MysticWonder
Okay, I almost never review a game that I haven't completed but I have so many strong feelings about Penny's Big Breakaway from my time spent playing it that I really want to get down on paper while I'm thinking about them.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
The first time I heard about the game was through the Nintendo Direct showcase, where it was advertised as an 'easy to learn but hard to master' 3d platform game. This is just close enough to being true to not be false advertising, but only just so.
I'll admit - I'm far from 'good' at these sort of games, but I've played through all of A Hat in Time, Super Mario 3D World, and I've also played the Sonic games Christian Whitehead was involved in.
However, I have the experience to say with confidence, that the game is in no way 'easy to learn'. The game gives you a 5 minute tutorial on 7 different abilities you can do for base level movement and expects you to have mastered them by the end of it. I game-overed at least 6 times in the first world, and while I'm normally lenient on games that ask a lot of the player, Penny is asking for too much.
Penny also suffers from a case of "who is this game for?"-syndrome. My best guess is that it's for the speed-running community, and people who have already played and beaten Penny's Big Breakaway.
If I tried to go fast (like the game is marketed), I'd game over because of the difficulty curve. If I tried to take it slow and safe, I might live and get through the level, but the game would constantly put sequences in my way that would say "Oh boy do this in 5 seconds and get a shiny thing! Go Go Go!".
No matter what I did, I felt like I was playing it wrong.
I'm not hyperbolizing on the time there either. The game will put dialog on screen saying you need to do something in 5 seconds, but by the time you're done reading the text, 3 seconds have passed and you don't even know what you're looking for. So you either replay the level out of frustration, or you just ignore all rewards and try to beat the level as best you can.
Fun fact: Did you know that while Penny is riding on top of her Yo-Yo that she can drift like in Mario-Kart if you press the trigger buttons? Well if you didn't, it's not your fault, because I only learned that she can do that when I went back and watched the Nintendo Direct trailer again. If they tell you that in game, I sure didn't get the message.
The ship boss was a complete mess and I basically had to shelve the game right then and there. On multiple different attempts the camera bugged out and put me 30 miles away from the action. On one attempt I was sent slowly ascending into the great beyond and had to reset. The speed boosts are finnicky as hell, and if you jump through them instead of riding through them you'll wipe out - it's extremely unintuitive.
But besides that, it's also just a poorly designed fight? Jumping up to the different sections of the ship was really weird - like you had JUST enough height to make the first jump from the lower deck to the middle, and then the pole vault doesn't even actually put you on the third floor of the ship. It just sends you adjacent to it? Like yeah I get it, I can just jump-roll out of it to get on top, but it doesn't feel right. It was buggy as hell and not a good look for any further content.
So at the end of my time with it I just got this feeling that the only way I was going to actually enjoy playing Penny's Big Breakaway --- was if I beat Penny's Big Breakaway first. That the only way to truly experience the game, was to already be a master at it, and honestly I just don't have the heart to push myself through 7 more worlds to find out what I'm missing. I might return to it later, but for now, play at your own risk - especially with the bugs.
Momodora: Moonlit Farewell is the final entry in a five game series by (mostly) solo indie developer RDein, and man it's really fuckin hard to rate. I've fiddled with the star rating at least 10 times while writing this review.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
M5, is a good game. RDein knows how to make a banger 2D platformer and M5 is no exception. There's some weird, not-well-thought-through ideas that are in the peripherals of the core gameplay, but they don't impact the game enough for me to call them out directly.
The game is visual eye candy as well. Downright gorgeous, best in the series by far. Close observers might notice the real-time 2D pixel-art environmental shading applied to the player character, which I know from experience is ridiculously hard to do in Unity. I'm always impressed with these games, but man they knocked it out of the park with this one.
The final boss of the game? God damn. That one's going down as one of the most visually spectacular bosses I've ever fought. What a way to say goodbye!
If this is the last game I ever get to play by RDein I think I'm okay with it, but I really hope it isn't. Game-dev is a bitch.
If you like metroidvanias and indie games then you should play M5. You should also play M4, (one of my favorite games of all time: Momodora: Reverie Under the Moonlight), and if you like that go play the OG M1-M3. The series is up there with the best of the best.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Go down the rabbit hole. Do it.
Void Stranger was a blast to play last year. A friend and I got in a voice call and collectively lost our god damn mind for a week straight trying to figure out all the puzzles.
If you do play this, grab a friend, and go in completely blind. Don't look up anything if you get stuck, you shouldn't need it.
8/10 would lose my god damn mind again.
Spoilers ahead:
A couple of the deeper lore puzzles are a bit bullshit (the snake one especially felt bad imo) but otherwise it was amazing from start to finish.
I didn't vibe with the true ending of the game admittedly. I thought they were going somewhere else but it ended up being a callback to another game by the same developers. Cool, but was really hoping for a big payoff at the end and it didn't really hit.
The times spent asking "wait is that a hint? Is this obscure thing a part of the bigger picture? NO WAY DUDE, IT IS?" is a vibe I don't think I'll ever get to experience again. Thanks for that System Erasure!
Void Stranger was a blast to play last year. A friend and I got in a voice call and collectively lost our god damn mind for a week straight trying to figure out all the puzzles.
If you do play this, grab a friend, and go in completely blind. Don't look up anything if you get stuck, you shouldn't need it.
8/10 would lose my god damn mind again.
Spoilers ahead:
A couple of the deeper lore puzzles are a bit bullshit (the snake one especially felt bad imo) but otherwise it was amazing from start to finish.
I didn't vibe with the true ending of the game admittedly. I thought they were going somewhere else but it ended up being a callback to another game by the same developers. Cool, but was really hoping for a big payoff at the end and it didn't really hit.
The times spent asking "wait is that a hint? Is this obscure thing a part of the bigger picture? NO WAY DUDE, IT IS?" is a vibe I don't think I'll ever get to experience again. Thanks for that System Erasure!
2022
Splatoon is a weird franchise. I honestly didn't get the hype for the first two games. It always had this 'baby's first fps' kind of vibe that turned me off of them. The idea seemed promising but I couldn't get behind the weird 'squid' music and it all just seemed so childish to me. I completely ignored them and stuck to my hardcore tactical shooters like Apex Legends and Rainbow 6 Siege that I knew and loved and let Nintendo's weird newest IP pass me by.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
But then in 2022 I went through a really vulnerable time in my life where my future became extraordinarily uncertain and fell into a depression.... right when Splatoon 3 came out.
And thank god that it did honestly, because I was sleeping on one of the best FPS franchises of the last decade.
"They call it Splatoon 3 because really you're getting three games in one" is what my friend told me as a joke, but they're really not wrong. You get a single player campaign that lasts 4-6 hours, a multiplayer FPS that has way more depth than I gave it credit for, and an absolutely bonkers PvE game mode that rivals the likes of Left 4 Dead 2 as one of the best swarm shooters I've ever played.
I never finished the single player campaign though, so lets just call it a cool FPS with a great PvE mode.
The normal FPS aspect of the game is the same as the other two Splatoon games. You have guns that shoot ink, you can 'swim' in surfaces painted by your ink, and you can 'splat' your enemies by shooting them with your ink. Each weapon has its own loadout, with a secondary grenade-like throwable and a special 'ultimate' ability that every FPS has to have now-a-days. It's really a cool setup, and allows for a variety of different playstyles. If you want to focus on the ink part of the game there are weapons that are good for spreading ink, but you can also say fuck that and take duelies and roll your way into the enemy base to score a killstreak.
If I had a gripe with this system it would be that Nindendo seems absolutely terrified of ever making a weapon that's... well... too good? A lot of the weapons I like are best 2 out of 3 -- that is -- the Weapon is fun to use, but either the Ultimate of the Secondary or both don't play well with it. Have a weapon that's good at picking people off but is lacking in the ink category? Well then of course, the grenade has to be the angle-shooter, an extremely hard to hit grenade that only does piddly damage and doesn't ink anything. Have a roller that is slow to move but wide and great for inking? Well obviously any Roller player would want to stop everything they're doing and place down a Splash Wall right? .... RIGHT??? ROLLERS LOVE STANDING STILL RIGHT???? I honestly can't blame them though, on release there was a weapon that was good at inking with a really powerful ultimate that you could easily spam and it took multiple nerfs just to get it back in line.... just for another variant of that weapon it to take it's place. Ahhhh live service balancing <3
Anyway, the creativity in the design of these weapons are perfect too. Splatoon takes place after a vague end of the world event that killed off all the humans, so all of these weapons are repurposed version of human tech. There's a sniper fitted to a #2 pencil called the Snipewriter. There's a mini-washing machine called the Sloshing Machine that chucks ink all over your enemies. There's a whole class of weapons that are repurposed window wipers, it's great.
But if Splatoon 3 was just it's PvP mode I probably wouldn't bother talking about it, besides curtly saying 'yeah it's pretty good'. That's where we get to Salmon Run, the PvE game mode.
No joke, Salmon Run is some of the most intense gaming moments I've ever had in an FPS. You have to fight hoards of frothing bipedal salmon called salmonoids and try to collect their eggs by delivering or throwing them into a basket at a central location. Outside of the normal salmonoids you get harder variants called boss salmonoids that are more threatening and all require unique ways of defeating them. It's all pretty straight forward until you find out that your weapons are all randomized from a daily set of four weapons. You and your team must work together to fight off the swarm while also often figuring out how some of these weapons even work, and compensating for any disparities in ink or range.
Every once in a while you'll get the privilege to face off against one of the 'King Salmon', these giant kaiju-like salmonoids that can absolutely wreck your shit. If you manage to take them out you'll get some salmon-run-specific currency that can be spent on special cosmetics you can show off in the PvP mode too.
And the whole thing comes together perfectly. The atmosphere of the rest of the game is gone. You're now in the trenches of inkling 'nam, and all you have is the weapon in your hands and your coworkers by your side. I fucking love this game mode and I climbed to Executive VP, the highest rank, over the course of 6 months.
A side note:
My friend group figured out that there's a role in high level Salmon Run called 'princess', and it's typically a role given to whoever has the most garbage weapon in the set. 'Princess's job is to ignore all Salmonoids and just focus on getting eggs to the basket. This is absolutely hilarious and I refuse to play Salmon Run without bringing it up in conversation at least once.
The community of Splatoon is really what gets me honestly. You remember the Wii-U Plaza from back in the day where people would post images and shitposts on the homescreen of the Wii-U? They basically kept that and brought it all the way up to Splatoon 3. If you log on consistently enough you'll get to see absolutely wild drama play out, such as one user named 'gao' fervently writing out the phrase: "Throw me to the Salmonoids, I'll come back PREGNANT" and deciding to post it for the entire world to see. I can't get this kind of unhinged shitposting anywhere else man, and believe me I've tried.
And if you've gone your entire life without experiencing a Splatfest, then good god man you're missing out. Basically every month or two Nintendo decides to split the community up by asking room-splitting questions like: "what's the best ice cream flavor" and watching us all devolve into cavemen. For one weekend, the entire atmosphere of the game changes. The day before, you can see them start to put up decorations, and as night falls the entire plaza is turned into a mixture of a rave and a festival as we all party and have religious arguments about how Strawberry is CLEARLY THE SUPERIOR FLAVOR and how I will SPLAT THE NEXT FUCKER WHO TRIES TO TELL ME OTHERWISE.
And when there isn't a Spaltfest to look forward to, then there's a Big Run on the horizon. If normal Salmon Run is squid 'nam, then Big Run is Squid World War 3.
The premise is fucking genius. The PvE and PvP gamemodes have completely separate maps because they're completely different games. The PvP gamemodes have pretty, sunny, generally family friendly vibes, while the Salmon Run maps are hell in a handbasket. Red horizons, green seas, everywhere you go is death.
So what if the Salmonoids actually made it past us? What if they made it allll the way to our safe and pretty little PvP maps? Well then you'd get a Big Run. Basically one of the PvP maps gets overwhelmed by Salmonoids and it's all hands on deck, all out war, for all that is good for Squid-kind. The music in the Plaza? Gone. The skies? Red. The TV's? All showing an emergency broadcast. It's lowkey one of the most unnerving shit you can put in a E10+ game.
It's these scheduled events that puts Splatoon into a tier of it's own for me. It made me feel like a kid again, waiting for the next update, waiting for the next community event so I can do my part and take down more anti-strawberry heretics. You really don't get this kind of shit in live-service games these days because, despite what the community thinks, they really don't make much money for the amount of time and effort needed to pull it off. But I think that's a horrible way of thinking about it.
It's a bit embarrassing to say, but, in a time where I didn't know what the fuck to do with my life anymore, I had Splatoon to keep me going. Did you see todays Salmon Run rotation? What about tomorrows, is that going to be any good? Did you hear? The next Splatfest was just announced, I can make it to then right? And then there's the next Big Run 3 weeks after that? It gave me something to look forward to when I had nothing else in my life to look forward to. And it's made this wonderful weird community of idiots that I can't help but miss now that the games entering it's sunset phase.
In all honestly, I can't in good faith recommend Splatoon 3 to people these days because I think it's juuuust about run it's course. They haven't announced when the last Splatfest will be, but I'm predicting it'll be in the next couple of months and after that there will be no new content. The community is a lot smaller than it was on release, and the casual scenes kinda taken a hit because of it. I can't hop into a turf war these days without getting absolutely bodied by people with 300 more hours than me, but honestly that's fine.
Splatoon 3 was a highlight of one of the worst years of my life. I deeply cherish the memories I had with it and you can bet your ass I will be there on day 1 for Splatoon 4 ready to fuck up some 10 year old's with my dualie rollouts.
2010
I'm a sucker for games with simple premises taken to extreme levels. VVVVVV has a weird name, but it is absolutely worth your time as an Indie title. Soundtrack also goes hard for no fucking reason.
This game goes so hard for no reason. The first game was just alright, a serviceable tie-in game that loosely followed the plot of the first game while being a decent 3D Collect-a-thon.
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
Rather than reinvent the wheel, the sequel is basically the first, but better and longer. There are more spells, more dungeons, more enemies, more hidden secrets to find, and it's all wrapped up in this thick layer of Potter-atmosphere that still holds up to this day.
There are still some models and environments that are pretty fugly, but I think they do a better job of hiding it in this one than in the first.
The biggest disappointment however was the final boss of the game. After fighting Aragog (who, no joke, is the reason I have arachnophobia), the Basilisk really fails to live up to the hype in size or sense of scale. And the Arena isn't doing him any favors either, the statue is like 3 feet tall, come-on.
Outside of that though, the game holds up pretty damn well. They only hold your hand so much as to show where you can go, but rarely actually force you into anything. This means you can take your time and fuck-abouts the castle at your own pace to find all of its secrets.
The dungeons and the puzzles aren't too difficult but they make up for it in those hidden secrets I keep raving about. You'll be combing every inch of the place trying to cast alohomora on every surface, and each class will teach you a spell that unlocks more stuff for you to find. It's incredibly well paced for a movie tie-in game.
I think they do a decent mix of combat and exploration here, with emphasis more in the exploration pool. You'll be jumping around climbing over boxes and tables like a horse climbing a mountain in skyrim. Most of the enemies in the game are beaten by a single spell and you have so much health that mistakes are rarely actually punishing. But you can't exactly ignore them either, and you're actively rewarded with secrets or beans for defeating enemies.
The two minigames, Quidditch and Dueling are both just okay. They don't actually tell you that you can go and do more Quidditch after the first time, but there's a whole season of it. It's a shame it boils down to mashing a button over and over. Dueling was much more fun and even had a modicum of strategy to it. But it also completely fucked the bean economy, meaning I could buy the most expensive stuff in the game with ease as soon as I got access to it. I guess, in a way, it is serving its intended purpose though: a neat side thing with a reward if you want to grind at it.
I think where the game truly excels however is the atmosphere. Hogwarts has a certain feel to it that oozes magic. The NPCs are all running around going from class to class, it always feels like there's something going on.
And then, when the game wants to, it rips it all away and the warmth of the castle becomes a cold and lonely place at the drop of a hat. The words written in blood on the wall in the charms corridor is genuinely haunting. I have no clue how that got into an E for Everyone game, for real.
Overall, I'd say this one's pretty darn good. You'd have to go pretty far out of your way to play it, but if you like HP and are looking for something to play you can't go wrong with the good ol Chamber o Secrets.
(Note: This is not an endorsement of JKRs shitty behavior. Trans rights.)
2017
The best 2D platformer released last decade. Nothing even remotely comes close. It's got a simple combat system pushed to it's absolute limits, a fully fleshed out universe with lore oozing out of every surface, an art style that makes me forget I'm fighting bugs, and an atmospheric soundtrack to help me get lost in the world they created.
I spent 60 hours alone beating the Pantheon of Hallownest.
10/10 don't fucking talk to me, I beat Hollow Knight.
I spent 60 hours alone beating the Pantheon of Hallownest.
10/10 don't fucking talk to me, I beat Hollow Knight.
2024
They weren't lying, there really do be animals in this well.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
Let's be real, if you're reading this then you probably already know about it, but Animal Well is a 2D puzzle metroidvania developed by Billy Basso and published by YouTube star VideoGameDunkey. And honestly, what a fucking show. First game developed by Basso, first game published by BigMode? I'm super excited and can't wait to see what both parties do next.
As for the game? It's fucking great.
It's a simple puzzle game centered around exploring and using items to solve puzzles. The items are super straight forward and yet with every passing minute, Basso manages to eek out more and more unique ways of using them. But the items would be nothing if it weren't for the secrets, and boy howdy does Animal Well have those oozing out of every corner possible.
No joke, any time I saw a black space on the map, no matter how small, I just knew there had to be a secret room or unlock that got me there, and 89% of the time I was right. Honestly, it was far less common for a room NOT to have a secret to discover than it was for it to have one. And in your pursuit of those secrets you'll find more items, more animals, more puzzles to solve, more moving parts to this strange strange world you've been dropped into. It's animals all the way down.
The atmosphere is top tier as well. There's dark and droll moments, but there are moments of warmth interspersed between, and you never quite feel lonely as, true to the name, there are animals fuckin everywhere.
I think they did a good job at ensuring that the normal game was beatable without hints, while also leaving enough questions unanswered to keep you coming back for more after the credits roll. I managed to get the normal ending of the game without hints, the true ending the of the game with one or two hints, and the super secret [REDACTED] ending by getting a lot of hints. Some of the super late game stuff was super obscure, but Billy Basso has gone on record to say that he never expects ANYONE to find them, so... go internet!
So give Animal Well a chance, it's a delightful romp through a damp and droll place with adorable animals and mysterious puzzles that you'll go crazy trying to figure out.
2023
Hellcard is great! It's a rouge-like deck builder that you play with friends with a number of different playstyles and challenges to overcome. I played it with two of my other friends to death last year, and we had a pretty good time every time we brought it out.
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
There are three different classes, Ranger, Mage, and Warrior, and each one of them have huge 'pop off' moments that are a blast to achieve. You'll get to the end of a playthrough and be one turn from a TPKO on basically every turn before you start slamming faces and clearing boards. It's high stress, big payoff -- it's great!
While in early access, they had a button on the side of the screen you could click in order to send feedback directly to the developers. We used it pretty often, and on more than one occasion we would come back and find that the game was different and our complaints solved! It was really cool! I wish more devs would do this.
(I will say that it's a game designed to be played with friends, so it's not the best single player game but I can't knock it for that.)
Give it a go!
2019
Everyone told me to go and play this game blind.
And so I did.
And now I'm telling you to go and play this game blind.
And you should.
You're only going to be able to play this game once.
And so I did.
And now I'm telling you to go and play this game blind.
And you should.
You're only going to be able to play this game once.
This game is fucking insane.
Imagine developing a 3 part series on your own for fun and then getting the funding from Patreon to do a 4th game and deciding to go all in.
And you knock it out of the fucking park.
This is one of the few games I've 100%'d. This is one of the few games I've played at least 10 or more times through. This game's movement is amazing. This game's combat is amazing. This game's atmosphere is the best I've seen in an indie game, with maybe only Hollow Knight beating it a year later.
There's a giant witch with huge tits that curses you to turn into a cat.
Oh and once you beat it, you can go back and beat every boss without getting hit to find their absolutely broken secret boss items. Fucking genius!
God this game is great, I'm going to go play it again brb.
Imagine developing a 3 part series on your own for fun and then getting the funding from Patreon to do a 4th game and deciding to go all in.
And you knock it out of the fucking park.
This is one of the few games I've 100%'d. This is one of the few games I've played at least 10 or more times through. This game's movement is amazing. This game's combat is amazing. This game's atmosphere is the best I've seen in an indie game, with maybe only Hollow Knight beating it a year later.
There's a giant witch with huge tits that curses you to turn into a cat.
Oh and once you beat it, you can go back and beat every boss without getting hit to find their absolutely broken secret boss items. Fucking genius!
God this game is great, I'm going to go play it again brb.
I played the shit out of this game as a kid.
Why?
Dude I don't know. Took me 1h to beat.
I laughed, I cried, it was a Frogger game.
Why?
Dude I don't know. Took me 1h to beat.
I laughed, I cried, it was a Frogger game.
2023
The first ever Comedy Horror game. Pretty sure it's just flavor of the month, but the Dev seems swell and I could see myself returning to play this every once in a while for shits and giggles.
Loses half a star because parkour is dumb
Loses half a star because parkour is dumb
2014
Wearing its inspiration on its sleeve, Halfway is an XCOM-like. It's a difficult turn based strategy rpg set on a space ship that is mysteriously under attack from uncertain outside forces. You scavenge weapons and ammo, recruit and rescue colorful characters, and face down an ever changing cast of enemies in a fight for your lives.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.
The game has a wide variety of characters, and genuinely interesting plot. It may play into a number of sci-fi tropes, but I did feel invested in the story and it kept me playing all the way until the end. There was internal conflict in the team as well, with the addition of Dr. Shaffer and Thirteen, though I'm a little upset that nothing came of it in the end.
The pixel art is also pretty darn good, which has become a staple of games published by Chucklefish.
I'm trying to offload the first part of this review with positive things because I did enjoy my time playing Halfway for the most part, and I don't want to seem like I'm dogpiling a 10 year old Indie Dev's first title. If you really really like XCOM, then Halfway is a short 12h experience with cool pixel art graphics and a decent story.
Halfway, to put it nicely, feels like the first draft of a pretty good game. There are creative and mechanical choices that I do not think were thought through or polished at all.
For one, there is a baffling choice to not show how much health an enemy has. You can see a health bar on an enemy, but ONLY if you go and try and attack it. Additionally, it's JUST the health bar - no numerical value. Do you have a weapon that does 6-10 damage in its description and want to know if your character will one shot the enemy? Well then go fuck yourself, that's too much information to display to the player apparently.
There's no loading screens in Halfway. You don't realize just how necessary loading screens are in games until you play a game that doesn't have loading screens. You'll be in a level, click to go to the next level, and you jump straight into a new environment with new music. No fade to black or anything, it's very jarring.
There's no undoing a movement action either. If you miss-click right next to an enemy instead of clicking on them to attack them then your character is about to take a lot of damage and there's not a lot you can do about it.
The game is an RPG but there are really only three stats, Health, Agility, and Aiming. I'm down with this, it's pretty simple! There are stimpacks that you can find in levels that you can use to permanently grant increases to these stats.
However, each character can only use 5 stimpacks before they start to have negative effects from 'overstimming'. I think it's supposed to prevent making one souped up cracked character and just rolling encounters, but by the time we got to end game - it didn't matter because it felt like the only stat that mattered was aiming.
Additionally, how many stims each character has used is not conveyed to the player in the UI, and it really should be.
You know how there's the meme in XCOM where a soldier will have their gun pointed directly at the skull of an enemy and still somehow miss? Pretty funny! Now to ruin it, the meme is born out of the absurdity of it all, and it's absurd because it's something that should not occur, and yet it does.
If you play Halfway you are going to be spending a lot of time experiencing that meme over and over and over again. You'll be spending a lot of turns sitting there taking pot shots at immobile, out-of-cover turrets that regenerate their shields every 4 turns and occasionally resetting because your sniper with a 68% chance to hit missed 6 times in a row and died to retaliation. I had a character with a chain gun have a 50% chance to hit a grunt that was in a wide open space two squares away. There simply has got to be a better way of handling this combat system - I swear to god.
Lastly, I beat the game and there was an actually cool final boss at the end, but I ended up coming away with more questions then answers in the worst kind of way. They never fully explain what exactly was happening to the ship, and after everything I wrote above, I'm starting to wonder if the writers themselves even know the answer. There could be a true ending if you beat every optional mission, but I got sick of doing them right at the end and now I can't go back.
So yeah, that's Halfway. I can't tell if it's a bad good-game, or a good bad-game. I do think, however, it's a good case study in how to and how not to take inspiration from other big titles. It pulls off a lot of good things from XCOM, but it fails to remove a lot of the bad things about XCOM as well. Anyway, it's $13 and it takes 12 hours to beat, so hey at least I got my moneys worth.
This review contains spoilers
Aaaaah okay here we go... Another Crabs Treasure is a good game - full stop. But lend me an ear and let me tell you why I also think it is an unfocused mess that's in the wrong genre and really could have used an extra month or two of development to iron out.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.
Okay so that's a lot, and it doesn't quite make 100% sense, but the same could be said about Another Crabs Treasure.
Okay so Another Crabs Treasure (which I'll be shortening to ACT) is a souls-like, through and through. Now I've played Dark Souls 1, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and beaten every one of them three or more times. So when it came to the challenges put forth by ACT, I felt like I was well equipped to deal with them.
So why did I give up halfway through the game and gave Krill a gun for half the time?
To put it simply, ACT's common enemies suck, more than usual souls-like games. They have too much health, have weird windups that are difficult to read, and are too numerous to deal with. If you're familiar with DS1, imagine if every single common enemy was replaced with a Black Knight, and you've basically got ACT. For over half of the game I did nothing but put points into Attack, desperate to figure out why the fuck it felt like I was dealing absolutely no damage to these common enemies, while also breezing through bosses like they were nothing.
And yeah no, I'm not talking about like special dudes, I'm talking about your Goomba-level guys, your Koopas, your 'i'll just sprinkle a little bit of these guys over here', dudes. Why do they take 12 hits to kill? This very rudimentary problem fucks up the ENTIRE game for me. Instead of giving new areas one or two good old college tries before running it down I started borderline speed-running the game after the second area. Don't fight anything I'm not required to, collect all the loot, and get the fuck out of dodge.
This is a problem with all souls-likes, but if the game is more enjoyable by NOT engaging with the level as intended, then IMO you have a balancing issue.
Now you may have noticed earlier (maybe because of the sheer shock value) that around the 40% mark I said that I gave Krill a gun.
This is where ACT gets a full 5 stars from me: Accessibility settings! Yes, ACT is hard, but you can make it easier, guilt free, with a wide variety of settings to make your experience more enjoyable. Some options are as follows: Decrease the damage you take, decrease the health enemies have, increase shell hp, keep your money on death, slow down combat, and finally, the best one of all, give Krill a gun. The gun is a photorealistic model of a glock, and has a special ability that instantly kills any enemy, common or boss level. It's great! I love this! I think any game that is willing to say 'hey you know maybe this difficulty isn't for everybody, but we still want you to have fun' gets a full 5 stars from me.
BUT
You notice that I mentioned a couple of relevant settings in that list? Specifically, decrease enemy max hp? Well I'm not convinced it fucking works, because even with that setting turned up to HIGH common enemies still were taking 12 or so hits to kill. I swallowed my pride and had those settings kicked up to the highest they went for the rest of my playthrough after the 2nd area and though my enjoyment of the game went up, I still couldn't shake this feeling that maybe, possibly, ACT might be in the wrong genre.
I got far more enjoyment out of the game treating it like a collectathon with puzzles and platforming than I did treating it as a souls-like. The combat is interesting and the hallmarks of a decent souls-like are there, but since every small encounter takes forever to get through, all I really wanted to do was swim around and do platforming. Hense: Gun.
The bosses are the only point where this feeling dissipates though, and I'm right back into the souls-lover-69-git-gud mentality when it comes to them. The stagger meter is great, I love the high risk high reward play-style it encourages, though if you don't have the execution ability unlocked then you're missing out on a lot of damage. Kinda feel like that shouldn't be an unlock, since you can miss it if you decide one of the other paths are more interesting, like I did. Some of the status attacks feel... just a little bit undodgable at times, and if you get frightened you get to just watch the stagger bar deplete... but hey this section was supposed to be a positive one.
So that's it right? I got to play ACT the way I wanted to right? When I stopped having fun I turned on the Gun and went to town until I started having fun again right?
Well...
ACT has a pacing problem, and is thematically inconsistent. Okay so picture this, I'm makin my way through the starting area of the game thinking: "Hell yeah, bitchin art style, simple motive - gotta get me my shell back". Made my way to the castle, met the duchess, went on a quest to the moon snail, came back and beat the duchess to death with a spork. Took me close to two hours to do, and honestly I was feeling pretty chuffed. No issues with enemies yet, a couple of difficulty spikes, but I was really digging the shell combat at that time.
And then I made it to New Carcinia and... it turns out none of those first two hours mattered AT ALL. No joke, aside from the necessary tutorials, you can cut that entire section of the game out and absolutely nothing about ACT will change. The ACTUAL plot of the game is a treasure hunt, and you have to collect map pieces in order to get a treasure so that you can buy your shell back. This is only the first of many weird narrative and pacing issues ACT has though.
For over 66% of the game there is a very anti-capitalism, pro-union, environmental theme to the game. The Antagonist is a late-stage-capitalist who exploits their workers for monetary gain, while flooding the streets with trash that is simultaneously worth a lot of money, and toxic to sea-life. And it's a bit heavy handed, but overall I think it's done in a cheaky manner, I mean your currency is literally microplastics.
And then the game kinda loses the plot. You have this big showdown with the primary antagonist after completing the treasure map. After beating him Krill loses his shit and tries to kill the Antagonist for the treasure. Now all of your friends are trapped in the Marianas Trench, deep at the bottom of the ocean and Krill has depression.
Now instead of the anti-capitalism message, the game pivots directly into the anti-pollution message and how being depressed doesn't fix anything. Okay, slightly different from the anti-capitalism message, but it's along the same lines. So you escape the Marianas Trench but right at the end the old-man crab tells you that there's a long lost shell that grants unimaginable power to change the world.
What
We went from pro-union, anti-capitalist messages, to hard pro-environmental message, to... high fantasy long-lost-civilization with a deux-ex-machina-shell. For a good two or three hours (depending on if you use the gun or not) the game goes HEAVY into the souls-like inspiration. The Old Ocean looks gorgeous, and plays like a mix of Anor Londo and Crumbling Farum Azula combined. Honestly, ignoring the stupid high health enemies that now come back to life, this was my favorite section of the game, and I wish the rest of the game looked and played like it did here. But it did give me tonal whiplash, and honestly doesn't fit in at all with the rest of the game. The boss of this area literally speaks in ancient tongues about living forever and how we'll never stop the spread of rot -- straight out of dark souls.
At the very end of it all we get an unnecessary 'betrayal' and killing of one of the named characters and you get to fight what feels like the god-of-the-sea in this universe, or at least one of that power level. It's the only boss I used the Gun on because the fight consists of him spawning 5-7 common enemies that you have to beat over and over and -- well - see a couple paragraphs ago on why that doesn't work.
And then, after all of that, after killing two near-god-like enemies, you finally get to put on the shell and make everything bett--- nope another named character steals the shell.
And the whip cracks once more and we're back at the hard pro-union, anti-capitalism message, but NOW Krill is ANGRY. There's this weird undertone about anger, and lashing out. The game basically says, if you're going to be angry about all these horrible things then you should focus that anger on making things better.
Queue the final boss fight which was pretty good! It felt like a satisfying narrative ark, if you ignore the previous 4 hours of content that went a bit ape-shit on the dark souls inspiration.
But hey remember that weird anger undertone? Well as it turns out by beating the final boss, Krill accidentally breaks the deux-ex-machina shell, dooming the entirety of New Carinia to be flooded in toxic, but monetarily valuable, trash. So I guess the message is... don't lash out in anger? But do fight for whats right? Even though doing so dooms the city? What am I supposed to take away from this?
The ending of the game is super gloomy. Krill has basically fucked everything for all the residents of the city, but in the last 20 seconds of the game they really try and make it seem like all is not lost as best they can. Honestly, to be frank, it feels like whoever was in charge of the story of the game got super depressed right at the end of development. And honestly, yeah that's game-dev for you.
So okay that's a lot of words basically just summarizing the plot of the game, but what's the deal man? Well the first 2 hours of the game can be cut entirely. The duchess literally has nothing to do with the rest of the game. The middle 10 hours are okay, though visually uninspired (we go to TWO different poison swamps? Wow! Such innovation! I wonder if the next one I go to will be purple!). Then the game falls off a cliff into the marianas trench and it's like I'm playing an entirely different game for 4-6 hours (again, depending on if you use the gun). Then right at the end we go back to the main theme of the game - with some weird anger undertones - right into a depressing save-the-planet ending. The game is all over the place, and honestly coming away from it I don't even know the developers want me to take away from this? Form a union? Fine I guess.
Overall the game feels... unfinished. Like 95% unfinished, but still noticeably unfinished a month after release. Some of the bosses have voice lines that are unimplemented. The entirety of the Marianas Trench level is missing music (it's a multi-hour long level, you can't tell me that no-music or sfx at ALL for that length of time is a good idea. See: Subnautica). All of the open-sea areas feel completely baron - and yeah it's accurate to the actual open-sea but that doesn't necessarily mean that your game has to also be completely baron (See: Starfield).
There's an in game map that is simultaneously gorgeous and completely fucking useless. On more than one occasion a character told me to go to a place and I could not for the life of me figure out where to go because of it. It locks to your current position and cannot be panned around, so guess what: if your in New Carinia -- All you can see is New Carinia. The compass, which should be used to mark where you should be going, is also similarly useless and completely broke for me right after I got to New Carinia.
The cutscenes in the game are fully voiced, but there actually isn't that much more out-of-cutscene dialog in the game, was it really that much more to do the whole game?
As soon as I got to the god-like boss at the bottom of the Marianas Trench I was locked into the shell that I had. I couldn't leave and I couldn't get any other shell in the area. It also wasn't a very good shell and certainly not what I was used to using for the rest of the game, so that felt like a huge oversight that could have been caught with more playtests.
So really at the end of it all I'm just left weirdly off-put and confused.
The character designs and creativity in this game are great. Seeing all the environments made out of house-hold trash was always super cool and the wide variety of gunked-up enemies were always fun to see, even if they sucked to fight. The puzzles were great too, with a good mix of platforming and puzzle solving. The characters are all compelling and they're tackling real world problems that are worth talking about.
So I like Another Crabs Treasure. I think it's a good game - full stop.
But also --- well now you've got me talking in circles.