Contagious happiness asterisked by an air of “hey, wait a minute” brought about through no fault of its own. Two experiences cause this feeling: realising that yeah, the best game on this thing really is the tech demo that comes with it, along with subsequent gladness that it only cost your brother £20 thanks to a raffle ticket inside a Doritos bag; and ogling the who’s who of Easter eggs after loading into your first level only to notice soon after that just one of the developers represented by them in that particular spot hasn’t been unceremoniously shuttered.

Despite how frequently it comes across as gaming’s cheeriest graveyard, the charm of Astro’s Playroom is such that it features real life peripherals as its main collectible and somehow manages to not feel cultlike. Astro himself’s a big factor in this, embodying so many of the best characteristics of this brand’s would-be mascots of the past; a simple enough silhouette that anyone could quickly scribble down a recognisable drawing of him, lack of dialogue forcing him to rely on universally understandable expressions instead, vibrant yet malleable visuals which let him be twisted into a representation of any IP you can shake a stick at, easily able to slide up the cute and/or cool scales as and when required. Regardless of his probability of joining them in the dumpster someday, he really pulls his weight in terms of likeability and as a distilment of the game’s meticulousness. Contextual idle animations like him waving at the camera or holding his hand out in the rain may just be presentational, but they still contribute a fair amount to making him feel alive and giving him a personality distinct from the otherwise pretty samey array of photorealistic humans he shares SIE’s narrow potential-marketing-icon umbrella with, plus this kind of attention to detail’s extended to interactable objects in more substantive ways anyhow (like fully functioning diving boards in the background of one stage or beach balls you can do keepy-uppies with).

It’s little unfortunate that he’s more interesting to gawk at or think about than to control, even if his double jump doubling up as an attack sees some inspired use, though the levels are smartly small enough that his limited moveset never becomes unengaging and is made up for by the segments where the controller’s gimmicks get to shine. The motion-controlled ball areas test your manipulation of momentum in a way that standard gameplay’s unable to, the climbing parts transform it into a miniature GIRP sequel, and a combo of gyro aiming plus the use of adaptive triggers make the shooting sections more tactile than this console’s actual flagship shooters, but my favourite ones are the frog bits. The long and short of one of my hypothetical game daydreams is a 3D platformer in which you play as a frog who has to do everything by jumping rhythmically, and I probably should’ve guessed before now that the closest thing currently in existence to that’s in something made by a subdivision of my favourite developer. Why wouldn’t it be? That’s why they were my favourite. Some studios create games so specific to your tastes it’s like they were made just for you, while others are so specific it’s as if they telepathically scan your brain for anything you think is cool and decide to make a game out of it.

Less fully on my wavelength is how it functions as a celebration of these systems’ history. This aspect’s still more good than bad, right enough. Part of why I mentioned that Astro’s Playroom manages to avoid feeling cultish is specifically because I wouldn’t trust any current SIE executives to be able to tell me what PAIN or Super Rub ‘a’ Dub are, nevermind greenlight giving them arguably more headspace than much bigger IPs by partially basing two levels’ mechanics off of them. Cool deep cuts notwithstanding, though, I’m taken out of it a bit by the haphazard distribution of Easter eggs. Kat, I love you, but what’re you doing in the PS2 level? I recognise her, but given that she’s a lesser known in the grand scheme of things and has no connection to the era she’s been placed in, I wouldn’t blame somebody if they didn’t. I even had this experience with a game I myself am actually familiar with, in part because of this sort of thematic mismatch and because what I assume’s recency bias (whether their own or imposed on them) led the devs to scrape the bottom of the barrel in places – it took me a 10 second long, confused, squinty stare to realise that The Order 1886 was being referenced at one point.

Apart from potentially hampering its own ability to give some of these games much needed exposure, it made me question whether it’s right for all of these lads to be on a level playing field representationally. Obviously, a company’s not going to encourage an interactive showcase to give some of its own IPs preferential treatment over others, but isn’t it a little weird to put your man on equal footing with a contributor to dual analog sticks becoming an industry standard, a platformer which piqued Shigeru Miyamoto’s interest in addition to driving the brand’s popularity in what used to be its home market or something which dwarfed the rest of its genre in popularity to the point that “God of War clone” was a pretty widespread term for a good two console generations? Granted, their most successful period up to this point needed some representatives and one of Astro’s cousins taking the form of a third party cash shop likely wasn’t on the table. “Cultural impact” is really just a straw you grasp onto when you need to rationalise that a transparent success you don’t like has actually secretly failed, so I’ll concede that what I think of when I think of Kratos having more songs written about him and crossovers under his belt might not compare to his most recent entries’ combined ~34 million units (albeit buoyed by discounts, bundles and giveaways).

Ultimately, I’m inclined to consider Astro’s Playroom a small miracle regardless of any of this because it’s so wildly out of the wheelhouse of what I’ve come to associate these consoles with and a refreshing reminder of why I was ever interested in them in the first place. If you wanted to get obnoxiously airy fairy, you could probably make some kind of point about how the bright colours of the ∆◯X☐ symbols regularly flying around aren’t even on the controller anymore, but its friction against the overall direction of its parent company only strengthens its case and makes the prospect of a more fleshed out iteration of it more exciting. If not fully in terms of people, Asobi at least seems to carry on a bit of Japan Studio's spirit.

A waste.

I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.

It's worse.

I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.

While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.

I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.

The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.

Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.

Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.

There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.

Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.

The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.

Great photo mode, though.

Lorelei and the Laser Eyes feels like an anachronism. I don’t just mean this from how the game haphazardly scatters documents from 1847 and 2014 throughout the hotel set in 1962, or how it references multiple past eras of gaming with PS1 survival-horror fixed camera angles or DOS-inspired 1-bit adventure game segments hidden away on floppy disks, though these elements certainly play their part in creating what developer Simogo refers to as “collage of styles, ideas, and disparate inspirations.” No, what instantly caught my attention was how uncompromising yet thoughtful the game felt. In an era where most developers seem content to simply pay lip service to the great mystery/adventure games of old while over-simplifying their gameplay mechanics, Simogo seems to have figured out the formula of creating a final product that feels intricately designed, yet ultimately accessible.

I’ll admit that I’m not too familiar with Simogo’s previous work; the only other game I’ve played by them is Sayonara Wild Hearts. That said, I would not have immediately guessed that Lorelei was by the same developers from my first hour alone. In some ways, Lorelei presents an interesting foil to Sayonara. Sayonara’s persisting strength is its grasp on harmony: the epitome of what is essentially a playable music video, it’s pure and immediate gratification racking up points to the beat in this flashy and lush arcade game. On the other hand, Lorelei feels deliberately constructed to emphasize its dissonance. From the uncomfortably quiet manor clashing with the occasional audible off-screen disruption to the vibrating monochrome textures interspersed with low poly environment, nothing seems right in its place. It’s a much slower burn than Sayonara as well, with most players taking fifteen hours or more (in comparison to Sayonara’s two hour runtime) to navigate the sprawling hotel with no hand-holding provided whatsoever.

As different as these two titles appear however, they do have one thing in common: minimalism. For example, both games require just a d-pad/joystick and a single button to be played. Sayonara gets away with this because the available actions on input feel clearly telegraphed by the visuals and generally boil down to moving and timed dodges with the music. Lorelei similarly gets away with this because it deemphasizes more complex/technical interactions (i.e. the usage suite of adventure game verbs in look, touch, obtain, etc) with sheer puzzle intuition. Simogo describes this as forcing the player to “get a deeper understanding… and connection to [the world]” and just like Sayonara, “wanted the complexity of the game to revolve around this, and not dexterity.”

What makes this particularly impressive is how Simogo was able to strike a fair balance between simplicity and variety. According to the game’s development page, the game became “a very iterative toy box” where many different systems conceptualized over the game’s development cycle could interact and interplay with one another in different ways. Interestingly, I found that most of the solutions to these different puzzles were not that difficult or complex to determine. Even so, despite Lorelei’s simple controls and straightforward objective (figuring out passwords/key phrases to unlock new areas and information), the game is able to successfully obfuscate the means to achieve said objective by drastically changing the means in which information is presented to the player, for instance by using different camera angles and systems that allowed them to “change a lot of rendering parameters on the fly” from the aforementioned iterative toy box. Additionally, Simogo highlights key details from clues to ensure that players don’t get too confused, but leave enough ambiguity by never outright leading the players onto specific logic trains and refusing to provide any specific assistance (no in-game hint system and no specific feedback aside from telling players if they’re right/wrong). The result is a confident final product that understands the persisting strength of a good puzzle adventure game: a game that gives the player all the information they need to succeed while giving them the room to work out the connections themselves, and a game that constantly surprises the player with new opportunities to intuitively understand the world around them without ever feeling too frustrated by unfamiliar mechanics.

I do have to admit however, that there are a few instances where Lorelei’s minimalism and uncompromising nature can backfire. For instance, the lack of detailed player feedback aside from a right/wrong sound effect usually isn’t a significant deterrent, given that players can fine-tune most of the game’s one-variable solutions and are encouraged to tackle the hotel’s many branching paths and puzzles at their own pace, since they may not even have the pertinent information required and might have to work out other puzzles to obtain said information. However, certain late-game puzzles require multiple sets of answers (ex: a computer that requires three different types of phrases in a password), and it can be frustrating getting barricaded by such puzzles and not knowing which part of the answer requires more investigation. I’ll also echo some of the previous complaints regarding the controls, because while I appreciate that Simogo has crafted a base system where more complex controls aren’t required, I also don’t think that it’s a huge ask to add a “cancel/back” input for a second button. As a result, it takes significantly more scrolling to get out of menus or spamming random inputs to erroneously enter passwords if I want to back out of a puzzle, and the amount of wasted time per menu/puzzle really builds up over a playthrough.

While I did find the somewhat telegraphed ending slightly underwhelming given how elaborately the game wove its lore into its many clues, I nevertheless really savored my time with Lorelei. I might not have laser eyes, but I can certainly see this game’s approach upon system cohesion influencing many puzzle adventure games to come. As it stands, it’s another solid entry for Simogo’s innovative yet familiar library, and I’ll be thinking about its many secrets for quite some time. Perhaps it's finally time to delve into Device 6.

This is an Ocarina of Time 3D style remake, where the core gameplay is almost exactly the same but the graphics and score have been updated along with minor changes to the UI and world (and the framerate being changed to 30fps, which was an upgrade in OoT but a downgrade here :V ). Of course, this means it's a great game since Thousand Year Door is an extremely pleasant game to play. I'll save the overall review of that for the original, so here I'll just talk about the changes.

UI changes are a bit mixed. For the good, the quick partner-swapping wheel is nice and the shortcuts from the original still work just as well. Additionally, swapping pages is done with the shoulder buttons instead of requiring you to scroll back up, which makes navigating the start menu easier too. Stylistically it's just as good as it's always been. Also, menus where you select items (cooking or handing things in for troubles) are updated so you don't have to pick things one at a time, which is great.
But for the bad...certain menus, especially in battle, feel weirdly "sticky". There are animations associated with scrolling and swapping pages, and you can't make a selection until those animations are done. So navigating in battle is a bit slower than before. (One habit from the original that is broken by this, you often can't select a move to avoid items thrown by the audience, because selecting takes too long). Also, audience items disrupt the flow a bit because the game pauses battle to point them out to you.

Balance-wise, most things are unchanged. However, because of the lower framerate, you have 1 extra frame for superguards and TWICE as many for guards. I don't really have a problem with this, though. Unfortunately this lack of changes means some badges which were more or less useless, like FP Drain or Tornado Jump, are still useless.

The soundtrack...it's probably nostalgia, but I largely prefer the original songs. The new versions feel busy, and the parts of the songs that I liked the most tend to be less prominent in the remixes. Fortunately, this doesn't count against the remake because there's a badge that swaps to the GC OST, similar to the GB sounds from Pokemon HGSS. It's practically free, available in the prologue, and is free to equip.

For overworld changes, there's a change to movement that I hate: the game is absolutely terrified of you having horizontal momentum while falling, and will kill it if you go below where you started from. This includes going down staircases, which are common throughout the game (especially in Hooktail Castle, an area you have to backtrack through multiple times). This makes going down these stairs feel really awkward and slow, especially with Yoshi.
HOWEVER, it's not all bad, as there are some changes to fast-travel pipes which make the large amount of backtracking in the game significantly more tolerable. There's pipes to the towns of every chapters, rather than just 1, 2, 5, and 6, and you can access these pipes straight from Rogueport Square. This makes it a lot more tolerable to do troubles which require you to travel between chapters. There's also a pipe from Twilight Town to Creepy Steeple you can unlock with Vivian, which cuts out the most tedious part of Chapter 4.

The game acknowledges completion of the recipe book, tattle log, and badge list, which is nice. Two new bonus fights were added to the game, and they're very awesome to see as a fan of both the original Paper Mario 64 and Thousand Year Door.

The game still isn't flawless, but it's just as fun as the original if not more. I hope this is a sign that more great Mario RPGs are coming in the future.

Game's cool. You play as Meatwad. It’s filled with smartly designed puzzles, making engaging use of an oddball toolset that rewards out-of-the-box thinking… but only so much. Beyond manoeuvrability skill checks that are satisfying enough to clear, and a few cool mechanical revelations, there wasn't a lot of head scratching here for me. Animal Well is tremendously well-accomplished for a solo project, I had a great time with it! It's just lacking a certain star power for it to really raise the bar.

For complete transparency, I had this game sold to me as an ‘Outer Wilds-like’ - and upon seeing that it was a sidescrolling metroidvania, I was beside myself with hope that I’d get a few notes of La-Mulana in Animal Well, too. In practice however, I think the more apt comparisons for Animal Well would be games like Environmental Station Alpha, Super Junkoid, A Monster's Expedition, or Knytt. The distinction is important, to me at the very least, because I approached Animal Well with pure intentions but spent most of my runtime hoping for an experience that never actually came. This isn’t a game about losing yourself in the sprawling tendrils of a world’s unfolding internal logic - Animal Well is an array of screens containing pressure plate puzzles. The world feels utilitarian, and even with the animal themed ruins that politely aim to conjure a sense of dread and mystery, it’s all misaligned and mismatched in a way that lacks the cohesion of a place with a history worth learning. The latter end of my runtime was characterised by backtracking through areas to collect the final few tools, but it was made excruciating by way of the fact that practically all of the screens merely become desolate roadways once you’ve solved their focal puzzles. I don’t think I spent any more than five minutes on any given puzzle in the first ‘layer’’ of the game, and for as much as I like how left-field the player toolset is, their interplay with the puzzles themselves is usually shockingly obvious and leaves very little room for doubt.

There is, undeniably, an inclusion of outtadisworld ARG-like puzzles that at the time of writing are still being unfolded by dedicated Animal Well researchers, but I’d be lying if I said I value things like that remotely as much as game content I can be trusted to learn and master on my own. Will the community uncover a secret back half of the game that turns the whole joint on its head Frog Fractions-style? I kind of doubt it lol. I’m a sicko that completed La-Mulana 2 on launch week before any guides were even written, the distinction here is that that series takes great pains to contextualise its puzzles in multiple ways - through cryptic hints and also through things like inferred historicity and synergy. Animal Well doesn’t do this, it scatters codes and event flags around the map in obscure nooks in the hopes that a friend group is putting together a Google Doc.

Unmatched in the field of causing involuntary bodily responses in the player, the difficulty of F-Zero X itself’s exceeded only by that of trying not to squirm in your chair as you (un)successfully round corners at >1500km/h, bump rival racers off the track while trying to avoid speeding headlong into the abyss yourself or snatch first place out of an increasingly tenuous situation just as a guitar solo kicks in like it’s cheering you on.

The constant multisensory tug of war comprising every race’s brought about in large part thanks to a significant emphasis on tracks’ newfound verticality, enabled by one of the N64’s relatively unsung (though no less impactful) series-first forays into 3D, but it wouldn’t be complete without the mechanics themselves getting a makeover too. What’s probably the most crucial example of this is that boosting’s gone from its own independent resource, as in the first F-Zero, to something you now have to sacrifice your vehicle’s health to use. It’s streamlining at its finest; races rarely play out the same way because there’s no longer a guarantee of either you or your competitors being able to boost upon the completion of each lap, it’s inherently riskier to use but with greater potential reward due to the momentum gained from it carrying over into slopes or airtime, and it paves the way for strategies and decision-making which weren’t really present before. Will you have a comfortable amount of health left for the next lap if you boost partway through the healing zone? Are you gonna do without healing altogether to go for gold and beeline for the boost pad between them instead? Boosting up this hill could rocket you ahead of the crowd, but is your health and the geometry ahead sufficient for a safe landing? With how little time you have to make up your mind, each race leaves your frontal lobe as sweaty as your palms.

All of this in turn has the knock-on effect of enhancing the death race concept at the heart of F-Zero, brought to the forefront by and intertwined with the addition of attacks you and your opponents’ vehicles can perform. At the cost of momentarily decelerating, you can either horizontally ram into other vehicles or spin to win, stalling whoever you hit for the most critical of split seconds and dealing damage proportional to each party’s speed and/or proximity to walls. How smartly this is incentivised becomes increasingly apparent as you ramp up the difficulty and other racers’ AI becomes accordingly aggressive – to come out on top on Expert or above, you pretty much have to kill your designated rival at least once both to broaden your own margin of error and halt their accruement of points, the health it grants you being similarly precious given how often you’ll be boosting. On a less tangible level, there are in general few outlets for gamer malice so cathartic as hearing a series of brrrrrings sound out as you position yourself for a double kill, nevermind doing so by rendering Fox McCloud an orphan in the opening seconds via the world’s least ethically sound game of pinball.

While the actual Death Race mode itself’s a bit anaemic, having only a single track (albeit one unique to it) in which other racers mind their own business instead of trying to bump you off too, it’s nonetheless a useful stomping ground for practicing these mechanics and is balanced out by more substantial post-game unlocks. My favourite racer doesn’t become playable until after the credits roll, for one thing, but the main draw in this regard’s the X Cup and its randomised tracks. Even if it seemingly can’t generate loop-de-loops, cylinders or steep vertical inclines in general, the layouts still manage to become chaotic enough and unlike any of the handcrafted ones to the point that you’ll invariably want to give it at least a few spins. “Ahead of its time” is a phrase I typically don’t like, since the way it’s often used feeds into the idea that new = inherently better and rarely references any actual points of comparison. That said, it feels appropriate in this case when you take into consideration the relative prominence of roguelike side modes and/or DLCs with similar emphasis on procedural generation that’ve crept their way into multiple major releases in the past couple of console gens – the people are crying out for what this game essentially had as a free bonus when I was still being wheeled about in a pram.

As much can be said of F-Zero X in general. Beyond its intentional minimisation of graphics exemplifying the uncanny foresight of Nintendo’s president at the time, it seems as if must have been on the minds of the team behind Mario Kart 8 (currently the second-highest selling first party title ever) to some extent given not just the appearance of both Mute City and Big Blue in it, but also the conceptual overlap between its anti-grav segments and X’s dizzying track designs. Tighten your frame of reference to just its own series and even more recent evidence of how rock solid these mechanics are presents itself in the form of F-Zero 99; while its Skyway and titular battle royale idea help carve out its own more accessible, comparably well-considered spin, it’s also simultaneously a fusion of the first game’s assets with X’s systems. In short, there’s at least a few reverberations of how much this game gets right still being felt, as well as of how timeless its appeal remains, enough so to be more digestible to today’s players than you’d initially assume. If and/or when they decide to prove as much again by taking another crack at the formula, hopefully it won’t be set upon by quite as many people who’ve never played any of them for not being the “proper” franchise revival they were definitely clamouring for.

This is all to say: don’t be intimidated by its steep learning curve and give it a whirl, because the F stands for fun and there are too few games which let you do something like this completely by accident. Like its announcer whose garbled voice gave my brother shellshock says, it’s way out in front.

Aside from Nintendo Land and possibly Super Mario Maker, Star Fox Guard is the first Wii U game I’ve played that actually feels designed for the gamepad. I'm not usually a fan of the 'Tower Defense' genre but the second screen creates a level of engagement and tension to it here beyond just setting up turrets. With how quick and bulky the enemies can be, both strategy and reflexes come in to play with placing and switching the cameras. The unusual control scheme makes it nearly impossible to port to other systems but hopefully it gets recognition some day as a unique take on the RTS format.

You know, after reviewing a good handful of the older titles in Rare/Ultimate Play the Game’s catalog, I have come to a bit of a stunning revelation… they weren’t really that good. Not to say that all of them are flat-out terrible, or that there aren’t at least one or two good games from this part of their history, such as with Battletoads and Jetpac, but a lot of them don’t really hold up at all, most of them feeling like they are prioritizing concepts over gameplay, and yes, while these concepts are creative, the gameplay isn’t enough to keep that concept or my interest afloat for too long. It is to be expected that not all of a company’s titles will be winners, but considering this is the same company that brought us titles like Donkey Kong Country, Banjo-Kazooie, and Conker’s Bad Fur Day later down the line, it was surprising to say the least. But now, I completely expect these titles to be pretty bad, such as with today’s subject, Snake Rattle ‘n’ Roll.

There is an interesting idea here, creating an isometric platformer inspired by games like Marble Madness, and considering that Rare helped port that game to the NES, they had plenty of experience making a game like this. Unfortunately though, some ideas like this should stay on the drawing board rather then being fully executed, because I didn’t have a good time with this game at all. It is admirable, what they managed to do here, but it is more frustrating than anything else, pretty repetitive, and it has some pretty irritating gameplay choices that don’t make me wanna replay it ever again.

I’m not even sure if there is a story or not, but it is primarily just a bunch of snake shenanigans, the graphics are good, with the snakes and “enemies” looking good, but the environments are pretty boring to look at, the music is pretty good, but that is to be expected from a Rare game, the control is an abomination, which we will get to later, and the gameplay is simple enough, while adding a little bit of challenge in there to make the player quick to move and react… at a price.

The game is an isometric puzzle platformer, where you take control of either Rattle or Roll, go through a set of simple, yet vast levels, defeat any kind of hostile obstacle that stands in your way, gather items and points along the way, and swallow as many pink or yellow balls as you can to extend your body, ring the bell to open the exit, and get on out of there… yeah, this game is kinda weird. Again though, like I mentioned earlier, it is pretty unique to stand out amongst either titles at the time, and there weren’t too many other isometric games, so does make it more appealing. Not to mention, the fact that the game isn’t too complicated or deep, coupled with how the game isn’t that long at all, makes it somewhat appealing.

That being said, this all comes crashing down with the implementation of the terrain and the controls. First and foremost, since this is an isometric platformer on the NES, you can imagine how confusing and difficult it would be to get used to. Sure, it isn’t that confusing to get used to, but when you pair it with the environments that you move around, alongside the depth perception which makes things much harder then they need to be, it makes playing through this game extremely damn frustrating. Not impossible, but really annoying.

And speaking of which, the terrain you have to platform around is also just as guilty in making the game frustrating as the controls are. I have already mentioned how the depth perception is a large hindrance on the player, but not to mention how it is never to clear not only where you are supposed to jump next to progress, but also HOW you are supposed to jump from one platform to another. This is especially aggravating when later levels implement ice physics and cliffsides, which, again, paired with the ass controls, makes making these jumps towards the goals seem almost impossible, with you needing god-like precision to jump, direct yourself towards the platform, and making sure to not shoot yourself off of the ledge in the process. Thankfully, I was using Rare Replay to play through this, like I have done with most of the old Rare titles I have been covering, but I can’t even imagine what trying to beat this on the actual hardware would be like. Probably wouldn’t even get past Level 2.

With all that being said though, I think we have ourselves another Cobra Triangle situation with this game, in where it is only enjoyable through short bursts and nothing more. If you try playing through it in one sitting, like I did, or you spend too long on it, you are gonna end up hating this game like I did. And again, this type of approach to a game like this would work wonderfully if this was an endless arcade game, but since it is a beatable NES game, that makes it a completely different story. I didn’t even mention the presence of fall damage in the game, or how the final boss is literally just a regular enemy that you have to hit, like, five million times in order to beat, but I think you all get it at this point.

Overall, while being yet another impressive experiment from the minds at Rare, the execution of said experiment leaves a lot to be desired, and is definitely not something I will look back upon fondly. Other people would probably get a lot more enjoyment out of this type of game, but seeing as how I have a pet peeve over terrible control in video games (which I have made VERY clear in previous reviews), this isn’t going to be one I will ever consider playing again………. But hey, it did get a sequel, so I will have to play through it eventually, won’t I? Yeah right, I’d rather have a snake poison me with its venom, so I can end the pain quicker.

Game #274

A very, very good update to an already great puzzle platformer. This version does have some problems though. The hurtboxes for Shy Guys seem to be a bit messed up - it's not uncommon to jump onto one and somehow die - and this is especially prominent in the new icy world.

Speaking of: the new levels are so much worse than the others in the game. They have neat ideas but they are not executed well at all. The main reason is that the ice physics (and particularly Mario's weird spin jump) don't feel like they were properly thought out. They might work well like this in a 2D platformer but these levels are usually barely larger than a single screen; the DK boss fight using this gimmick makes it especially apparent how much of an issue this weird skating jump doesn't fit into the slower, more-methodical movement system of the rest of the game.

It's a stark reminder how Nintendo Software Technology hasn't been allowed to make a new game in over a decade besides the other Mario vs. Donkey Kong games that nobody cared about and some crossword things on the 3DS. Hopefully they'll be allowed to make new games at some point again.

Initially felt inclined to rate The Lost Crown slightly lower due to some minor annoyances brought about by glitches, but by the end, I realised it represents too much of what I want out of this industry to lowball it. This game’s not just a welcome franchise revival or a showcase of a big publisher’s willingness to get experimental, it’s equally a reminder that not enough people are aware of what consistently great developers Ubisoft Montpellier are, an exercise in hardcore Indo-Persian frisbeeing, a vindication of Warrior Within enjoyers and – if you ask me – the single best search-‘em-up outside of actual Metroid games.

There’s a few indicators that Warrior Within was a point of study here – Sargon dual wields swords, it’s bloodier and more combat-oriented than most other entries, creatures from Persian folklore play a bigger role compared to original monsters and the Prince’s outfit from it was a preorder bonus – but the main one is that Warrior Within was Prince of Persia’s precedent for experimenting with a Metroid-y overworld. That more exploratory angle was always why I liked it best, so it’s just as well that The Last Crown expands on this like a duck to water. Mount Qaf’s dishing out surprises so regularly that the game never once feels stale despite how much longer it is than most of this genre, which is thanks not just to the conceptual creativity and sheer number of its biomes but also how those concepts inform their mechanics. To mention just one, my favourite’s the labyrinthine library whose master’s hunger for knowledge ended up turning him into Mr. X, in which you have to juggle that looming threat with puzzles where realising the solution is only part of the equation; showing you how I did this particular one isn’t even really a spoiler, because the onus is still as much on your dexterity and forward-planning as on figuring out what to do. Comparatively straightforward, linear areas aren’t without some kind of distinctive pull or spectacle either, one major highlight being pressing the resume button on a naval battle which had been frozen in time centuries ago.

That sort of moment-to-moment variety goes a big way towards helping avoid the staleness or tedium that could’ve been invited by its length, but the biggest asset in that regard is what a joy it is to gradually unravel Mount Qaf. I love the powers in this to the point that I’m hoping future metroidbraniacs rip them off wholesale. Nearly every individual one of them opens up several means of approach in both platforming and combat by itself; teleporting to an afterimage with Shadow of the Simurgh to slip through obstacles or set up multiple charged attacks quicker than you normally could, phasing between realities like in Soul Reaver to control when certain enemies or platforms become tangible, stuffing an explosive in your pocket to unveil a hidden respite in a precision platforming segment or even an entire enemy to even the odds in a particularly tough encounter… Every time I unlocked a new one, my mind was racing at the possibilities. Combine just a few with a little out-of-the-box thinking and it feels like you can reach just about anywhere – I’ve no idea how you’re “supposed” to get past the bit in that clip normally, and that’s beautiful.

Its combat designers similarly outdo themselves. Experimentation’s the name of the game, in part thanks to the impressive amount of hit reactions on its enemies’ part. They and bosses can be varyingly be tripped, launched, juggled, wallsplatted and more, but these differ heavily according to their weight class, which contributes to them being as varied functionally as visually in addition to making target prioritisation pretty frantic whenever big bois are mixed in with little ones. Coupled with the aforementioned powers, your means of approach are spruced up by the extent to which you can alter Sargon’s attributes through an equivalent to Hollow Knight’s charm system. I personally set him up with a ranged shockwave on melee attacks and another letting you turn the chakram into a lingering hazard, with an additional one that heals you on successful parries in case I ran out of potions during the increasingly tough later levels and their gleefully Shonen boss fights, but the customisation on offer’s such that your combat comfort zone’ll likely be pretty different. The feedback on attacks also deserves credit, seemingly taking pointers from Dreadtroid in that respect (love the slight screenshake on each hit in particular). As I said to a friend of mine, himself a French weeb, I’d loosely compare The Lost Crown to Streets of Rage 4 in that it represents what happens when a bunch of French weebs get together and stuff as much of whatever they think is coolest into a game as possible: an exhibition of action gameplay so well-studied and thoroughly understood you’d swear it was made by the Japanese genre figureheads they so clearly admire.

Same goes for its visual artists and the carvers of ancient rock reliefs they palpably draw inspiration from. It’s a delight to see this series dig deeper into the historical iconography of its namesake, ornate Faravahars and esoteric cuneiform and all, tempered by the hand of Rayman Legends’ art director to drape it all in this lovely cartoony, stylised edge. I imagine part of why it runs so well both handheld and docked’s due in part to some clever tricks the artists use with the backgrounds and certain characters too, rendering them with painted 2D images as opposed to fully textured 3D models; really lends figures like the Simurgh and places like the Crossroads of Time an otherworldly feel.

I’ve always been iffy on how “Ubisoft” is used as a descriptor, partially because it often crops up regardless of how similar the game it’s used in reference to actually is to any of their games, but also because there are so many Ubisofts that you can’t really talk about them like they’re a singular entity. I mentioned in my Chaos Theory review that I find it hard not to retain some goodwill towards them so long as at least some of their oldheads remain, and while that holds true, The Lost Crown’s also a compelling case for their newcomers. It’s clear evidence that there’s a swathe of latent talent amongst the group’s bloated headcount primed and ready for the chance to be let off the mobile game hamster wheel and deliver some genre-best efforts, with such avalanches of great ideas that I haven’t even mentioned Memory Shards or that this has a Persian Vergil who uses the 3D games’ time powers against you. Severely hoping Ahriman decides to lay off for a bit so that this game and the people behind it can see the success they deserve, and so we can get more of those in turn.

Are we so gullible? Do we as an audience not demand anything from our art? There's no story, no new mechanics, no real characters, no interesting or enjoyable visuals, no compelling gameplay, no original ideas at all in fact. Is a faceless strawman to antagonise really enough to get millions of people to play an Unreal Engine asset flip made as artlessly as possible? Is no one else actively disturbed by how blatantly and gracelessly this rips mechanics from every popular game of the last 2 decades, without integrating any of them together whatsoever? Has art ever felt this cynical before?

Feel free to discount my opinion. I am a 'salty Pokemon fanboy' after all, and I only gave this game an hour or so of my not particularly highly valued time. I personally just prefer the art I engage with to care for the art form it sits within, even a little bit. Palworld hates video games. It sees nothing more within them than a collection of things to do and hopes that by shovelling a flaccid farcical version of as many of them as possible into your mouth it will somehow constitute a 'video game' when all is said and done. It doesn't. I'm deeply saddened that so many gamers think so lowly of our art form that they genuinely think this is acceptable.