There was a small stir on the gaming zones of the social media a few months back where everyone was suddenly getting thirsty for demon girls. It soon became apparent that the culprit at the center of it all was a freeware Steam game named Helltaker, following a similar set of circumstances that put a newly added feature in a relatively anodyne New Super Mario Bros. U Switch remake at the heart of an equally horny fanart catastrophe. Helltaker's a brief puzzle game that's perhaps best suited for mobile devices (it has that kind of style to it), but notable enough beyond its central conceit of obtaining a "demon girl harem" to be worth reviewing for this feature.
Helltaker is a specific sort of puzzle game I've referred to in the past (actually never) as the "perfect path deducer". That is, you're given a limited number of moves to complete a map, working your way from one point to another, and going over this limit will instantly end the attempt and start you over. These maps are invariably a grid of obstacles to overcome, from rocks to skeletal goons to spike traps. Rocks need to be pushed out the way (and regularly form inconvenient barriers), skeletal goons are also pushed out of the way but can be eliminated if shoved against a wall, and spike traps simply remove two steps from your limit rather than one though can be safely walked upon during their "off" state (they alternate every step). This is the basis of the first eight levels of the game, with the ninth and final switching the format to a more reflex-intensive real-time boss battle.
Plotwise, Helltaker is about as straightforward as it gets.
However, there is one more obstacle to overcome before a level is complete: you have to convince the comely demon girl at the end to join your harem, via a very dating-sim-like multiple choice prompt. Failure to convince them usually has them clawing your head off, which naturally proves as fatal as failing to reach them in the first place. The developers made sure to give each of these infernal paramours enough of a distinct personality, sharp "business casual" fashion sense, and distinct role in Hell's operation, which may have spawned the whole demon waifu business that spread out over the internet for a brief but prurient moment in time. Honestly, this all thematically dovetails with the allure of the immortal genocidal cult leaders of Paradise Killer also, which proves if nothing else that the internet can stan anything, even pure evil, if it's sexy enough.
Beyond all that, the game's about an hour long and I'm not going to spoil the puzzles or the encounters, and the game's still free on Steam if you're curious yourselves. I believe there's an option to skip puzzles if they turn out to be too tough (I'll admit to spending close to 15 minutes on the eighth stage, and the ninth sure wasn't easy either) so it's fairly accessible. A pleasant freebie surprise, much like Doki Doki Literature Club was for 2017. Just, uh, maybe put SafeSearch on if you decide to go Googling for more information (or don't; no yucking anyone's yums here).
*Extreme Strong Bad voice* Ohh, there's three of them...
GOTY Verdict: It's cute so it's in the running, but I don't fancy its chances in the long-term.
Neversong is a quasi-sequel/reboot to a Flash game named Coma that creator Thomas Brush put together in his spare time as a student in 2010. He followed that up with the long-in-development Once Upon a Coma, which eventually morphed to become Neversong. Knowing that this game was a remake of a 2010 project made more sense in retrospect. Sadly, in the process of learning more about the source of the game after completing it (my usual practice, since I like to avoid spoilers whenever possible) I also found out that Neversong is actually a 2019 game: it launched on PS4 on the Halloween of last year. However, I'm counting it anyway because A) its European PS4 debut wasn't until the July of this year, which was months after its worldwide iOS and Steam launches in May, and B) I've already completed it so I might as well talk about it. I'll be sure to add an asterisk to it once I get around to my GOTY list.
These little rhyming storybook moments with Dr. Smile are just off-rhythm enough to add to his disquieting nature.
So, Neversong. It's nothing we've not seen before, but in a thematic way I think that works in the game's favor: as a game led by a child surrounded solely by other children in a vaguely mid-20th century rural setting (the date gets a little murky for reasons that become clear later) one of the main themes is the doubled-edged sword that is nostalgia and the dangers that dwelling too much in the past can cause. Just like how protagonist Peet's adventures in his suddenly topsy-turvy hometown belies a deeper adult trauma at its core, being ten years out from the melancholy puzzle-platformer fad has made it the newest of video game genres to feel wistful about. (At least, I'm assuming that was a part of its successful Kickstarter push, though other factors - the game's distinctive, gothic, Edward Gorey-esque look and Brush's profile as the creator of Indie adventure hit Pinstripe - certainly contributed also.) The game's progress is demarcated by new songs obtained from bosses that, when played on the heroine's home piano, open up chests that contain new traversal items that allow Peet to explore more of the surrounding countryside. Despite this item-based progression system though, the game is markedly not an explormer: in fact, it's very linear barring a few collectibles you might want to backtrack for, largely for the sake of keeping its narrative trucking along. The other kids lend their personal takes on Peet's progress, but will often contribute in other ways: sometimes by giving him hints on how to complete upcoming, or being a component of those puzzles themselves. A few are there to give you fetch quests to complete, while others exist as eccentric red herrings to give the world a little more personality. I bring them up because the final act does something of interest to this little gang of yours, paying off the investment the player puts in learning their names and quirks early on.
Gameplay-wise, I was often at odds with Neversong, though the blame lies once again with my own inadequate hardware (specifically my PC, though the "hardware" that lives in my head isn't necessarily off the hook). I've noticed certain brands of game creator software really freak out if you don't have the adequate GPU chops to consistently run a game at its desired framerate, with certain physics-y objects like the climb-able and swing-able vines glitching into outer space and stymieing your progress until they eventually calm down or the player is forced to reload their last save. The lag introduced by these framerate problems also made the aforementioned momentum puzzles - the swinging on the vines as well as a skateboard that needs some run-up for larger jumps - quite unpleasant to deal with. Overall and exempt these issues, the platforming controls fine enough and I appreciated how clever some of its boss fights were, even if combat with normal enemies can be a bit mashy and unreliable. A very handy floating tool - an umbrella, naturally - would've been appreciated for the game's early jumping puzzles, though it's regrettably instead the last item in the game's progression chain.
Here I am, struggling with the game's second boss fight. See those vines at the top that look like they're wrapped around their respective platforms? They're not supposed to be doing that.
On the whole, Neversong is every bit the type of emotionally-charged Indie puzzle-platformer that the industry has more or less moved away from in recent years. If you're still in the market for one of those, it's certainly serviceable and its peculiar artstyle, macabre sense of humor, and occasional flashes of gameplay ingenuity are additional feathers in its cap. The technical problems and some annoying puzzles towards the end meant my honeymoon period with the game concluded long before the game itself did, so I'm left mostly ambivalent about it despite those stated virtues. Ultimately: I didn't love it, but I would never say "never Neversong."
GOTY Verdict: Near the bottom of the list but not necessarily out of the running.
I feel like whenever I talk about an Indie action-adventure game clearly and purposefully built on the framework of the Legend of Zelda, I always gravitate towards my pet theory that every Indie Zelda-like emphasizes or de-emphasizes portions of the trinity, or triforce if you will, of that franchise's mix of open-world exploration, puzzle-solving, and real-time combat. However, there are also a handful of cases like Anodyne or today's game Lenna's Inception where the Zelda parallels aren't so much intended as a launching point for the developer's spin on that type of game, but instead serve as the foundation for some meta narrative trickery couched in a familiar framework.
One distinctive trait of the game that I've seen a few other Zelda-likes attempt, with very mixed results, is procedural generation. The world is generated anew each time you start, with the world's name also doubling as its seed. The game has a few example names for players to use if they can't think of one themselves, and it serves to reassemble the overworld, the items you obtain and in what order, and the layouts of the dungeons. However, as with most procgen projects, this only serves to make every dungeon feel the same, with similar "tiles" that you'll encounter over and over and enemy arrangements with inconsistent difficulty curves. If inputting a seed name wasn't a giveaway that the game has Rogue aspirations, the game's many potion types are initially unlabelled save for their color and consistency: a "fizzy red potion" could be anything from a heal, to increased fire resistance, to hovering or giant growth (both useful to brute force some puzzles), to many detrimental effects like poison, reversed controls, or slowness. The same is true for the many hues of tunic that the protagonist can wear, which provide a permanent version of the potion effect for as long as it's worn. The game's randomized "mini-dungeons," non-essential to progress but often containing helpful heart pieces or meteorite upgrade materials, will also have enemies under several simultaneous potion effects for a bit of variety.
The problem with Lenna's Inception as a procgen game is that there's very few monster types and dungeon tiles and so it feels like you've seen most of what the game has to offer within a few hours. It starts getting interesting again towards the end where there's a dungeon that encourages (and, in fact, requires) you to break the game and wander outside in the "out of bounds" areas, but before that it's a lot of generic randomized dungeons that suffer from procgen's intrinsic lack of creative direction. The overworld isn't all that interesting either, being built with a similar algorithm, and as far as I can tell the purpose for going the procgen route is twofold: to facilitate speedruns or harder playthroughs with additional harsh conditions (limited health, permadeath), and a "true ending" that is so obtuse and requires such specific steps that you'll almost certainly need to start over with a fresh run to see it. I'm typically not going to look fondly on a game that demands you play it several times over to get the most out of it, especially if I was already getting bored of it during the first playthrough, but I suppose I can at least see the logic of this approach. I think we're probably still a ways from implementing procgen effectively in anything other than short session run-based games like Spelunky or Hades, or games where the destination doesn't matter as much as the journey (e.g. No Man's Sky), and I wish the Indie game development sphere used it more sparingly.
It's bad enough that I'm carrying around someone's whizz in a bottle before you consider that you have to drink a potion before you know what the effects are...
In my bad habits, I sometimes lead my reviews with something noncommittal and inconsequential like "this game was not what I expected"; I feel like such a sentiment would be too much of a facile understatement when it comes to Kaizen Game Works's Paradise Killer, however, as it's a metaphysical murder mystery game set on an artificial island paradise pocket dimension built by immortal zealots who worship all-powerful cosmic entities. Functionally similar to something like Spike Chunsoft's Danganronpa - that is, a visual novel driven by crime scene investigations and evidence-led testimony in court - Paradise Killer also presents a surprisingly vast open-world 3D game across an island filled with trash, treasure, currency, secrets, and sometimes valuable clues to uncover. The required nature of the last item on that list makes encountering the rest mostly incidental, though there's enough worldbuilding packed into those finds to make their pursuit worthwhile.
Speaking of which, the game is not shy about throwing the player in the deep end of a particularly abyssal pool when it comes to its oblique setting and backstory. In as brief and spoiler-free as I can make it: at some point in humanity's past we found ourselves in contact with beings beyond the stars that referred to themselves as gods. After many centuries, with mankind split among the slave armies of these various cosmic entities, we were able to throw off the yoke of oppression and either slayed, imprisoned, or chased off the gods that subjugated us for so long. In its dying moments, one of these gods gifted a small faction of loyal human zealots named the Syndicate both immortality and the ability to create "island sequences": tropical-themed pocket dimensions from which they could launch attacks on the newly emancipated human race and recover the gods they had captured, whom would then be interred in pyramid tombs until their strength had recovered. A regular influx of "citizens" - humans abducted from the real world - are used as slave labor and chattel, forced to worship the Syndicate's gods to supply them with nourishing psychic energy until it was time to ritually mass-sacrifice them all and begin anew on a fresh island. In the present era, the nine-member ruling council of the Syndicate has been slaughtered to a man, and it's up to a formerly exiled Syndicate investigator named Lady Luck Dies to determine the culprit or culprits.
A former Turkish assassin turned skeletal bartender, Sam Day Break's one of the more chill occupants of Island 24. These little breakdowns of different blends of whiskey remind me a lot of the bar-hopping in the Yakuza series, a parallel that may well be intentional.
It's a hell of a lot to take in, and naturally you have to derive much of this information yourself from context once you begin, but Paradise Killer luxuriates in both its absurdity and its style and you either find yourself rolling along in its distinctive groove or slamming up against its alienating strangeness like a brick wall. The closest approximation of what the developers were going for, as far as I could tell, was something like Grasshopper/Goichi "Suda51" Suda's Killer is Dead, or earlier projects like Killer7 and The Silver Case. Much of Suda's telltale aesthetic and narrative flair is invoked here, including electronically modified voice clips, heavily artifacted images used for items, random asides given to philosophical musings and silly jokes, and intentionally ludicrous names germane for the game's cast of quasi-godlike immortals like former assassin Lydia Day Break or the cybernetic medic Doctor Doom Jazz. Calling a group of suspects that includes characters named The Witness To the End or One Last Kiss "a rogue's gallery" seems woefully insufficient. Like I said, though, the surrealism of the setting is something you're encouraged to let wash over you as you dig further into the comparatively grounded reasons behind the game's central murder conspiracy, with relatively quotidian motives like jealousy, long-standing animosity, past betrayals, or a desire for power and/or recognition. A group of immortals taking it easy in a series of island paradises over many millennia is bound to produce lot of skeletons in closets, or in one case (seen above) serving drinks behind a bar.
Traversing the island becomes easier with a handful of expensive upgrades, like a double-jump and an air-dash, though you obviously need to first determine the source of these upgrades and then find enough of the currency needed to buy them. Many items are placed in odd, out-of-reach locations (and there's a succinct in-game explanation as to why they're all where they are: a demon did it) and you could go nuts trying to figure out how to access them all, or grow exhausted taking detours to higher vantage points where you can hop down to them. The fast travel stations ameliorate this process to some extent, though they also require some of the game's finite currency supply to unlock and use. (Said currency are crystals made of frozen blood: the most precious resource to a group of blood cultists.) Then there's the vital upgrades to the protagonist's PDA device, which are needed to get past a lot of the locked doors across the island via a so-so hacking mini-game.
Starlight, the PDA assistant to Lady Love Dies, holds onto all the intel that you've collected. As well as organizing clues for both suspects and criminal cases, it keeps a tally of leads and hints to chase after in its 'Notes' tab, a rundown of everyone on the island and the island's geography, and a general timeline of the game's events and backstory. A good source for invaluable lore (plus it's an MP3 player!).
With the exception of crime scenes and certain other areas of interest, most of the map is immaterial unless you're searching for more lore or following up certain leads: to help focus the player, there's an AR mode that highlights every NPC's location so you can make a beeline towards them, and this mode also helpfully indicates when you have something new to ask them about. New revelations often create new cases to pursue, and every character has some response to your inquiries even if they're often terse and unhelpful. There's a few visual novel indulgences with these interrogations: characters have a selection of stock voice clips they'll use that may or may not be linked to what's actually in the dialogue box, a cost-saving measure common to Japanese visual novels, and the player can choose to hang out with suspects in a vaguely "social link"-esque manner for the sake of getting to know them better as well as convincing them to let some incriminating information slip. Much of both the map exploration and NPC dialogue is thus inessential, but you've no way of determining that ahead of time: any clue or hint might eventually prove valuable to your investigation, after all. Accessibility-wise the game has a host of options for those with limited sight problems, colorblindness, vertigo, motion sickness, dyslexia, or insufficient night vision to handle the game's intense day/night cycles. However, it should be stated that the game has no auto-saving and limited save opportunities: that is, you can only save the game at the aforementioned fast travel stations. There's a "mature content" filter too, but I'm not sure what it toggles; possibly the copious swearing from certain characters.
While I think the game can be a little too abstruse for its own good and that so much of its content is filler designed to lead the more OCD of us around in circles or have them running up looping apartment staircases ad nauseum, I really can't fault the game's bold sense of style or the confidence of its worldbuilding. The orange sunsets and neon pastels of its tropical streets and vistas, the sheer overwhelming personality of its setting and characters, and in particular a sterling '80s funk/"citypop"-influenced soundtrack that soon earwormed its way to the top of my list of Best Music GOTY candidates this year all lend the game an inimitable aesthetic that is sure to stick around in the old grey matter for many years to come. I'll inevitably still kvetch over the fine details when it comes to picking the best games of this year - I encountered one huge revelation about the case almost entirely by accident while running around off the beaten path, and the game suffers from some poor script editing with its many, many cases of getting its/it's and whose/who's wrong (far more than you can chalk up to typos, at least; it was more like the writers and proofers honestly didn't know the right ones to use) - but I think Paradise Killer will stand as the type of beloved cult auteur game that people will be discovering and falling in love with multiple years from now, even if it never sees any major exposure. I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more artistically-inclined of Giant Bomb's myriad guest GOTY contributors put it high on their lists, even if Giant Bomb itself won't have much to say on it (especially with Abby gone, given her proclivity for off-kilter Indie adventure games).
In addition to being a close friend of the protagonist and a suspect, Lydia's also the island's 'ferry woman': the only one capable of traversing the gaps between dimensions in a tricked out muscle car she's inexplicably dubbed 'Burn Parliament.' She's also the one who does all the fast travel business for you.
GOTY Verdict: Very close to the top, though not quite passing some of my heavy hitters. It's in a pretty short list of games this year I'd accept could be someone's GOTY.
Yeah, I'm technically breaking the rules again: Part Time UFO originally released on Android devices in 2017. However, this year saw its debut on a video game platform (the Switch) so it - along with Assemble With Care from earlier in this feature - qualifies for this year's GOTY, as per the rules of this site in case my own assertions were insufficient. Part Time UFO is a product from the small division of HAL Laboratory who are freed from the perpetual toil in the sugar mines needed to make Kirby games, creating instead such bite-sized portable delights as Picross 3D and the BoxBoy! series. Built for simplified touch controls, the goal of Part Time UFO is to float around as the titular alien temp worker and grab and drop objects into their appropriate locations, contingent on the current task given to you. This might involve putting vegetables on the back of a farmer's pick-up, or re-assembling a priceless statue, or angling up a JRPG mini-game's worth of fish from the ocean. Since all you need controls-wise is a single button for catch and release, and the free-floating movement, the complexity instead comes courtesy of the tasks themselves as well as some frequently tricky bonus conditions that increases your paycheck.
I tweeted about the game a few hours after starting, and I feel it concisely covers what I dislike most about the game:
Me, starting Part Time UFO: "Man, I love claw-catcher games and there's so many directions to take this idea. Can't wait." Part Time UFO, 90% of the time: "Just put everything in a big stack and pray it doesn't fall over. Fuck you when it inevitably does."
In other words, almost all the puzzles involve finicky physics puzzles where a stack of unstable trash has to stay standing without running afoul of gravity or your own careless swinging around of whatever it is you might be holding. Objects plummet to the ground if they lack support, and carried objects sway as you'd expect with every movement; coupled together, it makes for a very challenging scenario (or, indeed, many consecutively with little relief) that demands a level of concentration and precision I'm not sure you're likely to get with the various distractions that come with mobile gaming. As the tweet suggests, many players might approach this game having been long acquainted with the nuances of claw-catcher arcade games: where best to hook a rounder toy, for example, or using the sides of the machine to push an object into a position where it might be caught. Nintendo themselves have had a long-running F2P arcade claw-catcher sim on the 3DS, complete with a bunny who keeps demanding more money from you (which was something of a theme for the 3DS), and I've gotten fairly good at it over the years. The claw machine concept's a compelling one, but physics-based puzzle games are usually anything but; in my estimation, unless you're playing in a raucous group or trying to entertain an easily amused child (or stream audience), physics games like Human Fall Flat or Octodad are best avoided and the same rings true for Part Time UFO.
This isn't going to end well. (Narrator: "It did not.")
It's not all doom and gloom. As with BoxBoy! (and Kirby, I suppose) HAL Laboratory has cornered the market on cuteness, with the heavy-lidded UFO giving off a world-weariness that is at odds with its adorable appearance and universe full of oddball characters. Little recurring jokes like an enigmatic statue with a nervous look - involved in a great deal of puzzles as a frequently-hidden bonus objective - or a master thief who poorly disguises herself as any number of background objects give the game a quirky personality, as do the range of employers that the UFO works for which include a mad scientist and a circus apparently run by the animals. The game has thirty job assignments overall (or at least the Switch port does) but expands the longevity with each job's three bonus tasks, an achievement-like set of meta challenges that might involve milestones or completing jobs in oddly specific ways (such as assembling a statue or castle upside-down), and "hard mode" versions of all the jobs that add more obstacles like a higher total of objects to balance or more distractions to deter you. The money you earn, meanwhile, goes towards a fashion store run by a genie: many of the costumes will provide additional abilities like making the claw faster or heavier objects easier to lift, though most are simply cosmetic. Needless to say, they're all very cute as well.
The wholesomeness of Part Time UFO makes it a hard game to dislike, and yet I managed to get there regardless because of how often I was forced to watch a carefully assembled pile of garbage tip over because the game's tenuous grasp of gravity had deemed it structurally unsound. Even minor comedic quirks like the way the last ten yen coin in the pay packet needed an extra shake to come out grew to become deeply annoying, as it meant the animation added an extra couple of seconds each time and I was desperate to retry the task (because I missed a condition) or move on to literally anything else. I feel the same way towards it in general that I did about the original Scribblenauts: it came out of the gate with such an inspired approach to puzzle-solving and then proceeded to craft every puzzle with the same deeply frustrating format, instead of expanding the idea as far as it could go. Later Scribblenaut games were infinitely better because they found a broader, superior application of their particular conceit of summoning items to complete objectives, and extrapolating from that experience I imagine Part Time UFO 2 won't be something I detest with all my heart. Here's hoping, eh?
At least the UFO's apartment looks cosy. I can watch the trains slowly trundle on by as I wait for my blood pressure to go back down.
GOTY Verdict: It's visually and musically cute, controls well, provides a great deal of longevity if not variety, and is chock full of kooky personality. However, in my experience at least, loathed games don't usually do so well in finalized GOTY lists.
My first serious Go! Go! GOTY! contender for the GOTY list, if not the top spot, Murder by Numbers by Mediatonic is a delightful merger of picross puzzle games and a '90s-set detective procedural visual novel made in a Japanese style, specifically modelled after the likes of the Ace Attorney franchise, or possibly the Hotel Dusk duology. Disclaimer: due to it being something of the home of picross these days, I bought the Switch version of Murder by Numbers, though after learning my lesson from Picross 3D Round 2 I relied purely on the controller for filling in the grid rather than the undocked touchscreen controls.
The story of Murder by Numbers sees down-on-her-luck Hollywood actress Honor Mizrahi encounter an amnesiac robot named SCOUT, and a shocking murder at her former workplace eventually highlights both her latent talent for deduction and SCOUT's invaluable capacity for scanning and analyzing important clues and evidence. Most of this process involves SCOUT examining the local vicinity for items that might be relevant to the investigation, each of which leads to (of course) a separate picross puzzle. On the picross side of the equation, the game has a brief tutorial that explains the basics of the interface and of the "overlapping" technique - determining correct squares based on whether or not they're active whether you start the row on the left or right, a fundamental component of solving picross puzzles - before letting you loose and slowly building its way up to 15x15 grids (there is exactly one 20x15 grid, and only in the "bonus puzzles" section of the game, which makes me wonder why there weren't more). Something that occurred to me close to the end of the game is how miraculous it was that they were able to create a constant difficulty curve for the picross puzzles while building investigative stories around the objects you were finding; something I'm sure wasn't easy to pull off, at least not without some trial and error to redraw those pixel objects several times over until they made for an appropriately challenging puzzle for that specific stage of the game.
SCOUT is a bit... rusty when you first meet him, in perhaps more ways than one, but he becomes a reliable partner as the game progresses.
Due to its nature as a hybrid, and perhaps the developers' inexperience with either half of Murder by Numbers's make-up, there's a few fixtures common to visual novels and picross puzzles alike which aren't present here, though they are admittedly minor conveniences and the kinds of exclusion you'd only notice if you've played a lot of games from either genre. As an example on the picross side, there's a feature common to picross games where you can mark boxes rather than cross them out (to indicate there's definitely not a square there) or fill them in (to indicate there definitely is a square there) if you need a visual aid to plot possible solutions. Murder by Numbers has them too, but if you try to delete them en masse - by dragging the cursor across the whole row or column - it also deletes all the valid crosses/fills as well, which shouldn't happen. Once you've correctly (at least, by your estimation) filled in a row and can delete the no-longer-necessary guide markings by holding down the deletion button and working your way across the row, most picross games will only remove the markings if that's where you started. It's a very minor thing, but still makes guide markings less convenient to use. Likewise, as a visual novel, Murder by Numbers lacks any kind of "log" feature: an ability to see previous lines of dialogue if you clicked past them too fast. That's more than possible due to the way that Murder by Numbers, when dealing with situations where one character interrupts another, will have the first character's dialogue box interrupted in real-time without the player needing to hit the button to proceed to the next line. This makes it both annoyingly easy to miss the end of the interrupted dialogue, and easy to accidentally skip the interrupter's dialogue as you click the "next dialogue" button the moment it pops up unexpectedly. This is distinct from visual novels which will generally indicate an interruption with an en-dash at the end of the first dialogue box, but still hangs on it until the player is ready to read on. Again, it's worth reiterating that these faults don't drag the game down much at all and that developers that create picross games (like Jupiter) or visual novels (like 5pb.) have been working in those spheres since forever, and are often geared towards making nothing but them: to expect the same level of expert proficiency from a novice developer looking to create something distinct and breezily fun isn't all that fair, but I'm pointing it out anyway because I'm always cranky in December I guess.
Another prominent Ace Attorney influence is in its endless pun names for minor characters. Graham Nonna (or Nonna, Graham, perhaps?) is a typical example. Others might require rolling their names around your tongue for a while.
Murder by Numbers is also part of a small but growing movement in the Indie scene towards stronger LGBTQ+ representation in games, dovetailing the anecdotes of drag queens and Honor's best friend and flamboyantly out hairdresser K.C. with SCOUT's own voyage of self-discovery, including his confusion over whether or not he has a gender identity as a robot. It's all wholesome and cute and feels intended to introduce audiences to these worlds in much the same way the Ace Attorney games took steps to explain the more obtuse inner-workings of, say, filming TV shows or spirit channeling to its frequently bemused Judge character. The writing in Murder by Numbers is uniformly excellent for that matter, even if the whodunnit aspect can feel a little too perfunctory; it's amazing how quickly Honor can put together a solid explanation of the culprit and how they did it after SCOUT identifies half a dozen random objects sitting around the crime scene. The writing and themes are also much more, well, I might say "mature" compared to Ace Attorney - which I only keep bringing up because Murder by Numbers is so obviously riffing on it (to the extent that it brings in original AA and Ghost Trick composer Masakazu Sugimori for the music) - in how it covers difficult or nuanced topics, in particular the slimy, manipulative way that Honor's ex-husband tries to worm his way back into her life after closely controlling it for most of their marriage. That isn't to say Murder by Numbers doesn't also ably balance its more serious moments - a whooooole lot of dead bodies - with plenty of levity too, especially with SCOUT's terrible puns and Honor's half-baked explanations to her over-protective cop associate for why she put herself in harm's way again. I enjoyed it all, even if much of it only exists to get you to the next picross puzzle. Speaking of which, anyone worried there wouldn't be enough picross puzzles in a game splitting its focus between it and adventure gaming needn't be worried: not only is the story replete with puzzles everywhere you turn, but there's a whole bonus section dedicated to about 70 extra puzzles that exist irrespective of the main story progression. If I complete a picross game and don't want to see another picross for at least three months, then I'm satisfied it had enough of them - that was definitely the case for Murder by Numbers.
The witty K.C. has many one-liners like this, but the game takes measures not to treat him or his fellow LGBQ kin as paper-thin joke characters or stereotypes.
Overall, I think Murder by Numbers is probably too small, too niche, and arrived too early in the year for it to see any serious GOTY consideration (not that Mediatonic will mind too much: they also made Fall Guys: Ultimate Knockout this year, which has something of a higher profile), but I consider it a very effective blend of two disparate genre bases that's really only missing one additional coat of polish. If you're a fan of both stated genres, or a fan of one who is curious about the other and looking for a good entry-level gateway, then this game should serve you well.
GOTY Verdict: Absolutely worthy. Hovering around the middle of my list at the present, though might eventually get bumped off the top ten once I've caught up with more of 2020's bigger games in years to come.
I've got a busy month ahead with GOTY-related features, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. I picked out HopFrog's Forager because it's an excellent example of an undemanding podcast game: something I can half-heartedly chip away at while doing other things. An effective crystallization of survival games and idle clickers framed in a pleasantly anodyne top-down 16-bit pixel aesthetic, Forager is all about making gauges grow and inventory numbers get bigger as you forage and mine across an ever-expanding landmass with regenerating resources. The game has a progression structure, but lacks any overarching goals: rather, the player works towards short-term benefits at all times, figuring out where best to next expand their universe. Do they earn the money needed to add another island to their archipelago? Earn XP through busywork to unlock some new buildings or perks? Work towards the next upgrade for their pickaxe (faster resource acquisition) or shovel (better buried loot) or backpack (more inventory space)? Spend a few moments scouring the furthest points of their world for any rare resource nodes that may have popped in the meantime? Contribute valuable goods to their local museum to move ever closer to a special prize? Remodel an island to an attractive if immaterial home base, beautifying the surrounding area with paths, statues, and apiaries?
With no story beats to follow and no real conclusion in sight, it's entirely up to the player how deep they wish to get into Forager's systems and progression, not dissimilar to survival/crafting forebears like Minecraft and Terraria. One area where it differs is in how the player can eventually start building resource generators that work automatically and endlessly to increase the player's assets in the background, which is where the idle clicker comparisons come in. I've been building a few extra "banks" - structures whose entire purpose is to slowly generate money - so I can purchase new landmasses sooner, and the most recent expansions have introduced new biomes (one looks like a desert and another a spooky graveyard, each popping resources unique to them), and now I'm looking at the means of rebooting some lapsed item upgrade trees now that I have access to the uncommon materials they need. Forager's gameplay has a simple loop, but a compelling one: it ensures there's always something to chase after, and will let you pin any recipe to your HUD to make the next destination easier to reach, until (one assumes) you eventually run out of things to find, build, or possess.
The starting island is home to most of my creation tools, though these damn trees are everywhere now since I stopped chopping them down regularly. At some point wood ceases to be as valuable as it once was.
Experience and levelling plays a major part of the game's progression also: unlocking new structures to create, or new resources to procure, or new abilities that makes certain aspects of the game either easier or more efficient are all tied to the player's skill tree. This skill tree starts with four general quadrants: foraging, for living off the fat of the land; economy, for increasing your cash flow one way or another; industry, for building ever more elaborate structures for intermediary and advanced resources like steel or leather; and magic, which is a miscellaneous group of combat and fantastical perks. As level-ups get further apart as the XP requirement continues to inflate, the wide variety of choices available inspire that much more indecision: a passive buff to damage or increased wealth from mining might have to be temporarily put aside for the sake of new structures to build, since the latter is where you're likely to make big strides in what you can make.
For as much as I'm happily trapped in Forager's Skinner box, the game is not without some fundamental issues. Chief of which is a highly unstable framerate that probably started as a small issue and ballooned as the developer continued to add more content and polished the visual effects and graphics of what was already there. Most of the time the game will be stuck in something under 30fps (the in-game FPS counter won't actually go under 30, I assume as some sort of placatory placebo, but given the molasses-like pace it's clearly struggling to hit double-digits) while you'll see very brief windows of what 60fps looks like: just enough of a taste to make you long for the Elysium you're missing out on. This doesn't even seem to be a problem distinct to my all-too-common under-performing system woes; many of the Forager fan boards on Reddit and Steam suggest others are facing the same issues, all of whom with considerably more powerful rigs that should handle a 16-bit throwback Indie no problem. It sounds like it's even affecting the console ports. I'm not sure if I was just unfortunate to discover the game while it's in the midst of a temporary setback, or if this is a deeply ingrained issue relating to feature creep that, at this juncture, the developer has no plans or clues on how to fix. Either way, it's been highly detrimental to the playthrough, though not quite a dealbreaker just yet: after all, the game doesn't demand any serious skill or timing to its combat, which is where an erratic framerate would be a serious downer. Minor annoyances also include the usual compulsory (though are they?) survival sim elements like a dwindling hunger/energy meter that needs regular food to ameliorate and a strict inventory limit that you can address with certain upgrades.
A grid full of tantalizing level-up perks though it'll be a long, long time until I have them all.
I think with these resource-gathering survival sims you're either in on their endless looping systems or you're out, the latter possibly more inclined towards something with a narrative arc or meaningful progression that guarantees an eventual end state (or, perhaps, the idea of just collecting things ad infinitum doesn't appeal). For those inclined towards said sims, Forager is one of the purest versions of it I've encountered: there's barely any conflict besides the occasional dumbass monster; no multiplayer with groups vying for a limited pool of goods or lording their megalithic creations over the neophyte peons beating sticks and rocks together; everything regenerates quickly even if certain rare ores and plants might take a little longer and pop up further afield; and the game has a relaxed, unhurried vibe to it that implicitly encourages you to approach its smorgasbord of systems in any pace or order you wish. It is, in so many words and to circle back around to the start, a perfect podcast game - provided said podcast is being broadcast out of something other than your browser, since that might sap the framerate even further.
Devil's Kiss is a visual novel that is about twenty minutes long and has one achievement called "Basically Read a Book". It is not so much a commercial product (though you can buy it separately) but an elaborate Ren'Py joke included with the purchase of the actual next game on my list, Ben Ward and Dan Marshall's Lair of the Clockwork God. If those names sound vaguely familiar, it's because they made a couple of point-and-click adventure games more than a decade ago starring self-effacing facsimiles of themselves: Ben There, Dan That! and Time Gentlemen, Please! (Dan has since gone on to make a few other games, notably The Swindle from 2015, and I'm sure Ben's been busy also.) These two games appealed to me at the time not only because they were deeply referential, of '90s adventure games and trashy British pop culture alike, but because the two leads had a sharp comedic voice in a medium that is typically, and tragically, lacking for same. Their long awaited third game in their little trilogy finally landed at the start of the year, ironically settling on "the end of the world" as humorous subject matter shortly before Covid made it all too real.
However, I'll get to the Clockwork God and where he might be residing in a future update. Devil's Kiss is more or less a bonus prequel that posits how Dan and Ben originally met: in a school run by demons for the sake of the elemental manifestation of suffering that resides in Hell, which turns out to be the case for every other school also. Dan and Ben are joined on their first adventure by Laura, who likes shooting at wildlife and looking behind waterfalls for artifacts, and Jayce (or "JC" or "Jay-cee" or however you wish to pronounce his name) who is much more partial to going through vents in bathrooms and reorganizing his inventory every five minutes. There's a few minor branches here and there - despite any attempts to follow the "paths" of the other characters, Ben is Dan's true and canonical partner-in-crime - but it's largely an excuse to make a few referential jokes and kick people in the balls. Or bollocks, as we like to say around these parts. These bollock parts.
This is just me every day in GB chat.
I was a little wary about reviewing this along with everything else this month, mostly because people are going to be yelling at me for spamming the game-specific forums with all this insightful video game critique, but partly because there's not a whole lot of substance here and there was never meant to be. I think a pervading theme of Lair of the Clockwork God and its particular split-focus on adventure gaming and "Indie platformer" is how much Indie games have changed since the original Ben & Dan adventures - though, honestly, that sphere has long evolved past puzzle-platformers as well and is squarely in the realm of roguelites and VNs these days. Devil's Kiss may have been a way to address the recent surge of the latter, though it's not so much a love letter to this booming Japanese export than a begrudging (or entirely mocking) acknowledgement of its popularity. Either way, it was 20 minutes of clicking through dumb joke dialogue, and that's a good enough time for me.
GOTY Verdict: I don't think it'll make my top-ten list, but the genuine commercial product it was attached to certainly might.
A gentle puzzle game to start off Go! Go! GOTY! this year. Created by the same team behind the chill Monument Valley, Assemble With Care was originally a launch game for the Apple Arcade service, and its design from top to bottom feels intended for a mobile device: everything is built for touch controls (though the mouse suffices as an alternative), and it has an easy-going pace and atmosphere separated out into a dozen-plus bite-sized chapters. Since I have no Apple device through which to subscribe to the Apple Arcade service, its Steam release in March of 2020 is the official one as far as I'm concerned (a distinction I'll also extend to Oceanhorn 2, should I get a chance to play it on Switch soon).
As itinerant repairwoman Maria, the player rolls into the town of Bellariva looking for some work and to enjoy the town's modest charms as a big festival approaches. Soon, she's tasked with repairing everything from watches to cameras to slide projectors by two parties in particular: the local mayor, a widower who is struggling balancing his work life with taking care of his feisty daughter; and a pair of estranged sisters looking to mend their once close relationship, first by working on their respective money troubles. These two threads play out across the game's many stages, each based on a separate mechanical or electronic device that has since ceased to function.
I feel like fixing a telephone should be more of a process than this. Then again, smartphones are made by eight-year-olds in Vietnamese sweatshops, so how complex can a rotary be?
The gameplay has you viewing these devices, breaking them down to their constituent components, figuring out what needs fixing or replacing, and then repeating the disassembling in reverse to restore the device to its former glory. There isn't a whole lot of complexity - you're normally only working with whatever parts you're need, which conveniently helps you figure out what screws or cogs you may have left out - and besides some fussy object rotation controls and some smaller parts that might prove tricky to manipulate as needed, there's not much that should slow down the simple gameplay loop involved. It's ultimately not really a game about repairing broken things, at least not in the literal sense; these objects and the years of love and active use they've endured are more symbolic of the relationships of those who own them, and work to restore some past vitality that their owners have been lacking of late. Put another way, you're fixing the owners as much as you're fixing their possessions, as trite as that might sound.
The game earns that sentimentality, however. Wholesome from start to end - even the game-within-a-game that you discover while fixing an old portable games console is about taking photos of wildlife rather than murdering them - it makes the whole repairing process the sort of pleasantly casual pastime that might be sorely needed in this stressful year. It's not something that will need more than a couple of hours to see in full, but it does a fine job recreating the Zen-like appeal of using your hands to do something productive as a means of taking your mind off other matters. I could recommend grabbing it if you see it cheap on your phone or tablet of choice, though the Steam version I played is perfectly feasible also.
GOTY Verdict: A fine little game, but maybe too slight for the list. Then again, it might not have enough competition to keep it out of this year's top ten.
Feels like damn near everyone's planning to get as far through Cyberpunk as they can before it's time to nail down a 2020 list, but I'm putting it off until next year.
I'm not here to talk about 2020. That's what therapists are for.
However, I am here to talk to you about several games released in 2020 that perhaps slipped in under the radar, even during what was a relatively scant year for releases. It's all in the service of eventually constructing my own top-ten Games of the Year, of course, but it couldn't hurt to shine the spotlight on a few Indies and raise their profiles a little for others putting their lists together also. After all, we are getting ever closer to 2021 and the new horrors that await us there (we have some promising vaccines being tested and a way less crappy president though, so I'm all for a little optimism).
Giant Bomb's holding off on their GOTY deliberations until January, a decision that would make way too much sense even outside these current trying circumstances, so this will be a month-long series of Go! Go! GOTY! that'll terminate on December 31st with a final list of (at least) ten items. It'll come down to the wire, but it doesn't feel right to get into the GOTY spirit before the site does.
In case you missed the 2017 or 2019 iterations of Go! Go! GOTY!, here's a quick refresher on the rules:
Each game will receive a review upon completion, released sporadically across December as I complete them (or get sufficiently far) until I either run out of games or month.
All these games were released in 2020 on something, though a few may have debuted earlier on platforms I couldn't access.
If you've got any tips on some excellent freeware games released in 2020 (say, on Itch, Steam, or in browser form), I'd be happy to hear about them. Leave links/descriptions in the comments here so others can check them out too.
For the sake of that last bulletpoint, I'll put some big hints for the upcoming entries in this ongoing table of contents:
If I remove an item from the above list because it proved incompatible with my hardware or I simply didn't care to play it for more than five minutes, I'll discuss it here.
Valentina: Bought this platformer on Switch for 8p and, well, you get what you pay for. Shovelware of very little value, in other words, which is apparently an ongoing issue with the Switch eShop. Played with it a bit, but I'd be struggling to find anything about it worth writing about or, honestly, the motivation to finish it.
2021 EDIT: We're bringing this back for the 2021 season, happening now in 2022. It's a recession, gotta recycle everything:
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