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~.
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As with Fire Watch, this is another game I played alongside my wife as a sort of couples activity for us. However, unlike with Fire Watch, this is a game we actually played together! It’s something she’s been talking about playing together for a good few months now, and she bought us each a copy on Steam when it recently went on sale. I really had no idea what to expect from it, but I absolutely trust her judgment when it comes to looking for interesting games for us to get into together~. It took us about 3.5 hours to complete the English version of the game together.
“Bokura” means “us” in Japanese, and has an implication that the people being spoken of (or at least the person speaking) is a boy. Accordingly, Bokura is a story about two boys. The narrative starts with one of them sitting on a train as an adult, on their way home from work. Lost in their thoughts, they start to reminisce about an unforgettable winter they spent with their best friend at the time, and the story begins from that flashback. The thing is, Bokura, as a game, can only be played with two people who each have a copy of the game. It’s impossible to play it by yourself, and each player chooses one of the two boys to play as at the start, and they see the story from their respective boy’s perspective. Most of the story is shown to the both of you, but there are several points where you’re separated and view a scene different from what the other person is seeing (the game even instructs you not to speak to one another during those times apart, which is a very interesting design choice). The game’s main gameplay gimmick ties in heavily with its main themes like this. Seeing the world through your own perspective, and needing to communicate and compromise with those who see the world differently from you. It ties all this together with a much larger theme of dealing with loss, and it’s quite a well told story. It’s got some pacing issues with how long some of the inter-story puzzle sections go on, but it’s by and large a quite well written story that the both of us enjoyed quite a bit~. The gameplay is a co-op puzzle platformer (bold choice for a story-focused indie game, I know ;b). This game isn’t just metaphorically about seeing the world differently. Each player not only has a totally different graphics style for what they’re seeing, but they also have different things in the world that they can see and interact with. A moveable box for one player might be an impassible barrier for the other, while a scary monster for one can be a harmless platforming aid for the other. There are also certain parts of each level that only one player can interact with, making playing through the game twice a not unreasonable choice if you wanted a taste at what the other player got to do while you were in your world. It’s a game that trends surprisingly tough, overall, but it’s a quite fun little puzzle game. I think we finished it a bit faster than some others might because we have a bit more experience with platformers, but that shouldn’t be something that dissuades you from trying it out. This game doesn’t have combat or particularly challenging reflex tests, so even those who struggle with 2D action platformers can absolutely find fun here. My one piece of advice would be that the person with the most experience with platformers should probably choose the boy in the green coat, as we found that he had more difficult platforming stuff than the boy in blue. Similarly, if either of you has issues with seeing blood or gore, then that person should probably play the boy in the blue coat, as the imagery in green’s (while certainly not being a modern Resident Evil game by any means) is a fair bit more graphic than what blue has to deal with. Aesthetically, I think the game succeeds very well at doing what it sets out to do. The normal world along with the two worlds the boys see are all set apart very well in their graphical styles, and it aids the narrative themes and gameplay very well. The game has some slight net code issues here and there, and you can certainly see some weird screen tearing and graphical glitches here and there when things get a bit more animation intensive, but it’s nothing that made the game more difficult to play (even with her on the east coast of the US and me here in Japan). The graphical style is very pretty pixel art, and the music is quite good too~. Verdict: Recommended. I’d like to recommend this game more highly, but it’s a fair amount of little things that keep me from doing that. For sure, it’s far from the only well put together story-focused indie puzzle platformer out there, and that’s certainly part of it, but the fact that you NEED a partner to play through it with in co-op is another big part of it that’s going to be a meaningful hurdle for a lot of people. Add that in with that you also need to have some kind of voice communication ability (whether it’s over Discord or just sitting across from each other) to do a lot of the puzzles, and that’s one more thing that makes this a bit more difficult to engage with simply by the nature of how the game was designed. All that said, if you’re willing to spend a little over 10 bucks (and that’s when it’s not on sale) for something that you and a buddy can spend an afternoon doing together, this is a really great way to do it~. This is a game I’d heard great things about for years, but I’d never really put much priority on ever playing it. However, it recently went on sale for two bucks, so my wife picked it up to play through, and I figured what better time to pick it up and play through it myself than when I have her to talk about it with. It took me about 4 hours to play through the English version of the game.
Fire Watch is the story of a man named Henry who takes a job in one of Wyoming’s national parks doing exactly what the title of the game says: watching for fires. You follow his time there during the several months he’s assigned there, seeing the things he gets up to on the job as well as following his radio-enabled relationship with another of the fire watchers, Delilah. I hesitate to give more away than that, because a lot of Fire Watch’s story is really just going to hit better when experienced firsthand rather than being told about it. Though there is a slight degree of optional content to engage in, this is a game at the very least adjacent to the “walking simulator” genre, so the story is really what you’re here to see in the first place. And that story is done really well! The dialogue writing is excellent, with Henry and Delilah feeling so much like real people in the way they talk. The end result is a game that does a great job discussing guilt, regret, and the passing of time. Even though I don’t feel I relate to Henry on a direct level very closely at all (he’s just a very different person than me), the larger story beats were something I had no trouble seeing myself in at all. It’s a real shame that this dev team is probably never going to get a chance to actually make another game, because the way they execute the storytelling here is top notch, and as far as modern story-over-gameplay games I’ve played, this is easily near the top of the pile. The gameplay itself is, as I mentioned before, really nothing terribly special, as it’s basically all just walking places and pressing the button on stuff at the end of the day. You have general objectives to complete, sometimes they require a little bit of scavenger hunting via the map & compass you’re given to navigate, and there are some optional places to explore here and there, but this absolutely isn’t a game you’d go to because you heard the gameplay was stellar on its own without the story. I absolutely think that the gameplay does a good job of putting you in Henry’s shoes, at creating the correct atmosphere for the relevant story beat and all that, but this really is basically a walking sim at the end of the day, so don’t go in expecting some narrative-focused survival game or anything like that (not that I’m sure why you’d have that impression in the first place <w>). The presentation of the game is really well done. Just as the gameplay does, it compliments the narrative very nicely from the graphics to the sound design (not to mention the excellent voice acting. It’s so well done, it’s honestly hard to imagine the game looking much different while still having such an affective narrative. My only *slight* issue would be that, with the way the color palette of the game is done, it can be a bit hard to actually find your way through the forest sometimes. It’s an uncommon problem, sure, but it’s one I encountered often enough that it felt wrong to not mention it here. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a game that absolutely lived up to the hype. The normal price is a bit steep for a four hour game, I’ll admit, but if you can get past that (or get it on sale), this is an excellent narrative to spend an evening with. If you’re a fan of narrative-focused games, this is for sure not one you wanna pass up on, because you won’t be disappointed. (A very special thanks goes out to my friend Robin for buying the game for me when I was having payment processing issues on Steam, as I was like 7 cents short of affording the game on sale <w>) The last of the games that I played on my recent efforts to clear through some of my PC backlog, this is yet another game that I was curious about for ages, bought it on sale years and years back, and have only just finally gotten around to playing XD. I’m not usually one for FPS games, let lone one tied to Ubisoft, but the premise of this one had me so curious and the praise it received was so great that I just had to check it out. It took me about 5.5 hours to finish the game on normal mode.
Call of Juarez: Gunslinger follows Silas Greaves, an old cowboy just looking to stop into town and get a drink. Once he sits down at a table, he strikes up some conversation and the patrons quickly recognize his name as one of a famous gunslinger about which there are no shortage of unbelievable tales. Demanding stories straight from the source, Silas begins telling them stories of his younger days, and that is where you, the player, come in. Inspired by the way that Bastion’s narrator affected its gameplay, the narrative conceit of Gunslinger is that you are playing through the stories Silas is telling as he tells them, and revisions to the story or folks jumping in with their own details will change the game as you play it. It’s a super cool way to design a game, and they pull it off really well here. Being a game about the old west, there are certainly marks of the genre (especially regarding racism), but I think the game does a pretty darn good job of striking a balance between making the characters feel appropriate to the world they’re in while also incorporating many more modern ideas about the culture and stories of the old west. This is a game whose story is a love letter to old west fiction, and it has a lot of fun playing with the notion of storytelling and how the stories we tell affect our perceptions of both history and the present. It’s simultaneously a big, dumb cowboy story that features every famous and infamous cowboy who ever graced a Hollywood screen as well as a thoughtful contemplation on what these kinds of stories mean to us. It’s not the most deep dissection of those things, sure, but it does a great job at what it’s trying to do, and I loved every minute of it. The gameplay is pretty standard for an FPS of this time, but it has a few things here and there to make it special. On the more typical end, you can carry two guns at a time, you’re going through levels following objective markers and shooting enemies as they come, and you even have a bullet time mode you can activate once you’ve killed enough enemies. This definitely has the feelings of a budget title, in a sense, with how relatively few guns it has and how often locations are reused, but both of those aspects serve larger purposes. The guns are all relatively cowboy appropriate, for starters, and the reuse of locations is a bit more than meets the eye, and it’s honestly an aspect of the narrative device that I respected the most by the time I was done with it. On the more special end, you have little six-shooter inspired skill trees (which isn’t that unique, sure), as well as how the story changes depending on the flow of the narration as I mentioned earlier. The most unique part of the gameplay is how they’ve conceived boss fights in this game. In grand cowboy movie fashion, no matter how many unimportant enemies get taken down, a showdown against a bad guy almost always ends in a one-on-one showdown of reflexes. The way the game does this is with you seeing Silas’s hip holster and his hand as well as the enemy in front of you. Your goal here is to focus the reticle on the right hand side with your right stick (or mouse) on your enemy’s head to increase your zoom in for an easier shot, and you simultaneously use your left stick (or WASD on the keyboard) to keep Silas’s hand near his gun to increase the speed you draw your weapon at. The way you kill normal enemies already gets you points and EXP for both score and leveling up, and the better you do in these duels, the more EXP you’ll get for them. You get an extra big bonus if you win the duels honorably (by letting your enemy draw first), though it’s obviously a lot harder to do that. It’s a bit of a jank mechanic, but they do some really fun stuff with it and it helps the silly cowboy-ness of it all come alive that much more. My one main comment here is that these work WAY better with a controller, and I ended up being really glad that I still had my Xbone controller plugged in, because I’d play the normal game with my mouse and keyboard and then swap to the controller (which is a really nice, seamless transition) as soon as the duels started, because these control WAY more easily with joysticks than they do with the WASD keys and mouse. The aesthetics are really fun as well. The voice acting is really well done as is the sound design in general, with lots of fun, very cowboy-feeling music underscoring the action as it happens. The graphics also fit the game really well too. They’ve gone for a cell-shaded, vaguely realistic graphics style that gives the whole game a somewhat comic book feel without feeling like a comic book game. It lends itself really well to the hyper-reality of the action at hand, and it makes the whole thing that much more fun. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is a really awesome game! I went in expecting to like it okay, and I came away loving it. If what I described about the storytelling intrigues you, or you’re someone who likes westerns and/or FPS games, this is absolutely not one you want to miss, because it’s a real treat on all levels (and I’m saying that as someone who’s never even seen a western movie <w>). Like Pulse which I played earlier in the year, this is a game that I actually Kickstarted aaaages ago back in high school but just never got around to finishing. As was also the case with Pulse, I figured it was high time that I actually sit down and finish this game, because I’ve certainly owned it for more than long enough to justify it XD. It took me about 7.5 hours to finish the game doing just about everything I possibly could, though I’ll freely admit I would’ve finished it a LOT sooner had I not been stubborn about not using a guide when I got stuck.
Dropsy is a story of the titular character, Dropsy the clown with a quite scary face. As the intro cutscene shows, his life used to be happy and fun, loving being at and being in his family’s circus every day, but it all came to a horrifying end one day when the circus tent burned down and his mother lost her life in the accident. Now living in the old, dilapidated circus tent with his dad and little doggy, Dropsy sets out to make a better place of a world that fears his face (and maybe just do something incredible while he’s at it). Dropsy’s “story” is a weird thing to write about, as this game actually has no text at all. Outside of the title card itself, you’ll never see any text in the game until the credits roll, not even in the save menus or title screen. Characters communicate with speech bubbles that have pictures in them depicting what they’re talking about, and that’s how you as Dropsy interact with the world around you. The story that is there is remarkably well put together despite these self-imposed limitations, though it does fall a bit short, in my opinion. While the game’s main message of how doing good deeds brings good deeds back to you in return (and of course that you can’t judge a book by its cover) is one I quite like and think it does a good job at portraying, but they really fumble it in the last hurdle. I won’t spoil what the ending is here, but in taking the path they do for the ending, they end up muddying the waters of what the entire game is meant to say, and it just doesn’t logically parse with what the story has been up to that point. I’m not sure if they even are purposefully trying to have a point or message with the ending they went for, and they may’ve just been trying to be weird/shocking, but at any rate, I think choosing a different conclusion would’ve done the game a world of good. As things are, I think the story is certainly good, but decidedly not great. The gameplay of Dropsy is a point and click adventure game through the island that Dropsy calls home. Exploring the circus, the forest, the military base, and the nearby city, you’ll control Dropsy as he goes around trying to progress the main plot as well as give hugs to as many (consenting) folks as he’s able to (with the game’s dedicated hug button!). Hugs are your side objective, and Dropsy will slowly decorate his room with more and more drawn pictures of those whom he’s made friends with. A neat feature is that Dropsy isn’t alone on his quest. There’s his clown make-up wearing doggy you start the game with, but you’ll also acquire a mouse friend and a bird friend too, and swapping between them to accomplish tasks only they respectively can is a neat way many of the puzzles are designed. However, this is at the end of the day a point and click adventure game, and this game is absolutely not free from the pit falls this genre so often finds itself in. While I was able to do *most* things without consulting a guide, I ultimately had to, as some puzzles are just that unclear on how you’re meant to do them. This is made an even more serious issue, of course, by the whole “no text” gimmick the game has going for it. This means that you are entirely on your own for figuring out what items do and sometimes what they even are, and I think the game really would’ve benefited from *some* kind of way to analyze items in your inventory to help give the player a good kick in the right direction when they needed it. It’s far from the hardest point and click out there, but it’s certainly not going to convert anyone who already doesn’t gel well with this genre. The presentation of Dropsy is wonderfully surreal and one of the coolest things about it. While it’s especially the case for Dropsy himself (with all of his weird, wiggly animations and mannerisms), the whole world is populated by strange and delightfully stylized people who act and move like caricatures come to life. The sound design adds to this surreal nature very well, and seeing what there is to see in the world you’re adventuring in is definitely one of the biggest highlights of playing Dropsy. Verdict: Recommended. While this is certainly not one of my favorite games, and I certainly have my reservations about the story, this is still a game I had quite a good time with even when I was really stuck. The message of value kindness in the face of adversity is done in a way I found very endearing, and the unique approach to storytelling and surreal world design help make it an adventure that’s easy to really get into and want to see the next step of as soon as you can. If you’re a fan of the genre, this is totally one worth trying, but if you’re really turned off by point’n’click games, this is probably one to just watch a Let’s Play of instead of playing it yourself. This is a little game I’ve been meaning to play through for ages, but I’ve never really gotten around to it until now (and receiving it for free on the Epic Games Store also made for a very nice excuse as well, of course ;b ). Just like I really love metroidvanias, I’m also a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, so this was something right up my alley from the start. It took me about 2.5 hours to beat the game and toy around with the post-game endless mode a little too.
As the title suggests, this is a game about Turnip Boy (a boy who’s a turnip) who’s unhappy with taxes. When the evil Mayor Onion uses some obscure tax law nonsense to steal his green house, Turnip Boy sets out on a document-burning adventure to get his green house back and take out the evil mayor. The game is extremely silly and wears its nonsense proudly upon its sleeve (as the title is ever so helpful demonstrating). There isn’t *nothing* behind its silly writing, though it is a little hard to deduce if the anti-tax/anti-government messaging of the game is more coming from the devs being anarchists or if they have more libertarian leanings. At any rate, just enjoying the nonsense and the delightfully strange world of the game is good fun for the few hours of fun the game will give you, and that’s more than enough for me. The gameplay is a pretty straight forward 2D top-down Zelda like. You get several weapons and tools that you’ll use to solve puzzles both optional and mandatory, and there are lots of NPCs to talk to and do little sub-quests for, but this game isn’t trying to reinvent the wheel or anything. The combat was surprisingly challenging for what I otherwise would’ve expected, but this is far from a terribly difficult game. As long as you aren’t afraid to take your time with fights, bosses are generally really good about giving you health mid-fight to make even the tougher fights nothing too daunting. It’s a perfectly competent Zelda-like that doesn’t outstay its welcome, though it doesn’t have much to set it apart from better, longer games other than its zany concept. The presentation is, like the rest of the game, perfectly adequate. The art style is simple and not flashy, but just stylized enough to be memorable where it counts. The music is similarly nothing to write home about, but it fits the mood of the respective locations nicely nonetheless. Not much to go wild with praise over, but not much to really complain about either, really. Verdict: Recommended. I feel like I’ve repeated myself a million times saying this already, but this game is a short, sweet, and to the point that does a good job not outstaying its welcome. If it were any longer, I think they’d be laying the joke on way too thick for how much mileage their premise ultimately has, but the devs were smart in making something juuuust long enough that it doesn’t feel tiresome. If you’re a fan of the genre, this will be a fun thing to spend an afternoon on as long as you don’t expect anything super hilarious or life changing. I’m a big fan of metroidvanias, and this was one I hadn’t heard of, but a friend of mine is a big fan of. They happened to have a spare key for it lying around, and they very graciously gave it to me so I could play through it! Other than the bits of praise I heard from that friend, this was honestly a game I’d just never heard of. Judging from all the friends who jumped in call with me to watch me play it and how much they talked about loving it, it seems it’s certainly a popular one, and now that I’ve finished it myself, I can certainly see why! I played through the game three times. Once on normal mode and getting the good ending, which took about five hours. After that, I did a “Boss Mode” (this game’s version of the old Castlevania’s Julias Mode) playthrough that took about 2.5 hours, and then I finished it off with a hard mode playthrough to get the true good ending (which can only be gotten on hard mode after you’ve beaten the game once), and that was another 3.5 hours.
Lost Ruins is the story of an unnamed Heroine (who is simply called such throughout the game), who is summoned suddenly into some, well, mysterious and unfamiliar ruins. She has no memories of her life before being summoned, but judging from her clothes, she assumes she used to be some kind of school girl. A helpful witch quickly informs her that she is only the most recent to be summoned here, and that the evil Dark Lady is summoning all sorts of souls from other worlds to serve as sacrifices for a dark, ultimate ritual. With not a ton of help from her witch friend, our heroine sets off to take down the Dark Lady’s subjects and perhaps even get home in the end. The writing is nothing special, but it’s fine silly fun for what it is. The character writing is funny and weird in ways that make its small yet colorful cast charming in their own absurd ways, and that’s especially evident in the Boss Mode. It’s a lot less horny than you’d think a metroidvania about school girls would be, which was nice, though that’s not to say it’s not horny at all, of course XD. It’s at a perfectly tolerable level of it for me, and I found the writing fun for what it was and a good motivator for the adventure~ (clearly good enough to get me to go through it three times, at least XD). The gameplay of Lost Ruins is a 2D action/adventure metroidvania, so there’s going to be a lot of familiar elements for anyone even remotely familiar with the genre. However, there are a few interesting things that this game does that makes it stand out among the crowd of other high quality metroidvanias. First of all, this game has no mobility upgrades. There’s *some* recursive exploration, sure, but beyond going back to tackle trials or puzzles you just couldn’t beat the first time, the game is honestly fairly linear if you choose to play it that way, as the only thing keeping you from progressing are the bosses blocking your way and not the upgrades you might’ve otherwise gained from them. On that note, the game is actually very sparse on the upgrades full stop, really. You start with 20 HP and 20 MP, and by the end of the game your base stats will, at most, be 35 HP and 30 MP. The weapons, magic, and armor you find as well don’t really scale in power too much (though there certainly is *some* scaling to them), and you really end up playing through the whole game at a very similar durability to how you started it out as. You’ll find better weapons with different sorts of passives, you’ll find armor and trinkets that give different sorts of passives both defensive and offensive, and you’ll even get the ability to wear more pieces of armor/trinkets at once, but you don’t really play the game that differently at the end than you did at the start. This particular aspect of the game makes it particularly fun to replay, I think, as it’s both not terribly long *and* you’re not really getting much of a downgrade in your arsenal when you restart. As my hard mode playthrough that took 1.5 hours less than my original normal mode playthrough indicates, the skills and strategies you pick up from one playthrough carry over very easily to other playthroughs, and the different modes and little modifiers they give you make for some very fun challenge runs if you’re up to tackle them (such as Witch Mode, where you can’t use anything but magic spells the entire game). The aesthetics of the game are very pretty, and the pixel art is done very well. Both in the VN-style portraits for when the girls are talking as well as the animations on attacks, you can really tell a lot of time and effort went into bringing Lost Ruins’s cast to life. Several friends unfamiliar with the game actually thought I was playing a Momodora game, which is high praise in and of itself so far as I’m concerned. The music is also very fun and fits the mood of the game very well, and it all makes for a really good and fun time~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. As far as more action-focused metroidvanias go, this is a pretty damn good one! The story is fun, and the action and exploration is even better. Heck, the fact that I played through it so many times is in and of itself a testament to just how fun the game is to play. If you’re a fan of the genre, then Lost Ruins is definitely one you don’t wanna miss out on. This is one of a handful of games I backed on Kickstarter well over a decade ago and just never got around to properly playing. My girlfriend of the time and I used to play games like this, very artsy, colorful stuff, all the time back then, and this was one we just never got around to playing together back then. This is a game that's pretty poorly documented online (being a not super stand-out indie game from a decade+ ago), but with how short the HowLongToBeat time on it was, I figured I might as well sit down and finally finish the thing. Playing with a controller, it took me about an hour and a half to finish the English version of the game while getting like 20 out of 50 collectibles (though I more often than not wasn't really trying to find them, admittedly ^^;).
Pulse is the story of Eva, a girl living on a tropical island who has set out to do the trial that all members of her village do to enter adulthood. Eva, however, has generally been kept from ever attempting this, and from her family's perspective, for a very good reason: She's blind. Only able to "see" the world when it's illuminated via pulses of sound in the environment, she nonetheless sets out on a boat to do the trial, and ends up completing a lot more than that in the process. Pulse isn't a super world-changing game narratively, but it's still a well enough written story. It can be a bit hard to follow at times with just how experimental and odd the storytelling can be, but it's still a nicely written tale of facing your fears and not letting other people decide what your limits are. Gameplay-wise, Pulse is something between an adventure game and a walking simulator. You navigate the world in first-person, and you're really just getting from one end of the level to the next. While there is some platforming and even a stealth section or two to hide from monsters that live on this island, the actual interactions with other entities is (thankfully) quite a small part of the game. Aided by furry little critters called Mokos (which are the only thing that Eva can completely "see" no matter where they are in the level), you can toss them around to solve puzzles or just create pulses to see the world with to progress forward. Really, just navigating levels in and of itself is the game's biggest challenge for the player, as just seeing what's around you can at times be extremely disorienting with both how your "sight" works as well as how levels are designed. The stealth sections involving monsters kinda sucks, but it's short enough that it's hard to give the game too much flak for it. It's quite frustrating sometimes to just find the path forward, but that's also kinda the entire point of the game. If you're playing Pulse, that's the exercise you've signed up for, so while it may be awkward and fiddly, it's hard for me to knock the game *too* badly for just doing what it sets out to do ^^; Aesthetically, the game is very pretty if a bit too simple looking at times. The sound design is quite well done, but, kinda like I expressed in the previous paragraph, the beautiful world can at times get in the way of actually playing the game. It's quite hard to explain how the visuals in Pulse work in only text, but you don't use echolocation. If a sound is happening in the world, that part of the world is visible due to the sound pulses emanated off of those surfaces. This isn't echo location, however, as it's very easy to "see" something through a wall because that wall isn't illuminated with pulses but the thing beyond it is. The Mokos are cute and the concept of "a world through the eyes of a blind girl" is a super neat one, and it makes for a very visually striking and unique little adventure, but if you're sensitive to flashing lights or lots of quick changing colors, this might be one to steer clear of, because it can get *very* disorienting at times in some stages. Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. Pulse isn't a bad game, but it's a very particularly made one. It does what it sets out to do to an OK degree, but what it's setting out to do is in and of itself going to be something that is only appealing to certain kinds of players, and with very little replay value and such a short play time, this is one that will likely be a difficult to justify purchase for many. If reading this review has made you curious about it, I highly encourage you to check out a video or two on Pulse to get a look at just what it looks like, because it's a super neat concept for a game, and it's not like Pulse fucks it up completely or anything. Pulse is a game made for a very specific kind of person, and while I may not be that person, I think there is still a lot of interest to be found in this title for the right kind of gamer. While I had my Xbox controller out and the PC all ready to play games, I figured I may as well keep on chugging away at PC games that I've been meaning to play for ages. Eastward is a game my partner got me on Steam a good few months back, so it's been one I've been meaning to play for quite some time. I'd only ever heard good things about it, and though I wasn't *super* familiar with it, from what little I did know, it seemed right up my alley. It took me around 23 or so hours to beat the English version of the game while doing as many side quests and such as I can.
Eastward is the story of John, a miner living in the underground town of Potcrock Isle, who one day finds a little girl underground. Taking on the name Sam, this strange, white haired girl who he found in a strange yellow pod underground quickly becomes close to John, and they spend their days at the mines as John works out a meager living for the two of them. However, Sam's adventurous spirit combined with the turning hand of fate quickly make things difficult for the two of them, and they're forced to journey, as the title says, Eastward, for better or worse. Eastward was a game I absolutely bunched in with games like Undertale or Omori (two games, mind you, I haven't played) when it came out. It wears its inspirations on its sleeves, and the Mother/Earthbound series is very transparently one of them (to the point there's even a game-within-the-game called "Earth Born" that you can play). However, unlike many other Earthbound-inspired games, Eastward shares its genre with its other big inspiration, The Legend of Zelda, and with its other main inspirations very clearly being Japanese anime like Studio Ghibli films (as if the extremely obvious Hayao Miyazaki didn't make that clear enough), it certainly sets a quite high bar for itself both narratively and mechanically. Narratively, unquestionably so, I'd say it really lives up to the task it sets out for itself. Where something like the Mother series often uses a tale of growing up to communicate about the main themes of the respective title, Eastward uses being aged to do that. Honestly, I'd say the Studio Ghibli inspirations feel a lot stronger than the Mother/Earthbound inspirations in this regard, since the overall messaging and themes veer more towards contemplations on daily (especially family) life rather than the larger philosophical themes that Shigesato Itoi's works usually focus on. Eastward's main themes of responsibility and guardianship really impressed me. There's so much care and attention focused around the the different aspects of leadership and adult life (whether it's being the head of a settlement, a loving partner, or a parent to a child), it weaves a nuanced and heartfelt story masterfully. It's a story that's not afraid to get dark, but it's also a story that is never needlessly cruel or gratuitous, and that's something else I really appreciated it for. Eastward is easily one of the best written games I've ever played, and it's definitely one of my new favorite stories in media, hands down. While the narrative of Eastward may be more in the vein of a Studio Ghibli film, the gameplay is unquestionably more along the lines of The Legend of Zelda. It's a top-down 2D action/adventure game where you go through dungeons, solve puzzles, do sidequests, talk to townsfolk, all that good stuff. That said, given that this is a more linear game where backtracking to old areas is generally impossible, I suppose you could say it has more in common with games like Illusion of Gaia than Link to the Past. As a big fan of these types of action/adventure games, I found this to be a really fun one! The dungeon and boss design is really good, and the pacing of the story vs. action segments is also handled very well. There's a fair bit of side content to involve yourself with as well, and you very well might want to, because this is honestly a pretty tough game quite frequently. You can swap between John and Sam on the fly most of the time, and you can even split them up to operate them independently for puzzle solving. Sam has some attacks, but her main arsenal is a ranged stun move. John is your main pummeler and dispatcher of baddies, and his melee attack of a pan combined with the several guns you get over the course of the game will be how most bosses and such are fought. Rushing blindly forward into battle is often not the best course of action, however. John will step forward with each pan strike, which will usually stunlock most lone enemies, but it's not very helpful for fighting groups. Using Sam to stun enemies as well as dealing out your ammo (your guns all draw from the same pool) and bombs wisely is the key to surviving combats well, and the large enemy variety and well designed bosses make combat always something that's fun, even when it's hard. The game even has a very clearly Breath of the Wild-inspired cooking mechanic to top it all off, so you can always sure up your health bar with big healing items should you need to. On the whole, Eastward's mechanical design is just as well thought out as its narrative design, and that is to say: absolutely excellent. Aesthetically, Eastward is part of the modern trend of pixel-art indie games, but it's a *very* nice looking one of those. The music is fantastic and compliments each area and scene very nicely. The pixel art is also beautiful, and the enemy and especially NPC design is done so well that it brings each area to life in a way that feels different from the last. So many small touches and flourishes to each NPC, especially Sam, had be grinning ear to ear more times than I can count in just how well they add character and voice to a game with no voice acting. To that point, the localization in this game is REALLY well done. I honestly never would've guessed this game wasn't written originally in English with just how well done the dialogue writing is, and this Shanghai-based indie studio could frankly teach a lot of AAA publishers a thing or two with just how much care and attention can really bring a game to life in a new language. I'll finish this review off with talking about the game-within-a-game, Earth Born. Rather than being some tacked on little mini-game, Earth Born is a properly fleshed out little game (as well as a not super subtle framing device for the rest of the game), and a really competently put together little rogue-lite RPG. *This* is where the Earthbound-inspired mechanical design is, and you, the knight, have 7 days to train up, get equipped, and assemble a party before the demon lord's ritual is complete. It's a pretty involved little game, and you could easily spend a ton of time learning its ins and outs and optimizing routes if you were so inclined. You can also get little in-game amiibo-type things in Eastward to use as extra items in Earth Born if things get too tough (and I know I needed them), but you thankfully never actually *have* to play Earth Born for any real period of time. I played it once and got lucky enough to get the normal ending in it (but good gods was it close), and that single full playthrough took me almost an hour! With how good Eastward already is, Earth Born is just icing on the cake and one more thing to get invested in if you're so inclined~. Verdict: Highly Recommended. This is the 3rd year in a row that I've ended up playing something very early in the year that becomes an all-time favorite game. Two years ago it was Dandy Dungeon, last year it was Disco Elysium, and this year it's Eastward. Eastward is a master craft of storytelling and an excellently put together action/adventure games that's absolutely deserving of standing tall amongst its inspirations. Not many dev teams could've put together something that works this well, but these folks have managed it, and I'm super excited for whatever it is they put out next. If a bit of difficulty doesn't turn you off to it, this is one you definitely don't wanna miss out on if you're at all into quality story telling in games or 2D Zelda-likes because it's one of the best non-rogue-like indie games out there right now, as far as I'm concerned. This is a game I’ve effectively owned in one form or another digitally for quite some time, and it’s also one that I’ve been meaning to get to actually playing forever. Recently, though, my partner needed a palate cleanser from the visual novel she was playing, so she decided to play through this. I love being able to chat with her about stuff we play together, and given that I was in the mood for something of a palate cleanser myself, I thought what better time to finally give this a try. It took me about 1.5 hours to beat the English language version of the game after doing as much around the island as I could be bothered to do (and getting 17 feathers in the process).
A Short Hike is the story of Claire, whose aunt May has taken her to a favorite family nature park. On this island are many hills, including the highest point on the island, Hawk Peak. Claire is awaiting a very important phone call, but the island has basically no cell phone reception. Her aunt tells her that the only place on the island she’s likely to get signal is at the top of Hawk Peak, which luckily for her is only “a short hike” away. And so our hero sets off on her (relatively) short journey to the top of this nearby mountain to get the reception needed to receive this phone call. A Short Hike is a relatively simple and short game both gameplay-wise and narratively, but it’s a very heartfelt little adventure all the same. What you choose to do, where you choose to explore, and whom you choose to help on your way up the mountain will very much make your Claire’s journey feel unique unto itself. There are all sorts of friendly tourists and staff around the island to talk to, help out, and play with, and their dialogue is so fun and charming that I had a lot of fun just finding new people to talk to. Another game I played earlier this year, Lil’ Gator Game, clearly takes a LOT of inspiration from this, so it was hard not to compare the two, but as the sort of progenitor to that later (and for my money, better) game, I think A Short Hike is a lovely story about reflecting upon growing up and how you relate to other people. As for the gameplay, A Short Hike is mostly about exploration. Your only real goal is to make it to the top of the mountain, but to do that, you’ll need to be good at climbing. While you can jump and glide right from the start, if you want to be able to jump again in mid-air or scale walls, you’ll need to find a gold feather, and you’ll gain more mid-air jumps and climbing time the more feathers you collect. Exploring around the island, you’ll find all sorts of other folks to help or interact with, and they can give you little side quests that’ll reward you with money, feathers, or other goodies. Exploring is often its own reward as well, as you can find money, tools, and even gold feathers just lying around to add to your arsenal of treasure hunting. The island is big, but not overwhelming, and it makes for a fun little adventure even if you’re just trying to get to the top as fast as you can. Now I played this on PC, and while you *can* use the arrow keys, I very quickly abandoned them for use of my Xbone controller. The platforming and such is hardly difficult, and there isn’t even really a fail state to worry about at any point, so if you don’t have a controller available, it’s not the end of the world. That said, using a joystick was just so much better than the arrow keys that I really have to recommend using a controller for this if at all possible. The presentation of the game is absolutely adorable. You can tell that the creators are huge Animal Crossing fans, as all of the animal fellas populating the island often look like they could’ve popped right out of it x3. Solidifying that theory for me was how you can not only find a shovel to dig up buried treasure, but the X’s on the ground look just like the Animal Crossing ones, and the shovel sound is even almost exactly the same to boot x3. This isn’t a bad thing at all, though! They do a great job of making that style feel fresh to this game (which the very different mechanics from Animal Crossing also help a lot with), and the very chill music helps add to that whole vibe wonderfully as well~. Verdict: Recommended. This wasn’t a game I super duper loved and adored, but I’ve had a lot of competition for that sort of thing this year. As it is, A Short Hike is a bite-sized narrative and gameplay experience that achieves what it sets out to do very nicely. The story is cute, the gameplay is fun, and if anything, it was just a bit too short and left me wanting more! Which, out of any problem a game can have, I think leaving you wanting more is far from the worst one you could possibly be stuck with. |
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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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