Total randomizer pick, this time selected from the other gigantic Itch.io bundle to come out recently (the Palestinian Aid one). Those two bundles are going to keep this feature well supplied for another year at least. Another Perspective is also another deeply nostalgic pick: not in the usual Indie sense that we're hearkening back to our misspent youths playing 2D platformers on 8-bit/16-bit systems but in the specific, Braid-inspired sense that this 2D platformer is an emotionally-charged deconstruction of the genre that asks probing questions about why we play video games at all. (Though speaking of misspent youth, it is odd to think the current generation of kids will have played more ironic meta 2D platformer deconstructions than actual ones by the time they mature.)

Another Perspective puts you in the shoes of a nameless though oddly familiar scruffy protagonist as he hops on platforms and collects keys to unlock doors to subsequent levels. Eventually, you'll start meeting other versions of yourself: the game's primary mechanic is to switch between these other versions to make further progress. Your doppelgangers aren't perfect copies like in The Swapper, however: each one sees the world differently, and may be the only one who can access keys or the door. It's the job of the other clones at that point to assist the one iteration who can actually finish the level. You quickly get into the practice of using yourself as a platform: you can stand on your other self, jump, switch over, jump again so you're directly under your mid-air clone, and switch back to land on yourself - who becomes solid in their inactive state - with a higher vantage point. Easier to understand in practice, I assure you. Some of your clones might have inverted gravity, or be a different size, and you have to take those differences into account also. All the while, you're seeing little messages pop up on the screen that are ostensibly the protagonist's scattered and troubled thoughts, but the game gets a little more meta with the commentary as it proceeds.

Another Perspective really sent me flying back in time to about ten years ago when this sort of game was everywhere. (The game isn't deliberately invoking that era as a throwback, incidentally, since it came out in 2014 - around the end of this specific trend of thinky puzzle-platformers.) It has it all: the searching questions about the nature of this very limited version of reality, where the only things that exist are platforms, doors, and keys; calling out the player for their role in this little theatre; and the unusually sad music that accompanies your jumpy puzzles throughout, as if the game is secretly meant to be an analogy for processing grief or something. I'll always have an affection for games of this type - even if I've never been able to take them too seriously, even the renowned award-winning ones like Journey and Braid - because they were the first games that were specifically Indie: there weren't a whole lot of big AAA-budgeted games going for big emotional revelations just yet (though there certainly are more now) so all these games with their deep ruminations and soulful presentations built around some moderately clever platforming puzzles will always be "The First Wave" as far as this particular tier of game development goes, followed by many other waves like "everything is run-based because it's a cheap and easy way to extend longevity" and "Metroid sure was cool, huh?" and "hope you like getting punched in the 'deck,' because every RPG has card-based combat now." Indie games have definitely woven a vivid and fascinating tapestry over the years, and carved out a niche that continues to expand in intriguing ways. And, as the bigger publishers continue to self-destruct with obnoxious F2P mechanics and sexual misconduct charges, it'll be the little Indies that will keep the lights on here at Giant Bomb (well, along with Weezer album reviews and discussions about that one meme of a frog on a unicycle).

Anyhoo, getting back to Another Perspective, the game is a bit on the short side, doesn't really go as far as it could with the mechanical trickery if it's trying to be all twisty and meta, the dark and muted aesthetic is Drab City, and there's some harsh collision rules where you'll often have to restart the current level because one of your guys clipped a few pixels into a platform and will no longer budge, so that's not so fun. Each level (which are only a single screen each) is over so quick that restarts are scarcely an issue, however. Once you're done with the story there's a Mystery mode which gives you a handful of more difficult levels - and possibly more story, even if the game insists there isn't - if you're still looking for a challenge. The whole meta narrative thing is mildly and drily witty, as many British games tend to be, though I fear being this far out from that whole "what is game?" phase of Indie navel-gazing makes much of it come off as a little rote. It's possible Lair of the Clockwork God may have ruined these thinky, empathetic platformers for me forever - that game's satire was brutal - but it's always a little treat whenever I find one of these I'd missed out on originally.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or it's just become my thing now, but I've been "enjoying" a lot of tough RPGs so far this year. Not just tough in the sense that the difficulty curve is a little more K2 than usual, but tough in how there are mechanical or narrative reasons to encourage you to go as hard as you can for the best rewards. I started the year with a little game called Operencia: The Stolen Sun, which I played on its hardest setting for the sake of trophies, and wrote a blog marvelling at the level of twisted ingenuity behind a lot of its encounters. More recently, I've written about the deeper mechanics of Bandai Namco's Tales of Graces F and how it uses its reward-based adjustable difficulty to entice players to switch it up (or down) whenever the opportunity arises, and in last month's Dredge of Seventeen rundown I talked about how Piranha Bytes's Elex presents a tough but satisfying ordeal in taming its post-apocalyptic wilderness, even in spite of all its jank.

UnderRail might be one of the hardest RPGs I've played yet, and that includes all of the above. I spoke on that aspect in its "Indie Game of the Week" review from a few weeks ago, but since then I've been exploring further afield of the station base your protagonist calls home and encountering enemies that either require very specific tactics to defeat and/or are simply not worth the trouble. The titular Underrail - a cross between the Super Mutant-infested DC subway tunnels of Fallout 3 and the many irradiated terrors of the Metro franchise - is a subterranean nightmare factory where everyone and everything has become a master of survival out of necessity. As with the Operencia blog above, I wanted to outline a few enemy types and the way they introduce themselves (and the game over screen, repeatedly) to you. I don't think I've save-scummed in a game nearly as often as I've done in UnderRail so far, and encounters like the following are the chief reasons why.

(Duders, I swear, I just needed to get all this out of my system before I exploded.)

Bandits a.k.a. Humans are the Real Monsters

I adore a game that provides deep customization and specialization potential for your character(s), but more so for those who provide the same character building depth to its foes. The Underrail's most common antagonists are other people, those attempting to survive with the pragmatic method of killing everyone they encounter and robbing the bodies (and in some cases, eating them), and while you can get an idea of how they'll attack by their name - a "Bandit Smasher" is likely to roll up on you with a sledgehammer, for instance - they have access to all the feats and skills you might potentially have and are not to be underestimated.

The bandits I've met so far in my travels generally fall into three "clans":

• Lurkers: Those closest to the game's home base of the South Gate Station and most frequently found in smaller groups, or even solo. The strongest lurkers are the assassin types: those who have mastered stealth and employ brutal knife skills when close. I generally know when one is the area only after they've dropped out of stealth directly behind me and have hit me five times with Crippling Strike and bleeding status effects. The former doesn't drop your movement rate but your maximum strength, though if you're walking around close to your encumbrance limit it has more or less the same result.
• Ironheads: These guys are close to where I'm trying to get to next, a settlement called Railroad Crossing, and tend to focus on weapons produced through metalsmithing. That includes massive sledgehammers but also all manner of rifles and guns, including flamethrowers and grenades. Very much a distance game with those guys.
• Lunatics: The player has the option early on to learn psionic abilities at a significant maximum health cost - essentially making you a mage class - and if you refuse it for the sake of a different build (you really need to prioritize Intelligence and Will to be an effective psi-user) the Lunatic faction lets you realize what you're missing. They'll almost always start with a Telekinetic Punch, which stuns you for a round, and then play piñata with your inert form with a mixture of cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, and neural overloads. If you survive the first round you're either doing absurdly well or you're only fighting one of them.

Tactics: It all depends on the types of bandits you're fighting and your own build. I'm a sneaky sniper type, so I'll usually start by popping off the head of whichever one presents the biggest threat. That's after I've set some traps between them and me, ideally in areas where there's a bottleneck to exploit.

Something I learned fairly late into developing my skillset is that Throwing and Traps are absurdly useful against damn near everything. Thrown objects include knives (can apply poison effects) as well as caltrops (does damage and reduces movement) and grenades (explosive damage, but also includes flashbangs for incapacitating foes and EMPs for those using energy shields and weapons). Traps, meanwhile, include bear traps (stops an enemy in their tracks and does damage, and can also poison) and mines (bad guys go boom) and the latter has this fun effect where their explosive range can activate other nearby mines for a big old chain reaction of fiery mayhem. There's also EMP mines if there's ever an automaton on a set patrol route you'd like to take apart for scrap. I just found an acid mine, so I'm looking forward to springing that on someone soon.

Versatility is the name of the game in UnderRail, or would be if its name wasn't already UnderRail, and the above two skills gives you the most variation for your buck. If you assassinate the ranged bandits first and then corral the melee ones into your bear traps and caltrops, you're likely to be done with the former before you'll need to deal with the latter. I'm not so great up close, and sniper rifles are way less effective if you move before shooting or are inches away from the target, so for now I'm relying on assault rifle bursts to deter those gettin' up in my grill.

Using the screenshot above as a visual aid, I'll break down a typical coward "resourceful tactician" approach to clearing a room of human enemies whom would otherwise have no problem wiping the floor with you:

1. The room on the right contains three enemies (it's not always easy to see the doors, but it's there where the wall goes diagonally up and right). Those four mines/traps are my own carefully prepared "surprises." The switch in the upper left corner sets off an alarm that'll force enemies to investigate the area for intruders.
2. My plan here, if it wasn't evident, is to hit the alarm to make those dudes come running. The first will hit the bear trap, forcing the one behind to walk around and hit the mines, thus ensuring the deaths of both. I was planning on sniping the third while in stealth from a safe distance if the mines didn't get 'em.
3. The plan did not go as intended. Apparently, hitting this base-wide alarm puts enemies in the "defensive" state, which means they run out and take cover behind the sandbags and wait for you to pass close. I had to snipe the first one, exposing myself, and then get some extra distance as they ran into the traps I'd set up.
4. The other issue is that two of the three were bomber/grenadier types: not only can they throw high-yield (read: instant death) explosives at you from a fair distance, but they're equipped with armor that negates some amount of explosive damage (presumably in the case of a critical failure on their throwing skill check).

Even the best-laid plans never seem to go right. It definitely helps to have improvisational skills in this game. Also, saving a lot.

Siphoners

Most critters are less intelligent than humans and will commit to some basic "get close and try to eat" tactics against you. These include rathounds (dog-sized rats), regular hounds (dog-sized dogs), and wild pigs: their usual strategy is to overwhelm you with numbers or, in the dogs' case, hold you in place by gnawing at your leg so their human masters can finish you off. Siphoners are some of the earliest foes you can meet that display some apex predator vibes, adapting specialized tactics that require you prepare ahead of time or make a break for the closest area transition.

Siphoners are big frogs that can potentially jump out of any area with water. They'll do so feet away from you, gaining the initiative and quickly getting close with their barbed tongues that do anticoagulant damage and will siphon health from you to them, hence their name. This makes it hard to cure the damage they cause and makes fighting them an uphill battle as they continue to heal themselves. Worse is that they'll sometimes start with a headbutt which causes imbalance (eliminates your dodge and evasion stats, often the only way lightly-armored characters can avoid damage) and occasionally stuns you for a round.

I wish I could say that I've never been licked to death by frogs in a game, but UnderRail has many ways of making you humble. What's really cool - which is to say, malicious - about they way they're used is that their stealth detection is awful, so if you go everywhere in stealth mode as a matter of course you might never see one. It's only when you've dropped out of stealth because you've registered this benign watery cave as a non-dangerous zone and would prefer to move through it faster that they suddenly make themselves known.

Tactics: They're not all that tough fortunately, so if you've got an effective means to fight enemies up close you can probably finish them off quick. What's important is that you don't try to run: they're fast, and you risk triggering other siphoner spawns as you jog past the waterfront.

Azuridae

Brain bugs. Likely the first psionic foes you meet. They stick to neural overloads - the basic psi attack - if there's only one of them, but Azuridae have a fun feature where they're able to augment each other's psi output if they're encountered in groups via a process called "psionic synergy." That means the more of them there are, the more effective their psi skills become. I just met a group that included an Azuridae Goliathus, which was a rhinoceros beetle the size of a Dobermann; I noped the heck out of there by staying in stealth, a tactic that has served me better than most frontal assaults.

Azuridae offer a fascinating glimpse into the way regular creatures have adapted to this world's world-ending calamity, whatever it may have been. Working together in colonies greatly enhances their stats and combat potential, and so they become a combat consideration based purely on the numbers they're sporting. Most any enemy type becomes more dangerous when found in groups, of course, but rarely to such a potent degree.

Tactics: Best way to defeat these guys is by kiting them if you can, picking them off one at a time from a distance. Failing that, getting up close switches their combat strategy from powerful psionics to relatively painless pincer attacks. They're tough to surprise because they're armored until they use their psionic skills, at which point their brains become exposed; thus it's only after they start attacking you with mind magic are they most vulnerable.

Burrowers

Burrowers are when you start getting into enemy types that are simply not worth the hassle and if the option exists to skip past them, take it. It's clear when burrowers are nearby because their eggs are everywhere, and possibly their quick little spawn also, and that early warning is all you need to either regroup with the right tools or just bail and find an alternative path.

Burrowers are insects the size of sheep with armored carapaces that, when they see you, start spitting poison barbs two or three times a round. Those poison values can stack, and if you're facing more than one it won't take long until the poison is draining half your health gauge per turn without antidotes. When they're not spitting at you they're spitting out babies, or at least eggs that hatch into spawn within two turns. The spawn don't poison you but will surround you and peck you with pincer attacks about five times a round each as an equally annoying substitute. Basically, if you love being filled with venom you'll love burrowers, but anyone else should come up with a strategy to avoid them or at the very least isolate and kill them individually.

The thing I like most about burrowers, and believe me when I say it's a short list, is that the first time you're introduced to the idea of them is during an early mission where you're raiding a disused station outpost with a few rangers from your home base in order to unlock its vault. Upon opening the vault, the raid leader takes one look at the burrower eggs within and says (paraphrased), "Nope, fuck that. Close the vault doors now." Absolutely no-one in this universe wants to deal with burrowers.

Tactics: What I've noticed is that spawn are attracted by sound but the big ones aren't so much. You can probably throw some caltrops around and toss a noisemaker to draw out and take care of the spawns quickly, or give them another grenade to play with when they're all grouped together. Energy weapons work best on the adults because they won't negate most of it like they do with melee and standard gunfire: I find my trusty taser very useful in slowing them down long enough to finish them off. Fire works well too, as it does with many critters: toss a molotov their way and they won't be happy about it. Honestly, though, they're not super fast or alert so just sneak past unless you need a whole bunch of burrower poison for crafting traps and caltrops. Better than them quilling you softly with their venom.

Crawlers

If burrowers are bad, crawlers are the result of a deranged mind devoid of mercy or honor. Under no circumstances should you ever stop to fight in a crawler-infested area. In fact, as soon as you realize what you've wandered into, it's best to reload the area transition auto-save and then quickly un-transition back the way you came. Y'see, part of the crawler's wonderful charm is that they're better sneakers than you are and will detect you very quickly unless your stealth skill is obscenely high, so you'd be just as effective trying to pass them in a cloak of shadows as an elephant would. What a crawler will do is remain in stealth until they're right on top of you, sting you once with an aimed shot, and then disappear into the ceiling where you can't reach them. Their venom will do significant damage over time and after it wears off it'll incapacitate you for two whole rounds. The moment that happens, that's when the crawler reappears, stings you several more times per round with an opportunistic attack bonus, and then vanishes on you again once you've woken up with several new stacks of crawler poison on you. And then they'll descend on you again when that batch of venom knocks you out. Incidentally, crawlers almost always attack in packs and have variants called Death Stalkers that are even stronger, faster, more observant, and apply a "hyperallergenic" status effect which hits you with a huge damage penalty if you try to consume any type of medicine. Oh, and all crawlers regenerate health every turn.

You ever meet a Dungeon Master in one of your nerd circles that has a real bee in their bonnet about overpowered players running roughshod all over their carefully-crafted adventures? Sometimes those DMs turn evil, and sometimes they go on to develop video games about post-apocalyptic underworlds. The crawlers were actually patched at some point to be even deadlier than they were already. I don't think I've actively hated a video game enemy type this much since the birds from Ninja Gaiden.

Tactics: If you absolutely have to defeat some crawlers (their poison is almost worth the trouble) I've found that bear traps and molotovs are the best combination. Let them know where you are - ideally in a corner with many bear traps set up nearby - and then toss a flare down so they can't hide in the darkness. When they're close, let them dance in the flames of your ire. The fire will not only skip their resistances and damage them severely but also scare the heck of them, forcing them to run away... unless they're currently stuck in a bear trap. At this point you can dispatch them however you want, though ideally several feet away from their stingers. One annoying thing to add to the pile with regards to crawlers and burrowers alike is that they're immune to their own and each others' venom, usually so effective when put on traps.

Mutants

I have to say I prefer the mutants in UnderRail to those in Fallout, though only barely. Mutants aren't a result of whatever apocalypse occurred to make the surface unliveable: most of the ones you meet turned out that way because of an experimental mutagen. (Unless the mutagen took out the surface too; I haven't got far enough in the story to find out.) Mutants, and mutated dogs, love their acid attacks: they'll attack several times at range, sometimes with blobs that hold you in place for a round though will at least let you act. Acid damage is no joke, since it slips by most resistances and can cause the corroded status effect, which decreases your defense values even further. Mutants only appear in very specific locations though, and I've yet to meet any just rambling around the Underrail caves or old subways - they're usually in disused laboratories and the like.

Gotta love the mutant zombie trope, but Underrail gets clever by making a distinction between full mutants and those still in the process of changing into them. The latter still think and fight like regular humans, using whatever weapon skills and feats they might possess, but generally look pretty similar to the full-on zombie variants who'll only ever fight you with acid sprays and unarmed melee and are that much easier to predict.

Tactics: Mutants are tougher than humans but not as smart. They're most effective at range so they might be a handful for a ranged character, but trying to melee them isn't clever either because their swings hurt and any damage will cause them to shoot acid blood from their wounds like xenomorphs. I'm not sure how much damage this damage-acid does - I'm not a close-quarters type - but I find headshotting them from a distance works just fine, as it does with most enemies.

Sentry Bots

You'll meet basic droids patrolling the hallways during that aforementioned raid mission, but the tougher sentry bots are ideally avoided: they kind of operate like the cameras and turrets in that they're obstacles to work around rather than take on directly. Sentry bots are very effective guards and use their own nature to their advantage by dropping flashbangs at their feet - which incapacitate you but do nothing to them - and then wear you down with their 9mm gun turrets as you watch the birdies fly around your head like a Looney Tunes character. There's also tougher variants called Plasma Sentries that hit with energy weapons and usually have shields, and I've even met something called an Industrial Bot which killed me in a single round with its flamethrower attachment.

I've always liked mechanical enemies in RPGs but they so rarely appear in situations where their inorganic nature is advantageous to them. Like having them patrol areas that are already full of toxic gas: you get double the bang for your buck if you're a malevolent level designer. Having them all equipped with flashbangs is a great idea from a design standpoint, less cool if you're hoping to fight them effectively as a player.

Tactics: If you have anything EMP-related the sentries are what you use them on, along with turrets you can't otherwise evade and maybe well-armed humans with energy-based gear. The thing with EMP grenades, and why you don't want to be caught in the blast, is that they remove the charge of any electrical device the target is using and then apply that as damage to the target as well. Anyone using a shield or energy weapon takes something like double damage from most EMPs. I talked about tasers earlier: they work as well on robots as they do on biological enemies, and any kind of electrical damage (there's an electrokinetic psi ability, for instance) is very effective also. What you don't want to do is let them flashbang you, because you'll be a sitting duck for however many of them there are.

The Rathound King

I'll just give a special mention to this guy because he was a real pain in the neck to deal with. Along with a labyrinthine lair which had something in the realm of a hundred different mine and bear trap placements - essentially using your own tactics against you if you're a trapper like me - the actual fight, if you choose to fight him, involves taking on the Rathound King himself (the highest level character I've met so far) and his entourage of powerful rathound minions. The dude is great at stealth and an expert trapper, so any "preparation" you do before the fight is usually moot: he'll just walk right towards you if you try to hide or will dismantle any traps you put down near him. He also has an insanely powerful crossbow and will likely toss a net over you to prevent you from running.

Trying to figure out how to defeat him at the comparatively low level I was at was an interesting exercise in resourcefulness. I could've been smarter still and just walked away after a few ill-advised attempts to fight him with honor, but then trying to fight anything with honor in the Underrail is a recipe for disaster. I'd later find out that I could've just talked to the dude and acquiesced to his demands and resolved the related quest that way, but having to navigate past all those traps had really sapped my patience down to nothing. Sometimes a dude wearing a big rat costume needs to die - Mickey Mouse mascots at Disneyworld excepted - and sometimes the rusty cogs and gears in my head will spin long enough to determine a way to make that happen.

Tactics: So this is where I show off by talking about how I cheesed this dude in the most cowardly way imaginable, which was to lead him away from his rathound guards by placing traps one after the other towards the opposite side of the zone like a breadcrumb trail. Once he'd been separated from his rathounds I closed the door on them so they couldn't follow and then waited until the Rathound King reached the end of the breadcrumb trail, where I'd left half a dozen high-explosive and frag mines clustered together. I then tossed a grenade at him before he'd disarmed the first one. It's remarkable the amount of damage numbers you get from an ambush like that: each piece of shrapnel from the frag grenades and mines has to have its damage calculated on top of the heat and force from the initial explosion. Numbers were still scrolling out of his smoking corpse several seconds after he'd already hit the floor. For poetic irony reasons I wish I could say that all those mines were his own that I'd recovered elsewhere from his lair, but my traps skill wasn't anywhere near high enough to recover them. I might come back for that bounty after a few more levels though. After all, traps seem work pretty well in this game...

I also scored some sweet barbarian Rathound armor out of it. Only lightly singed!

(NB: I'm seriously only halfway through this game so I can't even imagine what's waiting for me in the high-level, late-game areas. I suppose I'll find out the hard way.)

Welcome back to Indie Game of the Week, Giant Bomb's longest running ongoing feature (that's wild, huh? Not that it's an official one or anything). I don't talk about my process in selecting new games here too often, but I'm sure I bring up my inadequate PC every chance I get: I actually had to dismiss several games this week simply because they're not optimized for a slightly(!) out-of-date PC. So, in a rare moment of impulse purchasing, I went and bought The Last Campfire yesterday as it was on last year's shortlist of GOTY candidates to check out. Developed by Hello Games, presumably as a break from No Man's Sky updates, The Last Campfire is an emotional story about a little cloaked figure named Ember on a pilgrimage who is temporarily waylaid when their boat sinks. While looking for a path forward on foot, Ember discovers other cloaked figures like them who have stalled in their journeys also; some have even given up hope entirely, becoming stone-like figures referred to as the Forlorn.

Because my brain is busted in a very special way, I immediately picked up the game's inspiration being a lesser explored aspect of the world-building of FromSoftware's Souls series. Yes, I absolutely went there and as soon as the second paragraph no less, but The Last Campfire feels like one of those sentimental Indie games based entirely on the "hollowing" concept of the Souls games: that you can keep trying the impossible while you still have the will to continue, but the moment you give into your despair you become a mindless husk. However, Ember won't let these poor souls suffer for long: each one can be brought back to the land of the living and corralled to the nearest campfire by solving an environmental puzzle. These puzzles tend to be the usual Zelda type stuff: push blocks onto switches or to create bridges, redirect lasers with mirrors to hit targets, dodge wind and water to keep a fire lit, and so on. Ember also acquires an item fairly late that lets them move certain blocks around telepathically, which is involved with a number of the later puzzles.

In terms of progression, you're introduced to a moderate-sized area with a central campfire and a number of different directions to explore packed with secrets to find and barriers to overcome. There's seven of the Forlorn hiding around each area, though you only need to "cure" four to proceed onwards. There's a few puzzles in-between these areas also, but the meat of the game is exploring these campsite zones of which there are three total. It's not a long game, but it feels packed with content: each of the Forlorn puzzles cuts away to a self-contained diorama-like puzzle stage and there's more than twenty of them total, not to mention the overworld puzzles that bridge them together. The player can also find diary entries of a mysterious wanderer - these usually better hidden than the Forlorn - which obliquely refer to upcoming puzzles, characters, and local points of interest.

With a game like this, though, a lot of the focus is on the presentation. Each campsite environment has a lot of incidental detail; Ember can even comment on some of the more notable items in the surroundings, even if they're not always all relevant to puzzles. The lighting effects and character animations are top-notch, emphasizing the desolation of the strange world Ember finds themselves in and giving life to the many humanoid and non-human entities Ember encounters. The lithe and colossal Forest King is a particular highlight: a soft-spoken avian tyrant that inspires fear and trepidation in Ember each time they meet. Ember is also followed everywhere by a melodic Welsh voiceover, who narrates the game and the diary entries as well as the dialogue directly: the gentle delivery feels like she's reciting the story to a child as a bedtime story, especially when she puts on slightly different voices for the other characters.

In contrast with its charming aesthetic, The Last Campfire is ultimately an allegory about life and death. About how we choose to meet our end, whether we embrace it, futilely attempt to cling onto life by any means necessary, or give into total despair in the face of annihilation. A universal path we all must follow, but not one anyone generally wants to think about outside of funerals or hospital beds or any similar scenario in which our own mortality is made abundantly apparent. Couching such macabre semiotics in a wholesome little cloaked guy's trek across the wilderness bringing hope to others is certainly one way to ameliorate the bummer vibe it may have otherwise provoked, I suppose. If 2020 made us think of anything, it was about how finite life can be. Especially if you don't wear a damn mask.

On the whole, I enjoyed my time with The Last Campfire as it emphasized two qualities I don't get to see too often in Indies: A) detailed 3D environmental puzzles, and B) thorough exploration. The three campsite areas aren't particularly complex or massive - there's no in-game map, and it doesn't really need one - but they're designed well in how they hide their secrets or require a bit of work to open up new paths to the Forlorn or have helpful shortcuts to unlock everywhere (as if the Souls connection wasn't strong enough already, though I'll admit I may be reading too much into that). I'll admit to getting stuck a few times, if only briefly, so the puzzles have the right balance of difficulty and experimentation: those cutaway puzzles are never so intricate to be an issue for long, though if you really don't feel like taking them on there's an option to skip them all. Just a solidly made game with a saturnine, if hopeful, message about the great beyond - and we didn't even need a year of patches and free updates to get there.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

When it comes to game releases every year has its big headliners and hidden gems, but none were more packed than 2017. As my backlog-related project for this year I'm looking to build a list of a hundred great games that debuted at some point in 2017, making sure to hit all the important stops along the way. For more information and statistics on this project, be sure to check out this Intro blog.

This was not a productive month for much of anything given the humidity was so high there were moments of the day where it looked like an N64 game both inside and out the house. However, I did polish off Elex - one of those games, much like the PB RPGs that came before it, that I'm going to be a big apologist about for the rest of my days - and knock out two of the remaining mid-card Indies that I'd stacked up prior to the start of this year. We're not quite at scraping barrel territory yet (and gods willing, we'll hit December before that happens) but the 2017 content I have available is definitely thinning a bit. That's why August might have to be the month where I invoke the biggest GOTY contender I have left, so look forward to that.

Before then, though, we've got a trio of dubious contestants to process. What sort of final list placements await them? Read on...

Elex

Last month proffered something of an aperitif on Elex, describing the manner of oblique backstory that allows it to be the bastard child of three completely disparate open-world RPG franchises (Skyrim, Fallout, and Destiny). For all its borrowing, I still think there's a kernel of an original idea behind the worldbuilding of Elex: that a ruined planet is suddenly filled with this unknowable alien element open to ruthless exploitation and experimentation that, as the finale of this game alludes to, is possibly even more dangerous than anyone realizes. It plays in the same speculative fiction pool as those with other similar eerie extra-terrestrial blue substances - The Expanse novels and TV show or the Metroid Prime trilogy coming to mind first and foremost - while also having fun with a Horizon-style post-apocalyptic setting filled with artifacts and mysteries of the "Old World" (which, to reiterate, isn't modern day Earth but a close approximation called Magalan) for the curious to find and learn from, provided they can evade or eliminate the nearby beasties. It's easily the strongest aspect of Elex, along with that Bethesda open-world model where heading off in any direction is bound to offer an intoxicating mix of discovery and danger.

The rest of Elex is... well, mixed to not great, I suppose would be the frank way of putting it. We're still beholden to the Piranha Bytes formula for better and worse - in short, it's best to ally yourself with a faction ASAP because that's when the class system really opens up, not to mention access to better equipment including the exclusive higher armor tiers - and trying to play through most of the game's content without the benefits a faction offers can be a limiting (and highly challenging) route. Of course, picking a faction too soon also nullifies all the other "do these quests and maybe you can join us" pre-faction qualification missions and all their handy XP and monetary rewards. It is a structure that affords for multiple layers of risk vs. reward and continues to be Piranha Bytes' lasting legacy, which is why they're always coming up with new thematic formats to frame that same approach rather than risk anything fundamentally different.

Diplomatically speaking, the combat is trash, and in the same way it always has been in PB games. It's all real-time third-person business, with enemies auto locked-on as soon as they're close enough. Both melee and ranged attacks will do their best to automatically point themselves towards the locked-on enemy, though you do have to be facing the approximate right direction in both cases. Even so, the game has a very odd sense of what registers as a hit; some enemies in particular have much further reach than their attack animations would have you believe, or are able to close the gap between you and they at an alarming alacrity, often at too great a degree for a ranged weapon's auto-aim to compensate. Ranged attacks are powerful but become next to useless if the enemy is right up in your grill. Melee attacks, meanwhile, are a much more tense affair because you'll want to use the heavy swings for maximum damage - I suspect but don't know for sure that defense values are of the negation kind, where you have to surpass an enemy's defensive value before damage is applied, which means some stronger enemies won't take damage at all if your attack value is too low - and it's a crapshoot if a heavy attack can finish its animation before the enemy knocks you out of it with a faster strike. Heavy attacks also have a mild knockback effect, so you can usually, if you're lucky, chain a whole group of them together before your stamina bar drains. Given you need that stamina bar for evasive rolls also, you're never in a great position standing around like a dummy with the "no stamina" danger icon above your head as the enemy makes mincemeat out of you. I'm not saying the combat doesn't have depth, just that it can break bad so readily and there's so many enemies early on that can kill you in within seconds with their stats and speed. It also doesn't help that most enemies have a ranged attack in case you get the bright idea to jetpack away to "safety" and try sniping them: their ranged attacks can come just as fast and will often carry additional damage-over-time status effects like poison and fire.

You'll learn quickly, either through experimentation or being on the wrong end of them, that stunning and knock-back effects on weapons (especially explosives) are overpowered to the point of effectively breaking the combat system wide open: the rate of fire for a weapon that produces a knockback effect, like the flamethrower or plasma rifle (with the explosive ammo setting), is faster than the amount of time it takes for the enemy to recover. This means you can stun-lock any enemy in the game forever, provided you have the ammo to wear them down and there isn't another enemy around to distract you - though the rate of fire might even be fast enough to stun-lock two or three simultaneously. Elemental status effects like fire, energy, ice, and poison are additive rather than replacing a weapon's core physical damage, so any weapons that carry those traits tend to be almost twice as powerful. In some ways Elex feels like Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night in that there are multiple obvious and less-obvious routes alike towards completely blowing the game's difficulty curve to shit if you're so compelled, after too many deaths, to make things easier on yourself or simply cannot resist the temptation to disrupt the game's ungenerously calibrated difficulty curve. Given that, absent these boons, the game might be a little too on the challenging side with its iffy combat and the ease with which groups of enemies can quickly cut you down, choosing to "balance the scales" with stun-lock cheesing may eventually prove too enticing to dismiss.

The jetpack is a relatively small addition that makes the world of Magalan far more enjoyable to explore, because it greatly expands your traversal capabilities. Anyone who spent any time "mountain jamming" in Skyrim knows the difference even a small traversal QoL improvement can make. The jetpack operates exactly how you'd think: hitting the jump button while in mid-air causes you to take off in either a long sustained boost (good for gaining height quick) or shorter bursts (good for crossing wide gaps) depending on whether you hold the button down or feather it. This "jump" button is also contextual: normally it makes you do a useless little hop without the second tap to activate the jetpack, but when the prompt appears it will also let you climb up ledges of a certain height (around five to ten feet tall). The jetpack automatically refills when not in use, though there's some nuance to how its fuel gauge works: there's a blue segment of the bar that regenerates quickly, and a small red zone that can be used for an extra little boost when needed that causes the bar to regenerate much more slowly. Ideally, you want to stop at the red zone to recover quickly for the next boost, but there'll be times when you need to give it a little extra juice to get to where you're going. It's also invaluable when leaping off high vantage points, since you can hit the thrusters just before landing to avoid all falling damage. The jetpack's not always the most controllable gizmo - it's very easy to overcorrect if you're attempting to land on a narrow strip of solid ground, like trying to ascend a creaking energy pylon via some small ledges - but it makes exploration of Elex's cracked and crumbling world so much easier to navigate. Better yet, the locations of Elex's more well-hidden loot were determined with the jetpack in mind, so the designers were free to play around with verticality when coming up with hiding spot ideas; thankfully, there's an accessory that helpfully highlights items in the vicinity if you're really struggling with the more elusive goodies.

A half-tip/half-criticism of Elex, which applies to many previous PB games, is that the economy isn't something that becomes an afterthought halfway through the game like it can be in so many other RPGs. While you can forgo buying new weapons for those found strewn about the environment, you'll need money for a great many things: buying new armor (in particular, faction armor, since you don't find that out in the wild); buying recovery potions; and buying new skills from trainers. The last of those is how you acquire new abilities: you're afforded a building point every level, but you have to actively seek out trainers to spend those points and each skill also has certain stat requirements to meet in addition to the training costs. Stats, conversely, don't actually do anything besides allow you to qualify for higher-tier skills: you gain a set amount of HP per level, and there's no encumbrance to make use of the strength stat nor are damage and to-hit values based on stats (the former is purely from whatever weapons you have and skills that modify damage, while the latter isn't applicable in an action RPG like this). Thus, when you spend your attribute points per level, it has to be in service to a skill you're aiming to acquire: to max out all three tiers of the Ranged Attack damage bonus skill, for instance, you'll need a Dexterity value of 85. Skills have a huge range of utility from boosting XP (not as valuable as they seem) to unlocking new active abilities during combat to new spells to lockpicking chests to hacking electronic safes to opening up new dialogue options. There's a skill that reveals enemies on the mini-map radar to avoid ambushes, one that lets you haggle for discounts, one that boosts the attack strength of your companions (or your own if alone), and at least four that allow you to craft items at workbenches. You do kinda need to do a little research to figure out which ones you want and then concoct a plan of action for when and where to spend attribute points to qualify for the most pressing skills as soon as possible. My advice? Get all the animal trophy-taking skills as early as you can, because you're going to need every extra shard of currency they'll bring you.

For all its faults, Elex captured my attention for damn near a month and part of that fascination is due to how it's a game that - at least initially, before you understand anything - is extremely punishing and makes you earn every little victory you can eke out. If you stumbled into a high-level enemy area and still somehow survived with a handful of salvage, there's something rewarding about that even if the salvage ends up being relatively worthless. Finding a powerful weapon and pouring your building points into your stats so that you might one day be able to use it is one of many exercises in delayed gratification that the game can offer, along with returning to said high-level areas fully loaded to bear and wiping out what once gave you so much trouble. Exploration is a no-fuss dream because there's no item limits or encumbrance to hold you back so your forays into the wilderness last as long as you have potions and health to spare, and if you decide to tap out there's unlockable fast travel points to warp to anywhere of note. The map likes to break early and often but will at least keep track of trainers and vendors if you need to drop a waypoint on their heads, and its Google Maps view of the world always gives you some idea of where off the beaten path there's another crumbling wreck of some ancient condo or an abandoned factory ripe for the plucking if not an idea of whether or not there's something big and scary lurking within.

Elex is as compelling and as frequently frustrating as any given Bethesda game, albeit with a lower quality of writing and even more bugs and memory leak issues typical of the Eurojank market, but the biggest and most important distinction is that it doesn't adjust itself constantly to suit your power level: rather, it's a harsh, unfair, and decidedly lethal world that you have to tame gradually, with every small advantage you're able to claim for yourself making that much more of a difference. Elex still has many of the same open world RPG quality-of-life touches you've grown accustomed to in other contemporaries of the genre, but it is not a game that holds your hand at any step of the way and its hostility might prove to be a dealbreaker for the less patient among you. For the rest, you might come to understand - if you aren't already there - how Piranha Bytes has managed to carve out a respectable little niche for itself despite making the same game over and over for at least twenty years.

Ranking: C. (I'll give it props for its ambition, its respect for you as a veteran RPG player, its enigmatic sci-fi setting cobbled together from a whole bunch of sources, its decision to give sunglasses valuable properties thus ensuring that you're always wearing sunglasses in every cutscene, and its huge open world full of pre-apocalypse loot and curios to discover. There's no getting around its many flaws either, chiefly where its combat and relative lack of a budget are concerned, but Piranha Bytes has this charming moxie powering its decades-long quest to recapture Gothic's success with that same formula in slicker and more modern contexts.)

Giga Wrecker

It definitely felt too good to be true - a 2D explormer by Game Freak? With the talent and resources at their disposal? - and my time with Giga Wrecker was at times a sobering one, though there's perhaps enough soul in here to have been retroactively worth the time investment.

Set in the near-future where human civilization has been devastated by an invasion of odd-looking robots named "Ajeet" an imprisoned human survivor named Reika is suddenly broken out of her jail cell by a mysterious young woman. However, this is soon followed by a hurried assassination attempt after the rescuer is spotted and quickly captured by the Ajeet. The dying Reika is later found by a human scientist and is brought back to life by merging her with Ajeet technology, turning her into a cyborg. This new form carries all the advantages of the Ajeet's overwhelming power: most of it is nanotechology-based, allowing Reika to use her cybernetic arm to turn nearby detritus into tools and powerful weaponry. It also allows her to infiltrate the Ajeet's compounds, since she registers as another Ajeet on their surveillance. This gives Reika the opportunity of destroying each Ajeet base of operations to save what remains of the human race.

Reika's nanomachine powers, named ARCHE, are heavily involved in the game's puzzle-platformer format, since they're capable of molding the destructible elements of the landscape in such a way to make progress possible. This might involve cutting off a chunk of rock with a sword to let it fall over a pit as a bridge, tossing a javelin into a wall to use as a foothold, or creating a big trash cube as a step up to a higher platform or a weight to hold down a switch. Giga Wrecker is also heavily physics-based, as these various detached rocks and other debris follow a not-particularly-intuitive set of rules behind their behavior once free of their bindings, along with other environmental effects like toxic gas clouds (which float up and can even lift objects placed on top). As is often the case with mechanics like these, they're very unpredictable and it can be hard to cajole them in such the right way to create the desired effect, but alternative solutions will often arise simply from messing around in the hopes it'll shake out right in a wholly serendipitous manner.

Reika's four abilities are doled out at set intervals and are usually if not always required for the puzzle rooms to follow, but she can also gather nano crystals from the terrain, from fallen enemies, or from special converters that can be spent on a skill tree to enhance her abilities in subtle, non-essential ways. These skill tree enhancements might include increasing her maximum health, increasing the window of invincibility after getting hit, adding new qualities to her extant abilities to make them more useful in combat, or increasing the rate at which she regenerates health (vital for the tougher bosses).

Giga Wrecker's presentation is... surprisingly mixed, given Game Freak's pedigree. For instance, the music is generally excellent and the art design is vivid and colorful while still retaining a certain visual clarity for what you can interact with in any given scenario. Likewise, the camera will helpfully zoom out in larger environments to give you a sense of all the moving parts you have to work with. However, the localization is really spotty - it's even more error-prone than most SNES JRPGs - and I had erratic framerate issues almost the entire time, given the massive variations in the size and complexity of the puzzle rooms. The story goes from making little sense to practically zero once time-travel becomes a factor; the heroine frequently bouncing backwards in time to undo tragic events though somehow leaving all the previous puzzle rooms solved, and the way characters suddenly become cognizant of the time alterations is never really given an explanation beyond the sake of plot contrivance. The sheer frustration caused by the unpredictable nature of the physics puzzles is the game's worst aspect, but there's a certain ramshackle budget Indie nature to the whole game that feels at odds with its source.

I realize Game Freak has been poking their head out of the Pokémon labs every now and again for what I imagine are "refresher" projects - games where they don't have to think about Pikachu every five minutes - and that they've been wildly inconsistent: i.e. for every HarmoKnight there's a Little Town Hero. It's still perplexing why they couldn't devote more effort to these games to get them anywhere near as slick as the Pokémon franchise. Maybe they're like trial runs for new employees before they're allowed anywhere near pokéballs and gyms? Perplexing.

Ranking: D. (Stylistically there's a lot going for Giga Wrecker and it's sort of surprising to see a major Japanese studio jump on the physics-based Indie puzzle-platformer train, but - much like its puzzles once I'm done with them - it all feels hastily thrown together and, if it works at all, it's only through wishes and dreams.)

Old Man's Journey

As has become my usual tactic for this feature, I managed to squeeze in a short, narrative-focused game at the end of the month for a little bit of additional flair. Old Man's Journey is a dialogue-free game about, well, an old man that goes on a journey. It's purposefully cagey about the old man's destination and the purpose for his trek, though the moments where he rests allows him (and the player) to revisit memories of his youth as a rough and tumble sailor bewitched by an attractive redhead and opting to settle down with her. The twists and turns of these backstory snippets eventually hint towards the end goal of this rambling, hirsute gentleman as he strides and rides all manner of vehicles to reach this final location.

The player's role in this odyssey is to help the old man reach the next stage of his travels by changing the elevation of the nearby rolling hills and landscapes. The player can raise or lower several "layers" of hills going from the background to the foreground, and once they connect (there's a circular indication to make it clear) the old man can hop from one to the next. Sometimes you'll want to move the old man to a side area so you can shift the hill he was just standing on, and you'll eventually have to interact with other elements to clear a path: nudging a small herd of sheep to another grazing spot, for instance, or rolling heavy metal wheels down slopes to crash through walls and make a route through. Even when the old man boards a train, the player is required to quickly move hills and bridges to connect the railway (though there's no actual rush as the train will come to a stop and patiently wait for you to fix the route). At set intervals, the old man will stop at a bench and take a breather to collect himself, which often leads to a reminiscence and the next segment of the journey. If there's an issue with this format, it can sometimes be a little awkward to line up the contours of each hill so they fit snugly enough for the old man to want to cross them, with some seemingly arbitrary limitations placed on how high or low you can move certain bluffs and slopes, but no single instance is all that difficult to ascertain and at worst it's a few moments of trial and error.

As expected from the Indie set, the old man's story is both bittersweet and earnestly told. There's tragedy mixed in with élan, of regrets and missed opportunities, and there's the knowledge that whatever was in the letter that spurred this journey, it's not necessarily going to be a happy circumstance given the old man's reaction when he first reads it. Visually and musically, the game nails the emotive tones its going for and while it has a simple, cartoonish aesthetic it does not always exhibit a chirpy mood. That said, the game also has a mild sense of playfulness, as you can tap on various background objects for some amusing incidental animations similar to those in games produced by Amanita Design (Samorost, Botanicula). The memories, which are mostly static images of the old man's previous years as a less-old man, are frequently stunning with a great deal of detail.

The game overall should take about an hour to complete so it's certainly not a long journey, but it's the sort of lunchtime break-sized adventure that packs its small frame with plenty of adventure and charm and when one such game drops into my lap entirely for free - Old Man's Journey was part of the Racial Justice and Equality bundle, as befitting its empathetic nature - it's hard to say no to the small time investment it asks for.

Ranking: C. (A more versed media critic can better cleverly pick apart the semiotics and themes of the old man's journey than I could here, but I'd rather keep this review short and sweet like the game itself. It's brief, not too tough, and while it doesn't reach the emotional peaks and valleys as something like Rakuen - another 2017 weepie - due to being dialogue-free, I still felt just the smallest pang of sympathy in my cold dead heart once it was over.)

I'm not sure what it is about the grim dystopias and bright neon lights of cyberpunk fiction, since I'm certainly not computer literate enough to follow half of the hacking nonsense that accompanies the genre, but I find myself drawn to that aesthetic again and again. Clearly I'm not the only one who feels this way, if there's a robust industry of narratives - video game and otherwise - spun within that same milieu. I guess it's due to our countenancing an ever more likely future run by invasive technologies spearheaded by unscrupulous corporations happy to eliminate privacy and personal liberties for the sake of revenue and an illusion of stability, or maybe because that cyborgs are cool and do sick shit like throw dudes through buildings with their biomechanical arms.

Studio V's Dry Drowning has more of the former than the latter, admittedly, but it's still very much beholden to the mores and tropes of the cyberpunk narrative genre as we've all come to perceive it. Set in the fictional European city-state of Nova Polemos in 2066, which has a fully state-controlled media blackout regarding the rest of the world like North Korea and extremely oppressive rules for population control and immigration, the story follows a reviled private detective with a ridiculous name, Mordred Foley, and his partner and associate Hera Kairis as they are offered a lifeline after a few dry years of clients. The duo had become personae non grata with the press and police alike after Mordred's dogged (and somewhat vainglorious) pursuit to put a notorious serial killer behind bars led to falsifying evidence that eventually sentenced two probably innocent suspects to death. However, this lifeline is from the country's proto-fascist, populist political party: clear its would-be presidential candidate of a scandal-laden murder and the rewards will be plentiful. Just in case Mordred had second thoughts about this deal with the devil, the killer's twisted M.O. turns out to be all too familiar to the biggest expert on the worst serial killer the country had ever seen...

Dry Drowning is a conventional deductive adventure game, albeit one that has less focus on inventory puzzles and more on paying attention to crime scenes and interrogations for the sake of tense denouement sequences where you're expected to figure out the sequence of events (and the probable killer) with the evidence you've acquired. Mordred has this uncanny ability to see "masks of lies" on suspects and witnesses: a macabre twisted vision of their own falsehoods distorting their faces and stories. The sequences where you break through these masks are not too dissimilar to the "psyche locks" of the Ace Attorney series: only by forcing the other party to confront the facts you present can you hope to wring the truth out of them, though you can only make so many errors in the process. In addition, Dry Drowning absolutely loves its difficult decisions: the type of no-win dilemmas that made Telltale Games a force to be reckoned with once upon a time. This game has more Morton's forks than the Koopalings' cutlery drawer and loves to call back to decisions the player has made, either to remind them of how much greener the grass may have otherwise been or to otherwise twist the knife as the dire consequences of these choices come to light. Many choices are actually immaterial - they'll produce a few lines of alternative dialogue, perhaps, but won't affect the story in a major way - while some will send the game off on a totally different vector, with the lives of major characters on the line.

The way the game handles its decision matrix is by smartly compartmentalizing the events of the game into discrete chapters, each of which is relevant to the overarching story but otherwise present separate cases with potentially separate culprits. Each is invariably a murder committed in the serial killer's traditional style - the killer, known as Pandora, always recreates the scene to match one of the Greek myths, such as Prometheus giving humanity the gift of fire and being punished for his insolence against the gods - and each involves gathering clues at the crime scene, talking to suspects, breaking down the masks of lies, and cornering the mastermind. A big decision then concludes the chapter, dragging you closer to one of three finales.

For the most part, Dry Drowning looks slick and revels in its cyberpunk noir themes by accompanying each of the dazzling neon backdrops with comparatively restrained monochrome character portraits. The UI goes for an elaborate future hexagon aesthetic even if its buttons can be a bit small and awkward to navigate, and the art and sound design is uniformly excellent. Where it falls down is in the English localization, despite having four credited names attached to it (the game was developed in Italy, with Italian being its default language). It starts small, with errors that would be the natural result of a non-native speaker (like calling drawers "draws"; a relatively simple mistake if English isn't your first language, but an inexplicable one if it is - and the game calls them "draws" several times so it's not a single isolated typo) and later becoming so egregious that it frequently misinterprets what characters are trying to say, sometimes suggesting the exact opposite. There's also ableist slurs casually thrown around, another case of either fan-translation-level insensitivity or another non-native speaker error, and syntax in particular is more often the casualty of any given scene than the game's creatively massacred victims. Normally, I don't come down too hard on so-so localizations, but this is an adventure game where narrative and dialogue play much more important, focal roles than in other game genres. It also has this real melodramatic, cheesy noir angle it's aiming for - think Max Payne's metaphorically overwrought monologues - that can't help tripping over these mistakes.

As for the whole decision matrix thing, it's never been an approach I've cared for due to the amount of FOMO anxiety it generates and I like it even less in detective fiction where there's only ever one solution and one circuitous breadcrumb trail that leads to it. If I have to play the game several times over to see variations in the characters and political upheaval appearing in the periphery of these cases, it's not going to change the fact that the cases themselves - where sussing them out constitutes the entirety of the gameplay - are going to play out the same each time. If you definitively know who all the movers and shakers (and killers, most importantly) are after the first playthrough, there's no longevity to be found in subsequent runs. It's why even the Ace Attorney games, which I adore, are always one-and-done affairs. It's perhaps better - and maybe even intended - to approach Dry Drowning's format by carving out a single route through all the decisions proffered and accepting whatever fate awaits at the conclusion as "your story."

Otherwise, the game is one of those stylistic exercises that clearly understands the genre and doesn't shy away from its heavier themes, though is in turn scuppered by some fundamental issues relating to its structure and localization.

(I hear the more recent Switch port is better though, and probably its localization too, so use that information as you will. For the record I played the version available on Itch.io, since it was part of that bundle.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

It's never too late for a mid-year check-in, that's what I always say. Though maybe in this case, it's a year which we don't so much check in but never check out, Hotel California style, since we're still all stuck indoors twiddling our thumbs while watching all the morally vacuous and scientifically disinclined people gallivant outside as they dance and sing and spit into each other's maskless mouths. May their deaths be quick and relatively painless.

That said, it's been a good year for getting in more backlog gaming and I'm forever tinkering around with ideas for future content. There's a real ambitious N64-themed idea that I was batting around as a tie-in for its recent 25th anniversary, and I've of course started several since 2021 began, but for the most part I've been playing it safe: with so many killer years recently, in particular that 2017-2019 period just prior to the world ending, I've let so many great entries in my favorite franchises and "wheelhouse genres" stack up like a precarious Jenga tower. I've also found the time for a few major bucket list items too, largely because they've getting long-delayed remakes or sequels showing up out of the blue this year.

Anyway, I've loosely structured a bunch of global and personal updates for this check-in, so I hope you stick around and find something that intrigues you. If nothing else, I might remind you of some great games that could already be sitting underappreciated in your own libraries, digital or physical.

2021: A Land of Contrasts

There's a remarkable fortitude behind the video game industry that's allowed it to not only persevere during this business-shuttering pandemic but even prosper, as one of the few industries to not necessarily need its employees to be sequestered into a single interior location (if anything they're better off now, if this Activision Blizzard lawsuit is any indication) but is very much benefitted by having its customers in that same boat. With most other social activities curtailed, new video games have continued to be released and celebrated for brightening a darker time in our lives.

Naturally, as a parsimonious son-of-a-gun, I've yet to partake of any this year's new batch of interactive media as I wait for discounts; however, I have been steadily building a wishlist of 2021 highlights and it certainly isn't short, to my ongoing relief. Here's a prospective top ten (in alphabetical order) that I hope to manifest into reality within the near future:

• Chicory: A Colorful Tale (June): An adorable Zelda-like where you can draw wieners everywhere, what's not to like?
• Death's Door (July): An adorable Zelda-like without the wiener doodles, but some challenging Soulslike bosses instead.
• Ender Lilies: Quietus of the Knights (July): Talking of Souls, I just completed Blasphemous and am looking for more torturously tough platformers. Ender Lilies definitely fits the bill.
• The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles (July): A twofer of Ace Attorney games I never expected to see localized, at least not officially. Glad to know I'm not done with the series yet.
• New Pokémon Snap (April): Loved the original but there was plenty of room for it to grow. Sounds like this is a sequel built for the fans first and foremost.
• Persona 5 Strikers (February): Musou games can vary wildly in quality, but hearing how much Strikers feels like an extension of the original game has my interest piqued.
• Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (June): It may be a while before I purchase a PS5, but this is the first exclusive to make a strong case for it. Provided I ever find one.
• Scarlet Nexus (June): An anime action-RPG even Jeff Gerstmann seemed to enjoy. If something non-Phantasy Star can win him over, that's worth a closer look.
• Strangeland (May): After Unavowed I'm ready for more Wadjet, especially the weirder stuff.
• Ys IX: Monstrum Nox (February): The newest of my beloved Ys games saw a localization in February and it remains my number one priority for this year.

Runners-Up: Eldest Souls, Record of Lodoss War: Deedlit in Wonder Labyrinth, Last Stop, Neo: The World Ends with You, World's End Club.

And here's another top ten for the months to come:

• Deathloop (September): Another PS5 exclusive, and another potential reason to jump into the next generation sooner rather than later. I trust Arkane won't lose their worldbuilding touch in the game's mad dashes.
• Kena: Bridge of Spirits (August): Could be an incredible cinematic platformer of a Beyond Good and Evil calibre, or it could be another visually impressive mediocrity like Ary and the Secret of Seasons. Counting on the former.
• Life is Strange: True Colors (September): I should probably play 2 first, but more Life is Strange is always good. Can't wait to romance the D&D dork from Before the Storm.
• Lost Judgment (September): It may be the last Yagami game ever, so I'm determined to enjoy this sequel while hoping they've improved on the original's weaker aspects (please no more mortal wounds).
• Metroid Dread (October): We're finally getting Metroid 4. Psyched this is happening, hope the finished game isn't quite as anodyne and clean as it looks now. Gimme them grubby metroids.
• Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous (September): Another game for which I'll be playing its predecessor in preparation. Could be a busted mess at launch like the first, so I'll wait and see.
• Psychonauts 2 (August): The hype for this long-awaited sequel is off the charts, though who's to say if the formula still holds up?
• Skatebird (August): Skating birbs are cute. Also, it feels like skating games are finally hitting their stride again, and I'm not talking about Shaun White's beloved gum.
• Tales of Arise (September): The seventeenth Tales game has a long legacy to live up to, but it's a consistent franchise and I don't doubt it'll deliver.
• WarioWare: Get It Together! (September): Who'd have thought we'd be getting another WarioWare this year? Here's hoping the microgames won't carry a macro price.

Runners-Up: 12 Minutes, No More Heroes III, Sable, Axiom Verge 2, Hollow Knight: Silksong (provided the last two even happen this year).

What Have You Been Playing Then, If Not 2021 Games?

Well, Mr. Sassy Rhetorical, I've been focusing on games involved in a number of blog features for the most part. I'll be starting the thirtieth Indie Game of the Week in short order, I've still been hammering away at a dwindling list of 2017 stragglers for Dredge of Seventeen, took on a batch of '00s games for May Millennials, and I've planned out a virtual Books Kinokuniya's worth of visual novel playthroughs for VN-ese Waltz. Some highlights out of all those include: Finding Paradise, Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice, Painkiller: Black Edition, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, Blasphemous, and The House in Fata Morgana.

Some of the long-standing backlog stuff I've been working through includes Judgment (just in time for its sequel in September), The World Ends With You (just in time for its sequel this month), AI: The Somnium Files (which just had a sequel announced, but only after my playthrough), Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (ditto), and Ys: Memories of Celceta (which I played instead of the new Ys IX).

My favorite game of the year so far is... hmm. Dragon Quest XI and Ys: Memories of Celceta were both exceptional, but I might give it to Tales of Graces F for completely bowling me over. Graces F had been my "back up" Tales game, sitting in my PS3 HDD for years, since I'd always heard mixed things and usually had more pressing/acclaimed Tales entries to check out like Xillia or Berseria. My plan to play Graces F this year was prompted by another imminent release - September's Tales of Arise, the first Tales entry in almost four years - but Graces F proved itself as one of the most exciting entries in the series on pure mechanical depth alone. Possessed of ingenious quality-of-life features inexplicably dropped from later games, Graces F balanced a modified Linear Motion Battle combat system equipped to allow for more elaborate arte combos with its permissive regenerating mana equivalent along with a cooking pot that essentially ran on magic, allowing it to spit out mid- and post-battle support meals and curatives on a constant basis without the need to head back to vendors to restock (though the mana powering it would eventually run out without refills). Even its weaker elements - the story and characters - weren't so bad to detract from the experience; they were mostly just mediocre enough to not add to it either (besides Malik, who was a lot of fun as an older "I'm just going to keep messing around with these kids" type, and Hubert, who had one of the coolest weapons and mystic artes in the series so far).

We're not done with 2021 yet though, and I've no shortage of material to play and blog about even if I don't touch any new releases this year. (Maybe it's time I considered rebooting my Sega Mega Drive wiki-spelunking?)

Other 2021 Highlights

• Guilty Treasures looks to be some esoteric, well-edited fun and a return to the site's prior focus on the unloved and underappreciated. Rorie's being tight-lipped about his pick when his turn comes around; we suspect it's something more obscure than his expected choices however. Excited to find out what other contractor features the site has in store for us - the site's planning to roll out several more before the end of summer.
• Nextlander's been a little uneven so far, mostly regurgitating the type of content those three fellows made at GB, but I'm anticipating some novel ideas from them in the future and possibly a few more staff members to mix it up and offer some fresh perspective. I'll pop by occasionally to see whatever new FMV monstrosity Vinny managed to dig up, or Alex playing through a Yakuza, or Brad... doing whatever it is Brad does.
• Dan Ryckert, unsurprisingly, continues to kill it with his Twitch streams, demonstrating what his fully unleashed creativity can do. The sound alerts can make those live shows an ordeal but his enthusiasm for gaming and dumb gimmicks hasn't diminished any. Speaking of which, his Fire Escape podcast with Mary Kish and Mike Mahardy hits that right flavor of hang out energy, though episodes could be a little shorter.
• Recent seasons of Castlevania, Thunderbolt Fantasy, Loki, WandaVision, The Expanse, and Invincible were all a tremendous amount of uncomplicated fun. I've been trying to fit in more anime too, including the 2019 adaptation of Dororo and the somewhat disposable silliness of Dragon Goes House-Hunting, Heaven's Design Team, and I've Been Killing Slimes for 300 Years and Maxed Out My Level. In the next couple of months I'm looking forward to that Marvel What If animated show - an opportunity to get real crazy with all that established MCU lore - and the next seasons of Archer and Taskmaster (neither of which are Marvel affiliated, though they sound like they should be). I swear I'll start watching TV shows intended for discerning adults any day now.

Stop me if you've heard this one: after some unnamed cataclysmic event renders the surface unliveable, the survivors go underground to form subterranean societies built out of the bones of old world infrastructure like metro stations, tunnels, and bunkers. Then again Stygian Software's UnderRail isn't all that focused on an original premise; rather, the game operates as an homage to bleak, claustrophobic, post-apocalyptic Eastern European franchises like S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and Metro (Stygian Software are themselves Slavic, hailing from Belgrade, Serbia) - drawing from the Eastern Bloc's desolate and violent history as part of the Soviet Union - along with the first two Fallout games from which UnderRail borrows its isometric perspective, turn-based "action point" combat system, and vaguely familiar character development. As a new resident of one of the more stable bastions of civilization in the southern regions of the Underrail - a massive interconnected network of tunnels and zones - you are sent out to prove your worth to this colony with a series of missions each incrementally more complex and dangerous than the last. Eventually, I suspect, this current progression loop will be interrupted by some manner of calamity and the game will go off the rails as it were, but for the time being I've been hunting vermin, poking through crates and lockers, and barely holding my own against roving bands of lurkers and brigands.

UnderRail's most interesting gameplay choice is the alternative experience system it offers. Referred to as "Oddities" by the new game menu, under this setting the player will only earn XP by finding specific objects out in the field. These could be treasures found in containers in remote parts of the world, or they might be unusual trophies dropped from enemies. Higher-earning oddities will, of course, only drop from stronger foes or located in guarded, locked, or concealed locations. Each type of oddity has a set limit to how much XP they can provide: collecting more instances of that oddity thereafter will have no effect. XP cannot be rewarded any other way with this system, excepting occasional rewards for major quests: you won't earn any from defeating enemies or successful skill checks like lockpicking and hacking. In theory, this system is a little too abstract to make a whole lot of sense. In praxis, however, it forces you to think more like a scavenger; to make difficult risk vs. reward decisions about going off the beaten track despite the greater danger, or to avoid conflicts you know won't produce any valuable oddities (either because you've already exhausted that enemy type's oddity supply, or they don't drop any to begin with). There are still spoils you can obtain from such foes, but if you're already well-stocked and/or trying to preserve precious ammo for any crucial battles ahead it may well be a better plan to drop into stealth and avoid the encounter completely. It's definitely in the wheelhouse of a loot-loving player like myself who now has more reason than ever to invest in subterfuge skills like the aforementioned lockpicking and console hacking.

The more hours I put into UnderRail the more I've come to realize that specialist builds will play a much more important role for the mid- to late-game than in other genre contemporaries. While UnderRail strongly resembles early Fallout its difficulty curve has been much steeper, perhaps more in-line with a Piranha Bytes open-world RPG like Gothic, and it thus behooves the player to come up with a character development plan early on and then min-max their way towards it with each new level. That isn't to say that versatility isn't viable, but it seems prudent to pick a couple of stats as your "majors" and build a character around that focal point: high strength and constitution benefits a tanky melee type but not so much any other playstyle, and likewise going for the game's mage equivalent of psi powers means you should spend the handful of bonus stat points in intelligence and wisdom and, skills-wise, work with those that are boosted by those two stats like those from the crafting (making your own gear and meds) and social (persuasion or mercantile) categories to give yourself an edge in conflicts. The chief reason to specialize are the feats, however: many of the best ones, such as the highly damaging "snipe" feat for rifle-users, require some punishingly high stat requirements and there's only so many building points you have to start with and can acquire later (five points during character creation and, I believe, about four or five total from levelling up to the cap). The feats are what you base your builds on, as the powerful ones are what will allow you to remain formidable in later conflicts against better-equipped opponents. However, there'll be fights that you can't approach in your preferred way - say, if you're the stealth assassin type, there might come a surprise ambush where dipping into the shadows isn't an option - so it doesn't hurt to have a few contingencies in place. Specialize, but don't necessarily put all your eggs in one basket, is one lesson I've taken away from my time with UnderRail.

Combat will obviously be the ultimate smell test for a valid build, and the game has enough options even with just four weapon skill categories for a wide range of possible approaches: a gunner might have an assault rifle for range and shotguns for close-quarters, which both fall under the same skill category of "guns," while a dextrous rogue might consider the versatility of weapons that qualify for the "throwing" skill, such as poison-tipped throwing knives, energy-sapping caltrops that keep enemies at bay, or grenades for crowd control. I went with a gun type, not realizing that ammo is sold at a premium - UnderRail's not unlike the Metro franchise in that and several other respects - but there exist methods to mitigate the costs of keeping all my firearms fed with gun food, between maintaining and alternating a variety of gun/ammo types to making my own bullets in my downtime. Like Fallout, the most important universal stat for combat is the dexterity equivalent, regardless of your build: this is because dexterity determines the maximum number of action points you have to spend, which might make the difference between attacking twice or three times per turn - a significant advantage. A psi type meanwhile might not have to worry about weapons at all: they'll have enough debuffs and psychokinesis abilities to control the battlefield without ever drawing a gun, though it might take a few levels before they can rely on their brain magic alone.

UnderRail's punitive difficulty does make it a little more linear than I'd otherwise like; as even with the open-world aspect and a very robust mapping system that allows for personalized notes (such as "locked door (lockpick 30)" for future skill checks) it's often too risky to explore too far afield from the current quest objective, though you can certainly chance it if you're quiet enough. On oddities mode, sneaking your way past enemies too strong for your current level might prove more than valuable for swiping a few extra XP items and giving you an edge in the story missions to come, provided you can make it back out in one piece. The mapping system is strangely selective about what information it decides to retain automatically - it'll tell you which enemy types can be encountered there or if there's a vendor in the area, but it doesn't make it clear how many exits there are and in which directions - but I have found it awkward to bite off more than I can chew between the obstacles that are item degradation and encumbrance (sadly very present factors) and the moderately rare/expensive avenues for healing, unless you're patient enough (so to speak) to backtrack to the hub town for a free doctor's visit. Like a lot of these Eastern European grim post-apocalyptic RPGs, don't expect there to be a whole lot of conveniences and hand-outs; part of their whole aesthetic is fighting tooth and nail for every scrap of progress and wealth. (It isn't quite as hostile to new players as I'm making it sound, but with all the protag deaths I've racked up it's best not to underestimate it either. If you have your doubts, there's an easy mode that greatly ameliorates the risk of demise by significantly boosting the protagonist's health.)

I'm looking forward to playing more UnderRail and seeing what I can get away with; my recent playthrough of Elex was spurred on by the same rewarding sense of overcoming a significant number of hurdles despite the stacked odds (though to UnderRail's credit its hurdles don't include Elex's poor combat engine and technical faults). I'm curious to see how much further this current mission-based structure will go and if this home base will remain so throughout the game - I hope so, since I'm storing away a lot of heavy components and excess weaponry in my personal quarters - and I'm enjoying exploring the game's many systems for loot gathering, progressing through dangerous areas with stealth and the limited resources at my disposal, figuring out how deep I want to get into the crafting systems, and agonizing over every point spent during level-up in the hopes I haven't gimped myself in the long-term (which is more fun than it sounds, admittedly). As with Basilisk's Eschalon and Spiderweb's many tactical RPGs, there's a distinct sense that the devs believe that the golden age of CRPGs was some time ago and that there's a rich vein in those archaic styles still worth mining in full, adapting modern quality-of-life enhancements to sand off the rougher edges. Any player with a similar philosophy - the Dave Sniders amongst us - should feel right at home in the dark tunnels of UnderRail.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far.)

Decided to spend the second half of 2021 checking out some renowned visual novels. Sometimes my ideas aren't any more elaborate than that. I've tried to discuss the following games in as spoiler-free a manner as possible, with a very spoilerish section at the end for my final thoughts on where the story goes.

I'm just glad I picked a cheerful game for this inaugural entry. The House in Fata Morgana (first released on PC in 2012 by Novectacle, later localized for PC in 2016 and followed by some console ports) is one of those tragic Gothic romance type of affairs where everything that can go wrong, does. Set in a mansion cut off from space and time, the unnamed protagonist is initially guided to various rooms by a friendly if dispassionate maid to witness events that transpired in the building throughout history. The story continues to evolve and shift beyond this structure, however, as you dig further into truth behind the place. It is... an emotionally draining game, but overall worth it if its particular Gothic style isn't something you're turned off by immediately. I will say it gets pretty darn violent, if a bunch of androgynous folks agonizing over unrequited love isn't enough of a pull.

Like a few of the visual novels I've encountered - I'm by no means an expert, though I've dabbled in recent years - The House in Fata Morgana is a largely passive playthrough but for a few decision prompts. The choices can either be the type of dialogue prompt where you have to exhaust all of them to move on, or those where one or more options will lead to an early "dead end" (usually literally so) or alternative ending. There is a true ending, but you have to persevere somewhat to get there. Also, like many visual novels, the experience is improved immeasurably by its presentation: the art and music have a melancholy beauty to them that perfectly suit the prose passing across the screen. There's also an emphasis on sound design where the sound effects serve to draw you into the stories on a more visceral level. The game recommends headphones to enjoy the experience as it was intended, and it's advice well heeded.

The structure of The House in Fata Morgana has a loosely connected but linear approach where you witness a group of hapless residents of the titular manse across time in the form of separate chapters. Each has the same viewpoint character: The Maid, the one you meet as soon as the game begins and is your ever-present companion throughout. Existing in each time period, mostly in a minor role, she talks about the events and people in a largely passive voice. The gaps in-between will often provide an opportunity to explore the mansion in its "inert" state, absent its mortal occupants. The only other constant is a white-haired girl, only ever referred to as such for most of the game, possessed of impossible beauty and innocence who nonetheless becomes a catalyst of each chapter's protagonist's undoing. Despite the huge gaps of time between each chapter - usually at least a century - the maid and the white-haired girl remain constants throughout.

I do think it is an exceptionally told story, in part because of the ways it subverts the format it establishes early on and, in so doing, your expectations. The vignettes are all, invariably, about doomed love stories; about bloodshed and insanity and miscommunicated feelings, and the deeper supernatural mystery that ties them all together and becomes the focus of the game's latter chapters. It continues to escalate towards the end, with twist after twist about the true nature of what you've seen and heard so far. Of course, to say more would be to say too much, but it's a game that understands what this specific format of storytelling can do, and - more's the point - what it alone can do.

The presentation is truly top-notch. Along with the ethereal and slightly otherworldly aesthetic of artist Moyataro's work, which captures the visceral terror of the game's grislier scenes just as adroitly as the gentle elegance of its heroines and the game's many quieter and sadder moments, the music and sound design does so much to enhance the atmosphere of each scene and lends additional personality to its characters. The soundtrack has songs in Portuguese, Latin, French, and a manner of non-verbal lyrical vocalizations that can occasionally sound downright Bjorkian (especially this track, which is the theme for the character of Pauline) and many are used as leitmotifs for both the era settings and for specific characters within them. The sound design is mostly radio play style foley work; once so effective long ago in separating Chunsoft's early "sound novels" from the chaff and still put to equally potent use in this more contemporary game to immerse the player/reader.

What follows are two spoiler-blocked sections:

1. The first attempts to describe some of the ways, mechanically, the game subverts its standard UI and features. While this section won't reveal any story twists in major detail, it could be a surprise players might want to discover on their own.
2. The second fully digs into the story, especially the ending, and the way it tackles difficult subject matter in a manner sympathetic to the victims. Recommended only for those who have already completed the game themselves or don't intend to.

1:

2:

This one's going to be tough to write. The game covers a lot of very dire themes throughout its run time - sexual assault, racism, physical and emotional abuse and manipulation, intersexphobia, psychoses, betrayal, and a whole lot of murder and violence - but handles it all with the right amount of sympathy for those affected. It is also, despite all the hardship and suffering, ultimately a hopeful game where enough compassion and empathy can eventually change the tune of even the most vengeful, hardened spirit. Reconciliation and forgiveness are powerful themes in horror fiction - even if Morgana doesn't fully commit to either, and nor should she - and it provides the game a pleasing absence of easy answers to difficult problems or a pure black and white morality (even if certain characters certainly hew close to one or the other).

I have to commend its structure first and foremost. As you move through the first four "chapters" with its frequently changing protagonists and supporting casts, you might be tricked into thinking that the whole game will follow suit with perhaps a short denouement in whatever counts as the story's present where it's just the protagonist and the maid. That the game really goes on a wild tear after the fourth story, quickly revealed to be a complete fabrication, is where it also ingeniously ties together the purpose of the isolated vignettes, the true identities of the ageless maid and the reincarnating white-haired ingénue, and the accursed witch at the heart of the mansion's malevolent enchantment.

I particularly liked the characterization of Michel, as impossibly purehearted as he was, and the way you get three different versions of his story before you get a full sense of the type of man he is: the fabrication with the white-haired girl and his lethal touch "curse" (symbolic of his true condition, and the reluctance of letting people get close to him); the version seen through Gisele's eyes as a standoffish but ultimately thoughtful and loyal partner; and Michel's own recount, which goes into his tragic, confused childhood and strained familial relationships. It's odd to think that the narrative's most important character, at least in terms of its focus, is one that is entirely absent for at least the first half of the game (longer, if we discount the false version). Gisele herself is a heartbreaking but appealing deuteragonist; the bait and switch about her vaguely sinister "The Maid" persona possibly being the true culprit is masterfully handled. The rest of the cast elicit a strange mix of sympathy and acrimony - except Maria, who kicked ass even as a villain, and poor old Pauline and her fatal hybristophilia.

In summary:

I'm not sure I'm in any mood to argue whether or not Jupiter Corporation - which enjoys a close relationship with Nintendo, but is presently not owned by them as far as I am aware - counts as an Indie studio, as this insouciance is largely inspired by all this sweltering weather. Of course, being stuck in a high-humidity soup for a month straight is a far sight from the tragic floods of Germany and Belgium or the spontaneously combusting towns of Canada, but it's enough to sweat out any desire to tackle anything too mentally taxing while I stew in my own juices. Picross is, fortunately, about as far from mentally taxing as you can get: that's not to say the puzzles can't get tough, but picross is the type of puzzle game where absolute adherence to a set of rules is paramount for solving them. In that sense, they're not too dissimilar to the likes of Minesweeper or Mahjong Solitaire: either have a plan going in, or fail enough times that the right strategy eventually emerges. That means that for a seasoned player of any of the above, a session can allow you to stick your brain on auto-pilot while you listen to podcasts or city pop YouTube compilations.

Picross S3 is the third of Jupiter's picross series to be released on the Nintendo Switch, hence the S in its title (much like a bag of Skittles, it used to be all E-numbers and little else when the series was on the 3DS). Jupiter's been at this Nintendo picross gig for a while now - one of their earliest games was Mario's Super Picross, a 1995 Super Famicom game, and its Game Boy partner - and they've been fairly regular with these Switch iterations every year since the system's launch back in 2017: they're even a little ahead of its annual schedule now, with the recently released Picross S6. However, my issue with Jupiter's S-series in the past - as I have indeed played and completed the first two - is that while it has an undoubtedly slick interface, it's a whole lot of style over substance and far too many corners are cut for a £9 Picross game. I was hoping Picross S3 bucks the trend I've seen emerging after the first two, and it ultimately both does and does not.

The one big issue, and one that continues to be the case here, relate to the game's "Mega Picross" puzzles. Rather than a larger puzzle made of several smaller Picross (it has those too, but with the less germane name of "Clip Picross") Mega Picross puzzles are these interesting variants where the number clues for two rows are sometimes mushed together, making them much harder to figure out. (For a primer on the basic rules of picross, a.k.a. nonograms, check its GB wiki page. I've reviewed too many of these games to want to explain them again. Apologies, but like I said, it's been a low-effort kinda week.) Said issue is that all the Mega Picross puzzles are just the regular puzzles in a slightly different order, rather than new puzzles. Not only is that some major corner-cutting, but playing one set after the other makes it much easier to intuit these puzzles: something you shouldn't, technically, be able to do. A well-crafted picross puzzle requires no estimation or guesswork, despite what some sources will have you believe, but it's too tempting to recreate lines as you remember them from the identical puzzle you completed several hours (or days) ago. Only a few of us have the sort of eidetic recall to perfectly memorize a puzzle, but the process of completing each one - identifying which lines are the easiest to ascertain and working outwards from there - tends to be consistent and will trigger faint memories all the same.

For Picross S, all you had were the standard puzzles and the identical but harder Mega Picross to solve, which left that first iteration with a sour first impression. Picross S2 added the Clip Picross - the aforementioned large-scale mosaics where you solve multiple smaller puzzles to produce a massive image - but they were few in number and weren't sufficient value-adds. Picross S3 adds a new Color Picross mode, one that adds a level of new complexity the previous two were lacking. There's only a handful of these also - thirty in total, compared to the 150 normal/Mega puzzles - but each iteration has been making a stronger case for itself than the last. The Color Picross puzzles have some smart integration to work with the limited tools of the Switch controller - you switch around the palette with a face button, with a handy icon that follows you around to indicate which color you're on, while the other face buttons have the same "X" (for marking tiles that aren't in use) and "O" (for marking tiles that may or may not be active, mostly used when working out overlaps) functions as they do in the normal monochrome puzzles. This is a much more elegant style than I've seen in other color-based picross puzzles, that throw the X and O forms in along with all the hues, meaning you have to switch all the way over to them to use them each time.

The game is also replete with accessibility options, many of which are irritatingly active as defaults even for those who wanted to go into the puzzles "pure" and without guidance. Importantly, the clean mode - that is, with all the assist modes off - is the kind that won't inform you of mistakes and subsequently won't immediately punish you for them, which has been a personal bête noire with puzzles in other Picross games. You can still dig yourself into a hole if you make an error, since they tend to snowball rapidly, but at least I don't have to hear an irritating buzz in my ear and a notice that I can no longer "perfect" the current puzzle without starting over.

I might not have recommended the Switch series of Jupiter's Picross prior to S3, but this is the first entry to make a strong case for itself. I've played enough picross in my lifetime that I've come to appreciate the bells and whistles and variants that the more out-there picross games - PictoQuest, for instance, was a flawed but noble attempt to reinvent the format with bolted-on RPG mechanics, Murder By Numbers heightened its simple puzzles and a lackluster interface with a mature and compelling storytelling framing device, and the free-to-play Pokémon Picross was a bundle of smart ideas let down by its obnoxious panhandling - that another selection of basic picross puzzles increasing in complexity isn't enough any more. I've stuck with Jupiter for a long time - heck, it's only because of them that I even know what a picross is (though I'm sure I would've picked it up elsewhere eventually) - so I know they're capable of more interesting games than this. I am intrigued by their upcoming Sega-focused Picross S: Mega Drive & Mark III Edition and am slightly more likely to pick up Picross S4, S5, and S6 when they next go on sale, but I'll continue to call these genre veterans out for any and all corner-cutting and coasting I find in these sub-annual releases.

Rating: 4 out of 5. (So far. I'm not expecting much to change in the game's latter half though.)

I realize I'm playing a lot of explormers lately, even for me, but I think whomever suggested that present Indie developers are smitten with the format might've had a point. There's just more and more coming out every year than ever before; maybe the Unity developers recently came up with some effective map tech and everyone saw that as an opportunity to get their Metroid on. Whatever reasons others might have for developing an explormer in recent years, at least with Tiny Dangerous Dungeons you know the score almost immediately from the way it looks: it was clearly designed for a Game Boy game jam by the way it conforms itself to that trademark tri-flavored pea soup green palette and tiny resolution.

A bite-sized explormer with a whole lot of lo-fi charm, Tiny Dangerous Dungeons tosses you into a dungeon (a tiny, dangerous one, natch) with no map or direction but it doesn't take long to get your bearings. True to its name, the dungeon is barely a few dozen rooms and your protagonist already starts with all the jumping prowess they're going to need; the upgrades instead tend to range from the map (there is one, you just don't have it to start with; which makes some sense in retrospect) to throwing knives as a means of defending yourself, to a few well-hidden health upgrades. To highlight the sort of truncation we're dealing with there's one upgrade that lets you walk on water that you need for exactly one barrier: after that, the rest of the level design uses lava pools as the pitfalls instead.

The map is extremely useful for navigation: it not only delineates all the rooms, including the secret ones, but will indicate where there are items still yet to be found. Perhaps a map that reveals too much you could say, but I'm starting to feel like the more accommodating the map the better; and it still won't tell you if those items are accessible right now, or if there's still some upgrade you need to reach them. With the secret areas, you know where they are in relation to the other rooms but not how to get there: whether you need to head up, down, or from the side.

Aesthetically, while the game has those Game Boy limitations it makes some smart use of them. One secret door reminded me a similar secret in Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3, one of the finest platformers for the original GB system. It involves making a door-shape out of the animated two-tone waterfall flowing in that part of the map. It's easy to miss if you aren't looking for it (as stated above, you only have approximations for secret rooms) but the sort of thing that only really works with a limited color palette. It also understands that the limitations of the resolution means you have to either build a game around sprites that take up a lot of room, or make smaller sprites that aren't nearly as expressive; Tiny Dangerous Dungeons opts for the former, making some of the (intended) difficulty of the game working your way around enemies during the first half where you have no means to defeat them. The platforming is precise enough, and the sprites have very clear hitbox boundaries, that it thankfully only presents a moderate challenge.

The game makes great use of its limitations, but the fact remains that it is constrained not only by its format but whatever strict time limit it was developed under as part of its game jam. Technically it works as intended - this isn't to imply rushing through development caused too many bugs, and the developer would've ironed those out after the fact if they planned to release it commercially regardless - but what I mean is that there's not a whole lot of meat to Tiny Dangerous Dungeons. There's no currency, no collectibles, no RPG mechanics, a handful of expected upgrades and key items, and really not much in the way of any notable features or mechanics beyond jumping over enemies and going through doors. It's definitely an appealing morsel of a game, but it works best as a stylistic exercise - a tech demo of a Game Boy explormer nonpareil that never was - than something capable of standing shoulder-to-shoulder with even the more modest Indie explormers of late. If it belongs with any crowd, it's with other small fry explormers like Xeodrifter, Gato Roboto, and the many fine Flash freeware explormers that used to congregate on, uh, Kongregate. Still, it does say "Tiny" right there on the label so it's not like it's keeping the scope of its ambition a secret...

Rating: 3 out of 5.