I will be upfront here and admit that my initial impression of Magic Pengel was underwhelming. The first couple of hours felt extremely plodding, thanks to the opening glut of story cutscenes with awkward voice acting, the lack of part variety to attach to your Doodles (your drawable monsters for battle), and the initial grind for more colors necessary to both draw and further develop your Doodles. This initial grind can be a nightmare because a lot of the fightable villagers will easily outclass you in terms of sheer stats and stall you out by using Charge every other turn to heal off more damage than you can inflict, so you’ll end up wasting your arena time if you happen to challenge a super tough villager since there’s also no way to forfeit a match. It also doesn’t help that there’s a half minute loading screen every time you need to move to a new area in the overworld, so you’ll end up sitting through over a minute of loading screens moving between the two main arenas alone since there’s no fast travel and you’ll have to pass through the market every time. Not a great start for a seemingly great premise!

Get past this initial roadblock by winning a few arena matches and gaining enough resources to thoroughly flesh out your Doodles with better stats, however, and the game starts to find its footing. Combat is almost entirely turn-based rock-paper-scissors (magic trumps attack, attack trumps block, block trumps magic) with some degree of mind games. This fortunately does get a bit more complex later on; landing magic spells can inflict status effects such as paralysis and sleep upon foes, as well as temporarily lock or punish types of attacks depending on the spell used. This essentially adds another layer to the mind games, aside from the aforementioned Charge for healing/powering-up the next attack/resetting neutral; thus, combat isn't just mindlessly following the advantage triangle specified above. In addition, the colors and parts used (i.e. adding limbs, wings, a held weapon, etc) drastically change both your stat and skill distribution (explained in more detail here and here ), and since your drawing capabilities and max capacity are increased with each arena win, you’ll likely be redrawing your Doodles all the time anyways to keep up with the tougher fights while tinkering with new and expanded loadouts. Simultaneously, it becomes a lot easier to farm resources since your Doodles will finally have enough attack power to deal more damage than opponents can heal off with Charge, and you’ll earn significantly more of each color (a few thousand as opposed to a few hundred in the early game) upon victories. While Magic Pengel’s combat never reaches the depth of similar monster battling systems such as Pokemon, I nevertheless found it easy enough to get into the rhythm of the progression loop once I got past the opening grind, and it served as a solid podcast game that vaguely reminded me of my days laddering on Pokemon Showdown.

A word of warning though: as much fun as it is sketching crude creatures with your Pengel and watching your crayon abominations destroy developer-drawn Doodles with much more effort put into sketching, that is unfortunately just about all that this game has to offer. Magic Pengel’s narrative touches upon some interesting lore and story beats concerning both the world of color and the supporting cast (such as your friend Zoe’s connection with her missing foster father, a renowned Doodler that once worked for the king), but the game never goes into too much detail with its sparse storytelling, and it ends on a bit of a cliffhanger as your friends decide to set off on another adventure. While you can sell spare colors for gold gems, there’s not much to purchase from shopkeepers; you can buy a few brushes to further adjust your line thickness, but the only other items on offer are Doodles, and there’s no point in buying those when you’ll get far more utility out of drawing your own (especially because you can’t delete any part of a Doodle drawn by an NPC). Finally, the game is a bit lacking in post-game content. The only unlocked features are a new arena where you can engage in 1 v 3 or 2 v 3 fights for higher rewards, as well as a hidden boss that can be fought if you somehow grind one million gold gems. As such, I have to concede that a lot of the Magic Pengel’s surrounding elements could have used some more time in the oven.

Ultimately, I prefer the game’s spiritual successor Graffiti Kingdom for its more succinct runtime and expanded drawing utensils. Even so, I mostly enjoyed my time with Magic Pengel (the quaint charm and artstyle admittingly a big reason why), and I’d say it’s checking out if you want a taste of one of more creative monster collecting/creating games out there. I think Taito had something really special on their hands with this formula, and it’s a shame we’ll never see a game in this vein from them again.

Ah. That’s more like it.

As the one person I know who likes Donkey Kong Country, Drill Dozer, and that one burrowing escape sequence from Ori and the Will of the Wisps, I knew Pepper Grinder was going to be right up my alley. What impressed me though, was just how precisely the game melded its influences into something that felt simultaneously fresh yet familiar. The level design is classic obstacle escalation (introduce a concept, scale it up, throw in a twist, and then run the player through a final exam into their victory lap) with DKC inspired secrets with skull coin collectibles for unlocking secret levels. Many of the usual formula beats are present as well to force execution tests, from the usual moving parts in the forms of cannons, rope swings, and grappling points, to constantly present sources of danger like the freezing ocean or the temporary dirt patches created from cooling lava. What sets Pepper Grinder apart however, is that the terrain itself is the main obstacle. It feels like such a natural pairing to seamlessly mesh environmental navigation with the course’s very foundation, and the best moments of the game lean into funneling the player through various layers of shifting and isolated terrain while tearing through all that may stand in their way.

That said, I think to really understand the nuances of Pepper Grinder, one has to readily commit to its time attack mode. I could have been sold on the game-feel alone as an amalgam of Donkey Kong Country’s momentum physics and Drill Dozer’s force feedback, but playing under circumstances that force you to squeeze every possible second out of the timer gives the player a better appreciation of its movement mechanics. Pepper is not very fast on foot, nor can she naturally jump very far. Therefore, you’d think that most speed comes from tunneling through terrain, but it’s not quite that either. Rather, the player has to maintain momentum through the interplay of drilling and jumping by exiting terrain via the drill run (boosting right as you’re about to leave a patch of dirt), which commits the player to the projected arc leaving the terrain but with the reward of significantly more speed. The result is some of the weightiest and most satisfying movement I have ever experienced in any platformer. I was constantly figuring out new ways to save seconds by timing by boosts both within terrain and right before exiting terrain (since you can’t just spam boost and using it too early can lock you out from getting the necessary boost jump out of terrain), skipping certain obstacles entirely with well-placed drill runs, and figuring out how to manage my health to bypass unfavorable cycles and damage boost past mines and thorns. Some of those gold time attack medals were tight ordeals, but I absolutely savored every moment of the grind.

Bosses as a whole are a significant improvement from the usual quality of those in Donkey Kong Country. You’re not safe just waiting above ground, and burrowing to dodge attacks forces you to at least dash-dance underground since drilling means you can’t stay in one place. As a result, the player is constantly on the move, and you’re incentivized to do so anyways given that most of the bosses require multiple hits to defeat and aren’t the usual “invincible until they’re done attacking” crop from DKC. The biggest complaint I can levy here is that boss hit/hurtboxes can feel imprecise; I’ve heard that many players have had difficulty figuring out how to correctly drill into the beetle boss’s underbelly, and while I had no issues there, I did die a few times from the skeleton king’s heel hitbox where there was no visible attack in its vicinity. Still, I much prefer these boss fights over many of its peers, and figuring out when and how to best aim drill runs from the ground to speedrun bosses was just as much of a pleasure as speedrunning the courses themselves.

There are a few questionable design choices that could be touched upon here. Firstly, there’s a shop system present where you can purchase optional stickers from a gacha machine as well as temporary health boosts. The former is mostly forgivable given that they don’t impact the gameplay otherwise and can be cleared in about three minutes of purchasing and opening capsules. That said, I feel as if the latter could be removed entirely given that I never felt pressured to purchase insurance for courses and bosses, especially because I was often taking hits anyways to skip past obstacles and because you’re not going to regain the extra health capacity in-level once it’s gone. Secondly, bosses in time-attack mode force you to watch their opening unskippable cutscenes before getting to the action, and this gets extremely irritating when you’re constantly restarting fights to get better times. Finally, Pepper Grinder has a few gimmick areas in the forms of a couple of robot platforming segments, two snowmobile sections where you just hold forward on the control stick, and a couple of run-and-gun levels with little drilling involved. I can look past most of these given that they don’t take up much time and that I enjoyed all the minecart levels from DKC as is, though I do wish that they spaced the gimmicks apart a bit more given that levels 4-3 and 4-4 both have significant run and gun segments sending each course off.

If I did have any lasting complaints, it would be that I just want more of this game. Most players will finish adventure mode in under four hours. That said, even despite a lack of polish here and there, I absolutely adore Pepper Grinder. At this time of writing, I’ve 100%ed the game and even gone back to a few time trials after snagging all the gold medals just to further polish my records. It’s often difficult for me to pin down what makes a game feel good to play, but in this case, I just know. Pepper Grinder feels like an adrenaline rush made just for me, and though its execution barriers and short length will likely make this a tough sell for many, it is undoubtably some of the most fun I have had with a game this year. If you’re curious or enjoy anything that I’ve discussed in this write-up, please give the demo a shot. They don’t make 2D platformers like this anymore, and Pepper Grinder’s existence leaves me wondering why when they absolutely killed it on their first try.

Bandai-Namco released Boomeroad worldwide two days ago as part of a suite of simple and experimental games to train new recruits from their indie developer Gyaar Studio. The concept here combines a standard 3D platformer with boomerang throwing that creates grindable rails that can be chained for extended mid-air traversal. You refresh your energy gauge by passing through rings and landing on platforms, and you can increase the gauge's capacity by collecting optional artifacts. Unfortunately, the gameplay is undercooked. You can't adjust the shape of the boomerang's arc besides flattening the upward curve a little, there's very few interactable objects (switches and fans) that force the player to throw the boomerang at them for activation, and you can in fact avoid most of these elements entirely by throwing two chained boomerang arcs to climb up and walk on top of the level's walls, skipping entire sections of the level while never running out of gauge. While I thought speedrun mode would mitigate most of these shortcomings, I don't find the movement satisfying enough because there's fairly little momentum conserved upon jumping off of rails for speeding up, so the movement itself lacks weightiness and route planning isn't very interesting when you're incentivized to just follow the set path of rings for time bonuses. I suppose there's only so much I can complain about a free game nevertheless, and although I don't see Gyaar Studio returning to this, I do think they've got a solid concept on their hands that could prove to be an interesting 3D puzzle-platformer if thoroughly fleshed out with more committal movement and tighter level design.

There's not a ton of complexity as to how Severed Steel operates and some elements need fine-tuning, but I can't help but appreciate how much the game accomplishes with surprisingly little. I'm a fan of the simple and effective UI; your aiming reticle is surrounded by two bars that convey how much ammo and slo-mo time is left (so these gauges are always near the center of attention) and the flashing light on your gun also changes color (from light neon colors to yellow to red) so you're constantly keyed in on when you'll need to pick up a gun early or engage/disengage when running low on supplies. Enemies stand out from the environment thanks to the cel-shaded enemy outlines, and upon death emit a distinct explosion sound-effect so there's no ambiguity when quickly rifling through targets during firefights or when picking off enemies from afar. Guns feel great to aim and fire in slow-mo, mainly because there's very noticeable recoil when firing in real-time; the contrast really helps sell the necessity of the feature. I also love Severed Steel's kick as both a form of attack and traversal; the obvious purpose is your primary melee attack while holding a gun if you don't want to expend your limited magazine to finish off an enemy as well as kicking open doors, but it can also be used to quickly ascend up walls or kick off of grounded/aerial enemies if your double jump isn't enough. The same goes for the arm cannon; you can fire holes into any surface if you don't feel like hunting down stairs/doorways for objectives, but it also provides a nice desperation option to instantly eliminate shielded enemies or drop heavy grunts down to another floor if you find yourself without a weapon.

Despite the appealing core gameplay, Severed Steel can often feel a bit repetitive. Enemy variety feels lacking since the player is usually approaching enemies in a similar manner (that is, entering slo-mo while using stunts to efficiently dispatch foes while firing into their heads/backsides), and I would have liked to see enemies that had to be specifically eliminated using the arm cannon or melee as mix-ups. The Rogue Steel mode does touch upon this with random enemy buffs that force such approaches, but at times I feel like this mode prefers to lengthen combat by overwhelming the player with excess enemies with more health. I do think the game could have also leaned a bit more into its parkour elements with additional stages that focused upon traversal and dodging/quickly disposing of enemies, as there were only a couple of timed story missions that necessitated a rush to the end. Finally, I have to agree with HotPocketHPE that the slo-mo gauge is unbalanced; you'll practically never run out of bullet time as long as you're staying in stunt mode (super easy since there are floors and walls aplenty to slide and wallrun), though this is again addressed from playing Rogue Steel via the "Rebalanced Bullet-Time" unlockable modifier. Even with these gripes however, Severed Steel is a pretty easy recommendation considering how content-rich the game is from its many different modes and extra campaign/workshop levels to tinker with. It was an absolute steal at 80% off on the Steam Spring Sale, and I can't wait to see how Greylock Studio iterates and improves upon their already fantastic formula.

Developers have long since exhausted the trope of "child trapped in a scary world," yet despite that, Murasaki Baby remains compelling in a way that none of its competition ever was. Simply put, it quite literally puts the child's fate at the player's fingertips. Your goal is to ferry a young girl across screens of hazards by manipulating hazards using both the Vita's front touchscreen and the back touchscreen to cycle through various backgrounds unlocked by popping colored balloons. I find the Ico comparisons to be on-point, as the player must physically guide the girl by the hand via holding and dragging on the touch-screen, taking care not to stretch her arm too far lest she stumble and fall. While the game isn't mechanically complex or challenging, it nevertheless constantly engages the player by gradually introducing more elements that require the player to micromanage dragging the girl and the balloon out of harm's way and switching/tapping the background to progress. The best example of this occurs during the final stretch of the game; after another character pops a hole in the girl's balloon, the player must juggle dragging the girl around, tapping the green background to repeatedly pump air into the leaking balloon, and switching/tapping additional colored backgrounds to flip the stage with the Vita's gyro controls and powering moving platforms with electricity. Though the path forward remains clear, the game demands a strong degree of attention and precision to quickly recognize and solve the game's many puzzles while building the bond between the girl and the player.

Murasaki Baby has unfortunately been more or less forgotten by the public. A slew of technical issues does hold the game back somewhat, as others have reported that saving sometimes breaks down in the middle of playthroughs and a few more (myself included) have experienced crashes. If I really had to nitpick, the game also could have done a bit more integrating all of the Vita's control functionalities into the gameplay (unlike say, Tearaway), as the face buttons/triggers/cameras are never used and the joysticks are used for exactly one exclusive segment outside of the menu screen. While I do feel as if the game was fairly short (about an hour and a half) and wrapped up just when I was beginning to feel a bit more pressured, I'm still glad that I got to try another overlooked title that showed real promise of how far a game could utilize controls to create an emotional and completely new experience. Until the day Astro's Playroom gets a follow-up, I suppose we'll just have to dream of a world where Sony invested wholeheartedly into its hardware and the Vita was seen as more than just a glorified control gimmick.

As a kid, I was absolutely obsessed with subways. Whenever my family and I traveled to a new city, my immediate fixation was not the city’s many attractions but rather the intricate infrastructure linking all these various locales. While my family handled the destinations, I handled everything in-between. I wanted to know the most efficient way to get from point A to B, if there were any loopholes or special conditions necessitating an off-the-beaten-path itinerary, and most of all, I kept tabs on any planned changes regarding the evolving transportation so I could make notes of where to adjust and prioritize for future trips. I never realized it back then, but there was a certain satisfaction to memorizing every station and optimal route and running the simulations in my head that eventually led me down the path of engineering.

Mini Metro is essentially my childhood fascination with subways conceptualized as a video game. It’s super easy to pick up thanks to its minimalist design and intuitive controls; passengers are depicted with geometric symbols headed to corresponding symbolic destinations, distinctly colored subway lines are constructed by dragging your mouse between stops, and you can easily manipulate existing lines without disrupting progress by simply clicking and dragging sections of a line to new stops. At the same time, it can quickly become challenging, but this skill ceiling feels fairly approachable because the game is less about memorizing specific formulas and more about understanding implicit guidelines. For example, having a line that hits every stop in the area sounds appealing, but what’s less appealing is how much more time is subsequently spent traveling and loading/unloading passengers; you can at least somewhat account for this by toggling specific stations as “no-stop” to create express lines. The AI is fairly predictable and will always calculate the shortest path to the corresponding destination, but this also means that there’s real potential for them to overload the capacity of certain stations while in-transit between different lines. Alongside this, the game is great at organically iterating upon its basic formula to escalate difficulty by introducing more stops, altering the shape of stops to create more unique passengers and necessitate different routes, and increase the system’s load with more passengers while forcing the player to juggle their already limited number of lines, cars/carriages, and tunnels/bridges as also dictated with newly unlocked maps. At its core, it’s a game that’s great at subtly teaching players how to recognize bottlenecks and micromanage individual elements to fully understand how minor changes can quickly ripple across the fully intertwined system.

My only real nitpicks are that picking apart subway loops can get a bit annoying since you can only fiddle with one exposed end at a time while in loop form; it’s a minor complaint considering that you can pause the game at any time to more carefully reconstruct lines, but adding extra steps to reconstruct common subway loops is fairly noticeable considering Mini Metro’s elegant interface. Also, I do wish that there was a way to construct slightly longer paths along rivers instead of automatically building across them between certain junctions and using up my already limited supply of tunnels and bridges. Nevertheless, I acknowledge that this last gripe is mostly personal, and I think this game absolutely delivers upon its premise with precise execution. With so many different maps and daily challenges to boot, there’s plenty of content to exhaust within the game, and if one finds the basic experience too stressful or is more interested in sheer experimentation, then they can simply turn to endless and creative modes instead. For an accessible yet deceptively deep management game that gives great bang for your buck, I’d say Mini Metro is a fantastic entry point into the world of optimization simulators that more than holds its own against its more daunting peers.

As much as I liked playing through parts of Again, I unfortunately find it quite difficult to recommend within Cing's repertoire. The hook is that you're an FBI agent investigating the Providence serial killings from 19 years ago, and you have special powers that allow you to simultaneously view the past and present on separate screens of the DS. In order to do so, you have to manipulate your current surroundings of the present to match the previously undisturbed past through a series of inventory and touchscreen puzzles to view past events as they played out, thus imitating the real life crime fighting techniques of reconstructing and reenacting crime scenes. It's a little rough around the edges, given that not every difference between the present and past will result in an interactable area of interest, and the game is not great at signaling when the player must exit the crime scene for more clues/evidence versus simply not having investigated enough of their surroundings. Nevertheless, I found this core premise engaging enough to see the entire game through.

Sadly, all the surrounding elements greatly dilute the overall experience despite the fantastic conceptual hook. Again suffers from the classic detective adventure game issue I refer to as the "every" problem. You have to talk to everyone everywhere about everything, every time. This gets grating immediately, and is exacerbated by the sheer amount of menuing, screen transitions, and mandatory flavor text that you have to tap through. In addition, the game often requires players to exhaust every option to proceed in order to pass time while NPCs investigate leads and evidence on their own. The game's overarching premise also backfires here. Because you're specifically investigating past murders, most of your time is spent interviewing former co-workers and family of the former victims. As a result, many of the game's characters exist simply as vessels to convey information of what the deceased characters were like back then, and generally lack any significant identity of their own. Couple that with all the constant traveling since you must ask each witness a new single question every time with each new discovery, and it's far too easy to feel disconnected from the game's plot and setting as a whole.

In a sense, Again may as well be the antithesis of Hotel Dusk. Hotel Dusk was a succinct mystery where much was revealed over just half a day, filled with complex characters all coming together within a connected environment all contributing to the final revelation in their own way. Again on the other hand, plays out over the course of more than two weeks with fairly little happening per day, and is filled with many underdeveloped characters and separated locations that usually have little agency upon the game's events, long forgotten about once the game starts to escalate towards its denouement. I'll give Cing their due for delivering upon the core gameplay premise (aside from the absence of any microphone and DS open/close puzzles) and nailing the true perpetrator revelation and confrontation, but I must admit that Again lacks the cohesion of much of Cing's library and fails to fully realize its potential. Even the conclusion feels like a letdown given Again's cliffhanger ending, though I'll cut them some slack here given that Cing would unfortunately file for bankruptcy in less than a year after the game's release and was clearly setting up for another installment. All I'm saying is that if Arc System Works is looking for another overlooked Cing game to remake... Again might be right up their alley.

There seems to be a prevalent expectation that as games evolved, they also became exponentially more approachable. Higher budgets resulted in smoother graphics and fewer bugs. More complex controls (adding left/right triggers, then adding one/two joysticks, then dabbling with motion inputs, etc) gave players a firmer grasp over their characters. AI became more predictable as their algorithms became more intricate to capture a wider range of responses. In a sense, as the technology expanded, the resulting products seemingly became more streamlined to better suit the player’s needs while more thoroughly capturing a developer’s vision.

Team Ico has never been about following tradition, however. If anything, the evolution of their titles embodies the regression of player control, choosing to instead utilize technological advancements not just to refine its premise via "design by subtraction" as chump has pointed out, but to deliver an entirely new experience altogether. Ico was a classic tale of boy meets girl; the girl had to be freed from her cage and pulled around the castle, as the boy protected her against everything in her way to prevent her demise. Shadow of the Colossus, however, was a story concerned with the struggle over control. The lone wanderer, in his quest to revive Mono, hunts down various several-story colossi capable of swatting him about like a fly. In the resulting desperate dance of death, he at first struggles to climb their hulking figures, hanging on for dear life until he discovers their weak points and stabs the colossi while they helplessly flail about. In other words, it's a game about trying to regain any semblance of control until you realize after the fact that the only shadow left was the literal shadow cast by Wander over their fallen corpse.

The Last Guardian then, can be thought of as the natural evolution of Team Ico titles, in that it melds previous design sensibilities and thrives off of disempowering the player throughout its entirety. Trico, the player’s companion and a cross between cat and bird, is essentially the analog to Wander’s horse in Shadow of the Colossus, Agro. Fumito Ueda designed Agro as a companion rather than just a vehicle, and had his team develop specific movement algorithms that would allow Agro to steer herself without the player’s explicit control, forcing players to put their trust in their steed during certain fights emphasizing bow aiming. Ueda and his new team at GenDesign iterated upon this idea, explicitly creating environments where the player was forced to rely upon Trico’s actions to progress and thus develop dependency between the boy and his companion.

While the game can be thought of as an inversion of Ico in this sense, its design influence upon The Last Guardian should not go overlooked, particularly in how the game captures Ico’s physicality. Ico’s key strength was establishing a sense of presence through minimalist puzzles that lacked overly gamey elements, namely in how Ico interacted with his surroundings. Players are subtly guided into climbing chains, pulling levers, sitting on stone sofas to save, and most importantly, holding down R1 to hold Yorda by the hand around the castle and pull her out of danger whenever captured. The Last Guardian innovates upon this by combining several of the traversable elements and the companion into one. To better navigate the vast ruins, the boy must guide Trico and utilize their tall body of climbable feathers in order to scale heights, while occasionally dragging around their large tail and dangling it over ledges to safely climb down. Most importantly, you get to pet Trico whenever you feel like it to comfort your friend in both their happiest and most emotionally taxing moments. In both Ico and The Last Guardian, the player’s constant contact with both the environment and their companion keeps them firmly rooted within its constructed sense of reality by regularly reminding them of their companion’s physical presence.

This physicality would not be as significant without the lessons learned from Shadow of the Colossus however, not just regarding AI behavior but also specifically in how it adapts the game’s sense of scale. Trico is large, and the boy is small. As mentioned previously, Trico can utilize their size to lean against walls and give the boy a step up, but they can also utilize their weight to hold down large chains and swipe away at imposing bodies of armor. Meanwhile, the boy is much more agile and can fit into otherwise inaccessible small spaces by Trico, squeezing through narrow tunnels and gaps in metal gates to pull switches and let his partner through. This obvious difference in size creates consistent room for contrast, not just in how the two characters differ in terms of functionality but also in terms of their scale when measured against the traversed liminal spaces of the ruins, constantly transforming from immense empty rooms to constrained and suffocating tunnels and corridors.

What is particularly interesting is not just The Last Guardian’s disempowerment or sense of scale, but rather what it manages to achieve with said elements and the resulting contrast to establish interdependency between the two characters and solidify their relationship. The combat, an almost complete inverse of Ico’s combat, is the most obvious example. Rather than defending Yorda by whacking shadow enemies with a stick, the roles have been reversed, in that the player must rely upon Trico to guard against scores of possessed armor as to avoid getting kidnapped himself. Even so, the game plays around with this idea of vulnerability, shifting the onus of responsibility about as the boy often finds himself in positions where he must actively support or protect Trico, such as disposing of glass eyes that scare his friend or scrambling to pull a nearby switch to lower a bridge and give Trico room to climb up to safety. The game is even willing to occasionally break its own rules to demonstrate how this sense of caring evolves past its defined guidelines. In almost any other game, this mechanical inconsistency would be regarded as a flaw, but it is this sense of doubt that creates room for the relationship to build from in the first place, and is perhaps the game’s most understated strength.

This is not to say that The Last Guardian was bereft of limitations regarding the execution of its ambitious scope. The most pressing challenge that Ueda and his team faced was how to balance its constructed sense of reality with regards to player expectations; that is, it had to find meaningful ways to commit to its vision of establishing the relationship between the boy and Trico while also acknowledging and appeasing players that would otherwise get lost or frustrated. Perhaps the most obvious downgrade from Ico is the presence of constant button prompts appearing on-screen to alert the players on how to better control the boy and instruct Trico; while the frequency of the prompts lessens over time, it is a slight disappointment that the game doesn’t simply force the players to experiment with inputs and commands as a more subtle and trusting substitute. This downfall however, is an anomaly amongst The Last Guardian’s other shortcomings, as it manages to successfully disguise many of its other concessions and limitations. There’s a classic “escape from the collapsing structure” sequence where all you do is hold forward and jump, but the game gets away with it because the player is used to being framed as a helpless participant. There’s occasional voice-over dialogue hints whenever the player has been stuck for a while in the same area, but it feels far less intrusive than Dormin’s repeated and booming hints in Shadow of the Colossus because the game has already established itself as a retrospective re-telling from the now grown boy’s point of view. Trico doesn’t respond immediately to the boy’s commands when being told where to go, but it makes sense that they wouldn’t function like clockwork and would need time to spot and process the situation from their own point of view, so the lag in response feels justified. It doesn’t matter that certain isolated elements of the game would crumble under scrutiny. What matters is that the situational context to allow players to suspend their disbelief is almost always present; in other words, the illusion holds up.

I’m still learning more about the game to this day. There are so many little details that I wouldn’t have spotted upon a first playthrough, and it’s an absolute joy finally getting to gush upon spotting them in replays. Of course it makes sense that you can’t just issue specific commands to Trico at the very start as a sequence-break despite not being taught by the game; after all, Trico hasn’t had time to observe you and mimic your actions to carry out such commands. Of course the hostile creatures that look exactly like your friend behave similarly; how can you then use your preconceived knowledge of their physiology to aid your friend in a fight against their copycat? I also can’t help but appreciate how GenDesign condensed so much learning within its introduction; in the first ten minutes alone, you’re hinted on how to later deal with the bodies of armor (the magical runes that appear before waking up are the exact same as the runes that appear when grabbed, and are dispelled in the same manner of furiously mashing buttons), you get to figure out how Trico’s eyes change colors depending upon whether they’re mesmerized or hostile, and it quickly establishes the premise of building up trust with a very wary creature that’s more than likely to misunderstand or ignore you at first. Combine all of these nuances with the game’s ability to destabilize and diversify playthroughs via Trico’s innate curiosity and semi-unpredictable instincts, and you get a game that becomes easier to appreciate the more the player familiarizes themselves with its inner workings.

I think a lot of criticism for The Last Guardian ultimately comes down to less of what we perceive the game is and more of what we perceive the game isn’t. It’s not a fully player-controlled puzzle-platforming game like Ico, it’s not a puzzle-combat game with spectacle like Shadow of the Colossus, and it’s certainly not a classic companion escort-quest game where you can just order Trico around like a robot and expect automatic results every time. Instead of focusing on the progression of more complex controls and puzzles, The Last Guardian is focused on the progression of a seemingly more complex relationship. I’m not going to pretend that everyone will get something out of this game, as it definitely requires a good deal of patience and player investment to meet the game halfway. It’s certainly more difficult to appreciate given its lack of influence unlike Ico or its lack of exhilarating boss encounters unlike Shadow of the Colossus. That said, it’s this element of danger in its ability to commit to its vision while alienating impatient players that makes it such a compelling title once it finally clicks. Many before me have pointed out how powerful the bond between the player and Trico felt upon learning from others that improperly caring for Trico results in your companion stubbornly ignoring the player’s commands; after all, volume swells cannot exist without contrast to provide room for growth. Perhaps this is why at the end of the day, I find myself transfixed by every word that Fumito Ueda has to offer. In an era where developers feel overly concerned with the best and brightest, he doesn’t seem concerned about what video games mean so much as what video games are. I can only hope that someday, he and GenDesign will return to bring us a new title that captures our imagination as thoroughly as many of his works already have for me.

At this point, I feel like I’ve been playing Journey for half of my life. I’ve played through underwater Journey, forest Journey, air Journey, space Journey, cat Journey, and even boring Journey. Yet upon my yearly ascent in the original Journey on New Year’s Day, I find myself just as floored as when I first picked it up years ago, in spite of clone after clone exhausting my goodwill. What exactly then, is present in the original’s realized game design philosophy that every other spiritual successor has found themselves bereft of?

To answer this question, I want you to imagine a world where Journey doesn’t exist. A world where the formula to indie developers meant something more than just mindlessly tilting up on the left joystick to walk towards the next checkpoint while some narrator waxed poetic in the background. Before Journey, before Flower even, the closest ancestor we had was Ico. Fumito Ueda described his game as an execution of “boy meets girl,” and what it boiled down to was a minimalist adventure game with some puzzles cleverly disguised as platforming and timing segments. Occasionally, you also whack a few shadows while protecting and pulling your female companion Yorda through vast and still castle ruins. It wasn’t a perfect game by any means; the combat was frankly tedious, Yorda lacked much of an identity outside of pointing at objects of interest/opening doors/getting kidnapped, and at the end of the day, there really wasn’t much in the way of a balanced and developed relationship when the player was calling all the shots, but it was still the start of something beautiful. It wasn’t mechanically complex or esoteric in any fashion, but it was different. It was different, and it felt dangerous.

This write-up is not intended to be a critique of Ico, nor is it meant to imply that games proceeding Team Ico's philosophy of “design by subtraction” have since been inferior. Rather, I bring up Ico in particular, because there seems to be this general perception that minimalism results in a crippling lack of mechanical depth. That is, many seem to believe that discarding and minimizing a game’s various elements results in a dearth of tangible mechanics or imagery to cling onto, and thus appears to result in an empty and vacuous experience with little to justify further replays or deeper dives. To me though, this line of thought fundamentally misunderstands the purpose of addition by subtraction. It was never about creating mechanically deep systems with limitless possibilities like an immersive sim or a sandbox. Rather, the philosophy aimed to remove excess layers that distracted from the game’s “more realistic feeling of presence”, such as removing optional bosses and landmarks in Shadow of the Colossus or reducing enemy types in Ico to just a single design. In fairness, the goal wasn't just to remove extraneous elements that made something feel overly “gamey,” but also to marry mechanics in a way where the invisible layer of intended design never made itself too apparent (i.e. hiding the user interface in Shadow of the Colossus outside of fights). It was not just addition by subtraction; it was also addition through illusion.

To that end, I firmly believe that Journey is the best Team Ico game that Fumito Ueda never directed. Journey’s design philosophy was not necessarily revolutionary for its time, considering its predecessors in the forms of Flower and Ico, nor was its ultimate goal of reaching a final destination via walking/jumping/flying mechanics particularly exemplary. What was exemplary was its level of care and precision in how it implemented said minimalist design philosophy. Every time I play through Journey, I pick up more subtle details through its fusion of audio-visual presentation and gameplay that seemed so clear and intuitive that I had taken their presence for granted. There are the obvious strengths, like how Journey wordlessly conveys your path forward by keeping the shining peak of the mountain visible at all times while outside, or how it uses consistent visual language through cloth creatures and strips to demarcate safe zones where the player can recharge their scarf. But there’s more beneath the surface; what about the game's sneaky introduction to the sand-sliding mechanic from the introductory dune so it’s no longer unfamiliar during the exhilarating and committal descent, or how there’s a section of the underground that’s filled with these scarf jellyfish tinted in blue allowing you to remain in flight that evokes the feeling of being underwater, foreshadowing the next section as a tower ascension where the player must continually breach the surface to “swim” and escape? Sure, everyone knows about how the bitter cold disempowers the player by slowing their movement and lowering the scarf’s energy gauge, but I usually don’t hear about how strong winds can chip away at the scarf’s capacity itself or how it reduces the volume and area of effect of your shouts, making it far more difficult to restore your energy gauge from the growing frostbite.

There’s also the overlooked audio aspect of Journey. Granted, everyone loves to discuss the soundtrack’s thematics, like how the final chord of Journey’s motif never resolves a single time in any track until the end of Apotheosis or for that matter, how all the instruments are never fully present until that final ascent, when the entire orchestra finally comes together as one only to slowly fall away as the player and the world fade away. Yet, the sound design regarding Journey’s implementation of said soundtrack often goes underappreciated. Again, there are plenty of clear strengths that have been widely discussed, such as the punctuated stillness of the desert dunes providing room for the piddle paddle of the player’s footsteps amongst the vast desert winds and eventually swelling into triumphant bursts of adventure. But again, there are little subtleties that speak to the soundtrack’s interactivity, like how the backing drum during the aforementioned underwater section gives the track the impression of being muted and seamlessly drops this filter once the player breaches the surface, or how the player’s shouts are always in the key of the backing track’s scale, meaning that the introduced notes remain within the game’s tonality. It’s these little things that further round out Journey’s experience; the music is so seamlessly woven in that it takes a discerning ear to pick out every specific detail, in such a way where it feels like the soundtrack is organically supplementing every memorable moment of the game.

Of course, it’s not enough to just handle the basics well, even if there’s a master’s touch present to carefully disguise these additions so silently. As I mentioned before, popular works need compelling hooks to draw in an audience, but they also need an element of danger to keep that audience engaged. In the case of Journey, Thatgamecompany tackles this through their stealth multiplayer. This is where Journey easily outclasses its successors and may in fact, even have one-upped Ico. If Ico’s main limitation was a lack of autonomy for any non-player characters, then Journey circumvents this problem entirely by replacing the AI with real players instead. The loose implementation adds a catch: nothing in the game aside from the final completion screen listing your companion(s)’ name(s) ever hints on this, and not once is the player given instructions or suggestions on how to interact with said players. The only obvious mechanical incentive from cooperating with other players is the ability to recharge one another’s scarves via proximity/shouts, and there’s no consequence to merely abandoning random players or quitting in the middle of a session. It’s what makes this multiplayer so compelling; many times you’ll find other players just wandering about by themselves, despawning, or quickly rushing ahead without care towards your presence. There’s no guarantee that they’ll cooperate… which makes that one instance where they do that much more memorable. In this sense, I think Jenova Chen and his team solved two problems at once: the aforementioned challenge of granting outside elements a degree of realism, and his own personal challenge of creating a minimalist environment where players had no incentives to act in bad faith despite never having any major incentives to cooperate either, resulting in seemingly organic interactions.

Perhaps it is cheating to state that this spontaneous element is what gives Journey a step-up over its peers, but I also can’t deny that this same feature is exactly what lends the game its identity. It’s hard to provide drastically different experiences for focused single player games after all; no matter how much Fumito Ueda may have insisted that he was inspired by emergent gameplay mechanics and player autonomy to allow for more diverse experiences, there remains an upper limit upon how far those experiences can unravel. However, Thatgamecompany’s take upon the “single-player odyssey” alongside the game’s cyclical nature and short runtime means that Journey is a far more replayable experience while remaining every bit as compelling as its competition. Even after multiple trips up the summit, I continue to be amazed by the thoughtfulness shown to me by other players. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve fallen down the temple from being blown away by the wind, only for my companion to jump down with me, or how many trips through the blizzard were spent slowly trudging together mashing my shout, just like strangers on a cold winter’s night huddling together for warmth while shouting cries of encouragement to take one more step forward. In essence, Journey didn't need an intricate or elaborate story told with fanciful cutscenes and voice-acting; it simply needed to provide a backbone with no other contradicting elements, allowing players to form their own stories by experiencing the game on their own terms.

Journey isn’t mechanically rich or wildly innovative in terms of its scope, but it doesn’t have to be. Rather, it’s a deceptively simple yet meticulous and thoughtfully different approach upon a respected design philosophy, which aimed to further refine said formula by whittling down any elements that detracted from the game’s constructed sense of reality. Similarly, it doesn't feel the need to present a grandiose narrative, instead stripping away any specific contextual layers as to allow players to create memorable experiences with no conflicting moments in-between. I should be sick of this formula after tackling so many misguided copycats, and I can't deny that I was afraid to label yet another old favorite as propped up by nostalgia. Thankfully, my fears have been assuaged. I keep waiting for the day where I’ll finally be content putting this down forever… but that day has yet to come. I was not the first adventurer to embark upon this pilgrimage, nor will I be the last. Maybe I just need to get over my cynicism and accept that there was never anything to be cynical of to begin with. I’m sure more developers will continue to lazily carbon copy one of my favorites until the end of time, but that doesn’t mean the good times have to end.

Thanks for reading, everyone. Happy new year, and here’s to another journey around the sun.

I’ll confess: I’ve never beaten a single Zelda game in my life. Sure, I grew up a Nintendo kid playing almost nothing but Mario and Pokemon, but for some reason I never really felt enticed to give Nintendo’s most critically acclaimed series a serious shot. I’ve tried out the opening hours of Wind Waker (something that I desperately need to finish one of these days) and have played plenty of scattered hours of Ocarina of Time at a friend’s house, and yet it wasn’t enough considering the series has eluded me until now. So, it felt like a solid challenge to cap off 2023, given my recent run with time loop adventure games… and that poyfuh recommended the game to me over a year ago. It took a while to muster up the commitment, but I finally got there! Feel free to take my readings here with a grain of salt given my lack of nostalgia for Zelda, but hopefully I can bring something different to the table by focusing on what impact it had upon a relative newcomer.

For lack of better words, The Legend of Zelda is an adventure game series. Maybe the adventure game series. Quite a few good friends and users I closely follow have commented about how Zelda is really a mish-mosh of different genres, which in essence forms the adventure game. Innuendo Studios has defined this as “games that tell stories using puzzles,” though this is a very loose definition as both narratives and puzzles take many different forms. Essentially, the genre has become a blanket term that has come to incorporate many different types of games. Zelda, as the platonic encapsulation of adventure games, has as a result, come to include many different types of genre-specific gameplay in one cohesive product. To sum this up, here’s a bit that I’ve jokingly brought up with friends: every game is basically Zelda, because Zelda is basically every game.

What I’m trying to say here, is that Majora’s Mask, much like the rest of Zelda, is not so much about any one single game mechanic so much as the coalescence of them all. No one particular element is going to stand out as exceptional because many games before and after have surpassed them, but the whole is certainly greater than the sum of its parts. Much like how a classic adventure game is a fusion of different game mechanics, Majora’s Mask focuses on the intersection of different narratives and activities to evoke “the adventurer’s spirit.” It’s very easy to be critical of specific mechanics and ideas presented within the game in isolation (and I absolutely will be due to my point of reference), but they nevertheless come together to create a game unlike any other.

I suppose the easiest way to explain the premise of Majora’s Mask is to describe it as a cross between a metroidvania (item/ability gating) and a mystroidvania (knowledge gating). The time loop facilitates both of these aspects: as Link repeats the three-day cycle to gather information regarding Termina’s workings, he also gains new key items (both classic Zelda tools like the Hookshot and masks to wear/transform), learns new songs for his ocarina, and gains access to new areas and allies that can further aid his progress. The pressing issue then, is that Majora’s Mask doesn’t fully lean into the strengths of either genre.

Majora’s Mask feels underwhelming when compared to traditional metroidvanias, because key items feel underutilized. Much of this is due to the lock-and-key nature of the puzzles. Classic Zelda games focused on items with multiple facets via both dealing damage in fights and traversal/exploration: one classic example is the hookshot, which can let Link grapple up towards wooden surfaces/chests while also acting as a ranged weapon capable of pulling items and enemies towards him. However, Majora’s Mask focuses on the collection of masks as the vast majority of key items, and most are used for one exact situation (i.e. Don Gero’s mask lets you talk to frogs) and nothing else. Additionally, the masks aren’t very balanced in terms of utility, as some masks are useless once obtained (i.e. the Troupe Leader’s mask) while some are so conventionally strong that you’ll be constantly relying upon them (i.e. the Bunny Hood increases Link’s running speed and agility, so it’s a godsend for general traversal and boss fights).

On the other hand, Majora’s Mask also feels a little lacking as a mystroidvania, because there’s relatively little observation involved when compared to similar titles. The Bomber’s Notebook is your main tool is your main tool to keep track of everyone’s schedules across the three-day time loop, but it’s a bit limited in scope. There’s only twenty inhabitants recorded with schedules, and of those twenty, at least a fourth of them can be stamped as resolved by simply speaking to them once at the right time with the right item/mask. In fact, there’s only two side-questlines that force Link to commit to strict and specific time limits across the three-day cycle (Kafei and the main Romani Ranch quest). As a result, completing the Bomber’s Notebook is surprisingly straightforward, and usually doesn’t require more than one iteration of the time loop to follow and solve each case, given that Link has the appropriate items on hand when necessary.

That's not to say that the time loop is a net negative in the scope of Majora’s Mask, but rather that in comparison to other time loop games since then, it doesn’t capitalize as much in its execution. For example, there is very little usage of the time loop in regards to its four main dungeons. As Scamsley has pointed out, the presence of a time loop should lend naturally to speedrunning (via both knowledge gating to clear the dungeon faster with skips and ability-gating to use obtained items for shortcuts), but this is more or less made redundant by beating the dungeon’s boss, as the game is content giving you a direct teleport to refight dungeon bosses in subsequent resets instead. Additionally, almost all of the time-sensitive content is located within Clock Town; while it’s quite satisfying figuring out how schedules play out in the main hub, it feels like a squandered opportunity to not include enough specifically timed events elsewhere to fully utilize the three-day cycle. The presence of owl statues throughout the map sort of speaks to this; rather than have the player spend time traversing on foot and potentially stumble upon other time sensitive events, the developers would prefer for players to jump to whatever destinations they had in mind as to avoid wasting time in areas where these time-sensitive quests didn’t exist.

On top of all of this is a general clunkiness that exists between many of the game’s various systems. There’s just enough quality-of-life to where the game feels thoughtful for its time, but also plenty of wasted time here and there that made me wonder if the developers could have gone a little further. The sheer number of key items in the menu is a huge culprit; with only three key item slots accessible at any time (and the ocarina/three transformation masks constantly taking up slots), the player is constantly roaming through the four menu screens to select the appropriate item for each situation, and it’s made worse because most items are used once and then immediately replaced as a stream of inventory puzzles. There’s also a ton of downtime from having to watch the same cutscenes over and over even if you’ve seen them in previous loops, and from being subjected to the same non-skippable Song of Soaring animation every time you teleport to an owl statue. At the very least, you can skip the mask transformations once viewed for the first time. Parsing through the three-day cycle can also be a bit annoying; the Song of Double Time does at least let you skip a full twelve hours ahead to the start of each day/night cycle, but oftentimes the timed events in question begin at midnight or midday, meaning that you’ll have to wait around for a few in-game hours since the Song of Double Time plants you at 6 AM/PM. Finally, I think it’s an interesting idea resetting the player’s rupee and general ammo count (i.e. bombs, arrows, Deku Nuts, etc) with each new loop while allowing the player to farm pre-existing Rupee chests that have been opened in previous cycles. However, while there is a bank that allows the player to store Rupees between loops, there’s no item storage facility to stockpile ammo between loops, meaning that the player will likely spend a few minutes at the start of each loop whacking bushes and enemies for basic resources (or at least eat into the player’s account to buy supplies at shops, if they don’t spend time farming chests for the Rupees instead).

Honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when trying to judge Majora’s Mask against today’s standards of what we consider a “good” adventure game. I do have other scattered complaints, such as boss fights being generally underwhelming (I might have legitimately spent more time fighting dungeon mini-bosses than the four main masked bosses themselves), certain tedious side-games like the RNG-heavy Dampé grave digging or the Goron race with rubber-banding AI, a few overused mini-bosses such as having to fight Wizzrobe six different times, and how outside of the Stone Temple, mask abilities are never satisfyingly blended together in puzzles/quests. The cherry on top of all this is the presence of the Stone Mask, which I’d say is a bit too good since it lets you completely ignore most dungeon enemies. That in itself made me question the quality of that one forced stealth section in Great Bay; if the optimal solution is to wear a mask which lets you outright ignore the entire system, then should it even exist? Even from the perspective of someone who’s never cleared a Zelda game before, I find myself nodding in agreement when others claim that Majora’s Mask shows its age a bit more than Ocarina of Time.

But that’s not really why we play Zelda games, right? Despite the clunkiness of some mechanics and the many areas of potential improvement, many of us are willing to sit through and accept these flaws because the general experience is the selling point. The obvious argument to be made is that while plenty of MM’s mechanics feel undercooked, the actual mechanism of gameplay is constantly shifting about to suit the specific context. In a sense, Majora’s Mask can be viewed as an antecedent to the modern possession game: the basic control scheme remains the same regardless of the mask worn, but the functionality of the basic control scheme differs. This allows the game to stick to a grounded and consistent formula even though Link’s toolkit is constantly evolving on the fly, and while there are occasional moments of jank from certain side-games, most are over in a flash and still contribute positively towards the final goal of gaining enough knowledge and utility to prevent the impending crisis.

Essentially, many of the previously mentioned shortcomings end up inverting in on themselves. While Majora’s Mask has plenty of rough edges due to its rushed development and heavy re-use of assets, it’s these rough edges that lend so much towards its personality. I love how absolutely absurd and deranged the writing becomes, and the adventure game structure lets Majora’s Mask take complete advantage of the situation. One minute you’re tracking down a circus performer so he can spill his life story about joining an animal troupe since humans are also animals, then the next minute you’re fending off these zombie lantern alien ghosts with searchlight eyes so they don’t kidnap your new friend and her cows before the sun rises. The seeming lack of focus with the constant barrage of minigames and side-quests keeps the player constantly guessing what the next twist of events will bring, and the game is more than happy to ask rather than answer questions.

The backing time loop connecting all of these events together is really what drives the message home. Even though it’s absolutely tedious having to watch the same cutscenes over and over again, nothing illustrates the plight of Termina more starkly than forcing players to endlessly relive the day’s events and realizing that they are the only chance this world stands at reaching a new timeline. The ending credits bring such a gratifying emotional rush because the game deliberately withholds any semblance of permanent catharsis until you finally break through. You can’t help everyone in a single time loop, and they will never be free of their troubles until the moon stops falling. Until then, they’ll be hopelessly repeating the same tasks three days at a time, waiting for the dawn of a new day that will never come.

At the end of the day, I could keep finding things to nitpick about Majora’s Mask, but I also can’t imagine the game without these shortcomings since they form an integral part of the game’s identity. The masks might be glorified gimmicks, but they’re fantastic symbolism that are forever carried with you upon your journey even as time is constantly erased, and ultimately strengthen the adventure game aspect by assigning you new tasks to peruse. The time loop might not be fully utilized outside of Clock Town and contain extended gaps of waiting to get to important events, but it’s the forced repetition of the three-day cycle’s events that enforces the gravity of the situation upon the player. Individual characters aside from Skull Kid might not have the fleshed-out backgrounds that I had hoped for, but it’s a non-issue when Majora’s Mask is ultimately the story of Termina itself, formed from the intersecting schedules of all the different characters and elements at play. Separately, I think all of these elements are easily picked apart, but meshed together, they contribute to this pervasive nightmare of abject misery where even in the face of imminent death, fleeting moments of joy and comfort are enough to humanize the fantastical elements of Termina and keep the player moving forward towards a better future.

The story of and surrounding Majora’s Mask fascinates me, especially when learning that director Eiji Aonuma has since expressed regrets regarding its development. I and many others, however, see nothing to be ashamed of with their final product. If anything, Majora’s Mask is classic Nintendo at its core: instead of making a product that was visibly better than its competition, the developers took a chance and sought out to make something that was visibly different. The Wii is often cited as the most prevalent example of this “blue ocean strategy," though I firmly believe that Majora’s Mask was Nintendo’s first notable crack at it. Having to follow-up a game considered by many as the greatest of all time with an even shorter development period was a daunting ask, but as far I’m concerned, they absolutely succeeded. It doesn’t matter that other time loop adventure games have since outclassed their grandfather; there’s simply nothing like Majora’s Mask, and I doubt there ever will be.

Got this for free via PS+ and gave it a few hours, and it was relaxing enough to begin with. Who wouldn't enjoy completely rinsing a car in five minutes with minimal effort? Unfortunately, the game gets real picky as you progress. Having to scour for that last invisible speck of dirt to fully clean a large wall or finding out which one of the sixteen identical wooden trims I had to more thoroughly investigate for every job really wore me out. Also, this might just be my experience playing on PS5 with a controller, but my right hand started aching after a half hour of constantly holding down the right trigger to continuously spray surfaces. Not a great feeling when you need a break from your gaming break!

The following write-up is divided into two parts: a general overview of Echoes of the Eye in relation to Outer Wilds’ base game, and a more spoiler-heavy breakdown of the execution.

Have you ever had that feeling where upon playing through a remake or sequel of a game, you start to question whether or not you liked the original game to begin with?

I’ve been going through this a lot in 2023. Ys: Memories of Celceta comes to mind first; it took me almost an entire year to finally complete it after beating Ys Seven last fall, because despite carrying over the baseline mechanics, the actual pacing of the game felt noticeably different. Then, I went through a similar feeling in the first few hours of Oxenfree II back in October, and despite the similarities to the original, I quickly shelved it and haven't returned since. Finally, this occurred a third time just a few weeks ago with Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX, which upon further investigation I found that despite retaining the base structure of the original Blue/Red Rescue team, the remake directly pulled mechanics and inspiration from more recent games in the series, resulting in a system that no longer served its original purpose. Needless to say, it’s a frustrating experience that often required a lot of scrutiny and soul searching to resolve: did the sequels/remakes change mechanics in ways that felt contrary to the spirit of the originals, or have I just been viewing the originals through rose-tinted glasses this whole time?

This brings us to Echoes of the Eye, my fourth example. In its defense, the cards were already stacked against it; practically every friend I’ve talked to has spoken very positively about how Echoes of the Eye serves as an extension of the base Outer Wilds, and how it greatly enriches the lore of its universe, so it’s hard to see even slight deviations as anything less than a disappointment. Perhaps it is also not entirely fair to lump Echoes of the Eye in with standard sequels and remakes, for Mobius Games was careful to market the DLC as an expansion instead of a separate adventure. I get that this sounds like semantics, but I’d argue that this in itself is representative of Echoes of the Eye’s identity within the game’s scope, or rather, its identity crisis as part of the game’s scope.

In theory, Echoes of the Eye needed to provide an expansion to the game without becoming a “mandatory” part of the experience, since it’s paid DLC released two years after the base game. At the same time though, the expansion also had to fulfill the role of providing a different experience from the base game (otherwise why not just release a free content patch?) while concurrently remaining consistent within the game’s lore and at the very least, capturing the spirit of what made Outer Wilds so compelling. Therein lies the dilemma: how do you make a separate expansion that doesn’t force the player to play the base game prior or coerce/spoil the player in their playthrough of the base game afterwards, while thematically capturing the design philosophy of a game that to me, felt complete?

I realize that it is difficult to discuss the topic at hand without at least explaining how the base game plays into this, so here is my brief (and admittingly, watered-down) summary since I sincerely believe that saying any more would lessen the individual experience. Outer Wilds, to me, is a game about pure discovery. It’s about struggling through life and death, time after time, making sense of something that is so much bigger than you to where it is almost unfathomable to conceptualize. At its core, the mechanics seem fairly simple and concrete; you’ve got a base set of tools and controls that never need to evolve, because much of the game is dictated by the individual circumstances around you in exploiting the set rules of the planetary system to progress further. Internalizing Outer Wilds’ baseline structure and governing mechanics and making the connections between discoveries and mysteries is every bit as key as the execution itself, and as a result, what seems to be this astronomical conundrum stemming from this vast universe becomes seemingly more manageable with each new revelation until the player puts all the pieces together to bring the tale to its close.

Unfortunately, this is not how Echoes of the Eye operates whatsoever.

Spoilers for both base Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye will be covered beyond this point.

BeachEpisode brings up a fundamental point in their review that I'd like to expand upon: despite separate planets and areas in Outer Wilds operating under different conditions, the universe nevertheless remains mechanically consistent because at their core, the same set of underlying systems and mechanics never changes. For example, once you learn the three rules of quantum mechanics in base Outer Wilds, you can exploit these same rules regardless of what planet you are on to manipulate quantum objects; capturing a moving quantum object with a photograph will always work on said quantum object regardless of what the quantum object is or the system it exists within. As a result, Outer Wilds also has the benefit of not having a set progression path. I like to imagine the game as a vast series of tunnels intersecting one another at various junctions; it’s super easy to jump back and forth between systems at one’s own will with no negative consequences whatsoever, and regardless of the starting point or route taken, anyone can play through the game and discover all of the content, inevitably coming to the same conclusions.

Meanwhile, Echoes of the Eye takes place almost entirely in one location, dubbed “The Stranger.” My best guess is that Mobius Games chose to isolate and contain all of the expansion’s content in one hub as to prevent players from accidentally stumbling upon the DLC’s side story, though it is still theoretically possible to unintentionally discover the strange black void in the sky without ever following the intended path of following radio tower interference to lead into the expansion, much like I did in my own base game playthrough. Already, you can see the conceptual conflicts; the player isn’t going to know that the Stranger is separate from the base game’s ending until they check their ship logs specifically demarcating the DLC from the base game, but the more troubling issue is the artificiality of creating an intended path with only one real trigger/clue for the Stranger. Either way, it puts the presence of the DLC in an awkward place.

Furthermore, centralizing the DLC around one set location makes exploration in the expansion much more deliberate. This doesn’t inherently sound like a negative at first, but again, consider this in relation to the base game. As implied above, one understated strength is that clues are spread across the entire system and can often be linked to other outlying clues in completely different locations, which encourages the player to more thoroughly explore around the planetary system while lessening burnout from getting walled by the same mysteries in certain locations. The player can simply switch tasks yet continually progress despite doing so. What makes this particularly grating when translated to Echoes of the Eye is that despite all the DLC content being present in the Stranger, the game is still completely connected to the base game and thus will always spawn you back at Timber Hearth even if you die/lapse within the DLC. It makes complete sense for the game to utilize Timber Hearth as a respawn in the base game, but it presents a real lack of quality-of-life issue during an Echoes of the Eye run when the player has to fly back to the Stranger over and over again during the beginning of each time loop, making death feel far more punishing.

This disconnect from the main planetary system becomes even more apparent thanks to the game’s baseline mechanics feeling very underutilized in the exploration of the Stranger. For instance, the Signalscope (used to detect radio wave sources) isn’t used a single time. The aforementioned quantum mechanic laws are also absent, most likely because knowledge of such laws would require you to have played the base game. The ship’s log, used for keeping track of rumors and connecting locations, does at least take note of discoveries in the Stranger, but its presence feels minimal because there’s no space travel involved once you’ve docked in the Stranger’s hangar and actively going back to the docked hangar to check rumors in the middle of runs becomes a huge commitment when considering the one-directional flowing river in the way. Even the time loop itself becomes a detriment. In the base game, the time loop simply makes environments different to navigate, rather than strictly more difficult; for example, Brittle Hollow slowly falls apart over time into a black hole, while the Ash and Ember twins swap sand volumes like an hourglass. That’s not really the case for Echoes of the Eye: the main event dictated by the time loop is the destruction of dam causing the river to overflow, which aside from a couple of key differences from extinguishing some campfire flames, mostly just makes the river more difficult to navigate by flooding the environment with stronger currents.

Here's where another key wrinkle comes into play: the player is unable to translate the alien language of the Stranger’s inhabitants (for reasons I can’t completely explain due to excess spoilers but thematically fit into the series’ lore), and as such, most of the Stranger’s narrative is told via slides that are manually viewed from a projector. I have mixed feelings here. On one hand, the art is beautifully drawn to quickly explain concepts and lore. On the other hand, this is indicative of Echoes of the Eye’s progression feeling fairly linear; the loop then becomes exploring around areas to find reels that hint you upon how to explore other areas for more reels, and instead of making the discoveries for yourself, the gameplay becomes an elaborate exercise of just following illustrated instructions really well. At least the base game left plenty of ambiguity from other forms of given context clues (such as Nomai translations and character dialogue) creating vague hints of what to follow up upon, but the reels often quite literally display exact solutions of what to do in particular scenarios (i.e. look in this direction during this specific part of the raft path to teleport to a new area), which can leave players feeling like they didn’t need to do much extrapolating and thus rob them of the thrill of discovery. Again, this isn’t necessary a pressing issue in isolation, but when compared to the open-ended problems that the base game loved to present, Echoes of the Eye’s reels leave something to be desired.

And then, there’s the dream world, which basically exacerbates every issue I’ve described above and adds some more to boot. The separate areas of the dream world eschew many of the governing laws that dictate the base game and the Stranger’s overworlds (so you won’t be able to use your jetpack/flashlight/scout launcher/etc), and instead force the player to adhere to exclusive mechanics present only in the dream world, such as the teleporting hands and the wooden totems that can extinguish/illuminate distant light sources. Much of these areas are enveloped in this blanketing darkness where you can’t see more than a few feet in front of you, unless you make the conscious decision to focus your lantern’s light and slow your movement to a crawl. Navigation of these areas is annoying enough as is, but they become even more troublesome thanks to these roaming owls that upon spotting you in the light, will immediately dash towards you and extinguish your lantern, waking you up and forcing another reentry with more backtracking. Oddly, while the slide reels at least give you the hint on where to go for objectives, they don’t give context regarding the owls, which means that avoiding detection more or less comes down to memorizing their routes via trial and error and shutting off your lantern so you can tip-toe around them in total darkness. At that point, the forced stealth-horror sections fail to spark any enthusiasm; the in-your-face scary monsters aren’t scary anymore when you’re just getting caught over and over trying to sneak past, and the learning curve feels far more punishing than difficult thanks to the time loop cutting your experimentation short before you’ve got to redo the whole shebang and reacquire the lantern/get back to the campfire entry to try again.

I’ve been fairly critical of Echoes of the Eye so far, but I can at least concede that within the DLC, the mechanics feel internally consistent and serve their situations well. The light/dark mechanics used to steer the raft, open doors, and display reels capture the expansion’s theme really well and match the player’s expectations (i.e. you’re shining your flashlight onto poles on the raft to steer, and it makes sense that you’d want to steer in the direction you’re looking in), which led to one particular light puzzle utilizing the scout launcher that I really appreciated. Exploration feels a bit tempered, partially because of the reels often spelling too much out and partially because using the jetpack feels risky when the flowing current can send you careening down the river, but at least the player usually isn’t lost or confused despite often not having the ship’s log within reach.

Sadly, I find it difficult to extend that same courtesy to the dream world. Aside from the tedious forced-stealth, some of the puzzles feel outright unintuitive, while others feel undercooked. For instance, one area requires you to tail hostile owls to figure out the location of a hidden stairway into an archive. However, the game has been instinctively signaling to you this entire time that the owls should be avoided entirely, especially when they can quickly spot and hunt you down as soon as they notice your light source. Why then, does the game expect you to completely invert this learning for one particular puzzle? Similarly, there are several instances in another area where the player is expected to walk between seeming gaps in mid-air using candles to mark invisible bridges. It’s not until you’ve accessed the area’s vault that you find out that those invisible bridges can be spotted all along by placing your lantern on the floor and walking a certain distance away to “reveal” the simulation and display the invisible bridges. Again, it’s a cool concept, but certainly it would have made more sense to learn the exploit before the puzzles instead of presenting it in a reel afterwards like some sort of revelation that’s not quite as useful anymore.

Many of the game’s discrepancies troubled me greatly at this time, so I decided to hunt down a primary source to better understand what was going through the dev team’s minds after completing the game a few hours later. It should then come as no surprise that many of the differences between Outer Wilds and Echoes of the Eye are a result of the DLC requiring a different design philosophy out of necessity because the base game already existed. Co-designer Alex Beachum describes Echoes of the Eye’s design philosophy in an interview as essentially the reverse approach to base Outer Wilds. While Outer Wilds was designed with story organically arising from gameplay possibilities, Echoes of the Eye had to implement the gameplay with preestablished premises in mind, building locations around the story. This then, explains the rigidity of the game’s overworld progress in phases (find the Stranger -> explore around the river -> explore the dream world -> solve the case) and hints towards why the designers settled upon reels as the solution for explaining lore and guiding players towards the intended routes of discovery.

There’s also evidence which suggests that scope creep was a pressing concern during Echoes of the Eye's development. Beachum mentions during that same interview that there were originally three worlds to be designed within the Stranger: a light world, a dark world, and a dream/simulated world. Originally, the pitch was that the Stranger was to operate on a day-night cycle, and that the big twist was that the light and dark world were really two sides of the same coin, using an elevator to flip you to the other side. The dream world essentially existed as a “matrix” where the ghosts manifesting in the overworld were plugged in. Eventually, this idea had to be greatly simplified when the designers realized it was far too much work to implement all three worlds at once. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting thought experiment considering how these three worlds would operate differently, and perhaps the distinct mechanics present in the dream world would not feel nearly as jarring if it operated as a transition world between the light and dark environments.

Finally, the interview confirmed that as a result of the game’s linearity, the development team had to deliberately scale back certain elements that they feared would lead to accidental findings outright skipping entire sections of the game. Essentially, the designers believed it made no intentional sense for the civilization to store away the “answers” to the security system. Instead, they hoped to make the final revelations of exploiting glitches in the system feel like deliberately timed discoveries. For example, Mobius Games increased the steepness of the angle at which the player has to tilt their camera to place down the lantern, so accidentally finding out about the virtual world from walking away from the lantern became much more difficult.

That more than anything, illustrates what I think is the main point of friction between the base game and Echoes of the Eye. Despite having strict solutions per hand-crafted puzzle, Outer Wilds felt like a game firmly within the player’s control thanks to its open-ended structure. By no means was it focused upon emergent gameplay, but the ability to turn accidental discoveries into tangible threads was nevertheless greatly appreciated and really made me feel like I was doing the brunt of the work. Echoes of the Eye on the other hand, is a game that had to be much more carefully scripted as to not take away from both its internal runtime and the larger overall mystery from which it stemmed from. The fact that Mobius Games had to intentionally limit the available possibilities by removing utility and filled up much of its planned runtime with forced stealth that felt like banging my head against the wall speaks to a much more visible artificiality (quite literally, in this case) present within the deliberately constrained and separated areas of the DLC.

The conclusion at least, brings Echoes of the Eye down to earth. After exploiting the simulation with the glitches that you learned about in the dream world vaults, you finally get to meet the lone survivor and learn more about what happened from their perspective. It’s a shame that the exploits are used exactly once and all at once instead of incrementally throughout explorations of the virtual world, but I can respect an ending that quickly comes to a natural close and serves as a succinct foil to the much more illustrious finale of the base game. The story is not quite complete yet though, because then it becomes time to share your side as the prisoner hands over the vision staff. It would not be an exaggeration to claim that this moment is perhaps the most satisfying catharsis in the entire game’s runtime. Such a simple act as becoming the storyteller yourself, coupled with the developer’s care to alter the specific pictured events depending on what your character has witnessed in the base game prior to opening the vault, really brings the whole piece together. I may have my gripes with the expansion’s conceptualization with respect to the base game, but I am certainly glad that it ended on such a memorable final message that only serves to bolster the sum of its parts.

All things considered, I think that Echoes of the Eye could have been a damn good game if it was entirely self-contained. I did feel that the light-dark mechanics were thoroughly explored within the scope of its environments, and if the game were uncoupled from the base game as to provide simple quality of life updates like a spawn point within the Stranger or a portable version of the ship-log to access at any time, I think the expansion would have been far less frustrating. Hell, if the time loop was removed entirely and I had more time to thoroughly explore the dream world without time constraints, I could definitely see myself attempting to patiently manipulate the AI for a more tense experience rather than simply bum-rushing each forced stealth section. In isolation, I think Echoes of the Eye’s mechanics and overall message are mostly thematically consistent and sound.

Major spoilers end here.

At the end of the day though, that’s exactly the core problem. Outer Wilds is a game about connection. It’s about making sense of subtle clues here and there and linking all the details together to process this overwhelming sensation of confronting something that’s so much more than you could have ever imagined. Echoes of the Eye is supposed to be an expansion that doesn't require prior knowledge of Outer Wilds, yet this linkage to the base game is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Without the base game as a reference point, its final message would not have such lasting impact, but as a result of being an expansion, it’s forever stuck playing second fiddle to something that was already so conceptually realized while feeling drastically different from its already established conventions.

Echoes of the Eye is the best DLC that never needed to exist. That’s simultaneously a knock on the DLC and praise for Outer Wilds itself, as it’s quite difficult to evaluate Echoes of the Eye on its own merits for better or for worse. Perhaps it could have been something more if it didn’t need to live in the shadow of something greater, but what purpose would it have served otherwise? It’s hard to think of any obvious and practical improvements when it feels like conceptually, Mobius Digital may have written themselves into a corner. I'm relieved that my love for the original game was not unfounded, though it's still a bummer at the end of the day that its artistic vision didn't translate too well into its expansion. As such, while I’m glad to have experienced Echoes of the Eye, I’m just as glad to have finally made some sense of this all and have seen this behemoth of modern indie games to its natural conclusion.

At first glance, I thought this was more or less budget Hypnospace Outlaw, with the old internet/Geocities inspiration replaced by some amalgamation of Miiverse, Swapnote, and MSN Messenger. That wouldn't be giving enough credit to Videoverse however; instead of focusing on the mystique of the deep web, Videoverse tackles the intricacies of navigating a dying social network tied to increasingly redundant technology and highlights the relationships within. The game forgoes Hypnospace Outlaw's discovery puzzles, and cuts right to the core of interacting with the community itself, instinctively conveying the fragility of maintaining such relationships. You're constantly scouring the same forums over and over for new comments and any changes, trying to decipher exactly what this particular user meant with just one sentence while playing the simulations in your head about how particular responses (or not responding at all) could make their day a little bit better or potentially upset another member due to unintended consequences.

It's a surprisingly gripping experience despite its limitations: sometimes there are certain responses that the game forbids you from picking because you're not "lawful/cocky" enough even if the responses feel more blunt than out of character, and browsing the same posts repeatedly can feel a bit plodding when the trigger to proceed requires you to leave more comments but the system itself can only mark whether a post is left read/unread. Despite that, the payoff makes the occasional tedium worthwhile; marking down "top posts" in a notebook lets you reiterate those statements to others later on, and the game really comes together when you're using small tidbits of wisdom to brighten an online friend's day. If you're looking for an cathartic blast to the past that depicts the ephemerality of online spaces while thoughtfully forcing players to confront the ambiguity of the interactions stemming within, then Videoverse may be just what you're looking for.

On the surface, Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Rescue Team DX appears to be a pretty faithful remake of the original Blue and Red Rescue Team. It’s the same turn-based dungeon-crawler roguelike Pokemon battling translation that I had grew up with almost two decades ago, coupled with the same storyline and a rearranged orchestral version of the original’s DS soundtrack. Minus the lack of walkable Friend Areas, DX’s atmosphere and core gameplay mechanics seemed accurate to my previous experience of the original games at first, and thus it seemed like a forgone conclusion that I’d naturally enjoy the remake. However, the more I played through the game, the more things felt off.

Further investigation into DX’s inner workings revealed that while DX preserves the core formula of Blue Rescue Team’s structure and basic combat mechanics, much of the surrounding survival mechanics have actually been pulled from the latest iteration of PMD via Pokemon Super Mystery Dungeon on the 3DS to “modernize” the mechanics as opposed to adapting mechanics from the original games in Red/Blue Rescue Team or the DS successors in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. I started noticing that in DX, the hunger mechanic felt much more prevalent; my Pokemon’s belly appeared to empty much more quickly than in the originals, and I found myself consuming an Apple every few minutes or so. There’s a variety of changes that contribute to this: the belly decreases by 1/7 of a point every action (instead of 1/10 for Blue and EoS), Max Ethers/Elixirs no longer restore BP, consuming berries & seeds only restore 2 BP as opposed to 5 in the originals, and so on. Similarly, Power Point (PP) management regarding move usage limits became far more grating in DX as opposed to the original. The obvious culprit is removing the standard attack that could be used at any time for a weaker strike that preserved PP (meaning players now have to utilize moves far more often), but to compensate for this, Spike Chunsoft had to supply the player with far more PP restoration items. However, instead of supplying them with Max Elixirs that fully restore PP for all moves used, the most common PP restoration item is now the Max Ether, which only restores PP for a single move. The optimal strategy then, is to spam the same move over and over again so you get the most bang for your buck out of using Max Ethers. Finally, weather feels much more intrusive in the remake as opposed to the originals, because DX removes the ability to naturally heal HP over time during sandstorms/hail if you’re not of a resistant type, meaning that you have to either pack a lot more Oran Berries or waste more time outside of damaging weather to heal up.

None of these changes would feel too problematic in isolation, but together, this results in DX overemphasizing its resource management in comparison to Blue Rescue Team or Explorers of Sky, meaning that overloading your toolbox with the necessary buffers or grinding in easier dungeons to stock up on said buffers is pretty much a given to succeed (especially when Apple/Sticky Traps in dungeons can further spoil your resources). I unfortunately find this shift in focus somewhat ill-fitting to a remake of Blue Rescue Team; while the structure and core gameplay remained the same, the circumstances dictating how the player had to interact with the structure changed, and thus it feels to me like the remake struggled to serve its intended purpose. Needless to say, I’m far more interested in the turn-based combat than the resource management of PMD, and DX felt far more imbalanced to where I felt like I was spending most of my time watching my health/PP/belly and menuing rather than focusing on the play-by-play.

In a broader sense, I’ve said before that Pokemon’s greatest weakness is the presence of excessive RNG and grinding. That’s not to say that these weaknesses were absent from PMD, but rather, PMD often prevailed in the face of bullshit RNG and grinding because of how the game’s structure and gameplay mechanics leaned into them. Once again though, for a remake that seemed faithful on the outside, DX regrettably makes changes that worsen the RNG and grinding to extents that were not necessarily present in the originals.

I’ll come right out and say that I’m not a fan of DX’s changes regarding team size and recruitment. Blue Rescue Team and EoS kept the max party size to four Pokemon at a time (with Blue only letting you bring in three Pokemon at a time while EoS let you bring four; if you wanted a fourth in Blue, it had to be recruited in the dungeon), but DX has a max party size of up to eight Pokemon despite only letting you bring in three recruited members. The short and thick of it is that these recruits are a necessary liability for successful runs. They’re a liability because you have to bring them back through the end of the dungeon run to permanently recruit them on your team (unlike the originals, which let you send them back immediately to base), but keeping them alive will naturally eat into your resources, and letting them faint once they’ve been temporarily recruited as a guest will cause enemy Pokemon to become “awakened” and pose an immediate threat via significant stat increases. It’s also extremely unwieldy to try and micromanage five guests at the same time, especially when you can’t give guest Pokemon exact move commands or control their tactics, and you’ll often find them getting attacked at the end of a single-file line in corridors, unable to lend a helping hand to fend off enemy ambushes. At the same time, these guests can be absolute godsends to runs: they often come with Rare Qualities that affect the entire team, such as Small Stomach (which lets you consume any seed/berry/apple and immediately fills the belly to max capacity) or Strike Back (which lowers the Attack and Special Attack stats of an enemy Pokemon, including bosses, that deals damage to your team). You can’t see what rare qualities an enemy Pokemon may have while fighting them, so it’s in your best interest to recruit as many guests as possible in hopes of getting more Rare Qualities to bolster your team. Essentially, this is yet another resource grind that’s present only in the remake. At best, getting the Rare Quality recruits you need is extremely time-consuming and luck-based, but at least lets you steamroll boss fights. At worst, not getting the Rare Quality recruits you need feels like an active detriment when you’re running low on supplies and the dungeon isn’t giving you the item drops you need to survive.

Perhaps this resource grind would be more forgivable if the level scaling were up to par, but as it stands, I find enemy XP drops during the main game to be rather lacking. You’ll have to stick around and roam entire floors to sufficiently scale up with the enemy Pokemon level increases as the story progresses, and that’s often not the best idea when you’ve only got limited resources in your toolbox to manage HP/PP/BP and you’ll likely end up spotting the stairs before mapping out the entire floor. The best way then, is to train in Makuhita Dojo. This too, has been drastically altered from the original. Instead of challenge-room type and boss mazes, the dojo has been repurposed into a straight XP grindfest. You now have to spend limited tickets to defeat as many enemy Pokemon as you can in a real-time limit (i.e. a Bronze Dojo Ticket gives you 50 seconds of real time), and because experience is significantly multiplied both by the ticket itself (3x for Bronze, 5x for Silver, 7x for Gold) and by using super effective attacks, it’s simply too good to pass up considering the meager XP earnings from story dungeons. Unfortunately, this is also extremely tedious due to the time limits, as excess animations from randomly doubling attacks or outright missing attacks/failing to OHKO from random enemy buffs feels particularly punishing when Dojo tickets are a limited commodity that have to be scored as job rewards or randomly from dungeon treasure chests/mail. It also doesn’t help that the ticket allocation itself is not scaled: you’ll still be receiving Bronze tickets far into the post-game when you’ll likely need to use up 3 or more tickets to level-up, and you can only use one ticket at a time instead of stacking time limits. The result then, is that Makuhita’s dojo outright breaks the difficulty curve of the game: I found myself significantly overleveled during the main story using it, but after the significant difficulty spike during the post-game, it failed to provide much benefit for my main team since I was inundated with Bronze/Silver tickets and thus led to even more time spent grinding both in and outside of dungeons.

Gummis have also been reworked in DX, and are a slight improvement over the original, yet aren't completely rectified. Gummi grinding was likely the weakest aspect of the original games: you needed them to level up the IQ of each individual Pokemon for basic skills such as not stepping on visible traps and not using status moves on Pokemon that have already been statused. Fortunately, these IQ skills have been entirely removed and as a result the AI has been improved significantly: you no longer have to micromanage every single member of your team to avoid making silly mistakes, and in fact teammates can aid you subtly like positioning themselves to target ranged enemies or deviating slightly from the path to pick up floor objects so the leader doesn’t have to pick up every object themselves. That said, gummies still serve a purpose, because they provide random permanent stat boosts (invaluable when level-ups are often just a simple +1 to all stats) and they’re the only way to add/change Rare Qualities attached to your team members. Obtaining gummis is actually more obnoxious than even the original games, because just like Dojo Tickets, they can only be obtained via job rewards or found randomly in treasure chests, and you’ll often need to run through a few just to get the right Rare Quality for a specific team member (or a Rare Quality at all, because Rainbow Gummis are not guaranteed to give a Rare Quality). At least in the original games, you could obtain Gummis as random item drops on dungeon floors.

The above three changes basically represent a trend of changing aspects from the original in a way that left something to be desired, and lead me to believe that the remake is somewhat misguided. It’s quite confusing: sometimes there are obvious improvements, like expanding the toolbox capacity from 20 to 48 (carrying this from Explorers of Time/Darkness forward) and adding in all evolution lines for Pokemon from Generations 1-3 + bringing in new moves that have been added since Gen 8, but then sometimes the game feels far more punishing than difficult in a way that the original never did, like how fainting in dungeons now makes you lose all of your money and items (whereas you’d only lose half of your items in the DS originals and at least in EoS, only lose half of your money), so you really better hope you’ve got the resources to rescue yourself with a second team or someone online spots your request promptly.

What is more damning though, is that for as many things as they did change, there’s a lot of not great things about the original that I’d argue they should have changed/improved upon but didn’t (or at the very least, didn't improve upon enough), such as the aforementioned issue of gummi grinding Ironically, the qualities left in from the original are what led me to realize that Blue/Red Rescue Team are more flawed than I had originally remembered. For example, the original wasn’t great at pacing either (I found myself equally bored in the main-game at times, forced to grind during one particular story-heavy section where I was limited to my protagonist + partner), but I think it was more forgivable at the time given that it was the debut of the series and was greatly improved upon in Explorers of Time/Darkness/Sky. DX feels far more egregious in context now that I have several points of comparison, for not fixing a lot of the grinding/RNG issues of the original (and in fact exacerbating a few of them) and transitioning the at-least involved main-story into an underwhelming post-game narrative, of which 80% can be summed up as “fight this powerful Pokemon because you can.” Take this with a grain of salt since my point of view is colored from extensively playing the original (albeit, almost a decade and a half ago), but I unfortunately found my time spent during the main story to be quite forgettable (as I breezed through the dungeons with little difficulty) and a good chunk of the post-game to be aggravatingly tedious while I scaled up my team to better deal with the far more competent foes and spongier bosses.

I suppose I did eventually come around on the post-game nevertheless, considering that at the time of writing I’ve now logged just over sixty hours on my save file. It’s a pity that it took hours of forgettable missions and grinding (instead of the game adequately scaling my gains throughout the story’s runtime) to get to that point and that my satisfaction was in spite of rather than as a result of the altered resource management (since these elements become minimal once you have the right Rare Qualities and a stockpile of Perfect Apples/Max Elixirs to throw at the problem), but a few of the game’s climatic dungeons really do bring out the best qualities of PMD’s gameplay. One dungeon that stands out is Meteor Cave: in it, you are constantly assaulted by infinite waves of different Deoxys forms that force you to consider the totality of your actions, considering each form has significantly stratified stats/moves that must be dealt with promptly before you run out of resources due to Pressure doubling your PP usage. In just twenty floors, this dungeon where you cannot be rescued challenged me in ways that Silver Trench couldn’t do in ninety-nine. This isn’t even my favorite dungeon in the game though: surprisingly, that title goes to Purity Forest. Considered by many to be the toughest dungeon in the game, Purity Forest drops you in with no items, no Poke, and only one team member, resetting your level to five and forcing you to fight and earn your way out to even hope to survive against fully evolved Pokemon by the end of your run. The caveat to my final hours savored in the game was that I had to slog through multiple other ninety-nine floor dungeons around the same time as tackling Purity Forest (and it doesn’t help that two of them, Wish Cave and Joyous Tower, are basically Purity Forest Jr since the only differences are that Wish Cave lets you bring items + teammates and Joyous Tower only lets you bring teammates), but ultimately, I can at least say I finished my run on a high note, even if I felt like my run was diluted somewhat by the lackluster pacing and never quite hit the perfect difficulty until the very end.

So the big question remains: do I recommend Rescue Team DX? While I ultimately got some enjoyment out of the game, I'm conflicted regarding its overall quality and lean towards no. All things considered, I don’t really know what audience this game appeals to or if it even excels in any particular category. Newbies will likely find this game too hard and too grindy during the main story, while veterans will likely find this game initially too easy and too grindy during the post-game. DX introduces enough quality-of-life changes, but it also doesn’t change certain exasperating elements from the original (or in some cases, outright fumbles the bag) and makes me question if the remake was necessary in the first place. The climactic gameplay, once the player gets past any resource and leveling barriers, is fantastic, but as I’ve mentioned earlier, is dragged down by a layer of RNG and grinding that often feels more tedious than challenging. Finally, I'd say that the story’s adequate given its time, but it can’t hold a candle to the emotional peaks reached by Explorers of Sky (due in part to Sky’s side stories).

If anything, my time with DX has confirmed that I see modern Pokemon games far differently than I once did as a kid. Obvious statements aside, I find that I tend to view the newer Pokemon games (of the ones I’ve played anyways, as I only have a few hours in Sword/Shield and haven’t touched Scarlet/Violet) more as sandboxes than well-rounded experiences. Granted, it might be a little unfair to assign this to a remake of a 2005 DS/GBA game, and it doesn’t even sound like a significant issue at first given that I’m usually able to dig deep and find the player motivation to thoroughly approach games on their own terms. That said, I would also say that there was once a time where Pokemon games excelled in both world-building/atmosphere and gameplay (Explorers of Sky being the obvious candidate), and as such it’s hard to see DX as anything but a personal disappointment at best. Even so, it might not be my ideal experience, but I’m still glad that others were able to fully savor what DX brings to the table even if I’m stuck in the past reminiscing about the glory days of PMD, and that’s okay too.

Overall, a pleasant experience despite some pacing issues and underutilized mechanics. Jusant basically fits every trope of the Journey-like (a solo pilgrimage from point A to B to C, heavy focus on atmospheric exploration with some environmental puzzles, rediscovering an abandoned/forgotten civilization, etc), but what separates it from most typical copycats is that the main moment-to-moment gameplay is actually pretty engaging this time around! The obvious example here is how the game forces you to tightly grip your controller’s triggers to climb and hang onto ledges for dear life, but most actions in-between such as placing pinons/swinging back and forth with your grapple/jumping across and between ledges keep the interaction flowing smoothly. Interestingly, I would say Jusant’s problem is also opposite to that of most Journey-likes, because it handles its micro well enough, but falters a bit in its execution of the macro. If I were to compare the climbing to say, that of Shadow of the Colossus, then the difference in sense of scale becomes more readily apparent. Shadow of the Colossus takes places in mostly connected and open environments (with a few in vast caverns), but a good chunk of Jusant’s climbing takes place indoors in often cramped spaces that left me wishing there was an FOV slider to compensate for the often uncomfortably close camera getting stuck on walls. I do think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity that Jusant didn’t get any opportunities to showcase its world in its entirety and instead cut off each area into its own isolated level. A part of me was hoping that it would execute this as a sort of mirror to Journey; whereas Journey tries to keep the final shining summit in view at all times outside to remind the player of their final destination, I think Jusant could have combined all the outside areas and given the player the opportunity to look back from increasing heights to remind themselves of just how far they’ve come.

Getting back to macro vs micro, I have a few quibbles and suggestions in regards to improving the overall pacing, as there were some elements that felt like occasional stumbling blocks. The environments are sometimes difficult to read (especially in indoor settings) because climbable rocks/edges often look similarly shaded to their non-interactable surroundings, which resulted in me getting lost a few times. The in-game guide (“Listen” via pressing right on the d-pad) could be improved in this aspect, since it gives you a general direction to move towards but doesn’t solve the issue of figuring out what background object is required to ascend. Speaking of background objects, the environments are often littered with so many differently-colored materials, which contributes to the above problem of figuring out the way forward and also makes the task of searching for collectibles more annoying unless you’re just focusing on the context-sensitive prompts. I sadly also have to agree with others here that the lore dumps via the letters/diary entries didn’t do much for me (resulting in a narrative that I mostly ignored), and I would have preferred emptying the surroundings somewhat to better establish a feeling of presence with a heavier emphasis on environmental storytelling. In addition, removing these excess objects would reduce the amount of 3D polygonal jank present in the game: I often found myself suddenly stagnating and getting stuck on the floor from bumpy geometry, and the same rung true while climbing because I once had to restart from the last checkpoint after getting trapped by some nearby vines.

I’m going to nitpick the climbing as well and concur regarding the lack of tension, as the game never forced me to fully leverage my capabilities: again, this is a key detail that separates this game’s climbing from the heights reached by Shadow of the Colossus. The game could have leaned more into tight timing segments that forced the player to quickly scale ledges before they crumbled; this is briefly explored in Chapter 3 with the sunlight burning off plant roots, but then gets replaced with more calculated climbing for the rest of the game. Similarly, the pinons feel underutilized: I can’t recall any instance where I felt obligated to place down more than one pinon at a time while climbing, and that was often due to needing the ability to swing back and forth rather than using it as a safety net. A possible solution here is reworking the resting mechanic so that it could only be used at a pinon: this would also solve the pacing issue of having to constantly pause to regain stamina, and force the player to more carefully place pinons to make the most out of the stamina gauge's capacity. Finally, I was surprised that I couldn’t alter the amount of slack/tension in the rope while climbing and hanging onto ledges. This ability would allow the player additional control over jumps and climbing capacity without needing to expend a pinon (since I rarely ever reached the full rope length as is), which in turn would give the player more freedom to create shortcuts by letting them go for riskier maneuvers that the restrictive mechanics would prohibit otherwise.

There’s a lot of room for improvement, but I nevertheless appreciate that Jusant doesn’t overstay its welcome. Despite being a bit rough around the edges, the core gameplay is a nice change of pace from its peers, and it further distinguishes itself from its competition with its restrained ending. Instead of going for a bombastic “victory-lap” finale, Jusant has the modesty to bring itself back to earth with a no frills back-to-basics climbing segment devoid of the previous level gimmicks and clutter. That's the game in a nutshell: it might not push the envelope of the medium, but it accomplishes its premise in the time given with solid peaks despite some shaky consistency. In a genre full of misguided and uncompelling carbon copies, I’ll gladly take it.