sleepytitan
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Crow Country
2024
After years of drift towards third-person action, survival horror finally returns to its roots: dunking your entire arm into every single trashcan you can find and showing disobedient vending machines and lockers the righteous fury of your boot heel.
Thank God the indie market is so robust these days, because the increasing homogenization of the modern big budget game and shrinking genre space therein means you wouldn't get proper survival horror otherwise. Crow Country and others like Signalis have been filling that void, but despite clearly playing to the charm of PlayStation era horror with its visuals - especially with its character models, which look as though they've been unearthed from an old Net Yaroze kit - Crow Country is no tired pastiche. It's safe rooms, puzzles, and resource management might harken to a design ethos that was at one point more commonplace, but these elements feel authentic and borne from a place of appreciation and understanding.
Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the park's layout and the way in which the player navigates it. The amusement park theme allows for neatly defined areas with their own theming and unique attractions, with hidden passages, back rooms, cast tunnels, and a subterranean network serving as the connective tissue between each "land" in a way that feels appropriate for the setting while serving to make the park feel highly interconnected. Crow Country is great at providing a sense of space while conveying where the player should go and what to do next. I never felt lost or completely stumped by a puzzle and was consistently engaged and encouraged to revisit old locations to explore - the part of my brain that starts processing how I want to route my way through a game activated pretty early, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that a survival horror game is living up to the promise of its genre.
The setting is also small. Crow Country is less Disneyland, more Santa's Village, so one way developer SFB Games succeeds in making repeated loops through the park threatening is by gradually introducing more enemies and traps to familiar locations. As the time of day progresses, rain and darkness further obscure the player's vision, and boobytrapped pick-ups begin to litter the map to prey on the sense of trust they've developed with their environment. I sprinted my way through the opening two hours, juked most enemies and picked up any crap I saw laying on the ground. By hour five, I was walking everywhere, stopping frequently, side-eyeing boxes of ammo, and finding that I actually had to conserve what I had due to the increased expectation that I shoot some damn "guests."
I also appreciate Crow Country for telling a complete and coherent story, something I think a lot of horror games have pushed away from. I think the Five Nights series has poisoned the genre and led a lot of other indie horror creators to believe a complex and intentionally vague narrative is the best way to ensure franchise longevity. Keep posing questions, provide no answers. I get it, sometimes it's best to let the audience fill in gaps, you don't want over-explain horror, but in the hands of a weak writer, the "unknown" can just be a euphemism for "nothing."
That's not to say Crow Country fails to raise any questions of its own, rather that in true PSX survival horror fashion, you're given all the clues you need to form the big picture through memos, context, and dialog. How well you do that is entirely dependent on how much you're paying attention, and whether you view Crow Country as being so cliched that its horror can be explained by way of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I was extremely satisfied by the ending, which leaves just enough unanswered that you'll still have something to think of without feeling like you'll need to consult a YouTube series or read like, seven fucking books and play a dozen more games. An indie horror game with a conclusion that is both cogent and earned, thank christ.
So make the most of your Memorial Day weekend and bring the whole family down to Crow Country. Come ride our newest attraction: The Seven Seas, and discover new types of bacteria. Remember, vets and children under 6 get in free!
Thank God the indie market is so robust these days, because the increasing homogenization of the modern big budget game and shrinking genre space therein means you wouldn't get proper survival horror otherwise. Crow Country and others like Signalis have been filling that void, but despite clearly playing to the charm of PlayStation era horror with its visuals - especially with its character models, which look as though they've been unearthed from an old Net Yaroze kit - Crow Country is no tired pastiche. It's safe rooms, puzzles, and resource management might harken to a design ethos that was at one point more commonplace, but these elements feel authentic and borne from a place of appreciation and understanding.
Nowhere is this more strongly felt than in the park's layout and the way in which the player navigates it. The amusement park theme allows for neatly defined areas with their own theming and unique attractions, with hidden passages, back rooms, cast tunnels, and a subterranean network serving as the connective tissue between each "land" in a way that feels appropriate for the setting while serving to make the park feel highly interconnected. Crow Country is great at providing a sense of space while conveying where the player should go and what to do next. I never felt lost or completely stumped by a puzzle and was consistently engaged and encouraged to revisit old locations to explore - the part of my brain that starts processing how I want to route my way through a game activated pretty early, and as far as I'm concerned, that's a sign that a survival horror game is living up to the promise of its genre.
The setting is also small. Crow Country is less Disneyland, more Santa's Village, so one way developer SFB Games succeeds in making repeated loops through the park threatening is by gradually introducing more enemies and traps to familiar locations. As the time of day progresses, rain and darkness further obscure the player's vision, and boobytrapped pick-ups begin to litter the map to prey on the sense of trust they've developed with their environment. I sprinted my way through the opening two hours, juked most enemies and picked up any crap I saw laying on the ground. By hour five, I was walking everywhere, stopping frequently, side-eyeing boxes of ammo, and finding that I actually had to conserve what I had due to the increased expectation that I shoot some damn "guests."
I also appreciate Crow Country for telling a complete and coherent story, something I think a lot of horror games have pushed away from. I think the Five Nights series has poisoned the genre and led a lot of other indie horror creators to believe a complex and intentionally vague narrative is the best way to ensure franchise longevity. Keep posing questions, provide no answers. I get it, sometimes it's best to let the audience fill in gaps, you don't want over-explain horror, but in the hands of a weak writer, the "unknown" can just be a euphemism for "nothing."
That's not to say Crow Country fails to raise any questions of its own, rather that in true PSX survival horror fashion, you're given all the clues you need to form the big picture through memos, context, and dialog. How well you do that is entirely dependent on how much you're paying attention, and whether you view Crow Country as being so cliched that its horror can be explained by way of Resident Evil and Silent Hill. I was extremely satisfied by the ending, which leaves just enough unanswered that you'll still have something to think of without feeling like you'll need to consult a YouTube series or read like, seven fucking books and play a dozen more games. An indie horror game with a conclusion that is both cogent and earned, thank christ.
So make the most of your Memorial Day weekend and bring the whole family down to Crow Country. Come ride our newest attraction: The Seven Seas, and discover new types of bacteria. Remember, vets and children under 6 get in free!
This is the second part of a two-part review for Monster Hunter: world, except this one will be for Iceborne. I strongly encourage you to read the first part here. Iceborne is an equally long game as World, but I don’t have as much to cover this time, so it should be shorter. This DLC has been hyped up for me way before I got into Monster Hunter, so I went in with moderate expectations, but considering my issues with the base game, I wasn’t expecting anything mind-blowing. Needless to say, it was a fantastic experience with a few snags, let’s get right into it.
Iceborne is a substantial DLC right away because it fundamentally changes how each weapon is played and what they can do. Longswords for example, get the Iai slash and Iai spirit slash. Iai slash becomes an essential tool since landing it will allow your meter to naturally charge overtime, giving you more room to disengage from the monster without fully compromising your ability to perform your Spirit Slash combo. Iai Spirit Slash on the other hand is a higher skilled foresight slash that rewards you with tremendous damage, large part-break damage, and is visually striking. However, the issue with this particular move is the timing is far too tight at times, and it has a lot of factors that make it unreliable and random which severely hinders any sort of benefit it could provide on paper. I’m not an expert when it comes to how this move works, however, I recommend watching this video by Peppo, a former speedrunner about Iai Spirit Slash. It was incredibly informal, and was personally the decision for me to never use this move despite the theoretical potential and advantage it provides. With that said, the simple inclusion of Iai Slash makes Longsword much more forgiving to play despite already being rather easy. Other weapons I can’t comment on as much, however a lot of them usually tie into another mechanic introduced into Iceborne, which is the Clutch Claw.
Clutch Claw is a rather divisive mechanic overall. In concept, it allows you to latch onto a monster from a relatively close distance, once you are latched onto a monster you have a few options. You can “tenderize” that part of the monster, which allows for more damage to be dealt in that specific area. Tenderizing takes two strikes to tenderize with light weapons, while heavy weapons only take one. This would be a fantastic mechanic because it’d allow the hunters a much faster means of defeating monsters while also rewarding monster knowledge by tenderizing weak points to deal even more damage. The issue with this mechanic for Iceborne specifically are the monsters themselves, or rather their bloated health pools. Monsters in Iceborne require you tenderize them to deal adequate damage for them to go down at a reasonable pace, which bogs down many fights to “clutch claw and tenderize as soon as possible”. It heavily restricts the approach one can take fighting monsters in Iceborne, that’s not to mention how inaccurate The Clutch Claw also is. Aiming the clutch claw requires you to aim a reticle at the part you wish to clutch onto, if you aim successfully, then there’s no issue, but that’s the problem, the aiming is terrible. Monsters are incredibly fast and always moving, so having the time to carefully aim and clutch onto a monster is a nightmare, on top of its short range, you really need to put yourself in danger to do it. At least if you latch onto the wrong part, you can jump to other parts of the monster, but this can waste time and has incredibly odd input buffering issues from personal experience, but this may have been my own issue entirely by quickly hitting the buttons, it was annoying all the same.
Clutch Claw’s second important use is wall banging with the slinger. In World, the slinger was mostly used for environmental interaction and getting the monster’s attention while also being able to interrupt their attacks if timed right. Wall banging is not only better in every conceivable way to these options, but once again brings up a balancing issue, except in reverse to tenderizing. If you can clutch onto a monster’s face while they’re not enraged you can use up all of your slinger ammo to make them go sprinting into a wall, which will deal tremendous part break damage and have them topple over, giving you a gigantic opening. You can also adjust where the monster is facing to ensure they run into some obstacle or wall for the topple, which is useful. Wall banging pretty much trivializes any fight before Iceborne, and in Iceborne itself, it can be equally trivializing with the right coordination, guaranteeing a topple is already strong, but wall banging itself can deal immense damage to a monster as well. While I think the challenge of the monsters you fight in Iceborne can make up the difference here, wall banging at first is an incredibly satisfying and fun mechanic, but it’s far too easy and rewarding for something that only requires some slinger ammo and the monster not being enraged. Let’s not forget to mention that tenderizing the monster will drop slinger ammo for you if you use a light weapon, the game is giving you the resources to repeat this process over and over. That’s the fundamental problem with Iceborne to me, they design these monsters around both of these concepts, to tenderize, and to wall bang,, so to make up for that, they made monsters have so much health and resistance, if you decide not to use these methods, I’d argue your chances of succeeding later become vastly lower. Not to mention it can slow down certain fights to an absolute crawl, because you need to use the clutch claw, but if the monster is moving around a lot, and you’re just getting unlucky and knocked off a lot, you’re just kind of screwed. Granted you can still fight the monster normally, but with their health, and that lovely time limit adding pressure to be a bit faster, it’s a combination I did not enjoy very much initially, but you do get used to the new flow Iceborne presents, though I feel it dumbs down gameplay a lot and can be a crutch.
I think I’ve addressed some negatives, let’s get into some positives! The monster roster for Iceborne is nothing short of utterly amazing! While I definitely had my favorites from World like Nergigante, Teostra, and Odagaron to name a few, Iceborne quickly introduced me to some of my all-time favorite monsters ever in both design and fights. Nargacuga’s blinding speed yet incredibly fair openings, Brachydios being a knuckle duster with explosive AoE’s, and Barioth’s blinding speed and aggression that can be stopped cold by shattering his wings. There were very few fights in Iceborne I didn’t enjoy or at least tolerated compared to base World, it gave the game much needed variety outside of World’s roster which felt very dinosaur and dragon loaded. Iceborne certainly doesn’t shy away from adding more of these types of monsters, but was pleasantly surprised to see more diverse design inclusions like Banbaro. One thing I could have done without are all the new variants of old monsters. In concept, I think the idea is good, but in Iceborne, they didn’t feel substantial enough at all to warrant including in my eyes. There are exceptions of course like Coral Pukei-Pukei, and Frostfang Barioth to name a few, but others like Ebony Odagaron and Nightshade Paolumu felt more like padding than worthwhile variants worth being in the DLC. That’s a negligent issue in the grand scheme of things, but still an issue regardless, still an amazing roster of monsters I was very pleased with.
Iceborne also has us exploring a new region: The Hoarfrost Reach. Hoarfrost Reach is a beautiful landscape covered in snow, but wasn’t too large or difficult to navigate, on top of being rather flat compared to the likes of the Ancient Forest, I was immediately a fan of this new area. One thing I was not a fan of constantly having to consume hot drinks to ensure my stamina wasn’t lowered by the cold. Thematically speaking, it’s incredibly cohesive and makes sense, mechanically? It’s bothersome to keep up with, but considering it’s not that often you need to refresh your immunity, it’s ignorable, but something I noticed compared to Elder’s Recess where you only needed to consume Cold Drinks for specific sections, not the entire map. We also get an entire new hub for this DLC, Seliana, wow. Seliana in stark comparison to Astera, was remarkably designed, much flatter, much easier to traverse, and had an unbelievably cozy and immersive feel. I loved everything Seliana had to offer in both layout and new activities such as the generator which just made certain items an absolute breeze to get without farming expeditions anymore. Seliana also had a much better and inviting Gathering Hub, with hot springs, more convenient layout, and again just really cozy. It has much better music, you get your own room you can customize and do side quests to obtain more decoration options which is an awesome inclusion that’ll give the game far more playtime and longevity for people who enjoy that. I personally only dabbled with it, but I was thoroughly impressed with how much you could do with it. As soon as I reached, I never went back to Astera, it’s just too bothersome and badly designed to navigate. I appreciate its verticality and scope, but Seliana is just more inviting and non-intrusive, it wins by a landslide.
Progression with Iceborne also felt far better than base world. A plethora of new monsters means more gear than ever to craft, and most of them are once again useful in their own right and look good to boot, with the added bonus of not having an armor set that can essentially carry you throughout the game like the Defender Gear. With that said, the last armor set in the game one could arguably obtain is far too versatile with how it’s designed, every single weapon or playstyle can be supported by it, and it’s due to this armor set that Iceborne’s endgame grinding is always the same, which is a huge detriment. Had the game allowed for any and all armor combinations to, in theory, be viable, it would have made building and using them long-term far more satisfying and valuable, but instead, what awaits you is a far superior armor set everyone uses, with zero reason not to, no negatives, no drawbacks, nothing, the only caveat being how you obtain it, but we’ll get there. Besides that one issue, the plethora of new options is great, and I very much enjoyed the progression in Iceborne more than the base world. I personally built far more weapons and armor in this expansion than my entire time in Base World because the monsters and difficulty increase every mission warranted it enough to feel important to do.
Iceborne unfortunately retreads the same issues the base world does with cutscenes, missions, and characters. None of it mattered to me, it’s all simply, once again, a means to justify why you’re fighting specific monsters, it works, but is completely unimportant overall. I once again found myself wanting to skip these cutscenes in favor of fighting large monsters. Characters are as one-dimensional as ever, but we do get a break from the Handler in this expansion for a little while, which was nice, but nothing significant. It’s honestly a tragedy these negatives still exist, as you also need to watch the cutscene first before others can join your hunt, which was equally annoying in base World, this same issue persists here. For as much as Iceborne improved upon base world, this was not one of those areas, and it’s a shame too because this DLC truly felt like it was really trying to right every wrong, but I guess it can’t all be perfect.
Let’s get into my largest criticism for Iceborne, the endgame, or more specifically, the endgame monsters you will be fighting. Now, it’d be hard for me to talk about this since it’s riddled with spoilers. I was inspired by one of my friends and inspirations, @DetectiveFail to use pastebin to discuss spoilers. So for the last section of this review, I highly suggest reading it here if you want my thoughts on it. For those who don’t, or wish not to, I will still give a brief summary here. Essentially, a lot of the final Monsters you fight in World boil down to DPS checks that don’t necessarily cater to skill, but more so how good your build is, and forces you to grind for something good enough to overcome the challenge. Monster Hunter already made it difficult at times to win due to the time limit implemented in hunts, and here that problem is exacerbated further. If your damage isn’t good enough, then you will simply wipe, that’s all there is to it. Not to mention the difficulty spike in the last two monsters especially is far too high, and I personally struggled to defeat them for several hours, to days. It was certainly rewarding and a huge accomplishment, but also an obstacle that will ensure I will never aim to complete this DLC ever again because the entire grind was rather unpleasant and not very fun. Instead it was incredibly frustrating and felt like the odds were always against me to win, this is ironically in the same spirit as Monster Hunter aims for, to feel an insurmountable challenge against giant monsters you can and will overcome. But here it feels legitimately impossible, and many have told me from talking about the final boss in Iceborne that they never came close to beating it.
This has been a very long review in the making, I appreciate everyone’s patience and support as I got this finished. I’m happy to say it is now finished, and ready to review some other great games I’ve been playing while working on this. Overall, I did love Iceborne, it was nothing but an improvement from the base game with tons of implementations, monsters, and ideas I felt were mostly good, others I can’t necessarily say I’d be sad if they never returned. While I do take many issues with the game and its expansion, I got to say it’s still a remarkable game. I’ve always wanted to get into this series, and I’m glad I did with this one! I can easily recommend it to others for the immersive monster behavior and designs, the soundtrack, and the fun combat that hits a few snags along the way. Thank you all for reading my review of Iceborne! Next time, we’ll be mixing drinks and changing lives! Until next time.
Iceborne is a substantial DLC right away because it fundamentally changes how each weapon is played and what they can do. Longswords for example, get the Iai slash and Iai spirit slash. Iai slash becomes an essential tool since landing it will allow your meter to naturally charge overtime, giving you more room to disengage from the monster without fully compromising your ability to perform your Spirit Slash combo. Iai Spirit Slash on the other hand is a higher skilled foresight slash that rewards you with tremendous damage, large part-break damage, and is visually striking. However, the issue with this particular move is the timing is far too tight at times, and it has a lot of factors that make it unreliable and random which severely hinders any sort of benefit it could provide on paper. I’m not an expert when it comes to how this move works, however, I recommend watching this video by Peppo, a former speedrunner about Iai Spirit Slash. It was incredibly informal, and was personally the decision for me to never use this move despite the theoretical potential and advantage it provides. With that said, the simple inclusion of Iai Slash makes Longsword much more forgiving to play despite already being rather easy. Other weapons I can’t comment on as much, however a lot of them usually tie into another mechanic introduced into Iceborne, which is the Clutch Claw.
Clutch Claw is a rather divisive mechanic overall. In concept, it allows you to latch onto a monster from a relatively close distance, once you are latched onto a monster you have a few options. You can “tenderize” that part of the monster, which allows for more damage to be dealt in that specific area. Tenderizing takes two strikes to tenderize with light weapons, while heavy weapons only take one. This would be a fantastic mechanic because it’d allow the hunters a much faster means of defeating monsters while also rewarding monster knowledge by tenderizing weak points to deal even more damage. The issue with this mechanic for Iceborne specifically are the monsters themselves, or rather their bloated health pools. Monsters in Iceborne require you tenderize them to deal adequate damage for them to go down at a reasonable pace, which bogs down many fights to “clutch claw and tenderize as soon as possible”. It heavily restricts the approach one can take fighting monsters in Iceborne, that’s not to mention how inaccurate The Clutch Claw also is. Aiming the clutch claw requires you to aim a reticle at the part you wish to clutch onto, if you aim successfully, then there’s no issue, but that’s the problem, the aiming is terrible. Monsters are incredibly fast and always moving, so having the time to carefully aim and clutch onto a monster is a nightmare, on top of its short range, you really need to put yourself in danger to do it. At least if you latch onto the wrong part, you can jump to other parts of the monster, but this can waste time and has incredibly odd input buffering issues from personal experience, but this may have been my own issue entirely by quickly hitting the buttons, it was annoying all the same.
Clutch Claw’s second important use is wall banging with the slinger. In World, the slinger was mostly used for environmental interaction and getting the monster’s attention while also being able to interrupt their attacks if timed right. Wall banging is not only better in every conceivable way to these options, but once again brings up a balancing issue, except in reverse to tenderizing. If you can clutch onto a monster’s face while they’re not enraged you can use up all of your slinger ammo to make them go sprinting into a wall, which will deal tremendous part break damage and have them topple over, giving you a gigantic opening. You can also adjust where the monster is facing to ensure they run into some obstacle or wall for the topple, which is useful. Wall banging pretty much trivializes any fight before Iceborne, and in Iceborne itself, it can be equally trivializing with the right coordination, guaranteeing a topple is already strong, but wall banging itself can deal immense damage to a monster as well. While I think the challenge of the monsters you fight in Iceborne can make up the difference here, wall banging at first is an incredibly satisfying and fun mechanic, but it’s far too easy and rewarding for something that only requires some slinger ammo and the monster not being enraged. Let’s not forget to mention that tenderizing the monster will drop slinger ammo for you if you use a light weapon, the game is giving you the resources to repeat this process over and over. That’s the fundamental problem with Iceborne to me, they design these monsters around both of these concepts, to tenderize, and to wall bang,, so to make up for that, they made monsters have so much health and resistance, if you decide not to use these methods, I’d argue your chances of succeeding later become vastly lower. Not to mention it can slow down certain fights to an absolute crawl, because you need to use the clutch claw, but if the monster is moving around a lot, and you’re just getting unlucky and knocked off a lot, you’re just kind of screwed. Granted you can still fight the monster normally, but with their health, and that lovely time limit adding pressure to be a bit faster, it’s a combination I did not enjoy very much initially, but you do get used to the new flow Iceborne presents, though I feel it dumbs down gameplay a lot and can be a crutch.
I think I’ve addressed some negatives, let’s get into some positives! The monster roster for Iceborne is nothing short of utterly amazing! While I definitely had my favorites from World like Nergigante, Teostra, and Odagaron to name a few, Iceborne quickly introduced me to some of my all-time favorite monsters ever in both design and fights. Nargacuga’s blinding speed yet incredibly fair openings, Brachydios being a knuckle duster with explosive AoE’s, and Barioth’s blinding speed and aggression that can be stopped cold by shattering his wings. There were very few fights in Iceborne I didn’t enjoy or at least tolerated compared to base World, it gave the game much needed variety outside of World’s roster which felt very dinosaur and dragon loaded. Iceborne certainly doesn’t shy away from adding more of these types of monsters, but was pleasantly surprised to see more diverse design inclusions like Banbaro. One thing I could have done without are all the new variants of old monsters. In concept, I think the idea is good, but in Iceborne, they didn’t feel substantial enough at all to warrant including in my eyes. There are exceptions of course like Coral Pukei-Pukei, and Frostfang Barioth to name a few, but others like Ebony Odagaron and Nightshade Paolumu felt more like padding than worthwhile variants worth being in the DLC. That’s a negligent issue in the grand scheme of things, but still an issue regardless, still an amazing roster of monsters I was very pleased with.
Iceborne also has us exploring a new region: The Hoarfrost Reach. Hoarfrost Reach is a beautiful landscape covered in snow, but wasn’t too large or difficult to navigate, on top of being rather flat compared to the likes of the Ancient Forest, I was immediately a fan of this new area. One thing I was not a fan of constantly having to consume hot drinks to ensure my stamina wasn’t lowered by the cold. Thematically speaking, it’s incredibly cohesive and makes sense, mechanically? It’s bothersome to keep up with, but considering it’s not that often you need to refresh your immunity, it’s ignorable, but something I noticed compared to Elder’s Recess where you only needed to consume Cold Drinks for specific sections, not the entire map. We also get an entire new hub for this DLC, Seliana, wow. Seliana in stark comparison to Astera, was remarkably designed, much flatter, much easier to traverse, and had an unbelievably cozy and immersive feel. I loved everything Seliana had to offer in both layout and new activities such as the generator which just made certain items an absolute breeze to get without farming expeditions anymore. Seliana also had a much better and inviting Gathering Hub, with hot springs, more convenient layout, and again just really cozy. It has much better music, you get your own room you can customize and do side quests to obtain more decoration options which is an awesome inclusion that’ll give the game far more playtime and longevity for people who enjoy that. I personally only dabbled with it, but I was thoroughly impressed with how much you could do with it. As soon as I reached, I never went back to Astera, it’s just too bothersome and badly designed to navigate. I appreciate its verticality and scope, but Seliana is just more inviting and non-intrusive, it wins by a landslide.
Progression with Iceborne also felt far better than base world. A plethora of new monsters means more gear than ever to craft, and most of them are once again useful in their own right and look good to boot, with the added bonus of not having an armor set that can essentially carry you throughout the game like the Defender Gear. With that said, the last armor set in the game one could arguably obtain is far too versatile with how it’s designed, every single weapon or playstyle can be supported by it, and it’s due to this armor set that Iceborne’s endgame grinding is always the same, which is a huge detriment. Had the game allowed for any and all armor combinations to, in theory, be viable, it would have made building and using them long-term far more satisfying and valuable, but instead, what awaits you is a far superior armor set everyone uses, with zero reason not to, no negatives, no drawbacks, nothing, the only caveat being how you obtain it, but we’ll get there. Besides that one issue, the plethora of new options is great, and I very much enjoyed the progression in Iceborne more than the base world. I personally built far more weapons and armor in this expansion than my entire time in Base World because the monsters and difficulty increase every mission warranted it enough to feel important to do.
Iceborne unfortunately retreads the same issues the base world does with cutscenes, missions, and characters. None of it mattered to me, it’s all simply, once again, a means to justify why you’re fighting specific monsters, it works, but is completely unimportant overall. I once again found myself wanting to skip these cutscenes in favor of fighting large monsters. Characters are as one-dimensional as ever, but we do get a break from the Handler in this expansion for a little while, which was nice, but nothing significant. It’s honestly a tragedy these negatives still exist, as you also need to watch the cutscene first before others can join your hunt, which was equally annoying in base World, this same issue persists here. For as much as Iceborne improved upon base world, this was not one of those areas, and it’s a shame too because this DLC truly felt like it was really trying to right every wrong, but I guess it can’t all be perfect.
Let’s get into my largest criticism for Iceborne, the endgame, or more specifically, the endgame monsters you will be fighting. Now, it’d be hard for me to talk about this since it’s riddled with spoilers. I was inspired by one of my friends and inspirations, @DetectiveFail to use pastebin to discuss spoilers. So for the last section of this review, I highly suggest reading it here if you want my thoughts on it. For those who don’t, or wish not to, I will still give a brief summary here. Essentially, a lot of the final Monsters you fight in World boil down to DPS checks that don’t necessarily cater to skill, but more so how good your build is, and forces you to grind for something good enough to overcome the challenge. Monster Hunter already made it difficult at times to win due to the time limit implemented in hunts, and here that problem is exacerbated further. If your damage isn’t good enough, then you will simply wipe, that’s all there is to it. Not to mention the difficulty spike in the last two monsters especially is far too high, and I personally struggled to defeat them for several hours, to days. It was certainly rewarding and a huge accomplishment, but also an obstacle that will ensure I will never aim to complete this DLC ever again because the entire grind was rather unpleasant and not very fun. Instead it was incredibly frustrating and felt like the odds were always against me to win, this is ironically in the same spirit as Monster Hunter aims for, to feel an insurmountable challenge against giant monsters you can and will overcome. But here it feels legitimately impossible, and many have told me from talking about the final boss in Iceborne that they never came close to beating it.
This has been a very long review in the making, I appreciate everyone’s patience and support as I got this finished. I’m happy to say it is now finished, and ready to review some other great games I’ve been playing while working on this. Overall, I did love Iceborne, it was nothing but an improvement from the base game with tons of implementations, monsters, and ideas I felt were mostly good, others I can’t necessarily say I’d be sad if they never returned. While I do take many issues with the game and its expansion, I got to say it’s still a remarkable game. I’ve always wanted to get into this series, and I’m glad I did with this one! I can easily recommend it to others for the immersive monster behavior and designs, the soundtrack, and the fun combat that hits a few snags along the way. Thank you all for reading my review of Iceborne! Next time, we’ll be mixing drinks and changing lives! Until next time.
me the son of butcher of iki and my father's murderers fighting the same enemy? ummmm.... awkward!!
it's fine i guess just more of the main game really (for better or worse). it's funny how everyone tries to gaslight Jin into thinking HE is the reason his father and countless people died like dude he was 10 years old?
one thing to note is that it spoils the ending within the first 15 minutes and cuts access to fast travel for majority of its runtime so DO BE AWARE !!
it's fine i guess just more of the main game really (for better or worse). it's funny how everyone tries to gaslight Jin into thinking HE is the reason his father and countless people died like dude he was 10 years old?
one thing to note is that it spoils the ending within the first 15 minutes and cuts access to fast travel for majority of its runtime so DO BE AWARE !!
Tails of Iron
2021
This review contains spoilers
Yay! This was a fun one, I'm really looking forward to the sequel. This game is unbelievably charming, from the art style to the narration, I caught myself smiling like an idiot on more than one occasion. You can tell a lot of love went into this game. I love how the creator integrated his own pets into it, making it feel so personal in the best way. The story was great, as heartbreaking as it was, it was well rounded and felt complete, though I will never forgive them for killing off my funky mole friend (RIP). I have only 2 complaints about this game, fist being the hitbox, while certain dodges and attacks worked sometimes, it didn't work ALL of the time, it almost felt like in decided not to work, and once you get hit once, more often then not you're fucked for the entire rest of the fight, so that was extremely frustrating. My other complaint is some of the bosses were really bullshitty and just un-enjoyable to fight, main one I can think of is The Iron Rat (I think?) towards the end of the game, it was just unenjoyable and wasn't as satisfying as some of the other bosses. It was kind of up in the air if you were gonna get an annoying fight or a great fight. Though the combat is unforgivable at times, it made up by the fact that it's incredibly generous with it's save-points and supplies.
I'm so excited to see what the sequel will bring to the table!
I'm so excited to see what the sequel will bring to the table!
Helldivers 2
2024
PART 1: OK, MAYBE I HATE COMPETITIVE TEAM GAMES
Before I start this review, I want to use this Part to yap for a bit, so if you are not interested in it, just skip to Part 2! Where I’ll actually start talking about my actual experience with the game.
Around 4 years ago, when I quit playing League of Legends I kept seeking another competitive team game that would tick the same boxes for me, but every game I would try one out I would either end up disliking them or not taking them seriously enough to actually consider them my “main game”. Which would result in me dropping them, and moving on to the next shiny thing, but what they all had in common is that I disliked playing with other people, League left this mental scar on me where now I think every random player I meet online is one mistake away, whether it's from me or them, from flaming the fuck out of me. This happened with Paladins, Apex, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, Hell, it even happened to me in the Versus mode of Left 4 Dead 2, where stakes couldn't possibly be lower.
Eventually, I started gaslighting myself into thinking that all Multiplayer games fucking sucked now, and the constant tryhard mindset was to blame for it. Of course, there are clear exceptions, like Splatoon or competitive games where it's just 1vs1 where I can blame either myself for my mistakes or my opponent for doing something I didn’t know how to play around.
During the same time I stopped playing League, I was getting deep into Final Fantasy XIV, while I have plenty of things to say about it, I’ll save them for whenever I review it in the future. The point is that when I started participating in endgame content, which is for the most part, PVE Focused, I found myself having that same fun I was looking for in multiplayer games that I had been seeking for a long time. The joy of sharing a clear with your team and cheering and being way more patient with each other, went far beyond than just being relieved of having ended a stressful match that was barely won.
This is something I also noticed while playing Souls games, Left 4 Dead 2 co-op campaigns, Phasmophobia or Lethal Company with my friends, and when I recently got into Helldivers 2, I was completely aware of this epiphany by now. Multiplayer games don’t actually suck, competitive team ones do, and it's now a new age for me, where I will use this realization to get into games I’ve never thought were for me, hell, maybe I’ll actually try getting into Monster Hunter despite my initial reluctance towards those series.
Now, let’s have a nice cup of Liber-tea over Helldivers 2.
PART 2: DEMOCRACY MANIFEST
When Helldivers 2 gameplay was first revealed I remember two key things about it, one of my friends was excited about it because it was a wild glow up from its predecessor, and it had this footage where the people playing it had one of those cringey scripted voice chat interactions. But for some reason I cannot find it on YouTube, I swear it happened at The Game Awards, but I’m starting to think it's my own case of Mandela Effect.
However, things started changing once the game actually dropped, and it seemed like its growth in popularity happened overnight. The next thing I learn, the game is having so many people trying to play it that the servers cannot keep up. This is something unprecedented, and it actually prompted me to take a look, what was going on over there that had everyone so fired up? And so I started checking out some streams, it’s a 4 player co-op third-person shooter where you can fight either Bugs or Robots. On the surface, I thought it was nothing special, then I caught a glimpse of the players using the in game Stratagems and throwing them around, making things blow up and causing as much collateral damage as possible, my interest was starting to get piqued, who doesn't like to cause a big explosion? But the biggest thing to accompany all of it, was the Galactic War system with its Major Orders, where every couple of days every player in the game is tasked with working towards a common goal to be rewarded with currencies and sometimes new purchasable weapons. Apparently, this is led by a guy called Joel over at Arrowhead that acts like a real-time DM and sends out the orders depending on what the players were doing.
But what really, REALLY convinced me that I had to buy the game, was the Malevelon Creek arc, where the community tragically lost control of this particular planet to Automatons, it was a massacre, tons of brave Helldivers and Super Citizens were slaughtered in the process, but the playerbase wouldn't stand by it, and vengeance was sworn on that day. It wasn’t until the Major Order to take it back was given where the players valiantly fought in the name of DEMOCRACY to bring it back to our side, and it was done at a speed that neither devs nor players could have even predicted.
This is something I had to take part of, there was one issue, however. At the time I was busy playing other games, so despite buying it, it wasn’t until recent weeks that I started playing it a lot more, it is one of my biggest regrets to not have been part of this when player counts still soared over 500k every day, but it still warms my heart to log in and see over 100k still playing actively. One of my most common fears with live service games is that at any moment where failure starts to be shown, it's only a matter of time when the publisher says it's time to turn the lights off, and all that time invested gets flushed down the toilet (RIP Knockout City and Rumbleverse, I still think about you two now and then), but Helldivers 2 seems like its here to stay, and I’m happy to be a part of it, to be spreading justice and freedom for as much as I can. To hopefully one day participate in a Major Order as iconic as The Battle for Malevelon Creek
If there's something I had to complain about the game is how some types of enemies are extremely obnoxious to fight against (I fucking despise Chargers and Hulks), and that Arrowhead has a weird philosophy when it comes to weapon balancing, I don't consider myself an expert in game design, but at the end of the day, this is still a PvE game, one that can become really fucking tough at times, if anything I think everything should be busted, so there’s no meta to be enforced by whatever toxic players might be out there and everyone can play their own way.
To wrap things up, on top of my brief rant about Competitive Team Games, there’s another type of game I dislike a lot nowadays and that’s not a controversial opinion, we are all tired of Live Services, games that don’t respect their customers and that think we all have unlimited time, games where just playing them isn’t enough. Gone are the 7th gen days when games would drop with a weirdly, yet charmingly designed Multiplayer mode whose servers barely worked in favor of rotating shops and time-limited Season Passes that unlock only fluff most of the time. Make no mistake, Helldivers 2 also has some of these tropes, but it appears that this time it remembered it still has a box price, so what would be the point of time gating battle passes and having absurdly expensive cosmetics? None, get all of that shit by playing, go out there, kill some bugs and bots, get that rising feeling of power when your Helldiver starts maniacally laughing because you kept firing for a full mag. Drink of the cup of Liber-tea.
Before I start this review, I want to use this Part to yap for a bit, so if you are not interested in it, just skip to Part 2! Where I’ll actually start talking about my actual experience with the game.
Around 4 years ago, when I quit playing League of Legends I kept seeking another competitive team game that would tick the same boxes for me, but every game I would try one out I would either end up disliking them or not taking them seriously enough to actually consider them my “main game”. Which would result in me dropping them, and moving on to the next shiny thing, but what they all had in common is that I disliked playing with other people, League left this mental scar on me where now I think every random player I meet online is one mistake away, whether it's from me or them, from flaming the fuck out of me. This happened with Paladins, Apex, Overwatch, Dead by Daylight, Hell, it even happened to me in the Versus mode of Left 4 Dead 2, where stakes couldn't possibly be lower.
Eventually, I started gaslighting myself into thinking that all Multiplayer games fucking sucked now, and the constant tryhard mindset was to blame for it. Of course, there are clear exceptions, like Splatoon or competitive games where it's just 1vs1 where I can blame either myself for my mistakes or my opponent for doing something I didn’t know how to play around.
During the same time I stopped playing League, I was getting deep into Final Fantasy XIV, while I have plenty of things to say about it, I’ll save them for whenever I review it in the future. The point is that when I started participating in endgame content, which is for the most part, PVE Focused, I found myself having that same fun I was looking for in multiplayer games that I had been seeking for a long time. The joy of sharing a clear with your team and cheering and being way more patient with each other, went far beyond than just being relieved of having ended a stressful match that was barely won.
This is something I also noticed while playing Souls games, Left 4 Dead 2 co-op campaigns, Phasmophobia or Lethal Company with my friends, and when I recently got into Helldivers 2, I was completely aware of this epiphany by now. Multiplayer games don’t actually suck, competitive team ones do, and it's now a new age for me, where I will use this realization to get into games I’ve never thought were for me, hell, maybe I’ll actually try getting into Monster Hunter despite my initial reluctance towards those series.
Now, let’s have a nice cup of Liber-tea over Helldivers 2.
PART 2: DEMOCRACY MANIFEST
When Helldivers 2 gameplay was first revealed I remember two key things about it, one of my friends was excited about it because it was a wild glow up from its predecessor, and it had this footage where the people playing it had one of those cringey scripted voice chat interactions. But for some reason I cannot find it on YouTube, I swear it happened at The Game Awards, but I’m starting to think it's my own case of Mandela Effect.
However, things started changing once the game actually dropped, and it seemed like its growth in popularity happened overnight. The next thing I learn, the game is having so many people trying to play it that the servers cannot keep up. This is something unprecedented, and it actually prompted me to take a look, what was going on over there that had everyone so fired up? And so I started checking out some streams, it’s a 4 player co-op third-person shooter where you can fight either Bugs or Robots. On the surface, I thought it was nothing special, then I caught a glimpse of the players using the in game Stratagems and throwing them around, making things blow up and causing as much collateral damage as possible, my interest was starting to get piqued, who doesn't like to cause a big explosion? But the biggest thing to accompany all of it, was the Galactic War system with its Major Orders, where every couple of days every player in the game is tasked with working towards a common goal to be rewarded with currencies and sometimes new purchasable weapons. Apparently, this is led by a guy called Joel over at Arrowhead that acts like a real-time DM and sends out the orders depending on what the players were doing.
But what really, REALLY convinced me that I had to buy the game, was the Malevelon Creek arc, where the community tragically lost control of this particular planet to Automatons, it was a massacre, tons of brave Helldivers and Super Citizens were slaughtered in the process, but the playerbase wouldn't stand by it, and vengeance was sworn on that day. It wasn’t until the Major Order to take it back was given where the players valiantly fought in the name of DEMOCRACY to bring it back to our side, and it was done at a speed that neither devs nor players could have even predicted.
This is something I had to take part of, there was one issue, however. At the time I was busy playing other games, so despite buying it, it wasn’t until recent weeks that I started playing it a lot more, it is one of my biggest regrets to not have been part of this when player counts still soared over 500k every day, but it still warms my heart to log in and see over 100k still playing actively. One of my most common fears with live service games is that at any moment where failure starts to be shown, it's only a matter of time when the publisher says it's time to turn the lights off, and all that time invested gets flushed down the toilet (RIP Knockout City and Rumbleverse, I still think about you two now and then), but Helldivers 2 seems like its here to stay, and I’m happy to be a part of it, to be spreading justice and freedom for as much as I can. To hopefully one day participate in a Major Order as iconic as The Battle for Malevelon Creek
If there's something I had to complain about the game is how some types of enemies are extremely obnoxious to fight against (I fucking despise Chargers and Hulks), and that Arrowhead has a weird philosophy when it comes to weapon balancing, I don't consider myself an expert in game design, but at the end of the day, this is still a PvE game, one that can become really fucking tough at times, if anything I think everything should be busted, so there’s no meta to be enforced by whatever toxic players might be out there and everyone can play their own way.
To wrap things up, on top of my brief rant about Competitive Team Games, there’s another type of game I dislike a lot nowadays and that’s not a controversial opinion, we are all tired of Live Services, games that don’t respect their customers and that think we all have unlimited time, games where just playing them isn’t enough. Gone are the 7th gen days when games would drop with a weirdly, yet charmingly designed Multiplayer mode whose servers barely worked in favor of rotating shops and time-limited Season Passes that unlock only fluff most of the time. Make no mistake, Helldivers 2 also has some of these tropes, but it appears that this time it remembered it still has a box price, so what would be the point of time gating battle passes and having absurdly expensive cosmetics? None, get all of that shit by playing, go out there, kill some bugs and bots, get that rising feeling of power when your Helldiver starts maniacally laughing because you kept firing for a full mag. Drink of the cup of Liber-tea.
I make no secret of the fact that Valkyria Chronicles is my favourite video game series of all time. The wallpapers on all my computers, phones and handhelds are various images from the series. I talk about it with ceaseless emotion to anyone unfortunate enough to listen. I own a couple of artbooks, and I once got scammed trying to buy a Selvaria Bles figurine for a price that was too good to be true (I got the refund, though it took a month). Through the years, I've championed the series to the point that almost a dozen people have bought an entry simply because I would not shut the fuck up about it. Sega should hire me.
Here it is: the game that started it all. Valkyria Chronicles is a brilliant, innovative, emotional, gorgeously designed and somewhat flawed game that, sadly, has never risen to the place it deserves in the RPG pantheon. It has attracted a decent cult following which spends the greater portion of its time dunking on the game's main cheese strategy than anything else. Nobody hates Metallica more than Metallica fans, as they say.
Yet on a non-autistic run, this is an incredible game. It delivers turn-based strategy and real-time tactics in one addictive package. It's unique and open-ended: depending on your decisions, battles may feel like a walk in the park or a desperate crawl through the trenches of hell. When I first played through this game, it was surprisingly hard - enemies are extremely unforgiving with opening up interception fire on your units, aiming for your weak spots, and they're always given the high ground. I recommend playing this game blind for that reason, so you can become your own Sun Tzu and focus on bolstering your units, using them for their intended roles, and maintaining a steady advance rather than a subdued steamroll. On your first playthrough, you don't want to get fixated on the game's biggest flaw: the focus on speed.
As the game bases your rank and rewards for each battle solely on the number of turns you took to achieve your objective, it's impossible not to attempt cheese strategies once the endless bleating of 'Alicia scout rush' reaches your ears. Do not google this phrase. Go play the game now if you haven't already, and then come back. On my most recent playthrough, I'll say that this strategy only really works for three of the game's story battles, because of how long it takes to unlock the required materials, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming one of the game's more infamous aspects.
It is true that Valkyria Chronicles' ranking system is its biggest flaw. While you may receive extra materials, as well as EA's famous 'sense of pride and accomplishment,' for killing special enemies, these choices do not impact your rating - only the number of turns you took. A more weighted approach would have been better, particularly as A ranks are impossible to receive on later missions on an honest playthrough. So don't focus on rankings on your first run, and enjoy the game the way it's meant to be played: as a hybrid of turn-based and action RPG, of strategy and tactics, maneuvering and attacking your way to victory and glory and freedom of the land.
Valkyria Chronicles isn't award-worthy just for its gameplay, however. The game's beautiful watercolour aesthetic, gorgeous character design and battlefield presentation are not to be missed. From the comic-book style 'Ka-Boom!'s, 'vroom-vroom's and 'ratta-tatta-ta's of movement and attacks, to the seamless switch from 2D overhead to 3D third-person graphics as you begin a turn, this is an inspired, visually spectacular experience. It was one of the first games to present an anime art style in 3D with such success, and it laid the groundwork for how JRPGs would look for years to come. As usual, Valkyria Chronicles does not get credit for this.
The story is satisfying, with the World War II-inspired setting being the highlight. Valkyria Chronicles is not shy about its real-world parallels, but at the end of the day it's still a fantasy game. The plot has a few weak spots, which may be exacerbated by the mediocre English voice acting (the option to select Japanese voices is available.) But it's never egregious enough to alienate the player. Not when the characters are this likeable. Not when the soundtrack is so stirring it still gives me goosebumps. Valkyria Chronicles is endlessly compelling: the story makes you eager for more gameplay, during which you're enthusiastic for the next bit of story.
The PC port is superb, with not one glitch or flaw in all my time with it. It also includes a couple of DLC chapters, but they were made back when publishers were still figuring out how they could milk more money out of games, and they are fairly inessential. I should warn you, though: this game does not have autosave, and you do not want to overwrite your New Game+ data with a separate playthrough or DLC chapter's save, as you will lose that progress.
Got all that? Now go play it, because despite its imperfections, Valkyria Chronicles is fantastic. It was one of the most original, lovingly crafted games ever made when it came out in 2008, and it's still enjoyable today. The sequel was even better.
Here it is: the game that started it all. Valkyria Chronicles is a brilliant, innovative, emotional, gorgeously designed and somewhat flawed game that, sadly, has never risen to the place it deserves in the RPG pantheon. It has attracted a decent cult following which spends the greater portion of its time dunking on the game's main cheese strategy than anything else. Nobody hates Metallica more than Metallica fans, as they say.
Yet on a non-autistic run, this is an incredible game. It delivers turn-based strategy and real-time tactics in one addictive package. It's unique and open-ended: depending on your decisions, battles may feel like a walk in the park or a desperate crawl through the trenches of hell. When I first played through this game, it was surprisingly hard - enemies are extremely unforgiving with opening up interception fire on your units, aiming for your weak spots, and they're always given the high ground. I recommend playing this game blind for that reason, so you can become your own Sun Tzu and focus on bolstering your units, using them for their intended roles, and maintaining a steady advance rather than a subdued steamroll. On your first playthrough, you don't want to get fixated on the game's biggest flaw: the focus on speed.
As the game bases your rank and rewards for each battle solely on the number of turns you took to achieve your objective, it's impossible not to attempt cheese strategies once the endless bleating of 'Alicia scout rush' reaches your ears. Do not google this phrase. Go play the game now if you haven't already, and then come back. On my most recent playthrough, I'll say that this strategy only really works for three of the game's story battles, because of how long it takes to unlock the required materials, but that hasn't stopped it from becoming one of the game's more infamous aspects.
It is true that Valkyria Chronicles' ranking system is its biggest flaw. While you may receive extra materials, as well as EA's famous 'sense of pride and accomplishment,' for killing special enemies, these choices do not impact your rating - only the number of turns you took. A more weighted approach would have been better, particularly as A ranks are impossible to receive on later missions on an honest playthrough. So don't focus on rankings on your first run, and enjoy the game the way it's meant to be played: as a hybrid of turn-based and action RPG, of strategy and tactics, maneuvering and attacking your way to victory and glory and freedom of the land.
Valkyria Chronicles isn't award-worthy just for its gameplay, however. The game's beautiful watercolour aesthetic, gorgeous character design and battlefield presentation are not to be missed. From the comic-book style 'Ka-Boom!'s, 'vroom-vroom's and 'ratta-tatta-ta's of movement and attacks, to the seamless switch from 2D overhead to 3D third-person graphics as you begin a turn, this is an inspired, visually spectacular experience. It was one of the first games to present an anime art style in 3D with such success, and it laid the groundwork for how JRPGs would look for years to come. As usual, Valkyria Chronicles does not get credit for this.
The story is satisfying, with the World War II-inspired setting being the highlight. Valkyria Chronicles is not shy about its real-world parallels, but at the end of the day it's still a fantasy game. The plot has a few weak spots, which may be exacerbated by the mediocre English voice acting (the option to select Japanese voices is available.) But it's never egregious enough to alienate the player. Not when the characters are this likeable. Not when the soundtrack is so stirring it still gives me goosebumps. Valkyria Chronicles is endlessly compelling: the story makes you eager for more gameplay, during which you're enthusiastic for the next bit of story.
The PC port is superb, with not one glitch or flaw in all my time with it. It also includes a couple of DLC chapters, but they were made back when publishers were still figuring out how they could milk more money out of games, and they are fairly inessential. I should warn you, though: this game does not have autosave, and you do not want to overwrite your New Game+ data with a separate playthrough or DLC chapter's save, as you will lose that progress.
Got all that? Now go play it, because despite its imperfections, Valkyria Chronicles is fantastic. It was one of the most original, lovingly crafted games ever made when it came out in 2008, and it's still enjoyable today. The sequel was even better.
FightCade
2015
Hey guys! I just logged Fightcade as completed 5 s- SHUT UP! This is a PLATFORM. Not a VIDEO GAME. Stop acting like you play video games by logging shit like this. Nobody cares if you played Chrome Dino and Smash Bros. Fighter Pass 3. Go play some real shit like Modern Warfare then come talk to me.
Saw
2009
some bitches will ask you to play a game and literally install this
Tears of the Kingdom is an exercise in how much a game developer can get away with in recycling content. Potentially one of the most uninspired Zeldas ever made, TotK retreads everything Breath of the Wild did but worse in almost every way--save for the weapon fusion which is brilliant and I will miss in other titles. From the beginning, TotK kicks you off in a worse version of BotW's tutorial, but longer and less focused. Then it drops you in to the exact same map as the previous game with the only changes being sprinkles of copy-and-pasted content to keep you entertained. Unfortunately, several highlights from the previous game have been completely removed (such as the Guardians) to be replaced with... nothing. TotK as a game seems determined to pretend that it's a vastly more substantive experience than BotW, but fumbles the ball, especially in regards to the new ares: The Sky and The Depths.
The Sky and The Depths are emblematic of everything I dislike about this game (note that I still liked it, I'm just disappointed). The Sky, outside of the tutorial, is barely anything to write home about. A few scattered islands copied across the entire upper level of the map, so sparse as to make one think The Sky exists solely as marketing filler. And The Depths, a whole map the size of Hyrule but covered in absolutely nothing. The Depths, while very cool and frightening when you first discover them, are immediately undercut by how little there is to actually do there. And while TotK benefits from a better sidequest system than its predecessor, it completely fails on making exploration more interesting--or at all interesting.
And outside of the painfully mediocre and repetitive dungeons--all of which feature the exact same "open four locks and fight a boss" structure, lacking personality or any actual difficulty, become the most droll and dull parts of a game that cannot allow itself moderation. TotK is a good game, but not a great one; hampered by a need to reuse its ideas as much as possible, without introducing anything new or interesting, it becomes one of the most lackluster Zelda games I have ever played. I had a solid time, but I wish I had a great time instead.
The Sky and The Depths are emblematic of everything I dislike about this game (note that I still liked it, I'm just disappointed). The Sky, outside of the tutorial, is barely anything to write home about. A few scattered islands copied across the entire upper level of the map, so sparse as to make one think The Sky exists solely as marketing filler. And The Depths, a whole map the size of Hyrule but covered in absolutely nothing. The Depths, while very cool and frightening when you first discover them, are immediately undercut by how little there is to actually do there. And while TotK benefits from a better sidequest system than its predecessor, it completely fails on making exploration more interesting--or at all interesting.
And outside of the painfully mediocre and repetitive dungeons--all of which feature the exact same "open four locks and fight a boss" structure, lacking personality or any actual difficulty, become the most droll and dull parts of a game that cannot allow itself moderation. TotK is a good game, but not a great one; hampered by a need to reuse its ideas as much as possible, without introducing anything new or interesting, it becomes one of the most lackluster Zelda games I have ever played. I had a solid time, but I wish I had a great time instead.
A waste.
I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.
It's worse.
I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.
While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.
I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.
The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.
Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.
Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.
There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.
Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.
The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.
Great photo mode, though.
I didn't finish the original Hellblade. I remember spending about an hour wandering through a forest where traveling through a gate would change the surrounding terrain, and it just kept going and going and going far longer than it had any right to. It was a ridiculously badly-paced section that was placed early in what was set to be a padded game, so I stopped. In the wake of the news of Xbox shutting down some of my favorite modern studios, I was surprised to see that they'd picked up Ninja Theory back in 2018; I hadn't noticed, given how many companies Microsoft has been keen on acquiring in the past few years. To be perfectly transparent, I was going into this sour. It was with my arms folded and my face screwed up that I downloaded Hellblade II — a sort-of defiant "well, let's see what Xbox thinks is worth keeping alive if not Arkane and Tango". What I had managed to play of the original game was, at the very least, interesting. I figured Ninja Theory would be able to tread water and release something that was about on par with the last title.
It's worse.
I wrote in my Breath of the Wild review that people who thought that game was doing anything seriously impressive or novel probably haven't played many games. It wasn't an especially polite thing to say, and it ruffled some feathers, but I stand by it. I'd like to take this opportunity to go further and suggest that anyone praising Hellblade II for being like a movie probably doesn't watch many movies; if they do, they don't have any actual understanding of the medium beyond blind, uncritical consumption. I've seen praise get heaped on this for its cinematography when it's comprised almost exclusively of over-the-shoulder shots, the most bog-standard drone flyovers you've ever seen in your life, and simulated shaky-cam group shots where everyone stands stark still in a circle while having a conversation about nothing of importance. This is shot, cinematographically speaking, like shit. Watching this feels like someone gave a film student an eight-figure budget. Take a shot every time you're in one of the over-long combat encounters and Senua gets grabbed from behind to transition into the next battle.
While I was settling in expecting a visual feast, this is more of a visual buffet. Maybe a visual McDonald's. It looks good, to be certain, but it's really not that impressive. The mandatory upscaling present here forces some compromise to be made where it really ought not to be; DLSS is hailed as being the best option of the lot, but it still leaves shimmering artifacts on the edges of models where it can't quite get the anti aliasing right. Switch over to FSR and you can mostly get rid of the edge-shimmer, but it similarly demands that you manually set the sharpness a bit too high and fuck up the graphics everywhere else. I can say without hesitation that I've seen a lot of games that look significantly better than Hellblade II. For probably the same amount of money and about six months earlier, Alan Wake 2 does everything that this wants to and more convincingly. Go back a few years to Detroit: Become Human or Death Stranding and it's plain to see that those are far more impressive works from an entire console generation prior. I wouldn't normally give a fraction of a fraction of a fuck about graphical fidelity, but seeing all of the praise for how good this game looks makes me wonder if our eyes are working the same way.
I appreciate Crystar for pointing this out in her review, but Hellblade II has a very funny concluding monologue. Ending the game on the statement "all the questions were answered" implies that any answers were given, and further suggests that any questions were asked. There's not all that much that's ambiguous here, and the parts that are don't manage to raise any interesting questions. I had a feeling that the giants didn't actually exist, which Senua seemingly confirms at the end when she screams it at the final boss. "There are no giants, it's just you", she says. Unfortunately, the giants not being real means that most of the game didn't actually happen. All of the characters who were talking about giants weren't. All of the characters who died fighting the giants didn't. Everyone who thought they saw Senua kill a giant didn't. The natural disasters that the giants caused were just random and unrelated; whether they ended after Senua "killed the giants" is either another coincidence, or they didn't actually end at all. Cut all of this away, and there's really not much story left. Senua and her friends (who may not exist) trek across the land (which might be ravaged by natural disasters) while fighting the undead (who may not exist) so that Senua can get a blessing (that definitely doesn't exist) from a group of underground mystics (who definitely don't exist) until they get to the slaver king's doorstep and beat him in a fight. This reads like one of those early-10s fan theories about Rugrats being Angelica's dying dream. I know I like to exaggerate for comedy's sake when writing reviews like this, but this is a stone-faced recap of what happens. There are no jokes here.
The command to not pay too much attention to the writing comes a little too late into the game, long after you've already sat through dozens of ridiculously trite scenes. The bar for the writing sits around the point where Senua cries while looking at her bloody hands, and the voices in her head say "you have blood on your hands", just to make sure that you understand. The voices aren't much more than exposition fairies. They exist to recap story events that just happened with breathless awe, never giving you a chance to think about anything being said. A character will mention something that Senua hasn't heard of — giants that control the weather, let's say — and the voices immediately pivot to acting like confused toddlers. "Giants? What are giants? Can we kill a giant? Are giants real? They can't be real. There's no such thing as giants. We don't know what's real. Giants might be real. What does he know about giants? Why is he telling us about giants? I wonder how much he knows about giants. Does anyone know what giants are? What if he's lying? Can we ask someone else about giants?" It continues at this pace for about five hours until the game ends. The voices chattering on and on is one thing, and I could at least understand it as something the devs were doing to intentionally provoke the player, but this constant motor-mouthing falls apart when you enter into combat. The voices somehow don't have enough lines to cover these incredibly strict and linear fights, so they're constantly repeating themselves. I heard the line "their bodies strong like rocks, you have to hit harder!" four times in a single encounter, and at least ten in total before the game ended. I was half expecting them to start asking if I had any potions, or food. Add this to the canon of game characters who manage to annoy the player by spamming voice lines like they're running HLDJ.
Pacing is, regrettably, another factor that Ninja Theory has regressed on. A vast, vast majority of this game is spent holding the left bumper and up on the left stick. You walk forward, and you walk forward, and you walk forward, and Senua's never really in much of a hurry to get anywhere. You'll have a good twenty minutes where you're doing quite literally nothing besides walking in a straight line while the voices ask questions about shit that you already know. They'll also celebrate you figuring out the solutions to the ridiculously simple puzzles in the most simpering way imaginable. I do not need to be told that Senua is a very, very smart girl who can do no wrong when the game told me where the symbol was, and then automatically solved the puzzle for me when I held the focus button vaguely in its direction. These over-long sections where you walk around and do nothing are occasionally interrupted by over-long combat encounters where you tap dodge and spam light attacks, and that's where the fun really begins.
Most of these fights are fucking silly; the part where Senua interrupts the ritual is easily five minutes, as is the cave fight, as is the undead raid on the village. This is only as much of a problem as it is because Senua can only ever fight one enemy at a time, which makes them drag. There are about nine distinct enemy types that exist in the entire game, and they all take turns to lazily swing at Senua and slowly get chipped down. A lot of games that do mob fights will have some enemies hang back while others slowly come at you, but this doesn't even attempt to give you the illusion. Senua never has to fight more than one enemy at a time, regardless of how surrounded she is. What really gets me is the fact that this wasn't a problem in the original Hellblade. Enemies would come at you in twos and threes, and that was even in the earliest fights of the game. This is a total regression of a system that was already pretty thin, and the fact that Ninja Theory have cut out a majority of Senua's attacks to streamline the combat even further than it was boggles the mind.
There are glimmers of something good in here. I really do like the part in the cave where Senua starts to get the blessing from the hidden men, and the entire place lights up like a LIDAR scan. It's got some genuinely good pacing, too; you've got puzzle sections that lead into little combat encounters, and then those lead into walking sections, and that leads into a stealth section, and then it leads into another puzzle. It's the only place in the entire game where any of these systems feel like they're working together in harmony, rather than existing solely to interrupt one of the others for going on too long. It's a shame that Senua has to exist outside of that cave. I thought it was a good place for her to be. It was interesting, at least.
Anyway, I'm not sure I buy Ninja Theory's Games for Impact-bait shift in the past few years. I see their logo and I think back to how they would write Monkey killing escaping slaves because it was badass, or that GDC talk they did for DmC: Devil May Cry where they dedicated a section to making fun of Dante for being gay. The company, to my knowledge, has never really had a reckoning for any of that. Tameem Antoniades seems to have slipped out the back door just in time for this to release, but he's still got the sole creative director credit. I'm willing to believe that Senua's actress Melina Juergens actually believes in what she's doing — she's said in interviews that her father had a psychotic disorder, and she seems to have the most solid understanding of the crew when it comes to how the narrative ought to handle Senua's mental illness — but I'm not extending that faith much further than her. There's something about the documentaries that Ninja Theory self-publishes where they go over how very, very carefully they handled psychosis (we promise!) that doesn't pass the sniff test. I don't think it's bad that this exists, and I won't erase the people who have said that these games have been genuinely good reflections of their own mental illnesses; I just have some strong doubts that Ninja Theory is doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. One look at their back catalog suggests to me that they only wanted to make a Serious Mental Health Story because their old shit stopped selling and they could tell which way the wind started blowing. With the constant distractions of giant-slaying, risen undead warriors, and the sins of the fathers subplot, the current big game on the market "about psychosis" barely has time for the psychosis.
The conclusion that I'm forced towards, reductive as it is, is that people who love Hellblade II don't play anything else. They don't really watch anything else, either. I don't know what they do. It's not worth just harping on the fans, though; I don't think many people dislike this game for the right reasons, either. Complaining about a game not offering a good enough playtime-to-dollar ratio is peabrain shit. People also cry about Senua being Sweet Baby-core because she's got peach fuzz and bug eyes, all acting as though she isn't the the textbook definition of conventionally attractive. And the game isn't bad because it's story-focused — the game is bad because it's fucking boring. You engage with it in a boring way, and it tells a boring story. This isn't an inherently broken game. The concept is fine. It's the execution where Ninja Theory makes it clear that they've got no fucking clue what they're doing.
Great photo mode, though.
Shadow the Hedgehog
2005
this is like the anti-sonic forces to me.
the problem with sonic forces is that it's bland, boring and it has extremely little to do. shadow has plenty of levels, hundreds of paths and is ANYTHING but boring.
but it's laggy, unpolished as all hell, extremely edgy in the corniest ways possible, and the level designs are... awful, to say the least. sonic forces, for how much i enjoy shitting on it, is an extremely polished game with so little edge it may as well be a circle.
shadow is better simply because i felt something while playing it. even if that was just laughing at the stupid cutscenes and stupider dialogue, it got something out of me. it also took some risks that, while i don't think they paid off, were at the very least interesting.
bad, but in a fun way.
the problem with sonic forces is that it's bland, boring and it has extremely little to do. shadow has plenty of levels, hundreds of paths and is ANYTHING but boring.
but it's laggy, unpolished as all hell, extremely edgy in the corniest ways possible, and the level designs are... awful, to say the least. sonic forces, for how much i enjoy shitting on it, is an extremely polished game with so little edge it may as well be a circle.
shadow is better simply because i felt something while playing it. even if that was just laughing at the stupid cutscenes and stupider dialogue, it got something out of me. it also took some risks that, while i don't think they paid off, were at the very least interesting.
bad, but in a fun way.
Lorelei and the Laser Eyes feels like an anachronism. I don’t just mean this from how the game haphazardly scatters documents from 1847 and 2014 throughout the hotel set in 1962, or how it references multiple past eras of gaming with PS1 survival-horror fixed camera angles or DOS-inspired 1-bit adventure game segments hidden away on floppy disks, though these elements certainly play their part in creating what developer Simogo refers to as “collage of styles, ideas, and disparate inspirations.” No, what instantly caught my attention was how uncompromising yet thoughtful the game felt. In an era where most developers seem content to simply pay lip service to the great mystery/adventure games of old while over-simplifying their gameplay mechanics, Simogo seems to have figured out the formula of creating a final product that feels intricately designed, yet ultimately accessible.
I’ll admit that I’m not too familiar with Simogo’s previous work; the only other game I’ve played by them is Sayonara Wild Hearts. That said, I would not have immediately guessed that Lorelei was by the same developers from my first hour alone. In some ways, Lorelei presents an interesting foil to Sayonara. Sayonara’s persisting strength is its grasp on harmony: the epitome of what is essentially a playable music video, it’s pure and immediate gratification racking up points to the beat in this flashy and lush arcade game. On the other hand, Lorelei feels deliberately constructed to emphasize its dissonance. From the uncomfortably quiet manor clashing with the occasional audible off-screen disruption to the vibrating monochrome textures interspersed with low poly environment, nothing seems right in its place. It’s a much slower burn than Sayonara as well, with most players taking fifteen hours or more (in comparison to Sayonara’s two hour runtime) to navigate the sprawling hotel with no hand-holding provided whatsoever.
As different as these two titles appear however, they do have one thing in common: minimalism. For example, both games require just a d-pad/joystick and a single button to be played. Sayonara gets away with this because the available actions on input feel clearly telegraphed by the visuals and generally boil down to moving and timed dodges with the music. Lorelei similarly gets away with this because it deemphasizes more complex/technical interactions (i.e. the usage suite of adventure game verbs in look, touch, obtain, etc) with sheer puzzle intuition. Simogo describes this as forcing the player to “get a deeper understanding… and connection to [the world]” and just like Sayonara, “wanted the complexity of the game to revolve around this, and not dexterity.”
What makes this particularly impressive is how Simogo was able to strike a fair balance between simplicity and variety. According to the game’s development page, the game became “a very iterative toy box” where many different systems conceptualized over the game’s development cycle could interact and interplay with one another in different ways. Interestingly, I found that most of the solutions to these different puzzles were not that difficult or complex to determine. Even so, despite Lorelei’s simple controls and straightforward objective (figuring out passwords/key phrases to unlock new areas and information), the game is able to successfully obfuscate the means to achieve said objective by drastically changing the means in which information is presented to the player, for instance by using different camera angles and systems that allowed them to “change a lot of rendering parameters on the fly” from the aforementioned iterative toy box. Additionally, Simogo highlights key details from clues to ensure that players don’t get too confused, but leave enough ambiguity by never outright leading the players onto specific logic trains and refusing to provide any specific assistance (no in-game hint system and no specific feedback aside from telling players if they’re right/wrong). The result is a confident final product that understands the persisting strength of a good puzzle adventure game: a game that gives the player all the information they need to succeed while giving them the room to work out the connections themselves, and a game that constantly surprises the player with new opportunities to intuitively understand the world around them without ever feeling too frustrated by unfamiliar mechanics.
I do have to admit however, that there are a few instances where Lorelei’s minimalism and uncompromising nature can backfire. For instance, the lack of detailed player feedback aside from a right/wrong sound effect usually isn’t a significant deterrent, given that players can fine-tune most of the game’s one-variable solutions and are encouraged to tackle the hotel’s many branching paths and puzzles at their own pace, since they may not even have the pertinent information required and might have to work out other puzzles to obtain said information. However, certain late-game puzzles require multiple sets of answers (ex: a computer that requires three different types of phrases in a password), and it can be frustrating getting barricaded by such puzzles and not knowing which part of the answer requires more investigation. I’ll also echo some of the previous complaints regarding the controls, because while I appreciate that Simogo has crafted a base system where more complex controls aren’t required, I also don’t think that it’s a huge ask to add a “cancel/back” input for a second button. As a result, it takes significantly more scrolling to get out of menus or spamming random inputs to erroneously enter passwords if I want to back out of a puzzle, and the amount of wasted time per menu/puzzle really builds up over a playthrough.
While I did find the somewhat telegraphed ending slightly underwhelming given how elaborately the game wove its lore into its many clues, I nevertheless really savored my time with Lorelei. I might not have laser eyes, but I can certainly see this game’s approach upon system cohesion influencing many puzzle adventure games to come. As it stands, it’s another solid entry for Simogo’s innovative yet familiar library, and I’ll be thinking about its many secrets for quite some time. Perhaps it's finally time to delve into Device 6.
I’ll admit that I’m not too familiar with Simogo’s previous work; the only other game I’ve played by them is Sayonara Wild Hearts. That said, I would not have immediately guessed that Lorelei was by the same developers from my first hour alone. In some ways, Lorelei presents an interesting foil to Sayonara. Sayonara’s persisting strength is its grasp on harmony: the epitome of what is essentially a playable music video, it’s pure and immediate gratification racking up points to the beat in this flashy and lush arcade game. On the other hand, Lorelei feels deliberately constructed to emphasize its dissonance. From the uncomfortably quiet manor clashing with the occasional audible off-screen disruption to the vibrating monochrome textures interspersed with low poly environment, nothing seems right in its place. It’s a much slower burn than Sayonara as well, with most players taking fifteen hours or more (in comparison to Sayonara’s two hour runtime) to navigate the sprawling hotel with no hand-holding provided whatsoever.
As different as these two titles appear however, they do have one thing in common: minimalism. For example, both games require just a d-pad/joystick and a single button to be played. Sayonara gets away with this because the available actions on input feel clearly telegraphed by the visuals and generally boil down to moving and timed dodges with the music. Lorelei similarly gets away with this because it deemphasizes more complex/technical interactions (i.e. the usage suite of adventure game verbs in look, touch, obtain, etc) with sheer puzzle intuition. Simogo describes this as forcing the player to “get a deeper understanding… and connection to [the world]” and just like Sayonara, “wanted the complexity of the game to revolve around this, and not dexterity.”
What makes this particularly impressive is how Simogo was able to strike a fair balance between simplicity and variety. According to the game’s development page, the game became “a very iterative toy box” where many different systems conceptualized over the game’s development cycle could interact and interplay with one another in different ways. Interestingly, I found that most of the solutions to these different puzzles were not that difficult or complex to determine. Even so, despite Lorelei’s simple controls and straightforward objective (figuring out passwords/key phrases to unlock new areas and information), the game is able to successfully obfuscate the means to achieve said objective by drastically changing the means in which information is presented to the player, for instance by using different camera angles and systems that allowed them to “change a lot of rendering parameters on the fly” from the aforementioned iterative toy box. Additionally, Simogo highlights key details from clues to ensure that players don’t get too confused, but leave enough ambiguity by never outright leading the players onto specific logic trains and refusing to provide any specific assistance (no in-game hint system and no specific feedback aside from telling players if they’re right/wrong). The result is a confident final product that understands the persisting strength of a good puzzle adventure game: a game that gives the player all the information they need to succeed while giving them the room to work out the connections themselves, and a game that constantly surprises the player with new opportunities to intuitively understand the world around them without ever feeling too frustrated by unfamiliar mechanics.
I do have to admit however, that there are a few instances where Lorelei’s minimalism and uncompromising nature can backfire. For instance, the lack of detailed player feedback aside from a right/wrong sound effect usually isn’t a significant deterrent, given that players can fine-tune most of the game’s one-variable solutions and are encouraged to tackle the hotel’s many branching paths and puzzles at their own pace, since they may not even have the pertinent information required and might have to work out other puzzles to obtain said information. However, certain late-game puzzles require multiple sets of answers (ex: a computer that requires three different types of phrases in a password), and it can be frustrating getting barricaded by such puzzles and not knowing which part of the answer requires more investigation. I’ll also echo some of the previous complaints regarding the controls, because while I appreciate that Simogo has crafted a base system where more complex controls aren’t required, I also don’t think that it’s a huge ask to add a “cancel/back” input for a second button. As a result, it takes significantly more scrolling to get out of menus or spamming random inputs to erroneously enter passwords if I want to back out of a puzzle, and the amount of wasted time per menu/puzzle really builds up over a playthrough.
While I did find the somewhat telegraphed ending slightly underwhelming given how elaborately the game wove its lore into its many clues, I nevertheless really savored my time with Lorelei. I might not have laser eyes, but I can certainly see this game’s approach upon system cohesion influencing many puzzle adventure games to come. As it stands, it’s another solid entry for Simogo’s innovative yet familiar library, and I’ll be thinking about its many secrets for quite some time. Perhaps it's finally time to delve into Device 6.
Super Mario 3D Land
2011
I don’t know if it’s the save states talking, but this isn’t so bad.
One thing’s for sure, I’m not messing around with those three gold coins anymore. Got only two coins at the end of the level? Oh fuckin well, guess you’ll just have to fight bowser and save the princess with slightly lighter pockets. I know what happens when you compulsively collect the three coins in a Mario game. Never again.
One thing’s for sure, I’m not messing around with those three gold coins anymore. Got only two coins at the end of the level? Oh fuckin well, guess you’ll just have to fight bowser and save the princess with slightly lighter pockets. I know what happens when you compulsively collect the three coins in a Mario game. Never again.
Super Mario RPG
2023
Ok, I kinda get why people want him in Smash now
This game felt like it was 1000 hours long to 9 year old me. Thats a shit ton of podracing. Why did I do so much podracing?? I must have raced through the ceramic mosaic water world of Choot Chumba 100 times, somehow enthralled and also bored to tears as I piloted Kirtl Jonkta and his giant twin swamp cooler ass pods. I raced through the battle marshes of Terkwue, served my sentence in Anikins home desert of Bhutupo-3, and through the magma halls of Mount Dooq, all for a chance to unlock Darth Vader, the only Star Wars character anyone really cares about.
But in all honesty I do think I gravitate to Star Wars alot more when its focusing more on the “Star” and less on the “Wars”. Pod Racing isnt exactly the most mystical or sexy thing in a Jedi universe, but it actually presents an interesting cultural exposee with the fact that pod racing itself is an exotic popular sport. You race on planets that dont typically feature in Star Wars media and get a more involved look at how these societies might construct themselves - in some cases you can even see how they engage with the sport itself through contestant racers. Its alien Gran Turismo and thats still got more going for it than regular Star Wars.
But in all honesty I do think I gravitate to Star Wars alot more when its focusing more on the “Star” and less on the “Wars”. Pod Racing isnt exactly the most mystical or sexy thing in a Jedi universe, but it actually presents an interesting cultural exposee with the fact that pod racing itself is an exotic popular sport. You race on planets that dont typically feature in Star Wars media and get a more involved look at how these societies might construct themselves - in some cases you can even see how they engage with the sport itself through contestant racers. Its alien Gran Turismo and thats still got more going for it than regular Star Wars.