwise so unimportant to the game that it may as well just not be there and save us the unskippable cutscenes. The gameplay of Snake Pass is you as Noodle the snake going around and collecting the 3 warp stones in each of 15 levels. Also in each stage are 20 wisps to collect and 5 gatekeeper coins (which are functionally identical. The coins are just usually harder to find/get to). Now you may be asking yourself, "but Pidge, only 15 levels, I know you went for 100% collectibles, but how is that an 8 hour game?" Well, fair reader, the reason is very simple: Noodle is a snake, and for better or worse (usually worse) he controls like one. Holding RT moves Noodle forward, the left joystick moves his head, and holding A makes him look upward. Holding LT "tightens his muscles", which basically means that your friction increases to whatever you're clinging to, allowing for time for some more precise movements for when platforming gets tricky. The right stick also moves the camera around, and pressing Y makes Doodle grab your tail and hold it up for you (invaluable for lightening your weight if just your head is on a platform and you're desperately trying to get up and not fall). To give the game devs credit, Noodle does genuinely move like a snake. You can't just move in a straight line, as that's not how a snake moves. Winding from side to side makes you speed up, whether you're on the ground or trying to climb up one of the game's many bamboo climbing poles (or trying to Skyrim your way up a rock face you definitely shouldn't be able to but can regardless). This game's level design is generally fine. The main issue the game has is that the control layout is inexcusably terrible. RB re-positions the camera behind you, sure, but your thumb has SO many jobs between A, Y, and the right stick that there were an uncountable number of times that I died because I couldn't simultaneously raise my head and call for Doodle, or keep my head raised and reposition the camera to see what I was even doing. There is absolutely no reason you cannot re-bind the buttons, there is no reason lifting your head couldn't also be LB, heck I think the B button literally does nothing, so who the heck knows why calling Doodle is bound to Y and not B (X is for diving in water). The game's main challenge and conceit is that it's awkward and difficult to control, and the bad controller layout does not help that. But this isn't a game where awkward controls are part of the silly design of the game like Surgeon Simulator or Octodad. Ohhhhh no. This is just THE GAME. World 2 (out of 4) is probably the hardest part of the game because suddenly the game forces you, not even for extra collectibles, to master how to cross a horizontal climbing beam and the nearest checkpoint is quite far away. It does not surprise me even remotely, looking at the achievement stats, that so few people who play this game actually finish world 2, let alone beat the game (heck I think even beating world 1 is something less than 10% of players have done). Most of what could be called the fun levels are the first four that make up the game's first world. After that, the kid gloves are off, and the game starts upping the challenge just enough with each stage that you constantly need to reevaluate just how well you've learned to control Noodle, and it's never not frustrating. Dying is an ever constant part of this game as you wrestle with the control layout, the control design, and the not always clear physics of how Noodle moves. The only saving grace is that respawns are so quick, but the pain in the butt is that checkpoints are not so frequent (although thank goodness you can reuse them as many times as you want). Verdict: Not Recommended. Snake Pass feels like a student project about snake movement that was pushed into being a full-fledged game before they actually had the main meat of it fully thought out. "Surgeon Sim, but a challenging platformer" is a pretty bad look for any game, but it's really the only way I can describe this. If you have it for free through Game Pass like I did, maybe it'd be worth your time if you have genuinely nothing else to do, as conquering the game's awkward controls does feel rewarding (and that rewarding feeling is honestly the best part of the game), but I would never say you should pay money for Snake Pass. Your time and money are almost certainly spent on some other indie game, because Snake Pass is largely just a ticket to frustration. The Game Pass train keeps on a chuggin' as I try and get in as much as I can before my sub expires in a few days. All I really remembered about this game was that it was basically the only thing Microsoft had at the launch of the Xbox One X, and people were kinda like "this is IT?" for the launch of what was apparently the new most powerful console ever. I don't have an Xbone X, but I DO have Game Pass, so I figured why not. It took me about 4 hours and 15 minutes (according to the Xbone's Stats clock) to get all 99 clovers in the base game.
It's a really simple story about a fox boy named Lucky who really wants to be a hero just like his cool big sister. Lucky gets his chance when his sister brings back a magical book with the power to contain whole worlds inside it. The evil Kitty Litter (this game has SO many cat puns, omg), a gang of evil cats, tries to steal the book, and Lucky saves his sister by jumping into the book after them but locking them all in in the process. He needs to collect lucky clovers (the stars of this game) in order to unlock gates so he can beat each member of the Kitty Litter and stop their evil father from changing history to rule the world (the book can also change history as well as connect to alternate worlds. It's exactly as confusing as it is entirely unimportant XP). Super Lucky's Tale is a stage-based 3D platformer that reminded me a lot of the first Sly Cooper game. You run around, can swing your tail to hit stuff, double jump, and there's a fairly generous climbing mechanic to get you on top of a ledge you juuuust can't reach. You can also hold RT to dig underground, and it's an interesting way that they create some timed platforming challenges, as you can't stop your momentum while you're underground, and you exit the underground with an auto-jump. It handles well, but Lucky moves a bit slow. You only have 3 hits before you die, and the game isn't thaaat frivolous with health power-ups, so especially if you're going for max completion the game is surprisingly difficult for what I expected from it. Each level has 3 goals and a final objective. Get 300 coins, find the secret clover, and collect the 5 letters of "LUCKY". Completing one will give you a clover, with a total of 4 clovers in each level. There are also some bonus stages you can access from the hub areas of each of the game's 4 worlds which are divided into auto-runners, pushing block puzzles, and marble-tilting mazes, which award a single clover each. The level design is good, with lots of nooks and crannies to explore to find coins and LUCKY letters. I'd heard the game had camera issues on the Xbone original, but those must've been patched out or something because I never encountered them. The camera is fixed at one point, for the most part, but you can tilt it from side to side if you need to. The only real flaw to the game is that there just isn't much to it (and also I fell through the floor a few times when I got hit by a projectile from above XP). Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. If you can get SLT for like $15 or $20, or if you can play it on Game Pass, I'd say it's worth a play. It's a good game, if utterly unambitious in its genre, but it's also just way too short to justify a high price tag. That new Switch version for $40 does not add THAT much content, and honestly if the game were twice as long it'd only barely begin to approach being worth $40. Maybe for some people this game will be worth that much money, but for any veteran of 3D platformers like me, you'll likely blaze through it fast enough that you'll feel your money could've been better spent despite the good time you had with this. |
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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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