“This castle is a creature of Chaos. It may take many incarnations…”

I’m a very easy wizard to please. Give me an entertaining game with a tight aesthetic and a killer soundtrack and there’s a solid chance I’ll at least remember it years down the line. Castlevania has always managed to check all of those boxes for me. The tale of a family of badass vampire slayers dedicated to putting a stop to Dracula’s plans generation after generation is all I really needed to get invested. And yet, I must admit that while I had played nearly all of them up to a point, I couldn’t claim to have actually beaten one yet. I could come close, but for some reason, none of the games ever quite managed to sink their claws deep enough into me that they could convince me to make that last leap. I’ve since rectified that, but even back then, I could tell right away that Symphony of the Night was something… Different. When I first dove into it some fifteen or so years ago, I became so entranced by its pale moonlit glow that I was briefly concerned that I might never leave. I suppose, at least in my mind, I never did.

As with other games where discovery is so crucial to the game’s appeal, I recommend you experience the game for yourself before reading this review.

Five years after Dracula’s defeat at the hands of Richter Belmont, the titular castle suddenly reappears, decidedly ahead of schedule. Unfortunately for humanity, Richter himself is nowhere to be found. With seemingly nobody else up to the task of investigating this regrettable turn of events, Alucard, the son of Dracula, reluctantly awakens from his self-imposed eternal slumber with the intent of infiltrating Castlevania and putting a stop to this aberration. As he combs the darkest depths of the place he once called home in search of answers, he uncovers a conspiracy that threatens to resurrect the Dark Lord – and a long and bitter family feud comes to a head.

With Symphony of the Night being as revered as it is, both in the past and present, it can be a little hard to remember that it was (and still can be) divisive with a select few for being both too different and not different enough. As far as Castlevania as a series is concerned, forgoing the previous stage-and-score based gameplay with a heavy emphasis on platforming challenges for something much more RPG-ish and exploratory in nature didn’t sit well with absolutely everyone. Given its nearest neighbor in that respect, it’s not too hard to see how some might have been apprehensive about it. It also didn’t always impress on a technical level due to insisting upon retaining the 2D visuals and gameplay when 3D was very much the hot new thing. As time has demonstrated, however, this experimentation in style not only helped to inspire a whole new genre, but it also allowed the game to age much more gracefully than it might have otherwise.

The game’s greatest strengths lie in where such differences become most pronounced. Rather than playing as the latest in a long line of vanquishers, you instead control the main antagonist’s estranged progeny, who chooses the path of forgiveness while his father seeks bloody revenge for mankind’s transgressions. Alucard is a far cry from any Belmont, Morris or Lecarde, or even Belnades, being capable of many of the supernatural feats one would expect of those with vampiric heritage. And also unlike most of his predecessors, Alucard is not a static avatar – his equipment and statistics change throughout the course of the game, and consequently he can grow in ability and power. Gone is your linear and segmented tour through Dracula’s domain, and while many sections are initially kept just out of your reach, you will eventually find ways to overcome your obstacles until not a single inch is off limits to you. Being given the keys to a realm only seen in snippets throughout past games fleshes out the world of Castlevania and makes it much more tangible. Even from an audiovisual standpoint, things have been turned on their head: The original style inspired by classic horror films painted a dark, dirty and frightening picture of the eternal struggle between the Belmonts and the forces of evil. Here, Ayami Kojima’s rich and luxurious art direction accentuates the darkness while giving the characters and their surroundings a much more regal and majestic feeling. You really get a taste of the more decadent and intellectual lifestyle the Ţepeş family was at one point accustomed to. This is complemented by Michiru Yamane’s absolutely impeccable soundtrack, which is at different times dramatic, mysterious, eerie, or even funky, but always, always perfect for the scene it accompanies. These parallels even seem to be represented in the level design itself: After you pick over the castle once, you’re presented with a version of it that has both literally and figuratively been turned on its head, forcing you to reacquaint yourself with something you were only a short while ago intimately familiar with. When all of its aspects come together, the game manages to break free of any expectations and provide an experience that feels remarkably fresh, both in spite of the venerable foundation it’s built on and the trends of its era.

This concept is probably best exemplified in the game’s balance… Or its lack thereof. When you start the game, Alucard is absolutely busted. The handful of enemies you encounter in the castle’s entrance hall may as well be ants for how easily he can stomp all over them. You might briefly wonder if this game is going to be an utter cakewalk from start to finish. Then Death shows up and yoinks your fancy gear, and suddenly you feel pitifully weak even compared to the relatively mundane protagonists of previous games. A lot of time in the early-to-middle game is spent leveling up and scrounging for new equipment, whether by picking up drops from enemies or nabbing treasures. Each time you pick up an item, you’ll be cracking open that menu screen to see where any improvements lie. Over time, though, you’ll accrue a fearsome arsenal. As you scour the castle from top to bottom (and then bottom to top again) you’ll discover many secrets and hopefully learn a few new tricks along the way as well. Eventually you’ll get to know Castlevania like the back of your porcelain hand and will probably have stumbled across at least one of the various game-breakers on offer. That sampling of power you had right at the beginning grows into a feast. I imagine the first person who found a Crissaegrim nearly peed their pants when they realized they’d just picked up a weapon that almost automatically wins the game. Did you know you can equip two of those at once? How about the absolutely nutters Shield Rod combos – especially when you’re using the Alucard Shield? Did you master the input for Soul Steal? Level up your familiars to their maximums? How about other ways you can trivialize things? That doppleganger was pretty irritating, huh? Equip that otherwise useless Red Rust and you can completely shut it down. Wow, this bonus boss’s attacks really sting. Slip this magic circlet on your head; it’ll make your life a lot easier. Symphony of the Night does not care if you cheat. It encourages it. This is your house. If you’re so inclined, you can turn it into your playground, and once you get bored of it you can head off to curbstomp your nuisance of a father and get on with your life. I would never call this game especially difficult. However, it establishes a certain kind of power fantasy for the player and lets them indulge in it, which I can definitely respect. Anybody who tells you they wouldn’t want to be a pretty dhampir with a big castle and a cool sword is either lying or hasn’t played SotN.

And yes, the uneven difficulty can just as easily be a turn-off for somebody who was accustomed to the more daunting challenges of earlier games in the franchise. Your wandering will certainly feel a bit aimless at times, an attribute of many of SotN’s descendants that I know a few people wish would have remained squarely in the past. Some foes can be a real chore to deal with, which in turn makes some areas the kind few would ever wish to retread. The second half of the game can feel like padding, and not every part of the game feels quite as good to explore upside-down. It’s easy to balk at the cheesy voice acting and dialogue (though I personally feel the excessive ham is a perfect match for the game’s aesthetics, and I have a real soft spot for Robert Belgrade’s performance as Alucard). And to the person who simply cannot leave any stone unturned: You definitely have your work cut out for you if you pass on using a guide. However, while I think Alucard’s adventure can be a little weak at times, I still find myself unable to resist the occasional urge to return to that castle and recapture the magic I felt in uncovering its wealth of secrets. Even for as many other games like Symphony of the Night I’ve played, within or without its own series, none of them have quite succeeded in providing me with the same dignified pleasures as that first moonlit stroll. Not bad for 1997.

By the way, the “updated” version included in The Dracula X Chronicles tries to remove all of the delicious cheese, so please don’t play it. But you probably won’t listen to me anyway, will you?

Too budget for its own good. Every town uses the same tileset; same goes for each type of dungeon. The combat is repetitive and abundant: it's Dragon Quest without the quirky spells. The plot stops existing after the first hour and doesn't come back until the last few. Oh, and the random encounter rate is too high.

The intro is really neat, though. You play as the last party to have reached the final dungeon, and if you open the menu, you'll find they have exactly the kind of inventory you would: a mixture of high-level consumables (including 89 (!) Elixirs) and random garbage. That got a good laugh out of me.

I would like to reccomend this because of its insanely cool platforming, which perfectly plays off those "unwieldy" vibes from early 3d platformers and supercharges them with Celeste-level wall-jump craziness; But the main character is a mostly naked anthropomorphic bunny with the thiccest thighs the artist could conceivingly model within the costraits of the haunting low-poly psx nostalgia visual style of the game, so now it's a bit embarrassing to go "hey check out this!".

It feels like everyone making games has suddenly become 200% more horny, while I wasn't looking. It was a bad enough experience when that happened to all of my peers during adolescence, and I don't like it happening again.

The only accessibility option being "Give Sybil pants" made me chukle tho. I have a friend named Sybil, and I am not sure if she would enjoy being given pants.

Anyhow the game is really good. Even tho there's one piece of the soundtrack that reminds me of Dark Souls 2.

EDIT: my one nitpick is that combat feels like an entirely vestigial accessory in the game, and YET the final boss is a straightforward combat challenge. Just feels weird to cap off the game with completely unrelated to what the player has mostly engaged with so far (jumping) for no thematic payoff.

this is the worst kind of direct sequel. gameplay loop is essentially identical but it has almost nothing to do with the previous game story/continuity-wise.

nintendo has always been allergic to lore but there is no time this has been more obvious than this time around.

they completely tapped out on what was good and what was bad about botw and just made the same game with some added crafting mechanics that can be fun but arent very practical to the core gameplay.

Kirby & the Amazing Mirror has some interesting ideas, but I think the execution has a long ways to go.

Think of this as the metroidvania version of Kirby; the first world you gain access to (Rainbow Route) makes a giant loop in itself and ultimately will provide access to the majority of the other worlds that you'll need to visit and explore to gain one of the eight mirror shards. Navigation can get kind of dicey in such a nebulous and giant interconnected universe, until you get the map for each of the worlds (which fortunately is already marked on the pause map without any need for collecting). This map is pretty key to the whole experience, as it'll show you the locations of the boss rooms (to get another mirror shard) and the connections to other worlds to find even more collectibles. There's a fair bit of backtracking involved since you'll often need some variant of one of the following: a method of destroying grey blocks (usually via Stone, Hammer, Throw, Burning, UFO, etc), a method to slice ropes (usually with Cutter or Sword), a method to light cannons (either Fire, Burning, or up B with the Hammer), a method of pounding stakes (Hammer or Stone), or in rarer occasions, the need for Bomb placement for switches or other more exotic uses. There are a lot of dead ends in each of these worlds after fighting tons of mini-bosses, but I'm not sure if this was entirely necessary because the goal games from the dead ends will only lead back to your hub world, and you often don't need to collect a ton of lives and health via the goal game because the levels themselves have tons of extra lives and health powerups if you have the right abilities to spare. More importantly, it is somewhat annoying that there are a ton of one-way exits and doors that will force you to have to warp back (or take a loop around the world map) in order to go back to that location. Kirby's also pretty fragile and even after collecting the heart powerups (which is a nice touch for this game), Kirby will still instantly drop any copy ability upon taking damage and will have to mad chase to get it back before it drops off into the lower boundary over pits or breaks in lava/spikes; losing your ability so easily can definitely contribute in needing to backtrack a ton more, and there are plenty of enemies and obstacles that can complicate the journey further.

I didn't bother 100%ing the game this time around, but fortunately my shortish time spent (about three and a half hours or so) was pretty fulfilling; there are plenty of fun abilities to use, such as UFO, Missile (you turn into a literal explosive missile that you can fly with using the D-pad), Smash (Kirby's Melee moveset, but with actual gumption and capable of destroying bosses by spamming Final Cutter), and so on so forth. I do think that the time could have been even more well spent if I didn't waste at least an hour overall backtracking due to losing my ability here or there or picking the wrong door in a 50/50, but alas, that's just how the cookie crumbles sometimes. The bosses are generally pretty fun fights, though pretty easily cheesed if you just laser spam with UFO or Final Cutter spam with Sword/Smash. Oh, and the final boss fight was fun, but I'm not sure if it was so fun that I needed to do it like four times. You'll see what I mean.

For better or for worse, this is yet another classic Kirby game; it's not difficult at all really but some cheap moments here and there might lower the enjoyment at times, and the colorful pixel GBA visuals + the short but chirpy chip tunes will keep you pretty content. I think there's real potential here for another deep dive if HAL chooses to pursue this idea again; taking some of the abilities like Animal or more thoroughly implementing world to ability interactions with Copy Abilities like Spark electrifying metal walls/floors or Ice freezing lava for navigation would do great things for this proof of concept. Come to think of it, Squeak Squad does take quite a few of the enemy and copy ability designs from this game, but if HAL were to combine the interactions from Squeak Squad with the concept from Amazing Mirror, I think they'd have a real gem on their hands. As is, it's a solid enough product for a few hours and it's always pretty funny to call in your AI friends when playing alone to tromp all over the boss. Considering how difficult it would be to play this game multiplayer nowadays with 4 GBAs and several link cables, if they were to remaster this game on the Switch with simple Wi-fi connectivity, I can't see any reason why it wouldn't sell like hotcakes. Admittingly I do gripe here and there how much of modern Nintendo's release roster is just 50% ports/remakes/remasters, but I'll keep my mouth shut if this ever gets one. If there's one thing I've learned recently, it's that the kiddie in me always finds a way to make an exception for Kirby.

A victim of its own success.

I'm locking this review in now, because the tides are rapidly shifting for Helldivers 2. It should be no secret that this was a surprise darling that nobody expected to blow up to the scale that it did — least of all Arrowhead. There was some early bumpiness as player counts skyrocketed into the deep hundred-thousands and threatened to crack a million, leaving the servers on life support. Unlike its live-service failbrother PAYDAY 3, Arrowhead got Helldivers 2 sorted within a little more than a week, and managed to win back some good will that had been lost in the chaos. Memes were made, TikToks were shared, everyone got in on the in-universe propaganda, and all was well. It's rare for a game to blow up this much and this rapidly, but word-of-mouth was getting around faster than the plague. Helldivers 2 is a complete runaway success, and represents a very, very big win for Arrowhead after their many years of developing games.

What's unfortunate, then, is that Arrowhead have a strong vision for what Helldivers 2 is and should be. For Arrowhead, Helldivers 2 is a game where you get out of scrapes against bugs and bots by the skin of your teeth. You use every stratagem available to you, you coordinate with your team to make sure there are no blind spots in your composition, you run away when shit gets too hot, you focus on objectives and treat the bonuses as nothing more than bonuses, you get a laugh when your friend shouts "Sweet liberty, my leg!" after you accidentally blast them to kingdom fucking come with an orbital barrage. For the broader playerbase, Helldivers 2 is a game where you play exclusively on Helldive, you only bring the Railgun and the Shield Backpack, you only stand stark still in the middle of a field shooting shit until it's all dead, you only play bug missions, and you're not interested at all in anything that doesn't directly give you medals and slips and super credits. For Arrowhead, the draw of the game is the game; for a lot of players, the draw of the game is filling out the battle pass, and the actual gameplay is just the means to that end.

The latest patch at the time of writing has nerfed the Railgun, which has single-handedly sent the widest parts of the community into a complete and utter Three Mile Island meltdown. It used to blow Charger legs open in two shots on Safe Mode, and now requires about four in Unsafe Mode. That's the extent of it. If that doesn't sound like a big change to you, it's because it isn't. There remain an obscene amount of options available to deal with Chargers — EATs, the Recoilless Rifle, the (buffed) Flamethrower, the Arc Thrower, the Spear, impact grenades, just shooting it in the ass with the heaviest gun you have — but none of that matters, because they want to use the Railgun. And they don't want to use it in Unsafe Mode. And they don't want to run away from Chargers. And they don't want to kite them. And they don't want to dodge the Charger and shoot it from behind. And they don't want to call down a stratagem. And they don't want to blow up its ass while it's aggro'd onto a teammate. They want to shoot them twice with the Railgun. Anything else is "unfun". Go and look at the recent Steam reviews/forum or the subreddit right now, if you're reading this shortly after I've posted it, and you'll see for yourself how everyone is proclaiming this one change to the Railgun to be the abject harbinger of the game's immediate demise.

I don't know who to blame this on, because it seems exceptionally clear that the people complaining the loudest don't seem to have any idea what the fuck they're talking about. I've seen several different posts stating that the Railgun is the only gun that deals with heavy armor, which is blatantly false; these are people trying to adhere to "what's meta" without actually understanding why the gun they're talking about is meta. This is something about live-service games in a more modern context that I cannot fucking stand: everyone is a tier whore. There hasn't been a multiplayer game that's come out in the past ten or so years that didn't have day one articles talking about how there's only one viable loadout and if you're not taking it then you're trolling, or tier list videos put together by popular YouTubers who broadly end up dictating a meta rather than reporting on it, because nobody actually questions why something is thought to be good or bad. This whole phenomenon leaked from Everquest and World of Warcraft like the green shit from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and now every game has to deal with the consequences. The secret of the ooze is that it makes everyone fucking stupid.

"A game for everyone is a game for no one", proudly states the footer of Arrowhead's website. I thought that was an interesting choice of motto, but not just because I agreed with it; Helldivers 2 certainly seemed like one of the most broad-appeal overnight success stories I've ever seen, and I wasn't certain who Arrowhead meant when they said they weren't making games "for everyone". Who was this abstracted "everyone", when everyone seemed to be enjoying themselves? With the way the discourse has been shifting, though, I think it's clear what they mean: Arrowhead has no interest in appealing to people who are playing the game the way that the loudest players complain they can't anymore. These are people who farm the exact same missions the exact same way for hours on end solely to get 100% completion in the battle pass. Why would anyone make games for them? They'd be happier with a piece of paper and some boxes they could fill in. How's that for player expression and a varied meta? You can put a check mark or an X through the box! Make sure to come back every twenty-four hours when your dailies refresh and you can do it all over again on a different piece of paper.

I've been playing on Suicide Mission at a minimum since day one (okay, maybe day three or so), and I've done a fair share of Impossible and Helldive runs, too. They are difficult. I am not surprised that they are difficult because they are the highest difficulty setting available. I have had to improvise, I have had to run away, and I have had to scramble just to barely complete an objective since the moment I started playing the game. At no point did the Railgun — even with a squad of four seasoned players who had come from the first Helldivers, where the difficulty went up to fifteen — allow you to stand your ground and slaughter bugs like a Doom wad. Anyone who attempts to seriously say that they're a Helldive player and that the Railgun nerf has killed their bug-exterminator playstyle is fucking lying. These are players who do not at all know what they're talking about, and they lie about the difficulty that they play on because they think it makes their argument more credible. These people are temporarily-embarrassed god gamers. They think that success and prestige is right there, just barely out of their grasp, if only the devs would allow them to reach it, and all the while they actually belong on the middle difficulties. There's nothing wrong with playing on 5 or 6, or even 1. Play what you enjoy. But don't pretend like you're at a level above where you are when it's obvious to the people who are that you're not. It's sad.

There's a wave rolling in, and I can see the foam at the lip of it from here. We'll have the regular YouTube videos rolling out soon — How Helldivers 2 Failed the Players, Helldivers 2: Dropping the Ball, Arrowhead Studios Gets WOKE and GOES BROKE with Helldivers 2 DISASTER — and leaving players will call themselves "Helldivers refugees" when they find something new to play that they'll hate within a month. What I certainly wish isn't coming is anything resembling an apology or a back-down from Arrowhead. They'll be under a lot of pressure to make changes, and this is the kind of backlash that most companies crumble under. It's been said that players are good at identifying problems and bad and identifying solutions, but I think that's being a bit too generous. I'd argue that the overwhelming majority of players of any game are bad at identifying problems and worse at coming up with solutions. Extremely rarely have I seen a live-service game actually follow through on fan-suggested fixes to fan-suggested problems and not had the game immediately become worse overnight. I hope that they're able to remember their own motto: a game for everyone is a game for no one. Helldivers 2 just got unlucky enough to be branded as a game for everyone.

Anyway, it's pretty good.

A very disappointing follow-up to the clunky but excellently-directed Clock Tower on the Super Famicom. I'm not referring to the wooden voice acting or the blocky graphics, which are par for the course for an early PSX game - there are other more fundamental issues where this drops the ball.

The original Clock Tower took place entirely in one location, allowing the spooky vibes and storytelling-through-contextual-clues to shine. This sequel takes place over several days with multiple scenarios and multiple locations - it tries adding more of a plot to string the setpieces together, but this just shines an unwanted spotlight on how threadbare the plot is and how weak the writing is. After scissorman appears and terrorizes Jennifer, butchering several security guards in the process, why does a single guard outside her home keep her safe? How does one of the characters go from hearing a passing mention of a castle that used to belong to the same family as the mansion in the first game to "let's round up 10 people, including two traumatized minors, to go on a field trip to this scary castle in another country"?

To me, the different playable characters and 'levels' feel like a band-aid over the fact that this game seems to have a lot less content than its predecessor. The levels are a lot smaller and generally less interesting than the mansion in the first game, which felt like a character in itself. And it misses the opportunity to at least provide some nice worldbuilding through flavortext, with the player character rewarding exploration of the environment with insightful gems such as "this is a couch."

I think I'd be much easier on this if I played it when I was younger - the tension of being a slow-moving defenseless waif who needs to evade a relentless pursuer is worth a few good scares - but without nostalgia goggles this comes across as a far weaker game than both its iconic predecessor as well as its survival-horror contemporaries.

Nancy Drew Sea of Darkness was released in May 2015. The 32nd game in this quiet little franchise, publishing two games a year to a niche crowd, not making much in profits. There’s a whole mystery to untangle about how this company even survived for twenty years. Anonymous reports from people who left Her company reported that they received funding from an outside investor who just felt it was the right thing to do to support “educational games for young girls.” Future attempts to gain investors or gimmicks to boost sales failed handily. Even so, there was no reason to suspect anything about the company’s structure would change.

At the end of 2014, just before the release of Sea of Darkness, former Disney marketing director Penny Milliken was installed as the new CEO of HerInteractive. Under Millikin, the entire structure of the company changed. Half of the staff was fired. Several quit in frustration. The remaining crew was given the job of making a new Nancy Drew game in Unity, compared to the previous engine the franchise used. Communication from the company died down. Lani Minelli was replaced with a new Nancy Drew voice. There was a weird announcement that MIdnight in Salem would be a “VR game,” which went nowhere. The game released in 2019, to poor reviews. It's unlikely another Nancy game is on the horizon. Sea of Darkness is sort of the last hurrah of the franchise.

As much as it's tempting for me to lay all the blame on Milikin, I will reluctantly grant that her decision to port all the games to Steam was the correct move. Previously, the games could only be bought in-stores or on HerInteractive’s website. The website is… bad. Games you bought can just up and vanish. Wanna play it again? Better pay up a second time. And the fact of the matter was, HerInteractive was unmistakably in the red. These games do not turn a profit. It gained a diehard (but tiny) fanbase that was basically content to accept anything, myself obviously included. But these are not “exciting” games. They’re goofy. They’re silly. Comfortable Bs. If the company wanted to really thrive, I can understand to an extent why shaking things up seemed necessary.

On the other hand, she also signed a big petition a bunch of rich fucks in California wrote to protest a potential bill that would taxing big companies more. The structure of the bill probably would have resulted in mass firings so companies could pay less taxes, but the threat towards the workforce clearly wasn’t the motives of the business people protesting that “this is hurting the poor innocent companies that are helping California thrive :( :( :( how could they bully us like this :( :( :(“ So with all that in mind, I don’t feel too bad about calling her a corporate monster.

I’ve put off playing this game for a long time. The Nancy Drew games are a huge part of my childhood and saying goodbye always feels… weird. I still haven’t even touched Midnight in Salem yet, even as it sits in my Steam library taunting me. Maybe it's actually good. Who could say. But all the things that defined the franchise as Nancy Drew are in THIS game, not Midnight in Salem. Yeah, the system’s clunky and Minelli’s acting is always a little stiff. But that’s kind of part of the charm, you know? And I think the devs knew that. People like to pretend the point and click genre “died”, but I think it mostly just started marketing to girls more than men, and gaming culture hated that. So for newer generations this was one of the best ways to get into the genre. I’m sure the newest gen have enough great indie point and clicks that I’m not too worried about the genre vanishing. But its still hard to see.

Maybe part of what’s so devastating is the sense that Nancy Drew’s legacy and cultural importance has been virtually abandoned. I’m not going to claim the franchise didn’t have problems from the onset. It's always been about a rich white teen who inspired people like Hilary Clinton. The original versions of the texts had major problems depicting race, and then the revisions of those books chose to whitewash all the characters and erased much of Nancy’s sassiness in favor of a girl with devotional loyalty to cops and authority. Both versions of those books are, as hard as it is for me to admit, bad! But I truly believe there’s something in this universe that hasn’t been fully utilized yet. Nancy had to answer the 1930s question of a "proper" female heroes by basically being loose enough to fill any ideal. But this results in something interesting. Because her character is written to be so thin, Nancy Drew can represent anything. Her potential is infinite. She can fly planes. She can solve murder by Tesla electrocution. There can be a jetpack homeless woman. She can do anything, BE anything.

But no one’s willing to give Nancy that chance. Simon and Schuster never advertised these games, leaving HerInteractive to foot the marketing bill. The 2008 movie is 90% great, but also shows embarrassment over the franchise’s supporting cast and spends too much time focusing on Ned’s romantic drama. The tv show is an attempt to rip off Riverdale without having any of the things that make Riverdale or Nancy Drew work. (“work”). Shit like Ready Player One take jabs a villain for liking Nancy Drew, because that’s the only kind of nerd franchise that’s not “important” I suppose. The last really great Nancy Drew work was a 2018 comic by Kelly Thompson. It took a noir approach to the character, wringing out some edgy character drama out of Nancy’s relationship with her friends and how her snooping has helped or hindered them in life. It's genuinely amazing. Ended on a cliffhanger that hasn’t been followed up on.

For Nancy’s 90th Anniversary, they announced a sequel to a Hardy Boys comic instead. The Hardy Boys in “The Death of Nancy Drew.”

How appropriate.

Anyway, now that I’m done having an existential crisis about my childhood hero for eight paragraphs, this game’s pretty alright.

The franchise’s formula has often tried to write some kind of tragedy set in the past and I’ve generally tuned it out. I’ve seen it before, you know? But at some point, I genuinely think the writing became something special. They nailed down giving characters unique voices and personality. The suspects particularly charming this time around. Gunnar, the boisterous drunkard who can’t tell a lie. The grumpy Lisabet who seems to teleport around town trying to keep some measure of peace in the town’s chaos. The girlboss lesbian Dagny, who’s such the stand-out of an already great cast. Her lines are constantly peppered with mean-spirited jabs so over the top that you can’t help but adore her. At one point, Nancy catches Dagny doing something shady and Dagny starts crafting a cover story. When Nancy acts like she buys it, Dagny immediately drops the lie on her own accord to lecture Nancy on being too trusting, before revealing the truth of the situation just for kicks. She’s a bitch and I love her.

But the writing also gives these characters a real tragedy to their lives. Dagny’s recently divorced and she still has her ex-wife’s last name in a lot of her paperwork, even years after the separation. Lisabet is grappling with a messy break-up and a messier financial struggle. Gunnar is irritable towards outsiders and over-the-top in his antics, but he keeps talking to someone as nosy as Nancy just because she looks like his lost daughter. Everyone’s struggling through these messy parts of their lives and the care to give them that depth highlights just how far the series has changed since the plot beat about the Trauma Therapy Robot back in the Haunted Carousel.

The game also takes a genuine swing at dealing with some more Nancy/Ned relationship drama, with the usual oddly paced writing decisions that entails. I've never been a Ned fan, but there's an attempt at tenderness here that truly feels warm and fresh in ways it hasn't been before.

Of course, it's still got the usual Drew problems. Some motivations and plots go nowhere, there’s a lot of red herrings that don’t quite line up, puzzles that barely make sense within the world’s setting, and this is probably the thirtieth treasure hunt plot these games have had. But those aren’t bugs per se. Those are features. That’s what you’re here to see.

Among the staff on Sea of Darkness were three notable writers. Nik Blahunka, Cathy Roiter, and Katie Chironis. The former two became the main Her writers for a good eight years and I think churned out some of its strongest swings of the franchise. Nik Blahunka is currently one of the staff on Fortnite while Cathy Roiter I couldn’t track down.

But I want to give special attention to Katie Chironis, a new hire at Her at the time.In between this game and being overworked for MiS and the dozens of other projects in between, Chironis spent 2013 to 2019 writing Elsinore, one of my favorite games of all time. I didn’t know about this connection until I was browsing the Elsinore website on a whim. It's one of the most touching, beautiful stories on narrative and the terror of an inevitable tragedy. Even while under the nightmare conditions of Midnight in Salem, she was making something truly personal and well-crafted.

And I think that’s where I really come down to with Nancy Drew. It's goofy, it's contrived, the writing isn’t always good, and you can really wander around for hours without a clue of what’s going on. There’s some copaganda aspects that come up here and there. But goddamn, you can feel the heart. There’s a genuine desire to just look around a new locale, teach some history, and maybe have some fun along the way. It was a franchise so comfortably in its groove, it kept finding new ways to expand and experiment, even within its formula. You got to see the team grow and change over the course of the years and make something really, truly sincere. Even 32 games in, I still wanted to see them do more.

But at the end of the day, I have no right to complain. 32 games in any franchise is a miracle. It was there for as long as it could be. And it really did make something wonderful in the process.

I love this game’s visual design. It’s tragically rather undercut by how the lighting is wayyyyyyyyy oversaturated — and washes out everything it touches — but there are so many cool things here otherwise. The abandoned apartments feel so grotty: all the litter everywhere, the layers of graffiti covering the walls, the layers of dust and mold and mess that lends so much character to the world around you. The design of the monster is so evocative — how it seems like the cherry blossoms are trying to burst through its skin — and I’m a fan of how, by design, you’re never quite able to see its full image, at least not for more than a glimpse's worth. I love how the flashback cutscenes showing Maya so effortlessly segue between graphics and what looks so convincingly like FMV, really helping to contribute to the idiosyncratic, off-kilter vibe the game takes whenever we go to the past. I’m not quite sure how much of this is meant to be a tech demo — or whether this really is just meant to stand on its own — but if the aim was to show off its engine it certainly succeeded on that front, even if it’s more the artstyle itself that stands out over its graphical fidelity. And even if it really could have used an option to lower the brightness.

It’s a bit sad, in that case, that I’m rather less into most everything else. Particularly the writing. There’s promise in the premise: I could certainly see a world where I really vibe with what the game has to offer, but I think where this game is let down most is by its dialogue. There’s no subtlety. The game will spell out everything a particular moment is trying to communicate just in case you might not get it. It kinda suffers from a lack of patience, too. There’s this one segment that earnestly does the PT-style looping hallway in a way that gels super well with what’s going on thematically, setting the stage to perfectly represent the downward spiral you know is coming... then the game proceeds to throw you straight down to the bottom, having things immediately go wrong and having the whole thing only end after, like, three loops. Things and themes are brought up and then never quite mentioned again, and while one of those is the kind of painful portrayal of social media and The Gen Z Quest For Likes which I was happy to see go, there’s some stuff that really felt like it needed to be addressed or expanded on which… wasn’t. You’d think that if there’s a scene where (I think) the main character grabs a razor to cut her wrists, with the scars on their arm indicating that this is a rather routine thing, that that might… come up later, but if you thought that, you thought wrong. It just kind of happens. And unless there was something I missed… it never gets brought up again. Feels like a bit of an oversight.

(also: the game is set in Germany and yet… the characters are going to college? but can’t actually go to college because they… have to pay tuition fees? the americans might not realize that other countries don’t work the same way the US does, but trust me, we’ll notice your cultural assumptions :V)

The script never feels particularly naturalistic, either. Characters go through stuff and talk about the stuff they go through like it’s some sort of cyberbullying PSA, and… as somebody who went through some of the sort of stuff some of the characters here did, it never really felt like my experience. I know that it’s loosely going for heightened reality — I don’t think the game was literally suggesting that our character walked down her school hallways every day while random jocks yelled “Go away!” and “Slut!” and shoved her towards the lockers — but if the game is really trying to sell this as a real thing people go through, I feel like maybe there could’ve been an ear towards having the bullies say things bullys actually say. If you’re going to talk about how The Gen Z Quest For Likes makes people feel alienated and inferior from their peers, maybe don’t make it seem like you’re making fun of it instead. If you’re trying to treat the complicated and nuanced topic of suicide and mental health with the care and respect that’s required… Look, I wouldn’t necessarily say this game is as triggering on the subject of mental health and suicide as others made me think it might be (it never goes as far about it as, say, something like 13 Reasons Why or Doki Doki Literature Club ever did) but also it was insanely funny just how many times they throw the content warning disclaimer at you. Like, I read through it when I started the game. You don’t have to show it again every time you portray something that could be a representation fucky-wucky. It just kinda makes your case worse.

There’s other things, as well: the chase sequences were kind of annoying to play. They’re like this weird looping maze you have to brute force until you find the arbitrarily correct way through and also the monster will just suddenly appear from in front of you and immediately kill you if you can’t react in time and I haaaaaated having to do them. Overall, though, I’m… rather mixed on this. In a way where it really could’ve been something I liked, as well. Because while visually the game is rather adept, below the surface… god the writing really betrays it, especially the slipshot way it handles its delicate, complicated thematic material. If this is a teaser of the future of the Silent Hill franchise, it’s… certainly indicative of what’s to come. In more ways than one.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dead dove, do not eat.

I’d like to believe that I’ve been living in my own personal Silent Hill the last few years. It would explain a lot, really. Konami has done a wonderful job of threading puppet strings through the arteries of Silent Hill and making the corpse dance, turning it into all manner of pachislot machines and skateboard decks, but they seem like they’re really trying to bring the franchise back this time. No more minor entries. We’re handing out the license and making some real goddamned Games this time. We’ve got a Ryukishi07 Silent Hill on the way, something we don't know much about called Townfall, and Bloober Team are even sticking their dirty, dirty fingers in the pie with a Silent Hill 2 remake. Silent Hill is finally back. But those are all coming later. We’re getting the first taste of the revitalized Silent Hill now, and it’s here in the form of Silent Hill: Ascension. Get hyped. This is the first marker being driven into fresh, virginal earth. This is Silent Hill from here on out.

This is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

Genuinely, I mean that. I want to be funnier about it, but I can’t. It’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played. I wish I could say that I’ve played anything worse than this, but I haven’t. It is the worst fucking thing I have ever played in my stupid goddamned life. Sorry. Every time I try typing something else, my brain just shuts itself off and my fingers move on the keyboard of their own volition to produce the phrase “this is the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life”. This is the first cognitohazard ever put to market.

IGDB was trying to protect me from writing about this any further. I appreciate them doing that, now. When I first made a page for Silent Hill: Ascension, they rejected it on the grounds of this “not being a game”. Naturally, I kicked my feet and made a fuss about it in the email appeals — we’ve got RPG Maker and Polybius and Spell Checker and Calculator on here, and I know those definitely fucking aren’t games — and the admin staff eventually relented. But they were only trying to help, I think. I should have just accepted their ruling and let this slip into the ether. Now we’ve got a Backloggd page for it, which means that now I have to think about this again, and it’s still the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

This is the kind of bad that’s hard to explain without experiencing it yourself. It’s like childbirth, or the smell of rotting meat. You don’t want anyone else to have to deal with it, but how could they know what it’s like without going through it? You can show them the season pass being sold for $22.99, you can show them the “It’s Trauma!” sticker, you can show them the wholly unmoderated chat bar where you can’t say “Playboy Carti” but you can say the n-word, but none of that is the same as experiencing it. They’re visible symptoms of the disease running through Silent Hill: Ascension’s blood, but the pain of another doesn’t exist unless you feel it yourself. It’s ethereal. I’ve got a sore on my lip right now, but you don’t feel it, do you? You understand that it hurts, and you can empathize with that, but it doesn’t actually exist to you. If I stopped talking about it, you’d assume I was fine, and nothing would change for you. Meanwhile, I’m still over here suffering through this shit, and it’s the worst fucking thing I’ve ever played in my life.

The game is streamed live every night at 9 PM EST, and you can show up to vote on what’s going to happen to the characters. The choices themselves are very clearly labelled with the outcomes; you’ve got Salvation, Suffering, and Damnation choices, helpfully color-coded as blue, white, and red respectively, just so you can still know which one is the “good” choice and which one is “bad” in the event that you forgot how to read. Mass Effect's Paragon, Neutral, and Renegade system lives on, strong and proud. This, of course, means that every single fucking choice made thus far has been heavily in favor of Salvation, because it’s clearly the good option. If you don’t like that, you can vote for something else. In an especially impressive bit of social commentary, however, the only votes that matter come from those rich and stupid enough to buy them.

To vote, you need to wager a set amount of Influence Points, or IP. I haven’t found a way to cast a vote for anything less than 200 IP, so either that’s the minimum spend needed to vote, or the UI is just so badly designed that I can’t fucking find the free vote option. You can buy IP in one of three differently-priced bundles, each one more expensive than the last; one of the IP packs is about twenty-five bucks for 26,400 IP, and the second decision of the game is currently for "Salvation" by roughly twenty-five million points. If you really want a choice to go a certain way, then you had better get to spending. By my math, you’ll be out a little over $23,650 if you decide that you’re going to stick it to those Salvation voters. Of course, with the audience shrinking every night after they see how fucking stupid this whole thing is, it’ll only get easier and easier to sway the vote with less money invested. If you’re as much of a moron as I am and you decide to stick around past your first watch just to see where this goes, then you’ll have a decent opportunity to roleplay as a real government lobbyist soon enough.

But buying IP for real money isn’t the only way to get it. Lucky enough for the impoverished, filthy masses, you can earn IP at a massively reduced rate simply by playing minigames. You don’t get much — maybe a thousand or two per day, resetting every twenty-four hours — but it’s enough to cast a couple votes. Doing your daily and weekly quests certainly helps to boost your IP gains, and if you just felt something cold run down your back after you read the phrase “daily and weekly quests” in a Silent Hill game, don’t worry. That just means you’re still alive. Unfortunately, though, the minigames are on a set rotation; you get one puzzle and one “mindfulness” game per day, each awarding a small pittance of IP if you manage to successfully complete them.

By the way, I’m glad you’re curious about what the minigames actually are. I’m really excited to talk about them, so knowing that you’re enthusiastic to hear more really encourages me to do my best in explaining them to you. They’re the worst fucking things I’ve ever played in my stupid fucking life. Most egregious of the lot is the rhythm minigame, which doesn't require you to have any rhythm nor timing whatsoever. There's no penalty for hitting wrong notes (the game even encourages you to "just jam along" should you feel like it), every note needs to be individually clicked, and every click produces a sound from what I think is a literal Garageband guitar VST. Since there's no warning for when the notes are going to show up or leave, you have to click them all as fast as possible, resulting in a complete cacophony of instruments playing over each other if you want to guarantee a good score. Worst of all is the fact that the selection of songs is exclusively limited to Akira Yamaoka's more famous works, meaning you get to listen to some of the greatest video game music ever composed get completely butchered in one of the worst minigames you've ever played, in service of gaining points to vote on what happens next in the dumbest narrative ever written. I think if you're a killer or kidnapper or whatever in life, this is what you have to do forever after you die as punishment.

Here's a video of me getting the highest rank possible on the theme of Silent Hill. I want to stress that this is optimal play.

Anyway, this is all in service of giving you votes for the completely fucking incomprehensible story. It's hard to call it a narrative. There's some old lady who sucks, and then she dies, and her family kind of cares about it, but not really. There's a girl who gets initiated into some cult called The Foundation that seems to worship the Otherworld monsters, and she dies, and a couple people seem a little bothered by it. There's some drunk guy who really hates that the girl is dead and she's also haunting him and calling him a fuckup. The grandson of the old lady who sucked and died speaks entirely in the spooky child language that only exists in bad horror movies where he talks about how he plays pretend with "the man in the fog". I've long said that stories should strive to be more than events happening in sequence. This is more like events. They're not really happening in any given order, they're just kind of shown to the player and then quietly shuffled off so another event can happen.

At the end of the show proper is a canned animation of a character getting lost in the Otherworld, and the live viewers do QTEs that don't actually do anything. If they collectively fail, you get the message that the character "failed to endure" and they lose hope, but I don't know what losing hope actually entails. If you collectively pass, which happened for the first time during tonight's November 2nd show, the game bugs out and assumes that you failed anyway. The CEO of the company has gone out of his way to specify that the QTE sequences are for live viewers only and, as such, don't actually do anything because it wouldn't be fair to people who watch the VODs. Imagine a Jerma Dollhouse stream where the commands didn't work because it wouldn't have been fair to people who watched the whole thing on YouTube later. You're the one insisting on a livestream and you're not going to fucking use it? Why? Seriously, why? What reason does this have to be live at all?

And speaking of the CEO, Weatherby is absolutely correct that the best part of all of this is the aftershow. For whatever fucking reason, Jacob Navok feels an incredible need to come out on his shitty laptop camera (you can tell it's a laptop camera because it keeps shaking while he passionately swings his arms around) and rant about how they're definitely not scamming people. You can tell you've got a good product when the actual episode is about eight minutes long and the CEO takes half an hour in the post-show to complain about how unfair everyone is being towards one of the shittiest fucking things ever made. It's bordering on performance art.

I cannot fucking wait to watch more of this. It's the most excited I've been for a recent release in years.

Free superchats on sign up means you can blast "wearing my james sunderland c o c k ring" on screen and change the canon of Silent Hill.

Spending real money to vote on what cutscenes you want to watch already sounds like a terrible premise for a 'game,' but adding a battle pass to a Silent Hill product with fun stickers that say things like "IT'S TRAUMA!" and khaki's for your loser Silent Hill OC are proof positive that Konami hasn't changed and nobody with any direct influence over the IP knows what the hell to do with it. At least Jacob Navok, CEO of developer Genvid, shows up at the end of each episode to die a little more in front of the cameras. Everyone keeps voting for the options Jacob doesn't want, and it's all the result of some cabal of bad actors that apparently nobody could've accounted for or put functional moderation in place to curb. Watch as a flawed man withers away, night after night, trapped in a nightmare and punished for his deeds.

Jacob would like you to believe that the monetization is intended for you to save time, and is useful more to bypass puzzles than rock the vote. I guess that's a fair point, I mean these puzzles have to be designed bad on purpose, that's how you monetize them! Eurogamer's article about Ascension's economy is a great read, just let all these numbers and stats wash over you and remind yourself it's all for a Silent Hill game.

Oh well, at least we have a Bloober Team remake of Silent Hill 2 to look forward to...

Sonic Mania released in 2017, and felt like an absolute breath of fresh air for the Sonic franchise after both the misguided attempt of recapturing classic Sonic magic in Sonic 4, and the 3D titles back in a downward slump after the series regained momentum with Sonic Colours and Sonic Generations. So, you'd think the natural course of action would be to get the dev team to work on a sequel with entirely original zone aesthetics, to give fans the next 2D entry to make the Sonic 2 to Sonic Mania's Sonic 1.

But you forget Sega are a stupid, dumb company, so they brought the stellar Sonic 1, 2 and CD mobile ports to consoles and PC, complete with Sonic 3&K, fucked them up, barely patched them, rereleased the compilation for more money and effectively swindled those who bought the terribly contrived Digital Deluxe Edition at launch, and left the devs to go make their own original title, Penny's Big Breakaway.

Instead, Sega found themselves partnering with Arzest, the company helmed by original Sonic designer, and director of Sonic CD, Nights Into Dreams, Burning Rangers and Blinx The Time Sweeper, Naoto Oshima. In a partnership started over Zoom calls with Takashi Iizuka during lockdown, I like to imagine the guy was venting about the nightmare hellscape of Balan Wonderworld and one thing lead to another. Oshima being back on board was a nice surprise, but Arzest have an incredibly spotty background history. Their back catalogue is a mixture of mobile games, minigame collections, 3DS 2D platformer shovelware in the form of Yoshi's New Island and Hey! Pikmin, and the aforementioned chocolate steamer of Balan Wonderworld. What a damn shame Yuji "Arrested For Insider Trading" Naka couldn't direct this one, and then get kicked off of his position as director as voted by EVERYONE ON THE TEAM.

I bring all this up to say a few things. One, that Sonic Superstars had huge shoes to live up to, and two, that it was dealt an unfortunate hand from the jump. While its easy to point fingers at Naka for being a total shitheel in regards to Balan Wonderworld (especially if you know his track record at Sonic Team), Hey! Pikmin and Yoshi's New Island are still prime examples of 2D platformers that shouldn't inspire confidence. With its weird focus on 4-player, simultaneous co-op akin to New Super Mario Bros Wii and U, a generic visual style that touted incredibly flat lighting and only made people miss the stellar pixel art of the classics, the inclusion of new mechanics within collection of individual Chaos Emeralds, and an almost full price of admission that was especially eyebrow raising given a huge part of Mania's success can definitely be attributed to its £20 price tag, there was debate from day one. The end result was always going to have to be compared to Sonic Mania.

But, let's start from the top, because we've got some pretty solid physics! After Sonic 4 and Forces, I wouldn't blame anybody for thinking Christian Whitehead and Simon Thomley were the only people capable of making Classic Sonic feel god to play, but Arzest, of all fucking people, made sure the feel of Mania was pulled wholesale. So, you know what that means; momentum's fully here, and rolling feels great! I was able to jump into Superstars and felt right at home from minute 1, especially given the amount of time I've put into the classic Sonic titles though my life. We've also got fully original zones after all, which is an absolute fucking delight after over a decade of Green Hill, Chemical Plant and the like being forced upon us.

But level aesthetics and game feel are every bit as important to Sonic as the rest of the game around it, from level design, platforming, exploration and pacing, to the visuals and music. It's hard to really give a concrete opinion on Sonic Superstars' level design right now; partially because we don't have the years of stockpiled knowledge of the best and fastest routes, but for the most part, it's... fine? Not many of the level designs really stuck out in my mind or kept me thumping to go back to replay them, but I can say the first few zones get the game off to a generally good start.

But that just makes the levels that annoyed me stick out even more. There's smaller things, like the ever annoying darkness gimmick in Speed Jungle Act 2, the painfully slow fans in Sky Temple, but those are just small irks. Then comes the constant platforming above bottomless pits in Pinball Carnival Act 2, which is challenging enough but made me feel a little cheated every now and then. Then the game drags its feet, and suddenly hits you with things like the absolute dogshit instant kill gimmick of Press Factory Act 2, and the laziest level in the form of the final zone's second act making you replay the first one in reverse. So when it isn't being frustrating, most of the level design just felt like it went in one side of my brain and out the other without much worth remembering. Cyber Station was the only one that really stuck with me, mostly for its visual style.

The highly marketed emerald powers are also insanely situational at best in most cases, which is exactly what I feared. The ability to storm the screen with clones was occasionally handy in boss fights for one free hit, and the bullet which acts as the Burst Wisp from Sonic Colours was really handy as well. But then there's the Vision ability, which lets you see very specific hidden platforms, basically as functionally worthless as Knuckles' Sunglasses from SA2, and the Water power that lets you climb up waterfalls, also highly situational. I remember playing some Sonic 1 rom hack back in the day that let you get additional abilities from the emeralds individually (I think you got the spin dash, super peel out, instashield etc, finally culminating in Super Sonic when you got all 7. Does anyone else remember this insanely specific rom hack?), and it's a damn shame that kind of approach wasn't taken here because it could've been great. Instead, all you get is the spin dash, drop dash and these incredibly hit or miss abilities. No super peel out, and not even any elemental shields. The emerald powers are kneecapped even more by the fact you get to use them exactly once before needing to hit another checkpoint to recharge them. I hate cooldown timers, but I'd have taken them over something this limiting, even if I understand the intention of making the players need to really pick and choose when to pop them.

The game also throws in this weird restriction of only letting you get one Chaos Emerald per zone, which feels like a really bad way of hindering people like me, who generally frontload a playthrough of Sonic 2, 3&K or Mania by securing the emeralds for the sake of the good ending. With giant rings so limited now, the only reason to explore is to find medals which can only be used to buy things exclusively used in the multiplayer I don't want to play because it isn't what I buy a Sonic game for. Thanks, Sega. The special stages also jump from legitimately braindead easy to "What the fuck do they even want me to do?" by the time you get to the 5th one, so I couldn't see all the emerald powers or seen the true ending at the time of writing. For all I know, doing that could be the absolutely universal gamechangers that'll make this game feel like I'm playing Sonic 3 & Knuckles 2: & Knuckles, but I doubt it!

And then there's the game's pacing! For the most part, the game's pretty alright with it as levels strike a good enough balance between speed and platforming, setting aside any bad gimmicks... until you get to the boss fights, which are some of the worst slogs in 2D Sonic history, right down there with Rush and both episodes of Sonic 4 and only barely above those because they take less hits on average. Lengthy periods of downtime between being able to hit them one single time before playing the waiting game again, and they're not even all that fun to cheese with the emerald powers. Classic Sonic bosses were never some holy grail of boss design or anything, but at least you were, more often than not, fully in control of how long they took. Here, though, it's all at a glacial pace, with long, drawn out, and unfun being the names of the game. The last boss in particular gets incredibly obnoxious with instant kill bullshit and a lack of checkpoints to go along with its agonisingly slow pacing, really making me feel like I'm right at home in the cold, hateful arms of Dimps' worst Sonic design traits.

The presentation definitely feels really flat and cheap, which I think does a real number to the charm of Classic Sonic, a character designed to be so expressive and cutting edge. The colours are plenty vibrant, and we aren't dealing with Sonic 4 Episode 1 or anything, but it just feels really generic, without anything to set it apart aside from maybe Cyber Station. Definitely wish we'd gotten a pixel art style instead, but Iizuka says it's not going to be viable in 10 or 20 years, despite the the amount of charm and care put into Mania's spritework meaning it'll inherently age far better than something like Superstars, so I guess we're stuck with this.

And in a shocking twist, the music is a really mixed bag. Every now and then, there's a banger track by Tee Lopes, but there's also a lot of tracks like just go in one ear and out the other, and ones that just sound actively bad. The track that backs the Sonic 1 bonus stage that just sounds like depressed fairground music was the first track that stuck out to me in regards to its lower quality, and any time Jun Senoue tries in vein to make something with that Mega Drive synth is absolute ear poison to what could be a decent composition. On the whole, the entire OST failed to stick with me after playing, with Speed Jungle Act 1 being the only track that really sat in my head for a while after turning it off and writing this review. A damn shame, but it is what it is.

So at the end of the day, Sonic Superstars isn't worth its price tag. It's honestly barely even worth half it, especially when Sonic Mania is not only cheaper, but better in terms of level design, visuals, music, the whole shabang. Superstars, conversely, is has decent highs, but the middling and low points win out at the end of the day. A boring, frustrating, disappointing slog.

But it's still Arzest's best game!