As a huge fan of 2D Zelda-like games, this is a game that’s been on my radar for a good while, but I’ve just never gotten around to looking at it. My girlfriend happened to mention it offhand a week or two ago, and it jogged my memory and my interest about it enough to finally sit down over the past few days and play through the darn thing. It took me about 10-ish hours to play through the Japanese version of the game on emulated hardware without abusing save states or rewinds.
The game opens with a flashback, where the main character is being told of his lineage before his father sets off on a journey that he clearly expects never to return from. We learn of an ancient clan of dragon warriors whose job it was to safeguard the world from darkness, and that you are one of that clan. However, the dragons have seemingly completely disappeared, and your father is going off on a quest to hopefully find one and fulfill your clan’s proud destiny. Upon waking up from this flashback dream, our hero is at a bar in the present, and they learn of a local job to hunt down dragon scales from a nearby abandoned fortress. Seeing it as a clear opportunity to fulfill his father’s wishes, he takes it up at once, and so begins our journey to find the dragons and (of course) ultimately save the world. The story isn’t really what you’d expect for the depth action/adventure games often had by 1994, but it’s nothing bad, just unambitious. Our silent protagonist has a handful of fellow adventurers that he pals around with, and their dialogue writing along with miscellaneous NPC dialogue is all quite entertainingly written. The twists the narrative takes are interesting enough, but it’s really not the reason to show up (as it were). Compared to other Enix titles and especially SquareSoft titles around this point in the SFC’s lifespan, Brain Lord doesn’t really have a bad story so much as it just fails to stand out from the crowd. It’s not a strike against the game per se, but it’s just one more thing that makes the game that much less novel or interesting to go back to in 2024. The gameplay is a pretty straightforward top-down action/adventure game. I’ve been calling it a Zelda-clone personally, but it honestly has so much more action than adventure that it feels like its drawing from inspiration outside of Link to the Past, at the very least. You’ve got five BIG dungeons and not much of an overworld to speak of, and 4-ish big bosses to fight along the way. You don’t really get traversal tools or anything like that. It’s just going through dungeons solving puzzles and fighting enemies in a not too complicated fashion. The only really novel mechanic are the fairies you can find as well as buy in some stores. You can have up to two out at a time, and they’ll either attack enemies around you or provide passive benefits like lighting up an area or increasing your attack power. Additionally, while you only get stronger from certain stat boosting items and new weapons/armor, monsters will occasionally drop EXP balls for your *fairies*, and that’s how they level up. Sure, there are a few weapon types, but the range on the sword is SO nuts that I never found any reason to use anything else (though at least they tried, I guess). Dungeons don’t really have puzzles, as such, beyond just finding keys and then the appropriate door to take them to. Overall, that signposting is usually pretty good, outside of how massive some dungeons are that can make it difficult to remember where a locked door or now-breakable block even *is*, but that’s really the whole of it outside the block pushing puzzles and platforming puzzles. Those block pushing puzzles are frankly pretty damn tough, and they’re such brain-benders that it’s allegedly what inspired the title “Brain Lord” in the first place. They’ll probably annoy some, but I like these kinds of puzzles, so I enjoyed them at least x3. The jumping puzzles were far more annoying to me, but as far as Zelda-clones with platforming go, I found the platforming in this far more bearable and fun than the stuff in Terranigma or Beyond Oasis at least. Ultimately, while the moment-to-moment gameplay is fun enough (if a bit too easy), and I certainly enjoyed my time with it, it’s an experience that, much like the narrative, really struggles to be memorable. The presentation is overall pretty good, if (again) a bit unimpressive for a 16-bit console in ’94. Anyone who’s played 7th Saga will likely find the human sprites looking quite familiar, and that’s because it’s from the same devs as that. Sprites are big and pretty, but they’re not *so* big that they make actually navigating spaces onerous, which I certainly appreciated. The music is pretty darn good. It’s not like, stand-out amazing, but there were quite a few times where I was going through a dungeon or overworld area and said out loud, “damn, this track really rocks!”. Verdict: Recommended. I wavered a lot whether to give this an outright recommendation or a hesitant one, but I think this game is overall solid enough that it deserves an outright recommendation. Comparing it to one of these that I played relatively recently, I’d say I enjoyed this game about as much as I did Crusader of Centy. While it doesn’t have the novel design or aesthetics of that game (the highs, you could say), it also lacks the most irritating parts of that game’s ambition (which you could call the lows). Brain Lord jumping and block pushing puzzles may drive some batty, and it doesn’t have a ton that makes it truly stand-out or memorable, but it’s a very competently put together game that I had quite a good time with. While it may be a bit generic, if you’re a fan of 2D Zelda-style games, I think this is still a game you can pick up and have a quite fun weekend with even if it probably won’t be an experience you’ll remember for years afterwards.
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Like I played through the first Frog Detective game earlier in the week with my friend on stream, we did this game a couple days later as well~. It took us about 2 hours to play through the game with her and I reading the voices for the characters (her as the frog once more, and me as everyone else).
It's in effect the same as the first game, but a bit bigger and a bit better. It's a first-person adventure game just as the first one was, and you talk to folks to figure out the items they want to complete the puzzles associated with them. It's a very simple thing, but that just makes it an even more effective medium to convey the silly story, which it is! The puzzles are a bit more complicated, and the writing is a bit more fun and funny than the first game. Verdict: Recommended. It's not gonna sell anyone who wasn't a fan of the first game, but it's a very nice sequel that expands on the first game's strengths in a way I found enjoyable. This one was so fun to do, it's got me looking forward to the next one even more than the first one did~ ^w^ A close friend of mine recently invited me onto a Twitch stream with her, and she said this would be a great game for the two of us to play together~. I'd never heard of the game before, but she turned out to be super right! She controlled the game, but it's so straightforward that, like with the VNs I've played with my wife at the helm, it's barely different from me controlling it myself, so I'm calling it beaten for me as well <w>. It took us a little over an hour to play through the English version of the game while reading out all the voices together on stream~.
Frog Detective is a series of short first-person adventure games. You walk around an environment talking to people and grabbing items, and it's honestly something much closer to a visual novel than it is something like Portal or even The Stanley Parable. In this one, our detective is solving the mystery of a haunted island (as you could probably already tell from the game's title x3). It's pretty fun! The narrative is a short, silly story, and the gameplay is light enough that just about anyone could do it. It's a very simple-looking game and there isn't much music, but it's such a bite-sized piece of fun that the aesthetic becomes much more of a feature than a bug (so to speak). Verdict: Recommended. If you want something cute and fun to play either by yourself or with someone else, this is a really good option to do it with~. Especially if you can find it for cheap, this would be a great option to gift to a little kid to help them get into video games if they're only just starting out being able to read and/or work out first-person control systems. Not the funniest or most exciting thing in the world, for sure, but a fun time that more than justified the price of entry. I tried to play the PS2 remake of this several times when I was younger, and I could just never stick with it. It was paced too slowly, writing was too boring, and the combat was just awful. I bought the PS1 original ages ago around the time I moved here meaning to give it a shot, but never really felt up to it until now. Well now I've finally sat down and played through the first PS1 Tales game, and it's given me a lot of valuable insights as to why I disliked the PS2 version so much (even if this also wasn't exactly my favorite thing ever). It took me around 33-ish hours to beat the Japanese version of the game playing on original hardware.
The story follows a young man named Stahn, who is discovered as a stowaway on a dragon airship and quickly forced to work upon the crew realizing that he's just some idiot and not a spy. However, once the ship is attacked my monsters, he discovers a mysterious talking sword, and as they fall to the ground in their escape pod, his grand adventure to save the world begins~. The game's writing is okay, but decidedly flawed. On its better aspects, the game has a fun sort of vibe almost like a 90's fantasy road trip anime. There's not a lot of meaningful dialogue, but the comedy bits are well written and the dialogue itself is well written. On the more negative sides, the game's pacing is still quite slow (especially in the back half), the false conclusions really hamstring the story, and the narrative overall is badly wanting in terms of focus. They end up coming down a bit too involved in societal issues to have satisfying closure with the more generalized "the world isn't worth destroying just because there are bad people in it" ending they settle on, and a lot of the more interesting characters and aspects of the plot slowly get weeded away until it's just against some random Big Evil Guy (TM). There's a lot of potential, granted, and it's a frankly frustrating amount of potential with just how good a lot of the societal critique that's present actually is. However, we only have the game we have, and what we have is a very mixed bag. It doesn't really stick the landing for its own story, but it's not hard to see how Tales games after this had far better stories with how close to being great this game so often comes. The gameplay will be very familiar to anyone who's played an older pre-3D Tales game. It's the old Linear Battle System the series is famous for, with an ARPG that sees you fighting against random encounters on a 2D plane as you go along your RPG adventure. The fundamentals are fairly strong, but like with the story, the devil is in the details. Dungeons have some neat puzzles, but some puzzles are incredibly tough and dungeons are also quite long with only one save point at the very end. While combat often feels very fun and quick, the game's balance is sadly quite rough. Enemies and even bosses struggle to ever be much of a challenge, and the only time combat really gets tough is when you're fighting annoying packs of enemies with lots of powerful AOE spells. Adding to that is that, while your ability as Stahn to really be aggressive and dictate the flow of battle is strong, that is your best and only real way to fight, as your AI partners are far too unintelligent to be much use a lot of the time. Even adjusting their AI behavior, I struggled at all points to actually get them to be as aggressive as I wanted them to be, particularly towards the enemies I actually wanted them to fight against. This is all not that much of a problem though due to the more favorable parts of the game's balancing. The game's EXP rewards are quite generous and the encounter rate is quite high, so I honestly felt over-leveled nearly the whole game as a result without even grinding deliberately. Your natural MP healing after battle is also VERY generous, so just using your healer's heal spells to heal will make it so you really never need to worry about healing with items and running out as a result. They're systems that, while frustrating, are still thankfully fun, but their design blind spots are not difficult to spot, and it struggles to be truly satisfying with just how easy things basically always are. The aesthetics of the game are very nice. The music is very good, and the character designs are delightful as well. Especially in battle, the characters' and enemies' animations are really well done and pretty, and the special moves and spells have beautifully done pixel art. The voice acting is also good, but it's weirdly sparsely used. Most of the game's voice acting isn't in battle when characters do battle cries to announce moves, but in skits that happen on the world map. However, these aren't like later Tales games where there's a button prompt telling you to hit Select or something to see the skit. Instead, you need to just stand still on the world map for like 8 or 9 seconds before the scene triggers. There are over 200 of these things, but the game doesn't tell you they're there at all, and even realizing they're there is very hard to do by accident. Unless you come across that page in the manual that mentions them (which I did confirm is indeed there), you'd likely never notice they're there at all, which is a real shame for something they clearly put so much time into. Verdict: Recommended. This game is far from excellent, but it's still a pretty good game. The pace of the adventure usually makes up for the less than perfect writing, and the action generally remains fun even if it is largely satisfaction from being powerful rather than overcoming genuine, well-designed challenges. While the following game in the series improves on these mechanics a lot, it's still well worth playing the original Tales of Destiny if you're a fan of the series and want to see its roots. It certainly doesn't meet the high bars set by its successors, but it was very fun seeing the seeds of where all that later excellence came from~. This is a series I’ve heard praise for for almost as long as I’ve been actively looking into retro gaming stuff online. The steep price of the English copies combined with so many other RPGs to play had always kept me away from actually starting them, but the creator’s recent passing got me thinking it was about time I finally get around to seeing just what all the fuss is with this Suikoden stuff. It took me about 30-ish hours to get the best ending (collecting all 108 Stars of Destiny) in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.
Suikoden is the story of Tir, the son of one of the five great generals of the imperial army. After joining up with the military and just starting out on doing missions for them, his childhood friend’s great secret is revealed. As it turns out, he controls a powerful and ancient magic that the empire’s high sorceress is hell bent on getting her hands on, and he gives it to you for safe keeping before he’s carried off by troops. Fleeing the capital, you eventually end up joining and leading the resistance army against the empire! Such is Tir’s quest to stop the empire and keep the Soul Eater rune out of the sorceress’s hands. Suikoden’s writing is a very mixed bag. On one hand, their opting to focus on side characters rather than a main character means that we get a remarkable amount of great vignettes along our journey to topple the empire. The game is loaded with great dialogue writing and memorable side characters, even if not all 108 of the Stars of Destiny (the guys you’re recruiting) have terribly big roles unto themselves. On the other hand, the story is very badly focused, and not for the obvious reasons you might think a game with 108 recruit-able party members would be. The biggest issue comes down to the whole “topple the empire, stop the sorceress” conceit of the thing. This isn’t so much a story of getting rid of a corrupt, evil government so much as it is a story about stopping the big bad wizard behind it all. The resistance army is really just a means to an end to keep her from getting the Soul Eater rune, and the game spends precious little time actually focusing on *any* sort of political or systemic bent as to why people would want to get rid of the empire. People offhandedly mention how the empire has “changed” in the past few years and that it is cruel *now*, but the whole empire thing seemingly worked out just fine until the sorceress started using it as a means to chase down ultimate power. However, the game still has TONS of moments that are like “so what IS your justice, main character!? Are you even sure you’re on the right side of this war!?”, and they hit really weak when you know for a fact that you’re fighting on the good side, because you’re not the side with the world-destroying sorceress on it. It makes for some very confused larger themes, as it almost seems like the game is going out of its way to exonerate virtually anyone but the sorceress and her most comically evil henchmen as ultimately just good people caught (i.e. mind controlled) in an actually good system that happens to be corrupted by one big bad actor. There are some other pretty significant problems around Tir himself not really being a real character (him being a silent protagonist makes the larger moments of pathos surrounding him pretty weak), but the big thing is just how bad the narrative’s indecision is about how bad the empire is vs. how bad the sorceress is. The moment to moment writing is still fun and I enjoyed it, but the ending was decidedly weak compared to how good that earlier stuff was. I can very easily believe that the games after this are much better (as I’ve always heard that Suikoden 2 is the realization of everything Suikoden 1 was trying to do), but that doesn’t really change how the original Suikoden is an impressive but still decidedly rough first try. The mechanics and combat are overall pretty darn good, or at least satisfying in a way I really enjoy games like this being. It’s a turn-based RPG with a party of six, and a back row and a front row for both you and your enemies. Dungeon design tends to be short and sweet, and it’s really good at not letting the narrative pace get dragged down by overly long dungeons with billions of random encounters. Though all 108 Stars of Destiny aren’t actually usable party members (some of them just provide services for you back at base like adding a weapon shop, for example), there are still a LOT of potential party members for you to use if you so wish. While on that topic, finding the Stars of Destiny is actually a lot more reasonable than I would’ve thought it’d be. Almost (but crucially, not actually) all of them are signposted very well, and it’s actually not that difficult to get nearly all of them without the use of a guide. Three or four of them ARE unreasonable enough to stumble across that I’d still recommend a guide to find them if you’re keen to (it changes the ending a little, though not super meaningfully, imo), but I was very happily surprised at just how easy to stumble across most of the optional characters were. On another very thankful note, the game’s EXP curve is also completely designed around just how massive a potential character pool you’re drawing from. Party members below the current level of an area level up EXTREMELY fast, often getting to rough parity with your other party members in the course of five for ten battles. Additionally, the large party combined with the safety of the back row means you have very safe and efficient way to include weaker guys in your party so they can still level up, which is also a very nice and well thought out gameplay feature. The bigger issue with keeping your party equipped is money. Up until about the halfway point, getting more money is tough, and that can be an issue with how often you’re forced to have certain party members come along with you. Armor costs a boat load if you want the good stuff, and while each party member doesn’t have interchangeable weapons, their respective forever weapon can be upgrade for (a lot of) cash at a blacksmith, which thankfully cuts down on inventory clutter. Magic is a bit of a weird one, as you equip runes on characters at magic shops, and then that character can use the different levels of magic from that rune via a sort of universal spell charge system tied to their character and level (not unlike how spell charges work in early DND or Final Fantasy 1). Magic is both very limited but incredibly powerful, and it’s a similarly nice blend of “simple but learnable” like the rest of the combat is. It’s an overall quite easy game, but it still manages to feel challenging, which is exactly the kind of combat design I like in one of these games. There are two other minor gameplay modes, and they’re duels and army battles. At certain parts of the story, your army will need to fight another army, and sometimes two characters will have a one-on-one duel with bespoke mechanics. Both of these systems, however, are just glorified rock-paper-scissors matches, with the duels in particular being extremely easy if you just spam the defend command (as defending also counters their power attacks to deal massive damage). The army battles are pretty and cool, but being RPS doesn’t make it terribly fun if you’re struggling with one. They’re not too hard, but that doesn’t change how it just sucks to lose when the only real reason you’re losing is just being too unlucky. Getting more Stars of Destiny will give you more and more powerful options in those army fights, so you can tilt the odds in your favor at least a bit, but it’s still something that I wish either had a bit more skill involved or were a bit more difficult to lose outside of just getting lucky enough (as there’s no cutscene skip option, and this game has some lengthy cutscenes at times that you’ll need to button-mash through to get another try at a hard fight). The game’s aesthetics are quite impressive for one of the earliest RPGs on the PS1. Being from December 1995, it’s no great surprised that some of the character models and such don’t have a ton of animation to them, and that the graphics do look a bit muddy in places. Be that as it may, this is still a very pretty 2D game on the PS1. Monster design is fantastic and varied, character portraits are detailed and expressive, and environments are well put together and hard to lose your way in with how both brief and detailed they so often are. The music isn’t *quite* on the level of a SquareSoft game, imo, but it’s *damn* close, and this game has no shortage of really good music tracks, even if the actual track list isn’t too terribly long. Verdict: Recommended. Though it’s certainly not without its flaws, Suikoden 1 is a really quality RPG on the PS1. It’s a bit mechanically bare for those who love really mechanically complex games, and the writing is a bit on the weak side for folks who prefer a better written story, but it does both well enough that I think it’s still a very easy game to have a good time with as long as you’re not demanding perfection from everything you play. If you’re in the mood for a good PS1 RPG, you can certainly do better, but you can do a lot worse too, and I’ve no doubt in my mind that, at the very least, Suikoden 1 will serve as an excellent spring board for its far improved sequel. After finishing Night in the Woods, my wife and I still wanted to play some games together, so we decided to hit this up. A shorter game we’ve had on our list to play together for a while (as we’re both big Stanley Parable fans), this made for a great end for the evening on a cozy Saturday. It took us about 80 minutes or so to play through the whole game.
The Beginner’s Guide is a story about video games. Narrated by Davey Wreden, the creator of The Stanley Parable (which this was released a couple years after, he leads you through a series of short games made by a friend of his, Coda. Coda was a game creator that Davey knew years back, and he’s showcasing their library of work in hopes to show them that people do like it, and that they should come back to making video games again. Much more linear and straightforward than The Stanley Parable, this game is undeniably less memorable than that, but it’s still absolutely cut from the same cloth. Seeing the lengths our fictionalized version of Davey Wreden goes to try and reach out to this friend of his is an interesting look into the creative process of video games, sure, but it’s simultaneously a strange and often surreal experience that at times borders on outright horror. I don’t really want to give away any more than that, really, as it’s something much better experienced yourself than simply told to you, but if you enjoyed The Stanley Parable, you’re bound to enjoy this too. The gameplay and aesthetics are pretty straightforward too. The gameplay is all simple walking simulators put together with Source Engine (as the narrator himself is quite frank about), and the aesthetics are similarly very Source Engine in flavor. It’s not entirely default assets or anything, and the game does a good job of working with both level design and environmental design to really aid in its storytelling, but this is nonetheless a game whose gameplay and aesthetic features are more functional than standout in any other way (and that’s just fine with me). Verdict: Recommended. If you’re into narrative-focused walking simulators, then this is a fun one! It’s super short, sure, and I don’t really think it can hold a candle to how novel and clever its big brother The Stanley Parable is, but if you can pick it up on sale, it’s an interesting and funny time you’ll probably enjoy~. Another game I got free on the Epic Game Store at some point, I vaguely remembered hearing this was a fun game, and I needed something to fill the rest of my night because LOVE had been so short, so I ended up checking this out. I’d actually had no idea how long a game this was at the time, but I ended up beating it in about 3 hours after doing just about every side quest I could find.
Pikuniku is the story of a little island and the money man running rampant over it. Mr. Sunshine is here with his robots, and he’s gonna give you free money if you just let him take all that unimportant seeming stuff lying around! Just let his robots take what they want, and you’ll be flooded with free money! Its in the middle of all of this money giving that you, Piku, wake up in your cave. After escaping with the helpful advice of a random ghost, you emerge to a world that is certainly drowning in money, but it’s difficult to shake the feeling that Mr. Sunshine isn’t all he’s cracked up to be. The writing in Pikuniku is really fun! I had no expectations going in, but it’s a game I found delightfully silly and funny, with some really fun dialogue writing in particular. The game also really wears its politics on its sleeve as well. It’s not exactly Disco Elysium, but it’s a pretty aggressive anti-capitalist work of satire, and it’s a very fun one at that. Perhaps it won’t be everyone’s cup of tea in regards to its humor, but I enjoyed it very much~. The gameplay is a relatively linear side-scrolling action/adventure game. There are several large hub areas where you have a main objective to complete, and there are often some side quests you can engage with as well. Piku can jump and kick, and that’s about it, but the platforming in this game is quite satisfying, although it’s also thankfully usually optional if that sort of thing isn’t something you really enjoy. A lot of the adventure stuff and action too are really here to enhance the engagement of the story, and I’d say they do quite a good job of that. Aesthetically, Pikuniku is as whimsical and weird as you’d expect a title published by Devolver Digital to be, really. Lots of bright colors, funky music, and strange yet simple characters populate the island, and they all have their own weird and funny ways of acting and moving. The weird silly walking style that just about everyone (especially Piku) have is one of the stand out highlights, as odd as that may sound. It’s a joke that could easily get worn out if the game were longer, but I think just how straight the game plays it makes it an enjoyable bit of fun that underscores every cutscene. Verdict: Recommended. It might be a bit short for some, but this is a really good time! The writing is super fun, and the platforming is too (though it can perhaps be a bit too hard for its own good at times). If you want a weird and wacky action adventure game to spend an afternoon with, then this is an excellent choice for you~. This is a game so tiny that I debated whether or not to even write a review here for it, but it DOES have its own entry and such on the Epic Game Store (where it's one of many games I've gotten for free over the years), so I figure it's only fair to write a review for it like I would anything else. It took me about 30-ish minutes to play through the arcade mode and the extra levels beyond that.
LOVE is a little precision platformer with no story and no premise beyond just "do it as well as you can". In level select, you can play any level you want (of course) including 10 levels not in the arcade mode, and arcade mode itself is 100 lives and unlimited checkpoints to beat 16 levels. You can jump with A and place (depending on the mode) infinite checkpoints with B or X, though if the checkpoint gets killed by an obstacle, it disappears, and you're going back to the start of the level when you next die unless you place a new one. It's a neat little formula, and while I wish your hitbox was a bit more clearly defined (as there were many times I thought my little fella's legs made him wider than he was and I ended up falling to my death), but other than that, it's a well put together little thing. The graphics are simple but effective, and the music is jammin' too, so you've got a great atmosphere to do your platforming in, at the very least. Verdict: Recommended. This is like a $3 game if you didn't already get it for free like me, and it's well worth your time if you like precision platformers like Meat Boy or such things. It's hardly a must play, sure, but it's a very well put together thing for what it is, and I understand this developer's other work to be similar in both genre and quality as well~. One of the main reasons I actually played through the original Celeste last weekend was because I had heard of this little game’s release and was really interested to try it (but didn’t want to just skip the original game, particularly when I already owned it XD). I’m a sucker for 3D platformers, and a free one that was getting rave reviews was obviously too good a prospect to simply ignore. It took me about dead-on an hour and a half to get all 30 strawberries and reach the place where this game’s equivalent of credits are without using any guides using my Xbone controller (and died 149 times in the process <w>).
This is very much a bite-sized freebie of a game rather than a full-fledged game, and it’s got a similarly bite-sized story to go with it. It’s been a good few years since Madeline climbed Mt. Celeste, but she’s paying a visit back there to meet up with old friends and work through anxieties she’s going through now that she’s taken on a new major challenge in her life. There’s not much more to it than that to say outside of literally relaying all of the game’s dialogue, really x3. Regardless, for fans of the original game and its story, it’s a very cool epilogue and it’s fun to see old faces again and what they’re gotten up to in the time since the original game ended. Mechanically, that’s what this game is all about. As a way to celebrate the game’s sixth anniversary, the dev team threw this together in “a week(ish)”. What we have as the end product is the second world of Celeste reimagined as something akin to a Super Mario Odyssey level, with 30 different strawberries (acting as our moon-like collectible) scattered throughout the stage to try your hand at collecting. There are cassette tapes here and there as well, though instead of leading to whole new versions of stages, the B-sides of the original Celeste, here they lead to little self-contained platforming challenges (much like Mario Odyssey and Mario Sunshine do with their Cappy-less and Fludd-less challenges), and if you want all 30 strawberries, the game’s biggest challenges lie in those tape dimensions. Celeste’s main mechanics are just about all here as much as they can be. While more technical things like wave dashing and wall bouncing are (mercifully) left out, Madeline absolutely has her jumping and dashing to aid her in this, and it translates very oddly to 3D. Now they made this in a week, so I’m not gonna be too harsh on it for not being the most polished thing in the world, but even still, it really takes some getting used to for how this game controls compared to the original game (or most 3D platformers, for that matter). Your movement is VERY heavily dependent on where the camera is facing compared to most games because of the relatively 360-degree movement you have (between your normal movement and your directional dashes), and getting used to your turning circle as well as just how generous your dashes can be are the bulk of the learning curve, so far as I experienced. I actually originally found the game really frustrating, and I was going to call it quits with less than 10 strawberries as soon as I’d found the credits, but I stuck with it a little longer out of curiosity and found myself enjoying it more and more as I got my sea legs better established. I’m not sure you could really turn this into a larger game, at least in its current form. Compared to how much the original Celeste was a very “easy to learn, hard to master” kind of experience in 2D, its 3D iteration here has much more of a vibe of “starts hard, gets harder”. That’s not to say that this game is bad for being hard, but it’s likely going to be off-putting to even seasoned 3D platform fans with just how mean its level design can feel at times. A lot of Celeste 64 involves navigating 3D spaces with little in the way of markers around you to help indicate where you are in physical space. You mercifully have a marker-line underneath you to help you platform in these harder bits, but even with that, the learning curve to go from awful to decent is a steep one. Again, it’s a game they made in a week(ish), so I’m not gonna say it’s inexcusable that it’s so unpolished, but the game we have is the game we have, and whether or not you’re going to actually enjoy the design here is going to depend at least a bit on how willing you are to put up with learning the unintuitive ways this game expects you to find your way around its world. The aesthetics are absolutely delightful. The original Celeste already had a lot of clear inspiration from Mario games (both 2D and 3D) in its gameplay design as well as its aesthetic direction, but this game makes that even more clear for anyone who was somehow still in doubt about such things by the nature of the game’s title XD. The graphics do a great job of replicating the feel of old N64 graphics (with the character models in particular being very fun versions of the characters we knew so well in 2D from the original). The music also leans *very* hard into paying homage to Mario 64, going so far as to even mimic its sound font for the handful of tracks in this game (all of which are really good, especially given the brief time in which they were written). Verdict: Recommended. This is a game that’s a bit too hard to recommend to everyone like I could with the original Celeste, but it’s still really fun! It’s short and it’s completely free, so the barrier to entry is incredibly low as long as you’ve got a controller to play it with. If you’re a fan of 3D platformers, especially if you enjoyed the original Celeste, this is absolutely one you don’t wanna miss out on as long as you don’t mind a bit of a challenge. This is a game I’ve owned on PSN for absolutely ages via my PS3, but the one time I tried to play through it years ago on that, it crashed like 30 minutes in and I had to give up XD. I got it free on Steam some time ago, so it’s been something I’ve been meaning to get to for a while, and it ended up being what I decided to do with the rest of my evening that Sunday night. It took me a little under 5 hours to beat the English version of the game using an Xbone controller.
Hell Yeah is the story of Ash, the skeletal rabbit that’s the prince of hell. After a paparazzi scandal catches him in a compromising position and he sees that there are 100 whole hits on it online (2012 was truly a different time XD), he vows to just go out and kill 100 demons, thereby *certainly* getting rid of everyone who’s seen the photo. It’s a very silly game that feels like a NewGrounds game that got an unlimited budget, and it absolutely drips late-era XBLA energy from every pore. Despite some references and such in the comedy being a bit dated (as one would expect in a comedy game from over a decade ago), I was very surprised at just how well the game’s comedy has aged. It’s a bit graphic for the sake of it, of course, but nothing that made me too uncomfortable, and I’m usually a huge baby about that kind of thing (so it must be fine XD). I was shocked to learn that it was made by a French studio, since it’s such a funny game in English I thought for sure that it must’ve been written by native speakers, but it’s a really cool and fun thing to be wrong about~. It’s a delightfully quotable game that sets out to be irreverent and ridiculous, and it accomplishes that fantastically as far as I’m concerned. Gameplay-wise, Hell Yeah is a pretty darn competent action/adventure platformer too! It’s not quite a metroidvania, as even though you’ve got upgrades slowly throughout the game and do return to some areas later, the whole experience is very guided and linear. Even returning to areas is laid out to you explicitly, so it’s not something you need to remember to do or anything. Ash has his blade wheel/jetpack he rides around in and a whole bunch of guns to kill demons and monsters with, and boy is he excited to do it! These demons are something between mini-bosses and environmental puzzles (depending on the demon), and you always execute them with a WarioWare-style micro game (that you take damage from if you mess it up). The level design is super varied despite the overall simplicity of the controls, so it remarkably never gets boring despite how much of a similar thing you’re doing from area to area. It’s a few weird ideas that end up coming together remarkably well, and I was delighted by just how far above my expectations that this game ended up hitting. It’s not a terribly hard game, but it’s not exactly easy either. I found it to be a nice challenge, which means it’s probably on the harder side given that I’m pretty comfortable with this sort of thing, but at least you have super grenades and a few other nasty tricks you can grind a bit of cash for to help you out if you hit a particularly nasty roadblock of a demon. The presentation is really fun! Everything has a very 2012 Flash Game vibe to it, but with the presentation of a proper (even Sega published!) XBLA indie game. There are a ton of weird, wacky characters to run into, and they clearly had a ton of fun thinking up all of the areas and demons you encounter along your adventure. The music is also very fun, and it makes for a great backdrop to all the silliness and mayhem (with my particular favorite being the fake Euro-beat club song that plays in the club level x3). Verdict: Recommended. It’s not a super incredible, must-play experience, but it’s really good fun as far as action games go! While not everyone will love the humor or the zaniness, if this sort of absurdity is your jam, there’s a lot to enjoy here. If you’re a fan of action platformers and absurdism with a bit of reference humor thrown in for good measure, this is one game that can make for a really fun weekend romp~. |
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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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