The unflinching hostility of this game became a more prominent aspect of the experience on this 2nd playthrough that I did on the NES version instead of the SNES one. Dragon Quest 2 is already somewhat notorious for being the most unforgiving game in the series, but the way that this is handled is interesting to give some deeper consideration to. The original Dragon Quest game presented a harsh world that could coldly kill you in mere seconds if you were unprepared, forcing you to carefully make your way through, with each new area being a risk that you could only overcome if you had sufficiently powered up enough. While Dragon Quest 2 is similar to this, it has the one key difference of often feeling as if it doesn’t even want the player to succeed, instead being content with repeatedly beating you to death no matter what you’re doing.

The game leans into this difficulty to effectively reinforce its tone, with its sense of hopelessness pervading each town you visit. The threat against the world feels so much scarier without the underlying optimism and belief that the legendary hero will be able to save the world, everyone is despondent, there are Kings that have hidden themselves away from the shame of being unable to do anything to stand up to Hargon, and any attempt at stopping the evil priest’s reign seem so out of reach. I don’t blame everyone for feeling so hopeless in the face of these threats either, because there’s very little working in favour of the player. While the combat system evolving to give the player a party and have battles move away from pure 1 on 1 encounters would seemingly make things easier, giving way to a wider range of strategies to employ and giving the enemies multiple targets to make it harder for the stunlocking nonsense of DQ1 to happen, the encounters are just, so much scarier for the most part. While your party caps out at 3 members, there can be up to 5 dangerous enemies that jump you at once, usually having spells that will damage your entire party, forcing you to divert a lot of your attack power into healing everyone back up before you can strike again. Adding to the problem is that your other party members completely suck, being extremely frail and mostly specialising in magic in a game that makes most spells entirely obsolete by the endgame. It hits a point where the other 2 members do such little damage that the optimal strategy is genuinely to just attack with your main character, and make the other 2 people block every turn unless they outright are required to cast a spell.

This reaches its peak in the last stretch of the game, where every fibre of the experience’s existence is pushing back against you, containing multiple excruciating dungeons in conjunction with enemies that genuinely just feel unfair, having capabilities that can decide to completely wipe you out even when you’re of extremely high levels, doing things such as putting your entire party to sleep, or having constant critical hits that bypass any defence that you have. This is also my favourite portion of the game however, and the one that works best for the game’s atmosphere, because of course the entire world is feeling hopeless to stop Hargon when this is the resistance he presents when you’re trying to reach him, it’s complete justification for why everyone is so terrified here, because it’s brutal in a way that nothing else in the game even comes close to touching. Everything from the Cave to Rhone to the end is a constant uphill battle that keeps escalating even when you swear that it surely has reached its peak by now, every fight is a close one where death is just one unlucky turn away, and your only safehaven leaves you entirely isolated at the top of a snowy mountain with your only quick way back down being one-way, effectively stranding you in this inhospitable wasteland unless you’re willing to brave the horrors of the cave once again, all culminating in a constant feeling of tension as you’re trying to get to the final castle time and time again, only to be met with a string of 5 bosses that each feel insurmountable on their own.

While the game’s final act spectacularly hits its target to make all the buildup worth it in some weird, twisted way, a large swathe of the rest makes the game as a whole feel pretty insufferable. While the escalating enemy difficulty that constantly pulls out some pretty cheap tricks plays nicely into the world being a more hostile place than ever, it completely kills the pacing of the game when you’re more often grinding than actually exploring in any serious capacity. The world is so big, but there’s no way to properly orient yourself most of the time, leading to situations where sometimes the next step you need to take is locating another town that you’ve barely heard anything about, and this is where the line between interesting player hostility and hostility that negatively impacts the experience comes in. While it’s true that the spirit of adventure can be found in aimless exploration of an unknown land, it feels a bit too obtuse here, there are clear places which you need to go, but you’re expected to get there just by wandering the open seas which feel too big and landmasses which feel hard to fully distinguish, combined with the middle portion of the game flatlining difficulty to the point where almost nothing feels like it can get in your way, further contributing to the confusing boredom. The talisman hunting isn’t great partially because of this, but also because of how most of them are hidden in extremely uninteresting locations that makes collecting them all feel like a huge anticlimax.

Dragon Quest 2 has some interesting ideas and is sometimes able to craft a very compelling atmosphere, but it’s also unfortunately a slog to get through that didn’t quite grasp how to effectively utilise its far greater scope in a way that didn’t feel cumbersome. It’s an ambitious title, but not one that works for me a lot of the time due to how much of it felt as aimless as it did. The NES version especially has these issues due to how you get much fewer resources to work with, along with no map or a way to warp to anywhere other than your last save point, making everything feel that much slower. Nonetheless was still happy to replay this and gain a deeper appreciation for it even if I still don’t really like playing it though, especially since I now have a greater point of reference to what it originally was like.

A genuinely magical game that’s kept me thinking about it and will continue having this grip on me for quite some time. Games that utilise the medium to such an extent that their identity hinges on the interactive element being present are some of the most fun ones to let sit with you, and this is one of my favourite instances of it. Return of the Obra Dinn is one of the greatest mystery games I’ve played and a lot of this is owed to the structure of the game, forgoing crafting a mystery specifically designed to surprise the player with its various twists and instead laying it all out bare and forcing you to pick everything apart to fully grasp the finer details of things. The mystery and story themselves are not the important aspects here, it’s just trying to immerse you into the role of a detective without any handholding beyond the bare essentials, and it does so perfectly.

Return of the Obra Dinn is a mystery/puzzle game that revolves around incomplete information and assumption, often leaving little to no definitive evidence and forcing you to jump all around to place with increasingly tenuous lines of logic as you feel yourself going insane. It was quite funny taking a step back after combing through a few scenes in excruciating detail and just thinking “wow, this is deranged” but that’s just how the game is. The player is likely to find all of the story beats of the game rather early on without knowing the fates of the vast majority of the cast, and then the rest of the game boils down to going between the relevant scenes in the game to try and figure out how to deduce some of them, which would seem like an experience that would feel stagnant very quickly, but is saved due to the sense of progression that will take place despite it all just looking like cleanup at first. The progression gates in this game are entirely dependent on and driven by the player, hinging on multiple big realisations on how they need to approach their investigations. This culminates in a deeply rewarding loop of thinking that you’ve hit the logical endpoint of what you achieve on your own, before realising a new detail that leads you down a new line of logic to discover someone, and then applying this newfound understanding of how to figure something out to other characters. A contributing factor to how this is so successful is due to the plethora of approaches that you’re expected to work out, sometimes really being as simple but uncertain feeling as “this guy hangs around this other guy a lot, they’re probably in the same field”.

The way that your answers are confirmed is a clever way of limiting the ability to brute force a lot of puzzle answers as well, since you’ve only got confirmation on whether you’re correct or not once you have 3 correct answers simultaneously written down. While some amount of guesswork was an expected element of this game’s design, by structuring it like this, players are still forced to confidently deduce 2 other people before they can start taking real shots in the dark with incomplete assumptions, solving a problem I’ve seen time and time again in deduction games where people will often resort to total guesswork the moment they’re met with some confusion and uncertainty. The presentation goes a long way in tying everything together as well, being visually striking while having the effect of being simple enough to make the important details easier to pinpoint while simultaneously obscuring everything just enough to invite uncertainty into every observation. I adore whenever a game can keep me thinking for so long after I’m done with it, and I love it even more when it does so through something as esoteric as it is here. Total masterpiece, something new to add to my list of favourites.

Knack is a bit of a weird game to me. On paper it’s something that genuinely feels like it attempts to accomplish nothing noteworthy in the slightest, with so many ideas present here being staggeringly mediocre and seemingly trying to culminate in the most average game ever, acting as a pseudo-tech demo that manages to not even accomplish that much to any effective degree. What truly gets me about Knack is how all of these ideas that were already as insignificant as they were, are consistently botched and made to feel bad across the board, transforming mediocrity into something that feels actively bad to play.

The content within this game feels skeletal, largely lacking in any memorable setpieces in favour of guiding the player through repetitive corridors of enemies, with the progression between each level feeling inconsequential and stagnant, and functionality rarely shifting beyond occasional types of Knack that make some small attempt at shaking things up. Unfortunately, even the most gimmicky parts of the game still feel near functionally identical and mostly boil down to different ways of taking damage over time, rather than anything that would potentially invite a playstyle that differs in any major way. Knack is also a 3D brawler/platformer that strives to dumb down both sides of its gameplay loop to painfully simple levels. Platforming is almost a non-entity, with most platforming that you’re doing being more akin to traversing battle arenas with an element a slight verticality as opposed to full fledged platforming challenges, but the combat is so basic that these slightly varied arenas aren’t enough to meaningfully change much. Knack’s moveset being as basic as it is makes it so encounters cannot have much variety to them due to how limited the player’s capabilities are, leading to a lot of visually distinct, but mechanically samey enemies that are sent at you.

Playing Knack feels like white noise that abruptly throws a high-pitched, ear-piercing noise at you from time to time, with its monotony only being broken up by cheap shots that you often can’t even see because big Knack takes up a third of the screen. Almost everything killing you in one hit doesn’t play nicely into how sluggish you’ll often feel, with a lot of situations that feel impossible to react to without dying a lot to memorise the exact route you need to take to avoid getting hit, which is an element of friction that I’d find compelling if the systems in play weren’t quite so braindead. The fact that something as simple as an actual combo meter is relegated to an unlockable as opposed to just being there is a testament to how shoehorned in the collectibles feel in general as well. For the most part, all that these will unlock for you are features that feel like they should have been part of your base kit from the beginning instead of a reward for finding secrets, especially since you’ll likely not get more than a couple of full gadget sets to begin with since the collectibles you get from hidden areas are randomised. The more you think about Knack, the worse it gets. A tech demo that was meant to showcase the power of the PS4, yet only takes any advantage of this with Knack himself, as every other character model looks somewhat uncanny and ugly, and cutscenes making me think of a Clash of Clans ad more than an actual game, being one of many bad elements to be found in a game that barely feels like it’s trying to do anything most of the time. Worse than I expected it to be, don’t play Knack.