I've been making a conscious effort not only to play more visual novels but to understand precisely what their definitional parameters are and whether a game can still qualify as a "true" visual novel even with a few interactive indulgences. Dating sims and traditional Japanese adventure games, for instance, have certain aesthetic similarities but are generally treated as their own separate enterprises. Meanwhile, you have a wide variety of possibilities regarding continuity and choice - the branching paths, "Choose Your Own Adventure" approach - that won't compromise a game's status as a visual novel, despite my perception that VNs are purely passive affairs in which the player's interactivity essentially boils down to virtually turning pages with a mouse click or button press. I feel like trying to properly delineate a VN is as much a folly as trying to define a roguelike by whether or not it persists with ASCII graphics and permadeath, so it's really just another one of those cases where video game genres are effectively useless as precise descriptors.
Anyway, what all this means is that I'm playing more VNs - the better rated ones, for the most part, though this week's game kinda fell in my lap due to a recent Fanatical bundle - to better clarify my own subjective criteria of what a visual novel is. Visual novels as a whole have been picking up steam as of late which has resulted in even more localizations and more consideration by the original developers to have an English version in the works before the original even releases, and as a proponent of adventure games in a broader sense they've always felt like something I should have an educated opinion about.
Synergia is - like VA-11 Hall-A (with which it shares more than just a cyberpunk vibe, said similarities are what intrigued me to Synergia in the first place) and Analogue: A Hate Story - an LGBTQ+-themed, non-Japanese interpretation of the format from Indie developers clearly more versed in the VN genre than I am. It concerns Cila, a skilled if saturnine cyber security and weapons expert whose speciality is neutralizing wayward androids, and Mara, a highly sophisticated android nigh indistinguishable from a human being with an insatiable curiosity about the world. The two wind up in each other's orbits apparently by chance, causing Cila some consternation as she was originally demoted and vilified by the media for daring to fall in love with a mechanical person: once considered taboo by the wider populace and later made formally illegal. The plot then meanders for a while as it develops this central forbidden relationship as well as a huge amount of exposition regarding the world they inhabit - it's one of those slow-burn narratives that drops you in the deep end of this sci-fi setting and then fills in the gaps as it goes along - before rushing into an action-packed climax that diverges into two separate conclusions, as determined by the player's responses to a few early dilemmas.
Yeah, gimme that melancholy Masamune Shirow aesthetic. Make it moodier. Moodier!
Synergia is a very by-the-numbers piece of cyberpunk fiction, perhaps deliberately so as it seems most of the developers' energy went towards establishing that distinctive atmosphere of cyberpunk noir where it's often raining, the streets are glowing with neon, and the unstoppable forward progress of mechanical transhumanism has rendered the future into this cold and dispassionate world where social connections and human warmth are usually either fleeting or illusionary. While the character designs are whatever, I loved the filters for the various static shots and backdrops the game employs, with some striking use of shadows, darker red and blue color profiles, and camera angles that collectively ooze with an appropriately bleak ambience. The game wears its influences on its sleeve, often in a literal context: each of the game's chapters features an interstitial quote from thinkers and authors often associated with technologically unrecognizable futures which blur the lines between human and machine, from Phillip K. Dick to Jean-Paul Sartre to William Gibson to Albert Camus. A little on the nose, perhaps, but then this game feels more like a love letter to the game's thematic genre than an attempt to carve out some unique perspective in same. What it loses in imagination it makes up for in fidelity, I suppose. (I feel like I should probably address the pink elephant in the room: Yes, the game is labelled as for mature audiences only and features the nudity tag on Steam, but it's not particularly salacious. The nudity is non-gratuitous and is mostly used as it is in something like Ghost in the Shell: androids typically appear naked when inactive or being repaired, despite looking human. Its central romantic relationship is treated very sweetly and does not involve a sexual element, at least not explicitly.)
It's also a bit... well, I can't quite put my finger on why the prose isn't quite as engaging as I'd like, despite the decent worldbuilding. The main cast of characters don't really jump off the page, with most of them drily delivering exposition with little trace of emotion, though in some cases that's to be expected from the type of world they inhabit. You could certainly draw some conclusions by how the android characters come off as less robotic than the humans; as if to punctuate how, in a future of corporate interests and mandated medications that grind our spirits down into compliant wageslaves, an android given a child's sense of wonder or a high level of emotional intelligence would come off far more human than anyone else. Synergia also spends so much of its brief running time setting up the dominoes for its world-shattering conclusion that it leaves little time to luxuriate in said pre-shattered world. There's also the fact that the text appears to be localized into English - there's some discrepancies from the way English sentences are traditionally formed and certain turns of phrases aren't quite replicated correctly (a tangential example is how days of the week are never capitalized, which might be the norm in the developer's native language). The script is certainly not incoherent and important aspects like character motivations shine through just fine, but given how integral the story and dialogue is in a genre that is traditionally nothing but story and dialogue it can be noticeably "off" in spots.
There's a handful of times where it drops you into a computer interface and lets you read emails (what kind of cyberpunk video game would it be if it didn't?) but there's only ever so much to glean. Like most of the game, it's mostly just there for flavor.
Overall, I think Synergia is a credible attempt at a bite-sized Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell type of "are androids people?" story with a tremendous sense of style, if nothing else. (The soundtrack is excellent too.) The narrative branch felt a little unnecessary - you could feasibly have one ending lead into the other, and both introduce characters I would've liked to see in whatever the "canonical" ending might be - and I don't think I warmed to its stiff characterization, but sometimes it's fun to be transported into a slightly different type of dystopia than the one happening to us right now. Style and atmosphere can count for a lot when it comes to escapism, it turns out.
I created the last "A Minor Primer" because I wanted to elaborate on something I'd bumped into a few times while playing Japanese games and researching them for various Wiki Projects - specifically in that case the origins and evolutionary path of Japanese adventure games, and the way they've since branched out into mostly-passive visual novels and routine-micromanaging dating sims - and it was while playing Sega's Judgment (the Yakuza spin-off featuring ex-lawyer Takayuki Yagami) that I encountered something else that I wanted to dig into more: how many Japanese board game video games and board game mini-games are based on a specific thing called Sugoroku.
Sugoroku, which literally translates as "double six," is an ancient Chinese board game similar to backgammon which was thought to be introduced to Japan in the sixth century. In that sense, it has a similar background as Mahjong or Shogi - both of which see many video game adaptations as well, and are also playable mini-games in Judgment. Eventually, around the 12th or 13th century, a different Sugoroku variant rose to prominence - known as E-Sugoroku, with the original referred to Ban-Sugoroku - which had simpler rules and was more accessible to children. E-Sugoroku plays much like Snakes/Chutes and Ladders, where many if not all board spaces will activate some kind of positive or negative effect; this might involve moving ahead or back a few spaces, losing a turn, or being allowed to roll again.
With Sugoroku being as popular as it is with younger Japanese generations, many of its video game adaptations were borne of developers needing to make something out of a licensed property they had acquired that was maybe also intended for children (Doraemon, perhaps, or Crayon Shin-chan). In my time spent researching the libraries of the Super Famicom, PC Engine, Japanese Sega Mega Drive, and the original Famicom, I kept bumping into these rudimentary dice-rolling board games (or rather, their many variants) and wondering why they were so prevalent. Turns out it's due to two factors: a pre-existing board game that was more popular in Japan than elsewhere, and perhaps a certain lack of imagination from these tie-in developers.
Variants
Beyond the standard "reversal of fortune" dynamic, the basic mechanics of Sugoroku are often given extra flourishes by certain video game adaptations to better utilize the unique advantages of the medium. Below are a few of the major off-shoots I've encountered, though I'm sure this list is far from complete.
Asmik Ace's hybrid of Sugoroku and JRPG is one of the most common variant types, though conversely it's not one that leaves Japan all that often. Event squares can now include battles with monsters, treasure chests with items and other bonuses, or the usual type in which some fortunate or unfortunate happenstance occurs to the player. The goal is usually to accrue a large sum of money: this can be done by liberating grateful towns of monsters, or defeating high-level targets which tend to leave behind high-level spoils. The player also needs to invest in healing items and equipment which might affect their bottom line for that turn but will pay off in the long run. Losing to monster fights might also incur a cash penalty, or some other inconvenience such as being returned to the starting square.
The first Dokapon game, as far as I can tell, was Kessen! Dokapon Oukoku IV: Densetsu no Yuusha Tachi for the Super Famicom. (The "IV" in its title actually refers to the maximum amount of players it supports.) Of the twelve games in the series, only three saw localizations into English: 2001's Dokapon: Monster Hunter for GBA (unaffiliated with Capcom's MonHun franchise), 2007's Dokapon Kingdom for Wii and PS2, and 2008's Dokapon Journey for Nintendo DS.
In truth, the line between Sugoroku and a property management game like Monopoly is relatively slim, as both can involve massive swings in the player's standings depending on how they roll. Monopoly even has a two dice system where doubles confer extra benefits, which was a core tenet of the original Sugoroku also.
However, the two franchises listed above take the concept even further with how properties will change in value dependent on other board events, making these games not only far more chaotic and unpredictable but - given how often all these high-digit numbers change on a whim - something that's only really possible with a video game CPU running all those calculations in the background.
Fortune Street, also known as Itadaki Street in Japan and Boom Street in Europe, is a Sugoroku franchise originally devised by Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest. It's subsequently why Dragon Quest characters and symbols (such as the ubiquitous grinning Slime) are closely associated with the Itadaki Street games. So far, only two games in this series have been released in the west: 2011's Fortune Street for Wii, and 2012's Fortune Street Smart for iOS and Android. One mechanic that sets it apart from something like Monopoly is that a player can also buy "stocks" in a street, or a set of connected properties: even if you don't own those properties yourself, it's possible they will see a lot of development soon - maybe because someone else bought them - and you'll get a cut of the money that goes into that development by investing wisely. Of course, properties have a tendency to tank in value also contingent on certain board events, so it's as much of a crapshoot as the real stock market.
Billion Road has a similar premise, purchasing properties that regularly increase or decrease in value, with the overall goal being to hit its billion yen target. Players can also recruit monsters that will occasionally help them out, though there are also nuisance monsters that exist to make life harder for whichever unlucky player is burdened with them. Billion Road was released on Steam and Switch a few years back, and is one of the few "financial Sugoroku" games to see a localization.
There's a few other more finance-focused Sugoroku-inspired games like the above out there too. Hudson's (later Konami's) Momotaro Dentetsu ("Momotaro Electric Railway") series, for example, which are railroad development simulators that feature Sugoroku boards to move around on. Momotarou Dentetsu actually began as a pun on Momotaro Densetsu ("Momotaro Legend"), a series of Dragon Quest clones based on the titular Peach Boy of Japanese folklore. Needless to say, the more imaginative (and perhaps incongruous) railroad tycoon spin-offs proved to be the more enduring of the two properties.
If you can draw a parallel between Fortune Street and Monopoly, then you could probably do so between the Jinsei Game and Milton Bradley's The Game of Life. The titles literally mean the same thing, after all. The Game of Life is perhaps the closest Sugoroku equivalent played in the west, as almost every space on a Game of Life board will affect your fortunes one way or another, with the net result being a better (or lesser) lifetime of financial, romantic, and vocational success.
Many Japanese video games based on Jinsei Game are either one-to-one adaptations or variants that might only focus on one particular stage of a person's life - highschool, for example - or one particular aspect of a person's life - their lovelife or their careers - or have the player live through a historical period, or perhaps even a high fantasy or sci-fi setting. The throughline is that they track income or "happiness" as the victory condition, and that the boards usually have a cyclical format where each rotation of the board will progress time and perhaps modify the layout and/or event squares. They usually don't allow you to acquire and develop property however, setting themselves apart from the Fortune Street variants above.
As for versions of this variant that are available in English, there's a post-game bonus mode in the third Danganronpa game (Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony) that - like previous post-game bonus modes - reimagines the world of Danganronpa as a normal highschool experience rather than the subversive bloodbaths that are the game's bread and butter. In this mode, the goal is to graduate from Hope's Peak Academy by building stats, fighting Monokuma-themed enemies, and befriending the other students (which also included characters from the first two Danganronpa games). It's far more elaborate than you'd expect from a bonus mode, though also a lot more grindy and luck-based: not entirely unexpected of Danganronpa developers Spike Chunsoft, who are also the developers of the grindy and luck-based Mystery Dungeon roguelike franchise.
You probably knew this was coming. For western gamers, the luck-based dice and board video game that immediately comes to mind - perhaps vividly like a sudden PTSD flashback - are Hudson's Mario Party series. Yes, these things are all based on Sugoroku as well: its one significant deviation from the norm being the mini-game interludes between each round which pits players against each other in games of skill and chance.
Using Sugoroku as a delivery model for mini-games proved to be as compelling a video game-specific format for the venerable board game as any other, and it might not surprise you to learn that games of this sort have been kicking (Jeff) around much longer than Mario Party itself. Mario Party certainly kicked off a wave of similar formatted games with other mascot characters - Sonic Shuffle, Animal Crossing: Amiibo Festival, and Wii Party come to mind (though not Crash Bash since it doesn't use a board and dice) - but as the below list attests there's been experiments with this format since the early '90s.
I mentioned Judgment has a Sugoroku mode, which takes place in a VR game-within-a-game, and while it's closer to Mario Party than any other variant due to the mini-games you perform on certain spaces - the lockpicking mini-game or a fight with specific rules, for example - it's distinct for being a solo experience. The goal is to reach the end of the course within a limited number of dice rolls, though you can increase your stock of rolls by completing those aforementioned fights as well as by purchasing related skill tree upgrades. It's one of the more potentially lucrative side-activities in Judgment, though opportunities to play are a little limited due to a "play pass" system: finding these passes out in the wild is a relatively uncommon occurrence.
Mario Party's other significant departure from Sugoroku is that someone usually wins Sugoroku, as opposed to nobody.
More Examples
And now, a list of Sugoroku-based games I've encountered while working on the wiki. I've included their systems, their variant type, and their associated licensed properties where applicable. This might give you some impression of Sugoroku's popularity.
Ah, throwback platformers, where would this feature be without you? We're jetting to Central America for this week's game, Sydney Hunter and the Curse of the Mayan, an 8-bit styled stage-based platformer with some mild explormer elements by way of upgrades and the occasional backtracking for collectibles. It seems CollectorVision started the Sydney Hunter franchise - each focusing on an Indiana Jones-style archaeologist adventurer with a distinctly Gallic visual design - as a means of producing retro games for defunct consoles, starting with the Intellivision (from which they presumably got their company name) and including most of the major 8-bit and 16-bit home consoles. Curse of the Mayan is the first to be specifically built for modern systems, though still looks a game made in the late '80s (by design, of course).
The plot of The Curse of the Mayan concerns, well, a curse of the Maya people, who have been stuck inside a time-frozen temple for untold years courtesy of the irascible Sun God Kinich Ahau and his minion, Kukulkan the Snake God. Sydney finds himself trapped within as well, and endeavors to defeat Kinich Ahau and Kukulkan by working his way through their other minion Gods (there's a bee one and a water one and an undead one, and they sure do look and act like a bunch of Mega Man bosses) and figuring out how to undo the curse. As I mentioned above, the game uses a stage-based format with a hub area - the hub connects all the entrances to these stages, many of which have pre-requisites and a few are even optional - and a system of colored keys that persist outside of stages, so you can take excess keys into other stages or even buy more (at great expense) in the hub if you don't want to go looking for them.
Yeah I bet you do, imperialist.
Like another Indiana Jones ersatz, La-Mulana, The Curse of the Mayan leans on two lesser-utilized aspects of platformers in particular: level design built around many secret walls and pits, and a high though not insurmountable level of difficulty throughout. Neither is quite as severe as it is in Takumi Naramura's MSX love letters however, with most secret walls having telltale cracks to set them apart from the rest of the environment so you don't have to whip every single tile to test and, while checkpoints aren't exactly plentiful in The Curse of the Mayan (and you don't keep any progress you made since the last one, including collectibles), most stages do have at least several dotted around, including a compulsory one outside the stage's boss door. Sydney starts with his trusty whip - which has a short range but a relatively quick fire rate - and he'll also pick up spears (which are his only weapon when underwater) and a boomerang, each of which trades speed for greater range in different ratios. Each stage also has at least one Relic, which might provide necessary upgrades to make progress - there's one that lets you breathe underwater indefinitely, for example, and another that makes invisible blocks appear - or a few conveniences like a cash doubler or one that halves all incoming damage. Currency gems found throughout stages can be traded for HP upgrades and other bonuses in high quantities, and the game has two collectible types: Crystal Skulls, needed for unlocking subsequent levels a la Stars from Super Mario 64, and Yellow Diamonds, which appear to have no purpose whatsoever. Some stages have a few collectibles you can't reach on your visit without a Relic from a later stage but the game only pulls this trick once: once you have the Relic in question it offers no further roadblocks of that sort.
Just five traps one after the other in the first screen of this level. NBD. (Only the fire is instant death, at least.)
Sydney Hunter, which I'm now realizing is probably a play on Tia Carrere's Relic Hunter TV show and its protagonist Sydney, is a solid enough example of a throwback platformer but for a few snags here and there that aren't egregious enough to sour the experience but do belie a certain roughness around the edges. That's literally true of a visual bug I kept encountering where you could see gaps between the game's tiles (each stage looking like it was constructed on a grid, with various graphics being one square apiece), but also includes gameplay issues like exaggerated hitboxes, enemies spawning on top of you, and forcing the player to play a game-within-a-game (one of the Intellivision Sydney Hunters, presented in-game as an arcade machine with a hidden key inside of it) which, diplomatically speaking, plays like ass. I appreciated the general balance of difficulty and emphasis on collectibles and exploration in its maze-like stages, but there were definitely times where I felt close to throwing in the towel. Dropping down into an instant deathtrap because you slightly clipped off a nearby block some ten screens since the last checkpoint is enough to drive anyone a little loopy. I persevered though, some might say heroically, and managed to roll credits on a game that probably has more going for it than against it overall. Worth noting: some of the stage BGM were jams, especially the final boss fight, so that definitely helped mitigate some frustration (the OST's bandcamp page is here; no-one's uploaded it to YouTube yet). I'll give this one a weak thumbs up, and I certainly wouldn't be hesitant to try any more of Mr. Hunter's adventures in the future.
So long, PS3 PSN. You were like a candle in the wind: unreliable.
Like many of you, I was disheartened to hear that Sony was closing the digital storefronts for the PlayStation 3, PlayStation Portable, and PlayStation Vita. My chief source of distress is that it's yet another example of Sony disregarding its own history and defying long-standing game preservation efforts by making it harder for those games to stay accessible. Worse is that it includes the Vita storefront, which while also in decline is still a major source of income of several Indie developers committed to the platform and some have even had to scrap projects in mid-production because there'll be nowhere to sell them once they're done. It's dismantling trust with those same developers and pushing them towards more accommodating platforms like Steam, GOG, EGS, Xbox Live, and the Switch eShop (as a consumer, I certainly don't take issue with wider availability; it's just the PS4 has been my preferred platform and this alienation won't help encourage any future PS4 and PS5 cooperative efforts). My hope is that Sony decides to expand their recent forays into multiplatform releases - the recent MLB The Show 21 coming to Xbox Game Pass was a little surreal - and perhaps figuring out a way to get more first-party games onto other storefronts that want them if Sony doesn't, leaving the door open for inclined third-party developers of Sony exclusives to follow.
But that's all wishful thinking, barring a few recent examples like Guerrilla Games's Horizon: Zero Dawn. The current reality is that many video games are about to disappear, possibly permanently, with the July 3rd closures of the PS3 and PSP PlayStation Network online stores and the subsequent PSVita PlayStation Network online store closure on August 27th. It's a little too much to take in all at once so for today I'm just going to look at some PlayStation and PlayStation 2 games, many of which I covered on 2017's The Top Shelf feature. Those two systems are never far from my mind, as even after several decades I've still only scratched the surface of their enormous legacies. Pre-owned marketplaces have no shortage of PS1 and PS2 games taking up space and it's not like all those older physical versions will suddenly vanish, but it is getting harder to find certain standouts as they appreciate in value.
Below, I've included 20 PS1 and 20 PS2 games that have, since their debuts, only been rereleased on the PS3 digital storefront as far as I'm aware. They're games I either own and can recommend, or games I've long been meaning to get into, including many that are exclusive to either North America (and thus the digital storefront remains the easiest way for a European like myself to acquire them) or Europe (which might be more relevant to this site's audience who've probably never had a reason to make an EU PSN account previously).
(NB: I realize there are... other ways to acquire these games, and I'm certainly more sympathetic towards that route once Sony has closed off all legal avenues, but... uh, well, it might not be becoming of a moderator to call attention to them. Emulation for those two systems is certainly getting a lot better though.)
I'm not sure what this says about my psychology, but whenever I complete a gigantic game that's taken my focus for several weeks if not months I always come away from it feeling this acute sense of withdrawal that momentarily prevents me from starting something new. Like a certain inertia to embarking on a similarly long journey after a small period of enervation from concluding the previous. The Indie Game of the Week has served as an excellent palate-cleanser for these situations, and something like the chill contemplative movement puzzles of Golf Peaks doubly so. (The long game in this case would be Dragon Quest XI, which I think took over 150 hours to finally put to bed.)
Originally created for mobile devices with touchscreen control - most inputs require dragging motions - Golf Peaks is a game that deconstructs golf to an almost unrecognizable form: instead of adjusting the power and lob yourself, you are given cards that each represent a specific level of both based on discrete values that correspond to the game's gridlike level design. A card might have two icons indicating that the ball will fly through the air two spaces before moving across the ground another two; the player will continually expand their knowledge of how different types of terrain will react to air and ground shots and add those considerations to their planning. Each of the game's ten worlds appears (I've reached as far as World 7 so far) to introduce a new type of obstacle or function to the level, from bumpers that redirect ground shots to warp holes that take the ball to the hole with the corresponding color. The first few holes of any World - each has nine holes, plus three tougher bonus holes - will gently teach the player about these new inclusions before reverting back to wherever that world sits on the overall difficulty curve. World 6 was certainly harder than World 3, for instance, but those first few holes where it teaches the new gimmick were deliberate freebies.
Typical hazards include those tan tiles with the lines, which eliminates any ground momentum, and the darker brown sand, which won't stop a ball but will cause it to sink if it stops on top. Once the ball is lost, you need to hit the arrow (undoes last move) or the circle (resets the level).
Like most modern puzzle games, especially those built for smaller screens, there's a simplicity to both the game design and to the general calming aesthetic that belies the degree of brainteasing intensity of later instances. My per hole completion time currently ranges from a few seconds to around five minutes, though I'm sure that number will continue to balloon as the game adds more wrinkles and combines all the previously established obstacles in more insidious ways. At the same time, there's a meta that you eventually cotton onto that makes solving even the harder levels a little bit easier: you have so many cards to play (or moves to make) and there are usually certain bottlenecks where only specific cards in your hand will be applicable, usually around the start or end of the run. I've tried to highlight this thought process in the below screenshot, but it's sometimes easiest to work backwards from the hole if there's only so many ways to sink the ball. I've also noticed that you don't always need to use every single one of the cards; like golf, sometimes there are shortcuts you can take to drop below par that don't always have to rely on expert play. Since there's no skill component to Golf Peaks, it's all about determining if the most efficient route necessarily requires every move you have available. I want to believe that I'm finding (probably intentional) alternative routes to make these particular "birdies" and that there aren't just red herring cards thrown in occasionally, because the existence of the latter might really cause me some headaches later on.
Golf Peaks joins a small group of puzzle games I've covered on Indie Game of the Week like Divide by Sheep (IGotW #119) and Puzzle Puppers (IGotW #81) with isometric, graphically minimalist perspectives and a certain unhurried ambient vibe to their soundtracks and presentations that operate best as "decompressors." Games that knot out the stress, if that's even the right term, of longer and more involved playthroughs. Hours spent unwinding while knocking golf balls around after staring intently at its procession of slopes and sand hazards to intuit the correct order of steps will soon allow me to jump right back into another colossal RPG or open-world thing with a fully refreshed slate. Even if I didn't appreciate Golf Peaks for its clever mechanics and finely-tuned learning curve, I'd appreciate its "mental shiatsu" workout.
So, this is a case where you're given seven cards/moves and it seems like too much to parse, but you can narrow down part of the right combination by starting backwards from the hole (there at the top). The '2 Ground' card would take the ball from where it pops up at the blue warp hole into a path where it ricochets off a bumper and into the hole. The '1 Air, 1 Ground' would also produce the same result but is more valuable in getting across all these hops and gaps. Likewise, you can only start with one of the four Air cards: there's no other way to escape that initial pit. This process of elimination is often key to figuring out what the 'middle' of the solution will look like.
(Usual disclaimer: A DRM-free version of this game was included with 2020's Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. I include these disclaimers in case other owners of the bundle were unaware that these games were part of it.)
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.
Much like an academically-reviewed Navarro stream things are trucking along smoothly here with Dredge of Seventeen, March adding another four games to the list to bring us up to a not-so-round total of 79 list entries. Many short and sweet affairs from the Indie corner of my 2017 backlog this time; I've been so focused on completing Dragon Quest XI by the end of the month (I am currently in its substantial "post-game" chapter, so I've no idea how much is left) that I barely had time for both the following and the usual Indie Game of the Week rabble. I think each of these four games took around one or two sessions to complete, though not without some difficulty. I have some much longer games waiting on the sidelines of course, but finding the right time for them is going to be a challenge (and I can't imagine I'll squeeze in too many other 2017 games on those months - it's why it's important to keep the completion average high for the time being if I still want to hit 100 by December).
I'd seen screenshots of this Japanese Indie platformer, and of course that name stands out quite a bit, but I guess I never paid enough attention to what exactly RosenkreuzStilette was all about beyond its veneer of magical anime girls in trouble. Turns out this was a Mega Man fan game all along, and not particularly subtle about it.
The protagonist, Spiritia Rosenberg, is part of a (tenuously) Vatican-approved mercenary group of supernatural beings and magic-users. The group is now in open rebellion against the Church for reasons that aren't initially clear, with Spiritia absent from all the in-group conspiratorializing due to some remote training. Upon her return, she determines that something rotten is afoot and decides to knock around her old compatriots to bring them back to their senses. Her former team of eight other magic-users comprise the game's equivalent of the Robot Masters: they can be fought in any order, each has a certain elemental power, and defeating them allows Spiritia to use those same powers in subsequent stages. With some careful experimentation, you can deduce (or just look up) which opponent is weak to which other opponent's magic and plan a route through the game accordingly.
Many bosses and levels are direct homages of the NES Mega Man series, including the compulsory Yellow Devil equivalent and that one asshole dragon from Mega Man 2 (except now it's a wall that shoots crucifixes at you). Just imagine Mega Man with a Touhou paint job and a dash of Castlevania's gothic eeriness and you're most of the way there. (I could've also invoked The Krion Conquest here, but I can't be sure anyone remembers what that is.) I'm a huge fan of the old Mega Man games and am well acquainted with their difficulty level, so while the game is very challenging - especially the boss rush in the penultimate stage - it was not insurmountable either. Many of the tougher stages let you farm energy tanks (mana tanks... whatever) at the start for a while and each boss has at least one weakness; the normal eight bosses are also weak to their own weapons, making their rematches a little easier. There's no avoiding how much this feels like an elaborate ROM hack though, with all new graphics and music (speaking of which, the soundtrack's pretty darn good) but much of the original level design intact. Yes, that also means disappearing blocks, those obnoxious Quick Man lasers, and the obfuscating cloud cover of Air Man's stage. The few aberrations include weirdo Schwer-Muta Casasola Merkle's stage, which is full of kaizo deathtraps (but the amusing kind that you only fall for once), Sichte Meister's boss fight which plays mostly like Flash Man except she does the whole "za warudo" Dio Brando thing instead, and a couple of Castlevania boss clones for a bit of variety.
This is a 2017 game by the thinnest of definitions: its original PC release was way back in 2007, joining what was then a small cadre of internationally popular Japanese Indie games (a.k.a. doujin) many of which were modelled closely after popular but defunct video game genres/franchises like 2D explormers (Cave Story), shoot 'em ups (Touhou), and indeed classic Mega Man. It took ten years for an official localization to happen, though many of its non-Japanese fans have long been enjoying the game prior even if they couldn't understand the dialogue - it's notably popular in the speedrunning corners of the internet, especially with runners that already have an affinity for Mega Man. The localization of its sequel, which follows one of Spiritia's rivals and has the even more elaborate name RosenkreuzStilette Freudenstachel, was also released on Steam in 2017 so we might be seeing that one further along in this project also.
Magical anime girls. This one has a swimsuit! She's also one of the hardest video game bosses I've fought this year. Just an absolutely brutal mix of Air Man and Heat Man.The game over screens are my favorite. There's one for every stage, each based on a different retro game. It's good they did something fun with game overs because I saw a lot of them.
Ranking: C. (It's a little rough around the edges and, well, more than a little familiar, but I appreciate it as an important bit of Japanese Indie history and it's every bit as entertaining and demanding as its inspiration. I'm thinking dead center of the list at present, around where Yooka-Laylee is (another nostalgic platformer with a few missteps and old-school annoyances).)
Yono confounds me. Not in a negative, frustration-producing type of way, but in how it presents itself as one thing aesthetically and a completely different thing narratively. Let's start with the former. From glancing at screenshots, you'd be correct in assuming the game is an isometric action-adventure game that owes a significant debt to the Legend of Zelda franchise. Yono, the titular blue baby elephant, has a handful of abilities which don't change for the whole playthrough, including a headbutt used as the primary means of attack and the ability to blow air and other projectiles through his trunk. The game is a mostly linear affair that has Yono travel from one destination to the next solving environmental puzzles to proceed and occasionally completing side-quests and other bonus goals for collectibles and health power-ups (every four of these gets you a new container on your health bar, typically enough). It both looks and plays like a kid-friendly entry-level Zelda game, though not necessarily one that always pulls its punches especially where its boss fights are concerned.
Narratively, the game feels entirely different. It's packed with heavy themes about capitalism, workers' rights, the curse of self-awareness, the cycle of life and death, systemic oppression, and the difficulties that can result from always trying to do the right thing and being burdened with the hopes and dreams of the entire world, and is frequently insightful and trenchant with its observations in a way you might not expect from its colorful and elementary art direction. Elephants in this world are treated like divine beings, with one appearing each millennium to usher in a new age of peace and to advance civilization another step; Yono learns more about his predecessors as he speaks to NPCs and explores, and how each helped foster massive structural changes to society and to humanity's understanding of the world. The very first elephant is even thought to have been the one to teach humans how to farm and cultivate the earth, putting an end to the era of nomadic hunter/gatherers and leading to the first cities. Humans are depicted as a friendly but wary sort who haven't been fully able to adapt to some significant recent changes, which is especially true of their paranoid queen. The other races include the bonewights: intelligent zombies that regularly spawn from the battleground of an ancient, devastating internecine war who are philosophical about their immortality, their minimalist lifestyles, and their largely passive relationship with the other kingdoms. For instance, they politely eschew formal trade agreements since they have no wants or needs and subsequently neither produce nor consume trade goods. The other are the Mekani: a race of synthetic lifeforms that recently approached "the Singularity" with regards to their self-awareness and are now capable of producing their own even more advanced offspring, and are still trying to find their place in the world. They suffer sanctions from the distrusting human kingdom that stunts their growth and they contemplate open rebellion as a result, though most are peaceful and would prefer to find a solution that did not involve violence. Yono realizes that fixing the problems between these three disparate nations is a lot tougher than occasionally squirting water at goblins or pushing a rock onto a switch, and the game makes it clear that this world, much like our own, lacks any easy or permanent answers for maintaining peace and harmony. Fortunately, it's something Yono will have several centuries to figure out.
I found this game deeply fascinating at turns and much too straightforward and basic at others, creating what was probably an intentional dichotomy of complex themes and simple gameplay. As a British '80s kid I probably have more reverence for the humble isometric puzzle-platformer than most, and I enjoyed the game's small variety of puzzles even if the mashy combat was less compelling. There's a substantial amount of fetch-questing to be done if you wanted some extra upgrade materials, as well as a separate collectible that allows you to translate and read adventures of the previous elephants (which, again, lead to some inspired storytelling about the often troubled nature of humanity as well as our potential for greatness), and there's this intriguing arc concerning a spirited adventurer girl and a clumsy acolyte of the elephant-based local religion who initially exist to deliver background and tutorial information but continue to grow as you keep encountering them throughout the game, learning alongside you about the nuanced struggles everyone is dealing with and adapting their once-shallow worldviews to accommodate these revelations. While mostly rudimentary and even a little glitchy (collectible totals can sometimes shift unexpectedly while passing through area transitions), Yono and the Celestial Elephants definitely has more going on beneath its surface than a cursory glance of its cutesy screenshots might suggest.
The bonewights have little stake in what's going on in the other kingdoms, so they approach everything with a detached curiosity and long-term musings. They're one of the best-realized immortal races in fiction, and from a game where you can buy cute clothes for your baby elephant to wear.Sometimes I just wanted to shake the screen and say, "Guys, would you calm down? It's a kids' game."
Ranking: C. (I don't think the core game is all that exceptional as a Zelda clone, probably on a tier with the original Ittle Dew or maybe Oceanhorn, but the novelty of its mature dialogue and story does raise it a little higher in my estimations. Probably looking at around the 50s for the time being - subject to change as the list grows, of course.)
You know me, I had to fit in one of my beloved explormers somewhere. I've at least three more lined up before this project's done, unless I can somehow find even more of them. Forma.8 is one of those free movement explormers like Aquaria or Song of the Deep, which aren't really explormers at all because the platforming aspect of that yet-to-catch-on portmanteau is moot, but still beholden to the usual tenets of the genre: there's a map, there's upgrades you need before you can reach some areas, there are boss fights (though only like three or four in this case), and there's a huge amount of optional backtracking.
The plot is practically non-existent, as this comes from developers (MixedBag) that evidently went to the Nifflas (Saira, Knytt Underground) school of atmosphere and tone above all. You're one of several spherical drones sent down to a planet for some reason, though you're the only one to survive the landing; the others, whose broken forms are littered across various hard-to-reach places, are the sources of your eventual upgrades. Since there's no text, you glean most information from context clues and ideographs; your power-ups in your inventory just have icons to explain what they do and the appropriate face button or key to activate them. The game has a stark graphical style that reminds me of Eric Chahi's early work: a whole lot of flat colors and angled shapes with no outlines, which are simple but effective in establishing this alien planet and its topography. Since you can freely float wherever, most of the enemy encounters and hazards tend to involve shoot 'em up mechanics like strafing around enemy fire and carefully lining up your own shots; it's pretty similar to Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet if you wanted a point of comparison.
For combat options, the protagonist picks up two weapon upgrades fairly early on: a limited range shockwave that can deter enemies trying to collide with you, and a mine that is dropped at your location and does more damage than the shockwave if it or its small splash zone connects. It doesn't take long for the player to realize the shockwave can also project the mine like a ranged weapon, with some helpful UI to give you some idea of where the mine will move once you've pushed it. It can be iffy to line it up with where a distant enemy is, especially if they're moving, but it is and will remain the most effective weapon in your arsenal. Later upgrades are traversal-based: they include a dash and, eventually, a short-range teleport. The latter of those is needed for a great many collectibles you can't otherwise reach, so it's sometimes worth keeping a note of where they are for later. If you're patient enough to jump through the hoops to get it, there's a "secret" power-up that indicates where all the collectibles and health upgrades are on the map by changing the contours of those rooms from white to blue; I always appreciate tools like this given my collectathon brain worms. The collectibles have a purpose too: for every ten you find, you can unlock a useful if inessential upgrade (such as, say, being able to lay two mines at once) by taking them to a certain room.
I ultimately found Forma.8 to be a bit on the ponderous side. There's no effective fast travel system, as what teleporters there are only have fixed destinations and aren't too helpful (though you can unlock shortcuts to earlier parts of the game), and not having any semblance of a plot or a progression besides a single glowing spot on your map to head towards robs the game of any stakes or meaning. It's more about exploration, soaking in the lonely ambience, and poking around to see where's accessible and surpassing any challenges that present themselves. Momentum and physics are big factors in the player's movement and in some of the puzzles, specifically those that involve pushing rocks onto switches, but it's not frustrating in the way some unpredictable physics-y game design can be. I don't think it's an explormer that's going to leave any strong lasting impressions given how many others of its type came out around the same time with bigger ideas or more direction, but it's a solid if somewhat detached example of the explormer genre if you happen to be looking for a new one.
(Usual disclaimer here: This game was included in the Itch.io Racial Justice & Equality Bundle from last summer. I always find it's worth pointing that out for applicable games because I'm sure a lot of folk bought that bundle without knowing its full list of contents (I know I didn't).)
This is what I mean by the aesthetic being "Chahi-esque." They're very Another World. I dig it.The game only starts messing around with perspective towards the end, but you can see it here in how these walls are kind of projecting away from the center of the screen. You can also see a bit of the color-coding here too: the red objects are hazards, and stand out brilliantly against the whites and blues of this area.
Ranking: C. (Yeah, low 50s again I think. I enjoyed my time with it and it doesn't pull off any egregious missteps that can sometimes pop up in these explormers - though I did once find a key behind a locked door, which is a big no-no since I could've used the original key I had elsewhere and missed that part of the map completely - but it was a little too leisurely for my liking. It's certainly not better than Wonder Boy & The Dragon's Trap, which is presently chilling at the top of the C-rank tier after dropping a few spots.)
Yep, another HOPA. Once I have enough of a hidden object "cushion" at the bottom of my top 100 list I'll probably desist including these rudimentary adventure games, but I still find them oddly compelling in short bursts. At this point I can complete them on autopilot, sort of like picross or Tetris, and there's always going to be gaps in my schedule where I want to veg out for a while.
Queen's Quest 2 does feature a queen, but that queen is not you. Instead you play as an unnamed alchemist (everyone just calls you "Alchemist," which struck me a bit rude, but I guess blank slate protagonists aren't new to these games) who goes around solving problems at the behest of King Robert. He sends you off to investigate the death of his agent, Wolf, and with a very guilty-looking Woodcutter and Red Riding Hood hiding nearby it wasn't the toughest case to crack. That then leads to a series of smaller disconnected adventures that slowly build to uncover a conspiracy against the King, and you eventually work to bring down its ringleader. Usual fantasy setting, albeit one that mixes in Robin Hood for some reason. I guess he's fantasy, but I wouldn't put him in the same thematic genre as witches and magic potions (despite what the '90s Costner movie might think).
Circling back around to the alchemy aspect, while it isn't a new feature to HOPAs it is at least something distinctive that at times you'll be tasked with finding magic reagents for transformation potions. It starts with becoming a bird to reach the King's castle in a matter of minutes, and later includes a hamster (so you can talk to another hamster, who seemed to do just fine talking to you while you were still a human) and a fish (because that's easier than just reaching into a river to pick up a quest item). It involves breaking out this neat little mobile alchemy station and completing a few basic recipe puzzles but, well, as I said it's at least something. These potion puzzles eventually dry up halfway through the game, sadly, and then it's back to digging through piles of junk for conspicuous crest pieces and elaborate keys as per usual.
After covering a dozen of these things in blog or another I don't have much insight left to offer. They're all based on the same specific model, mass produced by a consortium of mostly eastern European developers working under the Artifex Mundi label or one of the other publishers working the HOPA racket, and for as much as I wish one might break the mold they - and their audience - seem happy enough with this "fresh off the assembly line" approach. I guess it's no worse than being a developer putting out endless identical Nicktoons/Cartoon Network licensed platformers throughout the '90s and '00s, but any budding game scholars looking to fill a gap in their adventure game awareness only needs to take in a few of these to get the gist. But, yeah, as a distillation of the concept of clicking an object and finding the place where it belongs, there's some atavistic power it has over my organizational lizard brain that makes these games hard to fully disdain.
I figured I'd better screenshot this. It seemed important.I like how this portable alchemy box just flips down all its sides without sending its bottles crashing everywhere. Probably because it's magic, right? Sure, magic.
Ranking: E. (I doubt I'll play a HOPA that deserves to be higher than dead last on the list, though most are competent enough to hang on for dear life for the time being. Asking me to subjectively rank the three HOPAs I've played so far doesn't seem fair given how similar they all are. I guess this sits below the one where you smooch Einstein but maybe above the one with the constant memory puzzles?)
That's going to do it for March. With April I'm going to try to fit in another major wishlist game so I have something better than a mid-carder to present, though this soon after DQ11 I'm not quite ready to take on another colossal RPG like Trails in the Sky the 3rd (though I am still eager to start it soon). Here's hoping furtively reaching my hand into my SteamI Indie library will continue producing good results and not the video game equivalent of that venomous stump beast from Flash Gordon.
Any good detective fiction should keep the audience guessing, placing the protagonist's power of deduction slightly ahead of everyone else's and allowing them to freely dispense the shocks and twists in the denouement of the adventure. However, with video games and the player's heightened role in same it's hard to pull that off: after all, if we're controlling the detective hero in question, shouldn't we know everything they know? If we're going through the clue-gathering deductive process step by step, it robs us of that revealing final act and many other surprises. If I had to credit Mografi's Jenny LeClue Detectivú with a specific quality rare to this particular thematic genre in this medium, it's that it was wholly unpredictable.
Most video games I've played within the detective fiction genre are usually structured like classic point-and-click adventure games: those that afford you a certain degree of freedom in interrogating suspects and sweeping crime scenes for clues until you're ready to draw some conclusions. Recently those have included Kathy Rain (IGotW #71) and Whispers of a Machine (IGotW #167), and vicarious playthroughs of the many Nancy Drews Abby streamed while she was still at Giant Bomb. I figured girl detective Jenny LeClue (even her name's similar) would follow the same footprints, as early on you find a map of the town and start building a rogue's gallery of locals before the game's first momentous murder happens. Instead, it turned out to be something closer to Oxenfree or the finale of Night in the Woods: an almost entirely linear structure as you scurry around the hidden depths of the town as it slowly reveals its secrets to you, only pausing occasionally for the mostly inconsequential binary decisions, the very inconsequential collectibles, or a mini-game puzzle or two.
The game establishes a framing meta-narrative early with an author by the name of Arthur K. Finkelstein, the creator of the genial Jenny LeClue adventure serial novels. Arthur's a gentle and old-fashioned individual who chafes under his publisher's command to enliven the next Jenny LeClue, as the series has been losing customers due to its low-stakes, low-thrills detective yarns where Jenny might track down a lost library book or a missing cat. Specifically, it needs to have a central murder mystery concerning one of its major characters, which Arthur is loath to do after several dozen episodes of developing the population of his beloved Arthurton. However, while the game revisits Arthur's plight between "chapters" you don't really get a sense of it leading anywhere; there's a few teases that the player, as Arthur, can make big adjustments to the story as it progresses but doesn't capitalize on this idea except towards the end. Likewise, the many choices Jenny herself makes during a story, many of which involve her relationships with ancillary characters like the overachieving rich girl Suzie Glatz, her concerned mother Julie LeClue, or her estranged best friend Keith Strausberry, also don't seem to affect the plot much: the game doesn't even do Telltale's customary data collection informing you where everyone else leaned on these decisions. I've never really been a fan of this binary approach to a branching narrative - they've never felt too significant in Telltale Games, even when lives were on the line, and it activates my FOMO something terrible as I abandon so many roads not travelled - but if you're going to include one you might as well do something with it, subversive or otherwise.
Jenny's ever constant companion is her journal, used to track where the story is heading, the map, collectibles (the postcards), and this rundown of all your choices so far. One curious inclusion is the personality test thing on the left, which I assume varies based on the decisions you've made. It only changed once all the time I was playing though.
However, the rest of Jenny LeClue is fairly solid. There's a mix of environmental puzzles (pushing rocks around as a step to climb up places, for instance), puzzles based on deductive reasoning (even with the railroad plot, Jenny is required to solve a lot of mysteries to progress), and puzzles with structures I don't often see in games, including a recurring one involving a word cipher, that were entertaining to solve and kept on coming at a rapid pace. The more action-oriented sequences were still platforming by way of adventure game mechnaics, getting to the right zone and having a button prompt to jump up or climb or swing across (which is where the Oxenfree comparison comes in, since most of that game's exploration used a similar format), so it's nothing too intensive if you're more of the adventure game persuasion and just wanted a story and the occasional puzzle to mix things up. If you're a fan of precocious kid detectives, from your Nancy Drews to your Harriets the Spy or what have you, I think this game works both a straight homage to preteen sleuths and as a mild deconstruction of same, as you enter this pre-established world of benign, often silly grown-ups only to start layering in Stranger Things and The X-Files-level mysteries over the top (or under the surface, as the case may be) of this otherwise normal town. The binary choices do at least serve a purpose here to let your particular Jenny LeClue be as much of a caustic, know-it-all brat as you'd like, treating poor Suzie and the other townsfolk you encounter with unwarranted disdain if that amuses you more than playing peacekeeper at every step.
Now that I'm several hours removed from the playthrough, I can't help but think back on how meandering the story was, even if it did keep me guessing throughout. The "interrogations," which involve looking over a zoomed-in character and picking up on odd little discrepancies and asking them about them, made for a novel way to marry deductive reasoning and the usual suspect dialogue tree delivery system for exposition (the mechanics of it reminded me a little of those sequences from the Apollo Justice games where he picks up on a character's tics, though used to serve more of a Sherlock Holmes "I noticed the discoloration on your shoe" type of observation) but these mostly dried up in the second half of the game where it's almost all running around tunnels, forests, graveyards, and secret laboratories on your own building a pile of evidence that never gets used. Other than the slightly manic conspiracy theorist CJ (whose voice actor is doing a bang on Christopher Lloyd impression) who keeps popping up everywhere, you don't spend any significant amount of time with any of the other characters and it's hard to make the player care about the strange occurrences happening to this town and its citizens if you hardly ever encounter the latter. I would've liked to spend more time in the town and around its people before the craziness ensued, putting players in a similar position as the in-universe long-time readers of the Jenny LeClue novels as they're suddenly alienated by this violent and creepy new direction the tale has taken. I won't get into how the specifics of how it ends or its big reveals, except to say that the game ends abruptly without any definitive ending for the sake of a cliffhanger; while you do at least learn the hows behind the central murder mystery, you never get around to the whys (which will, of course, have to wait for a sequel to dig into). All in all, there's a lot about Jenny LeClue: Detectivú that leaves you wanting more information (like what the hell a "detectivú" might be, for one).
Arthur, wondering where the hell his own story is going. There's some potential with this framing device, but it's mostly used as dressing and a way to separate the game's chapters.
I can fault the game's narrative structure until the cows come home, but I can't really fault the sharp adventure game design enterprise Mografi has crafted here. It's evident a great deal of work went into constructing the many different modes of this adventure - I didn't even mention the part where Jenny drives a boat around an enormous lake chasing treasure hunt clues - and I think there's a solid basis here for (hopefully more revealing) sequels to build on, but something about establishing that this is a "Part 1 of who knows how many" serial narrative without warning just rubs me the wrong way. It's why I eventually bounced from the TV show Lost after all, and this game showing up with some familiar mysterious hatches leading to underground labs of an unknown purpose got my hackles up in a similar fashion. Even with all this narrative kvetching, though, I certainly don't think it's a bad game: the puzzles are fun to solve, varied, and thoughtful; the writing has an amusing energy to it as the story (and Jenny) insists on sticking to the dangerous and scary path even as its cautious author balks at every turn; graphically the game has a certain Cartoon Network charm (including that sort of vaguely '70s angled architectural look that many '90s cartoons seemed to love) and a strong use of color, even if I was slightly bothered by the fact that everyone seemed to have a nose except Jenny; and I liked that one variety of collectibles were stickers which could then adorn your journal used for in-game notes and reference materials. It's enough for me to say it's worth a gander at least.
I'm not sure if it's encroaching burnout or the ongoing national mood or what, but there's been some perfectly genial Indie games of the past few months that immediately started rubbing me the wrong way because of one asinine design quirk or another. Coldwood's first Unravel game, which stretches the definition of Indie given EA's involvement, is a 2D puzzle-platformer that revolves around its central character's yarn-like properties, and how they can use a yarn trail that follows them everywhere to swing on hooks, use them as temporary anchors to rappel, or create bridges between multiple points which can also act as trampolines. The game's not lacking for ideas, tossing in various hazards - the protagonist Yarny is a tiny knitted figure, so pretty much anything omnivorous is a threat - and set-pieces across each of its dozen levels.
However, it is heavily dependent on physics that don't always want to play nice or produce reliable results. Couple this with a trophy - again, inessential but nonetheless a design decision someone somewhere thought was a good idea - for completing every level without deaths, and you have a recipe for consternation. Yarny can die at any moment from an unexpected trap (deliberate), physics going nuts (not deliberate), or right at the end of the level after fifteen minutes of progress because you spent a little too long in the water or fell into soft snow and died somehow. I gave up on the Platinum almost immediately due to this, and being the completionist braincase that I am it cast a pall over the rest of the game. I've scattered a few screenshots in this review to highlight these physics-y instances of pure irritation.
Whee! How delightful! Just don't move an inch or you'll fall off and have to restart.
Outside of all that though, Unravel is banking on its charm. Some of that is due to the cute central character, who tries to tap into the wholesomeness of the various Yoshi and Kirby games that also followed the knitting and crocheting recipe sheets, and then surrounds it with a slightly more melancholy story about an old lady and her photo album. The specifics of this incidental story escaped me since I was too busy getting mad at the wonky physics, but it appeared to go through many stages of this woman's life as a child playing on the slopes of her Scandinavian home, a brief tryst with another woman (I may have completely missed what that stage was about), and then a long and fulfilling marriage with some guy that appeared to lead to children and grandchildren before the husband passed away. The seasons change also, getting more wintry as the game progresses, which in turn allowed the developers to set up all manner of seasonal weather puzzles/obstacles such as spring showers and winter snowstorms. The micro-sized environments are gorgeously rendered, as close to lifelike as I ever tend to see in games barring some of the animals involved and the incongruously cartoonish Yarny itself, and the orchestral score does the usual thing of picking up in moments of dramatic action and then dropping the tempo or disappearing entirely during the game's more serene and moody moments. Definitely can't fault the game for its presentation.
This will require some explanation. The barrels to the left start rolling down this hill after you remove an obstruction, and will kill you if they hit you. You can drop below this yarn bridge you made earlier to avoid damage. The first time I didn't see the bridge, went to where the barrels stop, and got killed. Second time, I went under the bridge, and the barrels fell in and killed me. The third time, they went back to rolling to the left again. No consistency, and if I was dumb enough to try doing a no deaths run I'd be in a very bad mood right now.
But yeah, once a game's first impression loses you it's hard to recover, and I found myself just trudging through the game's procession of occasionally annoying puzzles and obfuscated darker environments out of a sense of grim determination. If I was meant to be lost in a bubble of quiet awe or whimsy throughout this time, that illusory enchantment had completely failed to take hold and I just found it to be another physics platformer that, like the rest, was simply too arbritrary to feel all that rewarding or pleasant. Establishing a flow in platformers is a major component of their enjoyment factor, and there's no flow if a swing is slightly mistimed and the physics decide to throw you into a wall, or a rock rolls the wrong direction when you're trying to set it up as a stepping stone, or you get accidentally smushed rolling that same rock some three minutes after you last found a checkpoint. It tries to go for some nuance with how much yarn Yarny can use at any one time, becoming distressingly emaciated as it literally approaches the end of its rope, and build some puzzles around the most efficient use of string, but lacking a more obvious way of telling how much yarn Yarny has left (maybe an on-screen gauge, getting off this "no UI it'll break the immersion" high horse in the process) it's not always the most intuitive approach, especially as most of the time Yarny seems to have an infinite amount of string and can jog across entire fields and mountains without issue. One scenario even had me restarting the whole level because I hit a checkpoint and then went back to an earlier checkpoint because I was checking to see if I missed any secret collectibles (each level has five); at that point there was no way to reach the third checkpoint along in the series due to an insufficient amount of yarn. Most of the game's more clever touches had drawbacks like this. If anything, I'd say the floaty platforming and the way you just slip off many of the more rounded objects reminded me a lot of LittleBigPlanet, and that is not a compliment by any stretch.
These lovingly rendered machines are certainly pretty, in a cold industrial sense, but they can be visually obtuse. That angled part in the middle of the screen? Not a thing you can interact with. Thus, I fell past it into this nook and got slapped by that piston on the right. Again, glad I gave up on "no deaths" early.
Safe to say I was wholly underwhelmed by Unravel and spent most of the playing time in a state of vexation due to random little quirks of misfortune. The funny part is that I bought it in a bundle with its sequel - which doubles down on its no death trophies by creating several of them, and then adds time trials as an extra dollop of obnoxiousness on top - so I'm doubtful I'll ever get my money's worth out of that decision. I'll keep trying these physics-based puzzle-platformers because the Indie industry seems to want to produce a whole lot of them per annum, but their track record certainly hasn't been great so far.
If I have to give props to Mobius's Outer Wilds for one thing in particular, it's for its atmosphere. Perhaps an ironic statement, given most of the game is set in a vacuum, but Outer Wilds fills each of its locations with so much personality and backstory that you really get a sense of each one's particular pitfalls and quirks after a few visits. In fact, the game handles atmosphere and tone so well that its frequent forays into the uncanny and disquieting create more effective spooks and chills than most survival horror games are capable of producing; in this case it's less about jumpscares and more about the existential dread, the weight and enormity of what's happening to your corner of the universe, and the game accommodating a wide variety of phobias that it seems perversely determined to tick off one by one. For the record, I don't think the game is supposed to be scary - probably closer to melancholy and thoughtful for the most part, especially when this music kicks in - but since I don't fall victim to any of the following irrational fears I couldn't say for sure that it isn't.
Obviously, this is going to require me to dive deep into some Outer Wilds spoilers, geographical if not narrative, and that will detract from a fresh playthrough since the entire game is about exploring the unknown. I've tried to preface each phobia with a more general sense of what the game throws at you before going into spoiler-blocked specifics, but suffice it to say there's going to be lore tidbits scattered throughout that might diminish your enjoyment if you've been holding off on playing it (and if that reason is a save corruption bug in the PS4 version, you have my assurance they've since fixed it). If you're looking for a more spoiler-free analysis, please feel free to check out my review of the game over here.
For the rest of you, prepare to soil your spacepants:
Acrophobia
Any game involving space travel and trying to land successfully will be hell on Earth (or several hundred meters above the Earth and falling fast, as the case may be) for those terrified of heights. There are specific moments that are even more vertiginous and harrowing for those who get the high-up jitters like Vinny (which makes me wonder how much he actually enjoyed playing this game).
The first comes right from the jump where you climb to the top of the path to get the launch codes at the observatory and can see the whole village stretch out beneath you. There are also caves and walkways with their own local gravity: these veritable cookie-tossers make you walk across walls and ceilings as you try to follow a path of crystals and not look down, or wherever "down" may be presently located. The worst is Brittle Hollow, as an ominous black hole sits beneath your feet at all times swallowing chunks of the planet as they crumble off. One slip means falling into a bottomless pit and being rudely expectorated into a vacuum somewhere on the other side of the system. The inconvenience of having to warp back to Brittle Hollow and start over is probably worse than that sinking feeling as your feet approach the event horizon, IMO.
Agoraphobia
A fear of wide open spaces is not something you're going to want to have in any game that involves outer space, but even if the star system of this particular game isn't spread out too far - you're unlikely to be more than a couple dozen kilometers from the furthest planet - it's enough to hit you with a profound sense of sheer emptiness as you float through the cosmos, especially if you accidentally left your ship somewhere else.
As well as the aforementioned unrequested black hole rapid transit system, Dark Bramble's dimensional trickery can leave you lost in misty cavities that seem to go on forever, bar a chance encounter with the occasional vine branch or one of its hungry residents. But yeah, it's mostly space. Space is not good for agoraphobics.
Aw crap crap crap crap crap crap cr-
Autophobia
As in, the fear of being alone. Outer Wilds is a lonely game by definition, as you are the only person (well, one of two, but the other guy's not helping) cognizant of what's happening and the journey to fix it is entirely your own. However, the game does share some sense of community with the other members of Outer Wilds Ventures, five of which are stationed across different planets, and you can always go home and talk to the village NPCs again (not that any of them will ever have much new to say, since this is all still the same day for them).
I always felt the loneliness most keenly in places where the Nomai died en masse. Something about all those ancient cadavers and the notes they left behind made those spaces feel devoid of life in a much more profound sense. When you find the revelatory data on the Sun Station regarding just how long it's been since the Nomai were wiped out - about 280 millennia - it's a little startling just how well all their structures and technology have held up. Also I guess I should've added Necrophobia somewhere, because there are a whole lot of skeletons lying around (how are they not powder after that long? Did they have titanium bones? Oh right, it's a video game).
Claustrophobia
With the sheer width and breadth of the cosmos, you wouldn't think claustrophobes have anything to worry about. Besides your own ship (and spacesuit), how many tight spaces could a game about outer space possibly have? Well, don't worry, Outer Wilds didn't leave you guys out.
So I'm talking specifically of Ember Twin here, the half of the Hourglass Twins that is currently filling with sand as opposed to slowly emptying. To reach the more lore-valuable locations on Ember Twin, you first need to navigate a system of caves underneath the planet. These eventually lead to a Nomai settlement called the Sunless City and the High Energy Lab, both of which have clues useful for other planets. However, while exploring these dark, dangerous caves, they - along with the planet - are filling with sand. If it gets to the ceiling of the cave, you get smushed (we can assume this is very dense sand). Being stuck in a cave looking for one more clue a Nomai left behind as it fills with sand, with almost no light besides the weak illumination provided by your flashlight, is perhaps the least comfortable I felt while playing Outer Wilds. I think Anakin Skywalker might've been onto something.
Sure is getting cozy in here.
Ichthyophobia
Fear of fish. I feel like I've already said too much by including it on this list.
Yeah, those fish. The enormous deep sea fangly fish. Oddly, there's no fish to be scared of on the ocean planet (unless you count jellyfish, and those things are too benign to be all that frightening). No, these things are the ones prowling around the Dark Bramble, sitting in the still and silent air waiting for a noise they can hone in on and devour in one bite. If there's ever a moment where Outer Wilds goes for a cheap jumpscare, it's when you fix your ship towards one of the many dim lights in the Dark Bramble only to get all up in the grill of a colossal cosmic terror. I am sad we didn't get any space whales though. Space whales are cool. (And also not fish, so you don't need to correct that.)
Pyrophobia
You know what space has in spades? Giant burning balls of gas that will char you to a crisp if you're dumb enough to fly right into them. Sometimes you have to look that big yellow bastard in the face and take your life into your own hands though. Even the sun has secrets.
Landing on the Sun Station was one of the least pleasant things I ever put myself through for the sake of a trophy. It of course meant regular trysts with Mr. Sunshine in a manner far too intimate for my ship to handle, but it was a crash course (as it were) in learning every one of the ship's controls and not just the highlights. You can get pretty much anywhere with the vertical (for take-offs) and horizontal (for flyin' to places) thrusters, but learning the necessary advanced positional stuff, feathering the thrust to maintain a semi-stable orbit, and using the pitch/yaw controls to line that tiny imperiled solar space station in your sights before making the dumbest move in astronautical history is the culmination of one's mastery over the game's shockingly intuitive space flight controls. You don't need to be a Drew Scanlon to land on the Sun Station, but it probably wouldn't hurt. For one, you'd have the perfect facial expression for when you finally pulled it off. (Of course, even if you reach the Sun Station the "smart" way, which is to say the one that isn't immediately lethal 99 times out of 100, you still have to make a harrowing EVA jump from one side of the station to the next with only several million tons of nuclear fusion hotness below you to worry about.)
Damn it, get back here stupid station. Sigh. Looks like it's barbecue again for me tonight.
Nyctophobia
Sure, space is dark, but it's not that dark. There's usually a whole bunch of stars to break up the wall of black nothingness, even if Outer Wilds's all seem to be blinking out in rapid succession. Absolute total darkness, though? Well, the game needs you to immerse yourself in it a few times. Night night, don't let the space bedbugs paralyze.
The darkness is only strictly necessary for the whole quantum entanglement thing which I thought was a neat puzzle that paid off a phenomenon that, prior to understanding how it worked, had been an eerie curiosity. There's also those aforementioned Ember Twin sand caves. Does the black hole count? I kind of want to drag that spherical bastard in as many categories as I can because Brittle Hollow was such a PITA to get around in.
Thalassophobia
If you're someone who can't take a bath if the water's over a foot deep, your fear of the ocean and the endless abyss that lies beneath is going to get a work out here too. Turns out the game has an ocean planet and it's not shallow. (Scientifically speaking that would make it a puddle planet.)
Giant's Deep was a world that wasn't quite as mysterious as I'd hoped, though I appreciate you had two layers of puzzle to solve before getting to that zappy center and the missing node from the planet's orbital probe launcher (i.e. the first thing you see whenever you wake up). Going that deep underwater in a type of vessel that traditionally can only handle either one or zero atmospheres' worth of pressure sure was daunting however. I'm so glad the Hearthians had the presence of mind to waterproof that ship for several hundred meters, but then I guess it's not like they didn't know they'd have use it to explore an ocean planet at some point (a giant ball of water is a hard thing to miss floating past in the sky).
Even dead these things are intimidating. How the hell did it get halfway across the system?
Xenophobia
You have nothing to fear from the alien Nomai except maybe their skeletons leaping out at you from a closet like it's an Indiana Jones movie, but in a more general sense the fear of the unknown is something the game is all about countenancing. Can't solve a timeloop without poking into places mankind (or newtkind) was not meant to go.
This encompasses the whole game pretty much but I'll limit it to: exploring the center of The Interloper and learning some pretty dire truths about this formerly innocuous (if tricky to pin down) comet visitor; playing around with the Nomai's warp system at their lab until you accidentally break spacetime (and that was quite the effect that ensued); reaching the electrified core of Giant's Deep and the enormous coral forest within; figuring out the deal with the Quantum Moon and what awaits you in its enigmatic "sixth location"; and, of course, the Eye of the Universe itself. Each one was a very cool discovery but also sort of chilling in an existential way. The secrets of this particular corner of the universe were a lot to take in, especially as they started hitting one after the other towards the end of the game.
FOMO
I'm just throwing this one in here to complain about the game some. Otherwise we were pretty much done after the all-encompassing Xenophobia entry above. What's the point of having a soapbox if not to whinge about whatever slighted you today?
Fear of Missing Out in this case means fear of missing something behind, or being in the right place at the wrong time and not being sure if the pivotal moment has passed or is yet to come. The game does not track cosmic events in a chronological fashion the way a Majora's Mask might, nor does it track the time at all (you invented interplanetary space travel, is it so hard to also invent a damn clock?), so most of the time you're guessing at an approximate time to show up. This fear is best exemplified when the sad "the sun's gonna blow up, sucks to be you" music starts playing and you realize that you've either wasted a whole cycle or are about to waste a whole cycle because you aren't yet finished in this well-hidden area it took the whole cycle to find. See also: The first time I discovered the Nomai mothership with seconds left to go, or read the log in the Sun Station that said (paraphrased) "Time until the Sun Station is gobbled up like an aperitif: 2 minutes, 11 seconds. Better jog on over to all those priceless archival scrolls, spaceboy. Hope you can speedread. If not, enjoy getting flambéd a dozen more times trying to get back here." This game is a real ass sometimes.
Boo! Did I scare ya? If so, that was only a small taste of the terrors that await should you decide to boot up Outer Wilds thinking it's just some harmless soulful time-looping Indie action-adventure puzzle whatsit. It is that, but it is also a horror show of monsters waiting in the deep, chilling scenarios that will keep you awake at night, and missed appointments. Ye have been warned, ye have. Yarr. (NB: There are no space pirates in this game.)
I suppose the theme of this edition of Indie Game of the Week is déjà vu. Not just in the sense that Mobius Digital's award-winning, space-faring adventure game Outer Wilds operates on a repeating time loop Majora's Mask style, but that I originally covered it as part of a series of GOTY contenders towards the end of 2019 whereupon I crashed and burned spectacularly due to a save corruption glitch: perhaps the worst thing a game can throw at you, except maybe a virus that bricks your entire system. That Giant Bomb themselves then went on to award it GOTY that year has left me with something of a cognitive dissonance ever since: how can a game with an egregious technical fault possibly be GOTY-worthy? I knew I needed to give it some time before I could hope to review it again with a wiped slate and an open mind.
For the unfamiliar who don't feel like reading the above linked review, Outer Wilds starts with you hopping into your ship (after talking to the folks in your village for some establishing world-building, gameplay tutorials, and the launch codes from your mentor) then blasting off to whichever planet (or moon, or maybe comet) looks the most interesting. This is soon followed with your first death, either because you landed too hard in the ship, fell of a cliff, ran out of oxygen, or stayed alive long enough for the sun to suddenly supernova and destroy everything. You then wake up again on your home planet with the launch codes already in your memory, ready to get back out there and figure out what's going on. By some convenient stroke of luck, your spaceship's computer has also been granted immunity from the progress-wiping resets and will retain all the information you've learned: this data can be viewed in map mode, telling you what you may yet need to accomplish on any given world, or rumor mode, which is a flowchart that attempts to connect relevant nodes of data and lets you tackle these individual smaller mysteries by their threads rather than by their locations. Your fellow villagers and astronauts aren't cognizant of the loop (mostly), but might still have relevant information if you were to ask them the right questions. Through these data points, some transitory and some permanently recorded, you can eventually piece together what's happening and hopefully put an end to both the loop and the imminent fiery destruction of everything you've ever known.
Wait, was the sun always this color?
Immediately, I was reminded of just how annoying it was to get anywhere in Outer Wilds. Let's take the nearby planet of Brittle Hollow as an example. Because this time loop began after a massive, initially unknown power surge, many planets suffering adverse environmental effects have seen these effects mysteriously accelerate to breaking point. Brittle Hollow was already unstable and prone to having parts of itself collapse and sucked through the black hole in the planet's former core (if you've heard the theories about the Large Hadron Collider creating a miniature black hole, this is the end result people were worried about). More and more of it becomes inaccessible the longer in the cycle you wait to visit, which makes navigating the already obtuse system of surface access points, transportation beams, and dark crumbling walkways that much harder. Spending hours here, I've still yet to figure out how to get to the observatory underneath the southern pole, the "quantum tower" on the equator which has an already-broken entrance no matter how early you reach it, or the upper parts of the "hanging city" which appeared to be the main population center of the ancient species that once occupied this solar system. I'm not sure which of these are even supposed to be accessible, perhaps more's the point. It's like the worst parts of Myst ("what the hell am I supposed to do?") and Shenmue ("why is everywhere already shut down for the day?") combined, rendering whatever appeal the central mystery behind this doomed star system had moot due to the sheer frustration of accessing the clues to ascertain it. I could look up how to get to these places, but why even play a game with a strong sense of exploration and mystery if I'm going to be punching things into Google just to make progress? Other planets aren't much better: the twin planets Ash Twin and Ember Twin decrease and increase in mass respectively as the cycle progresses, making the relevant areas of both inaccessible at different stages of the loop. Giant's Deep and Dark Bramble have environments almost too hostile to risk the visit (islands on the former have a nasty habit of flying several hundred meters into the air, and there's something very big and hungry living in the latter). Trying to land on the space station orbiting the sun is an exercise in futility because of the star's enormous gravity well. I have at least enough gray matter to understand that solving all these meta-puzzles to reach vital clues is another part of the game's intended puzzle-solving process, but these elaborate games of keep-away are doing nothing to endear me to the clue-gathering process. Especially if it means sitting somewhere for fifteen minutes twiddling my thumbs until an opportune moment in the loop's timeframe comes to pass (not that there's any in-game timers or a Majora's Mask timetable to tell you when these moments arrive, as far as I know).
Don't even get me started on this goddamn eerie quantum moon. Even after figuring out how to land on it, my success rate was... not great.
I dunno, it's not like I've ever agreed with Giant Bomb on any of their GOTY choices (besides Mass Effect 2 ten years ago) though, per contra, I do at least respect their opinions and give them weight when considering what to play next. Enough of them adored this game that I can't help but feel like I'm missing something, besides the landing platform on that solar station a dozen times in a row. It does have a fascinating premise and a surprisingly (even incongruously) intuitive approach to space travel. I like how it organizes the information you find so that you always have an index to refer to and any number of breadcrumb trails to pursue next, as vague as they might be. I think its writing and dialogue is trenchant and its lonely atmosphere is fantastic. I appreciate that most of its secret achievements are for executing on dumb, lateral thinking ideas like trying to escape the solar system by accelerating away at top speed for the whole cycle and using your oxygen tank as propulsion when your jetpack runs out of fuel or landing the toy drone on the moon. I'm just struggling to understand how anyone has the patience for even half of its bullshit, especially Giant Bomb who are - with the possible exception of Vinny - not regularly all that invested in video game narratives or hard-A Adventure games. An enigma as potent as the game's own.
Rating: 3 out of 5 (at least it didn't wipe my save this time).
Post-Script: Well, I got to the end and what an end that was. Rather than focus on that, though, let's kvetch about the game some more. If I never have to negotiate the cave system underneath Ember Twin or pass through Dark Bramble again I'll be happy, though the mystery did come to a satisfying whole when you have the full flowchart of clues and information. I liked the asides too, like figuring out when the ancient race and the protagonist's ever met or what actually happened to said ancient race. It can be a very creepy game too when it wants to be; I credit that to the game's mastery of atmosphere, and how well it reflects the reality that space travel is often a series of terrifying unknowns.
I dunno, I did come around to the game a little once I demystified its more annoying enigmas and witnessed that conclusion, but I think my outstanding issues with the game are still applicable. I recognize that regularly checkpointing isn't easy with a game like this, but when a whole loop is 22 minutes long and you're completing various objectives within that time frame, the occasional flag in the ground wouldn't have hurt for those occasions where I missed my window, mistimed a jump, or wasn't able to reduce my ship's velocity sufficiently because I was in a hurry. For what I believe is currently the best game in terms of providing tools to navigate a time-loop and reliably taking on the heady mix of causality and paradox involved, the underrated Vision Soft Reset is a good bet. It doesn't quite have this game's gravitas, but it approaches the mechanics of time-travel (specifically how they function within a video game format) in a much more palatable fashion.
At the end of this journey, I can begrudgingly see why Giant Bomb afforded it the acclaim it did, even if I agree with Jeff that its annoyances and setbacks often serve to undermine its soul of wanderlust, mystery-solving, and exploration - I might compare to something like SOMA or Deadly Premonition in how the moment it decides to be a game rather than a purely narrative experience is also where it lets itself down hardest. On the whole though? Not too bad, time-travel guy from Heroes.
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