The secret behind Pikmin’s success was not that it somehow outclassed classic real-time strategy franchises, but rather that it was never competing with them to begin with. According to Shigeru Miyamoto, he came up with the idea for Pikmin one day when he observed a group of ants carrying leaves together into their nest. Miyamoto then imagined a game focused on cooperation rather than competition; he asked, “Why can’t everyone just move together in the same direction, carrying things as a team?” Nintendo EAD’s design philosophy went along with this line of reasoning, melding design mechanics from different genres to create an entirely new yet familiar experience. As a result, instead of competing against other players in Pikmin akin to classic RTS games, Pikmin forces players to explore and compete with the very environment itself by introducing puzzle-exploration and survival mechanics. It made sense in the end; after all, real-time strategy is concerned with minimizing time spent to get a competitive edge over opponents, and what better way to translate this than to force players to master their understanding over the terrain itself, managing and optimizing the one resource which governs them all?

Perhaps Nintendo’s greatest challenge was figuring out how to translate a genre considered by many to be niche and technical to an intuitive yet layered game, and even more so, translating classic actions from a mouse and keyboard allowing for such complexity to a suite of simplified controls using a gamepad. Coming from the other side as someone who played Starcraft as a kid and didn’t get into Pikmin until recently however, I’m surprised at how well EAD’s tackled this endeavor. Classic RTS games focus upon base-building and resource gathering through the micromanagement of units. Pikmin’s take upon this is to introduce a dichotomy between the player character Captain Olimar, who is incapable of doing anything by himself but can issue commands to the units only he can create by plucking out of the soil, and the Pikmin, who are essentially brainless but represent the units that must do everything. The player as Olimar must be present to figure out exactly how to best traverse and exploit the environment around him (replacing the base-building with management/prioritization puzzles) while the Pikmin provide bodies to construct, move, and attack the world around them. However, the Pikmin’s AI is fairly limited and as a result, Pikmin will sit around helplessly once they finish their actions and often get distracted by nearby objects while moving around, which is where the micromanagement kicks in. Therefore, the player has to decide how to best build up their supply of Pikmin to allocate tasks to surmount bottlenecks while exploring and opening the world, all while working against the limited thirty-day timer throughout the game’s five areas.

A part of me expected to really struggle with the gamepad while playing Pikmin, but the available actions on offer allow for a surprising degree of control despite the simplification. For instance, consider Olimar’s whistle; as a substitute for dragging and clicking to select units on PC, the whistle on the GameCube lets Olimar quickly rally groups of clustered units. Holding down B for longer allows the player to increase the size of the whistle’s AOE, which allows the player to better control and target how many Pikmin to rally in any cluster (hence, the analog of clicking and dragging to select boxes of units on mouse and keyboard). The Swarm command is another interesting translation. The obvious use is to allow Olimar to quickly move nearby Pikmin by directing them with the C-stick versus needing to aim and throw them by positioning and rotating Olimar himself. However, because it can be used to shift the position of Pikmin with respect to Olimar, it can also be used to swap the Pikmin on-deck for throwing (since Olimar will always throw the Pikmin closest to him) without needing to dismiss and re-rally separated Pikmin colors, and most importantly, it allows you to directly control the group of Pikmin following Olimar while moving Olimar himself. This second application allows the player to kite the Pikmin around telegraphed enemy attacks, and properly funnel them so the Pikmin aren’t getting as easily stuck behind walls or falling off ledges/bridges into hazards. That said, noticeable control limitations do exist. Olimar cannot pivot to move the reticle without changing his position with respect to the Pikmin around him, which can make aiming in place annoying if the Pikmin types you need to throw aren’t close enough to be moved next to Olimar with Swarm. Additionally, there is no way for Olimar to simultaneously and directly control multiple separated groups of Pikmin, which does make allocating tasks a bit slower. However, given that the tasks themselves usually don’t necessitate more than one Pikmin type at a time, this limitation is understandable, especially since the sequels would tackle this challenge with more expansive controls and multiple playable characters on the field.

Pikmin’s base model as a result is a fantastic translation of an abstract design philosophy, but I can’t help but wonder if the original could have been pushed further. Don’t misunderstand me: I absolutely take pride in mastering a game by learning all about its inner workings and pushing its mechanics to the limits simply by following a few intuitive genre principles. As such, I wish that the game was a bit harder in order to really force me to squeeze every bit of time from the game’s solid premise. For example, combat is often optional in Pikmin given how many full-grown Bulborbs are found sleeping, but given that most enemies don’t respawn within the next day after killing them and I can bring their carcasses back to base to more than replenish my Pikmin supply, combat is almost always in my favor, especially since certain enemies will spawn more mobs if they aren’t defeated. If circumstances existed where it would be unfavorable to engage (such as losing a significant number of Pikmin every time, or having so little time left that engaging would waste time), then I feel that this would add an additional layer of decision-making of deciding when to sneak past sleeping Bulborbs rather than just wiping out as many foes as I could as soon as possible. In a similar sense, I felt that certain design elements such as the Candypop Buds for switching Pikmin colors were a bit underutilized; outside of one environmental puzzle, I never had to use the Candypop Buds, mainly because I had so many remaining Pikmin and time to never justify their usage. I’ll concede here that Pikmin’s one-day Challenge Mode does at least provide a score attack sandbox where I’m forced to take my Pikmin stock and remaining time into higher consideration, but it’s missing the connectivity of the main story mode where my earlier actions would greatly affect how I planned later days in a run, particularly in making judgement calls on which days to spend at each site and which days I dedicate towards building up my Pikmin numbers versus hauling in ship parts. Regardless, I found myself completing the main game with all parts in just twenty days on my first run with minimal resets, and I’d love to try a harder difficulty mode with a stricter time limit and tougher Pikmin margins to really force me to better conserve my working force and dedicate more time to restocking my supply.

Gripes aside, I’m glad that my friends finally convinced me to try out Pikmin, not just to better appreciate RTS games as a whole but to also gain an appreciation of how different genre mechanics can work in tandem to intuitively convey concepts without spelling everything out to the player. It’s classic Nintendo at their core, and while I had my reservations coming in as a fan of older RTS franchises, they’ve managed to convince me once again that the best hook is not simply offering something that’s visibly better, but rather offering something that’s visibly different. I still think that there’s improvement to be had, but given how much I’ve enjoyed the first game, I can’t wait to see what they have to offer from iterating upon their memorable beginnings.

Being a kid was pretty rad, huh?

This game portrays the feeling of navigating a new world with the language barrier inherent to being a child.

It almost perfectly replicated the feeling I had of playing Ocarina of Time for the first time before I knew how to read, forcing me to use other clues, means of progression, and sometimes just fucking around until something works.

But with Tunic, this is by design.

This was a fantastic game, but what really pushed it into masterpiece territory was the final puzzle, which really brings the game's intentions full circle and is one of the most impressive and creative puzzles I have ever seen in a game.

It's a magical little experience, the likes of which I have never encountered in my adult life.

Ballin'tro

I'd staved off a review of Balatro until I'd become victorious and completed a run. Many months and eleven hours of gameplay later I have finally notched my first victory... and boy was it worth it.

Balatro is a poker-based roguelike in which the player is tasked with making their way through eight antes (tiers,) three rounds each, in which they must clear an arbitrary chip count to proceed. To do this, you must take advantage of the rules of Poker and a plethora of accents and boons given to you through chance in the form of Jokers (accent cards that alter multipliers and round scoring,) planets (which create multipliers based upon which hand is played,) tarot cards (consumables that accent certain played cards,) and more. The benefit of this game entrenching itself within Poker is that it's a game that is already engrained in the minds of (most) of its player base. Poker is such a ubiquitous experience to most Americans that jumping into Balatro and its ruleset felt like second nature, making the learning of its tertiary mechanics much easier to parse.

It took some time (clearly) to finagle myself into creating decks that worked for me. At first I tried decks and bought into jokers that accented pairs and the chip gain I could get from playing these in quick succession. I tinkered with straights and flushes a little more before I realized I wasn't doing too hot with the assembly and heightened RNG required in suits that required more cards. I returned once again with a fresh mind into the pair based deck, stubbornly telling myself that I would find victory with two cards played at a time. I lost again and again, but I was getting smarter and going further. I understood the necessity of holding certain cards to heighten their sell value and discarding when I ultimately didn't need to, to boon jokers that gave me a higher multiplier if the lowest card in my hand was higher. Of course as you play more and get further in the ante's, Balatro rewards you with newer jokers, tarot cards, and vouchers that will make subsequent runs (likely) more successful. I kept at it, frustratingly losing even more in the sixth and seventh ante's. I ran into "The Needle," a stipulation that requires a player to clear the certain chip count in one single hand or else they will meet failure, a furious amount of times. Eventually I lucked out and was able to bypass The Needle on my sixth ante through some clever strategizing, and I knew I was in the clear en route to victory. After all this time I cleared the eighth and ante and felt qualified to write a review.

Balatro is a vindicating and involved roguelike that uses a familiar DNA to make a captivating game. The feel of the game's UI and playable experience is seamless, cards floating as you select them and everything snapping in the way that it should to make for a crisp and quick gaming experience that you will want to come back to. I eagerly await my next victory in Balatro... but it may have to come some time down the line when I feel more confident in attempting different decks and hand strategies. I heavily recommend Balatro to fans of roguelikes or for folks looking for a game that will be a good time spender throughout the year. I can't believe that this is the game going head-to-head with Persona 3 Reload as my GOTY so far and not FFVII Rebirth, but here we are.

Another Meh Soulslike

I had high hopes going into the final third of this game, I really did. Another Crab's Treasure for the majority of its runtime was a charming, funny, and ultimately creative endeavor that took a lighthearted approach to an overwhelmingly serious and intense subgenre of videogames. I found myself laughing at plenty of the character interactions and items that our protagonist hermit crab Kril encounters on his journey to return his former shell to his back. Moments like your first encounter with the taxes levied by the areas queen, making your way into New Carcinia, and rummaging through the Blighttown-esque Flotsam Vale fill the player with opportunities for laughter and intrigue. I had this game internally prepared for review as a Four out of Five Stars as I approached what should have been the final boss. It had its flaws, mostly lying in suspect hitboxes, poor camera angles, and a very low health bar, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. It wasn't until this fateful fight in which I was bugged on perfect dodges that sent me flying to the sky and back down into boss one shots that I realized where the cracks began to show. I defeated the boss using an in game assist, of which there are plenty, and realized I had only cracked the shell (hehe) of how much more this game had left... and how little of it was enjoyable.

Say what you will about the majority of Souls or Souls-likes as made by Fromsoft, but the final segments of said games are so quick. They end when they should end. They know not to overstay their welcome. I'd make examples here, but this isn't a review of those games. There's a power in having your player built up for a major encounter and having them know they are at what should be the end of the journey, the collective moment where they way upon their experiences and know they can put it all together for one last huzzah. In Fromsoft's games, this moment of self Spirit-Bomb always makes sense and is apparent. Another Crab's Treasure, a game that ostensibly takes inspiration in many ways from Fromsoft (I mean the area is called the Sand Between for example,) Aggro Crab wildly missed the mark on having the finale play out at the right point. You beat the boss and the game keeps leading the player into the worst areas for traversal, littered with the most annoying and rhythm breaking enemies, only to have a handful of multi-phase boss fights left and a needlessly deep narrative introduced. Man, even Lies of P in its endless frustration let the player know that the game was going to end after the one big dungeon, because it made sense.

My frustration with Another Crab's Treasure is that ultimately this could and should have been a game that was much simpler and easier to digest than it was. I get why the developers felt the need to make it deep and introduce a grandiose narrative into it, but it didn't translate to an enjoyable experience.

The act of actually playing their sophomore effort is a different story, that was overall pretty enjoyable. Minus hiccups and difficulty in later game encounters, the variety in shells and shell abilities makes for a fairly fun experience. You are implored to try different shell combinations and levelling up your character in different ways to play with the way you like to do so. If you want to go more physical strength heavy, you are allowed to. If you want to take advantage of the damage and buffs you can derive from the shells that Kril finds upon his journey, you are also allowed to. I enjoyed this and the mixing and matching of playstyles that... mostly worked throughout the game. Parry/dodge timing was overall respectable, yet had a noticeable input lag to it, and damage against enemies/bosses was very apt. An issue I have with many games that try to mold themselves around the Souls games or hack and slashes in general (looking again at Lies of P here) is that they struggle with damage sponging bosses to make them feel more difficult than they should be. Another Crab's Treasure did not do that, and I applaud the developers for that. Outside of combat, traversal and platforming leaves a lot of room to be desired here. No movement from point a to point b is too complicated but many times I found Kril barely missing jumps because of clipping issues on terrain and the climbing mechanic not really snagging the environments as it should have.

In reality I should probably rate this game lower than I did because of how poorly it ends, but my first few days playing were overall very enjoyable and I was a pretty big fan of the direction it took until the last few areas. I can't recommend Another Crab's Treasure unless you're looking for a complete Soulslike in a fairly saturated genre.

(7-year-old's review, typed by her dad)

[Dad: What score are you thinking]

[CatTheCutest: A five!]

[Dad: A five?? Are you sure?]

[CatTheCutest: Well, a four. A four-point-five!!]

Okay. So first up, you start off as Gollum, and if you look at him, he's kind of creepy and horrifying. Then you see some... beautiful image. But then Gollum shows up! GRRR! And also it's very dark, so it's kinda hard to find things, especially those VINES. It was just so dark. There was only like teensy bits of fire and that was your only light. And be careful, or else you'll accidentally fall off a cliff! Cuz I did.

This is one of those games that I really want to like. I’ve tried nearly a dozen times to get it to “click” and it never does.

I always bounce off of it and I’ve never entirely understand why.

Sure, the platforming is precision machined but maybe the fact that the game is too forgiving with its checkpoints leads to a lack of stakes or tension for someone like me that isn’t going to go for every strawberry.

I also think the levels might be too long and that the game forces you to spend too much time in individual biomes.

The story’s presentation, at least early on, may also be a bit too sappy and not engaging.

Idk. I know people really love this game and what I’ve played of it is fine. But it’s lacking something crucial.

Good OST, though.

Unstellar Blade

A game so milquetoast that it literally crashed my PC in switching inputs from my PS5 to my main display so I could write this review, and thus I lost all of my notes I had carefully constructed over the past three days of playtime. What I pulled together is that this was an attempt at making Nier: Automata without actually making it fun and without Yoko Taro.

I remember Stellar Blade's Official Reveal as Project Eve, named after the game's main character, jumping out of an otherwise uneventful and boring Sony State of Play with its flashy combat, beautiful environments, and overwhelmingly attractive protagonist. Hot character bait aside, I was interested in this game because of the influences it was clearly wearing on its sleeve in the aforementioned Platinum Games magnum opus. Many have tried and few have succeeded in nailing hack and slash as well as Platinum or their cousins in Capcom have done with the plethora of impressive titles between the two. Did I think Stellar Blade was going to go one on one with Nier, DMCV, or Metal Gear Rising? Absolutely not, but I did think it was worth a try, to see if there was a company out there who could go to bat with the best of them and put an effort forward that would be worth paying attention to in the years to come. I was excited for Stellar Blade as the release date neared, because it meant that I could one quell the discourse over the design of Eve by providing actual input on how the game plays, and secondly because the need for a fast paced hack and slash was weighing heavily on me after playing slower burn titles like FF7R2 and P3R fairly recently. Within a day of playing my interest waned but I remained hopeful, however on the third complete day of playing and the day I ultimately completed the game... I came away fairly perturbed.

The good, lets start with that why don't we? This game is downright beautiful. I played it on my PS5 on my 4K display with HDR enabled and woah nelly, it looked great. One of the greatest aspects of this title was how great both characters and the world looked from a graphical standpoint. As you transition from dilapidated buildings and streets into destroyed railways and misgiving deserts, your eyes will feast at the eye candy abound in the backgrounds of the world. I found myself navigating the camera up and down constantly at the world I was interacting with as it was tremendously rich in flavour and care from a design standpoint. I felt like the developers put a great deal of effort into creating a visually striking game, which unfortunately seems to have accompanied a trade off in other aspects of the title. More to come on that shortly, as I do want to praise the team for putting some of the best facial and body design in gaming forward. As I've already experienced, much of the conversation about Stellar Blade has been lost in the perceived attractiveness of Eve, but every character you interact with truly looks incredible. Though their proportions and mannerisms may not be totally... human, they are indubitably crafted with an intricacy and care to look astonishing. Stellar Blade if nothing else is a journey of eye candy, but that's kind of... it.

While not exactly fast enough to be a Nier-like, and not fun punishing and explore heavy enough to be a Souls-like, Stellar Blade attempted to forge a path forward that played out like a middle ground between Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and the Jedi: Fallen Order/Survivor games. Eve's combat relies on using a plethora of learned abilities and tech to parry and dodge her way through a litany of grotesque alien foes who have claimed Earth to be their own. Where this goes wrong is in quite a few places, but the most apparent and earliest was in the poor "janky" feel and lack of reliability in both parry and dodge timings. This can be sort-of remedied by investing in Eve's skill trees and upgrading Eve's exo-spine but never really feels... good. Even if I was a dissenter of Sekiro over all, I felt like it mostly gave the right kind of feedback and snap to the parry/dodge timings required to master such a difficult title. For a game as infuriatingly hard as Stellar Blade gets in its late game, I felt like I was at the whimsy of luck in my dodges not directly feeding into a followup attack by a boss and my perfect parries not being read by the game because of poor latency or buffer timing. Time after time I'd land a perfect dodge only to be hit by the boss moving faster than Eve could recover right after. Cheap is the way I'd put that and it proliferated throughout the entire runtime of the title.

Difficulty is something I've spoken about ad nauseum in action-rpg titles and I'll continue to do so as I have an affinity for these kinds of games. After grinding my teeth in the (generally) slower paced Fromsoft classics and the speedy Platinum/Capcom games of the last decade and change, I feel like I'm fairly qualified. Stellar Blade early on feels hard, but not in a way that cannot be conquered. If I was getting my tail kicked by a group of world enemies or a boss, I found that I could readjust my stratagems to craft a better gameplan, coming back smarter and using my abilities at optimized times to come out victorious. I found my confidence growing, something that did not happen this early in Sekiro, and I continued on to the later stages of the game. I opened up my Playstation menu to check my progress, a feature of the console that tracks how far you've made it through the main story, and saw I had notched at 89%. I labored on to the area boss on one of the last major quests of the game. It was here I through my face into a wall, stressing with every ability and item I had to make it through the three phases and effective six health bars that the boss had. I double this up because of the way shields work. See in Stellar Blade, simply doing damage and having fun taking down your enemy's health bar is simply not allowed, you must first deplete their shields before you can do any "meaningful" damage to their hitpoints. Meaningful in quotations because even then on a fully upgraded weapon, after laboriously taking away the superfluous shield bar, you are granted the ability to do slightly more damage to the bosses health per hit. I've played Dark Souls underleveled and with un-upgraded weapons enough to know torment when it comes to weapons doing very little damage to bosses... and even that does not compare to how insulting Stellar Blade's damage counter feels.

It wasn't even until a few bosses later that I truly came to terms with my disdain for the needlessly draconian difficulty that exists within Stellar Blade's late game boss fights. I threw everything together that I could into defeating the (name kept out of review due to spoiler) boss. I thought I could craft a winning effort of combining my ultimate abilities with my tertiary skills and burst maneuvers, but nothing was taking. I couldn't perfect dodge and parry any longer against the multi-faceted and multi-phase boss fight at hand. Visual clarity was completely nuked from orbit as I could barely tell what moves were hitting me, where certain objects were, or where my Eve's reactions would take me next. A greater qualm I have with games at large now, I wrote about these most notably in my FFXVI DLC reviews, is a complete lack of being able to actually see what's going on in boss fights because of the "ooh how cool" quality that moves need to have. Keeping this in mind, the bosses began to teleport away CONSTANTLY from Eve so as to reposition their efforts while tarnishing any offensive effort I had put forth. This was rhythm breaking and tore any motivation I had towards chasing the enemy down, I felt discouraged and unmotivated to capitalize on optimized windows because I knew the boss would simply teleport away at any given moment. After being unable to keep up with this, the visuals going on, and the randomly included DPS checks, I put the game on "story mode" (reminder this is in the last hour or so of a medium length title) and kept chugging. I'm not actually sure this did anything to make the game easier. What it does in theory is give you windows to dodge and parry, popping up with on screen prompts of what button to press to not be hit by the enemies maneuvers. Does this work? Absolutely not. Most of the time these move to fast to even parse what move you're supposed to use, and half the bosses moves don't even populate your screen with a prompt at all. Through the next couple bosses and into the final boss I became increasingly confused if this was actually a difficulty slider at all or simply an effort to make you "feel" better by putting a semblance of choice of difficulty in front of you.

A best in class soundtrack (potentially one of the best of the year) and impressive visuals couldn't prop Stellar Blade up enough to go against its resoundingly poor English VA (I eventually played in Korean,) drab narrative heavily borrowed from Nier: Automata, and impressively frustrating and unrewarding combat. This is absolutely not a title worthy of purchasing at a $70 price tag, maybe half of that at best. I commend Sony and SHIFT UP for putting together a brand new IP and throwing some serious marketing at making this game stick out, but it felt like a great value Sekiro meets Nier at best. I would not recommend Stellar Blade to anyone with a PS5.

spooky atmospheric japanese game where you get to run around as not just one, but three lovely ladies what more can you really ask for? The combat is dumb, straight up bonkers but despite the flaws,,,,the game mesmerized me in such a way that it wasn't a turn off. Games have jank, and you just have to go with it. Steer into the skid type of situation. You're going to be walking all over the place, but you really start getting familiar with the landscape. It's cool that these virtuals worlds become navigable in such a way like your very own neighborhood. Im in a time of my life where im not beating games like I used to. Seeing this game through to the end was a pleasure and it feels good to finally beat a game after so long. Return to form boogiepop era? i sure hope so!