Welcome back to the Mega Archive! We skipped another week, this time due to Giant Bomb XL charity streams and the careful moderation thereof, but now it's time to dig further into the November 1992 release catalogue of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive. November 1992 was very dissimilar to the present November of course, as Democrats celebrate their candidate's electoral victory over a crappy one-term Republican President.

If you wanted an idea of what the Genesis release schedule looked at this point in time, this entry has nothing short of five licensed games: half the games we've covering this week are based on animated TV shows, movies, and - in one case - a fast food outlet. We also have another peripheral pack-in, another The Bitmap Brothers Amiga/ST port (to follow Xenon 2 from last time), another horizontal shoot 'em up, an isometric RPG classic, and an ominous portent of the upcoming dark and gritty '90s comic book fad. I'm excited to dig in.

First, a quick reminder of how we got here:

Part XXIII: 331-340 (October '92 - November '92)

331: Landstalker

• Developer: Climax Entertainment
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-10-30
• NA Release: October 1993
• EU Release: October 1993
• Franchise: Stalker
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Elf Boy and Fairy, But Not Those Ones
• Premise: Treasure hunter Nigel is tipped to the final resting place of the indescribably wealthy King Cole, who is presumed to be pretty old if not necessarily a merry soul, and with his new partner sets out to find it.
• Availability: You can get it on Steam right now, or in the Sega Genesis Classics compilation for PS4/XB1/Switch. If you have the Sega Genesis Mini, it's on there too.
• Preservation: I've tried to get into Landstalker a few times, yet despite being an action-RPG and an isometric game - both of which I have a fondness for - it's yet to click. What's odd is that I enjoyed its much more derided Dreamcast sequel, TimeStalkers, as well as Alundra, which was created by a few of the same developers. Either way, the Stalker series is the lesser - in terms of quantity and critical attention - of Climax's two big JRPG franchises that began on the Sega Mega Drive: the other of course being Shining, as in "Force" and "in the Darkness". Perhaps due to its lower profile, the Stalker series is also the more experimental of the two franchises, since after this and Lady Stalker - one of the few times Climax branched out to a Nintendo platform, in this case the SFC - the series got a little strange from Saturn's time-looping Dark Savior onwards.

332: Bio-Hazard Battle / Crying: Aseimei Sensou

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-10-30 (as Crying: Aseimei Sensou)
• NA Release: December 1992 (as Bio-Hazard: Battle)
• EU Release: November 1992 (as Bio-Hazard: Battle)
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Horizontal)
• Theme: Gross Bugs
• Premise: Umbrella Corporation has... no, wait, let me start over. The planet Avalon has destroyed its own biosphere after years of biological warfare, rendering the planet an inhospitable petri dish. Survivors in bio-engineered bioships (sure saying "bio" a lot) scout ahead after many years in stasis to see if the planet can be reclaimed.
• Availability: You can buy this on Steam or via the Sega Genesis Classics compilation for PS4/XB1/Switch.
• Preservation: Sega probably felt it had been too long - almost a month! - since the Genesis was last graced with a shoot 'em up and put out Bio-Hazard Battle themselves, the latest in a noble line of gooey visceral shoot 'em ups in the vein (as it were) of Life Force and Abanox. BHB's most notable trait after its macabre visuals is the heavy bass synth soundtrack by veteran Sega sound engineer Shigeharu "Nasu" Isoda, who also directed the game. BHB's also one of a small number of shoot 'em ups I've encountered to make the environment just as much as an antagonist as the enemy waves; while you can't get damaged by touching the ceiling/floor like in Gradius, the game will speed up certain scrolling sequences to make it easier to get smushed between a wall and the edge of the screen.

333: Batman: Revenge of the Joker

• Developer: Ringler Studios
• Publisher: Sunsoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Batman / DC Comics
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Parents Still Dead
• Premise: The Joker's back to pull off his tricks, and maybe a boner or two, in Sunsoft's follow-up to their successful NES platformer. You're laughing. We get two Batman licensed games in two months, and you're laughing.
• Availability: No rereleases. Given the source, I don't think we should expect one either.
• Preservation: Turns out there's both a "Revenge of the Joker" and a "Return of the Joker". Take that, Star Wars! You only wish you had the Clown Prince of Crime involved in your silly space opera, or his famous VA Mark Hamill. First released on NES, Revenge (or Return, as it was on Nintendo's sanitized system) is both a sequel to Sunsoft's NES Batman and a spiritual sequel: that is, Return of the Joker has an iterative approach to its platforming that clearly ties the two games together, but is thematically based on the original comics rather than the Burton movie franchise. The license for Batman Returns was given to other developers, as we found out last entry with, well, Batman Returns (MA XXII). The obvious difference between Revenge (Genesis) and Return (NES) are the 16-bit graphics: small-time contract developers Ringler Studios were brought in to polish those up - we last saw them with Mario Lemieux Hockey (MA XIV), a game that local oaf Dan Ryckert decided needed to be ranked alongside all the Super Mario games in one of his recent stream challenges.

334: Disney's TaleSpin

• Developer: Interactive Designs
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: 1992-12-14
• Franchise: TaleSpin / Disney
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Friends For Life Through Thick and Thin
• Premise: Higher For Hire is in financial trouble, so Baloo gets out of his plane - you know, the one thing that sets TaleSpin apart from its peers - to go hunting for the company's missing cargo on foot.
• Availability: No rereleases, and seeing as this is a Disney product there's probably not going to be. There was a TaleSpin game in the Disney Afternoon Collection, but it wasn't this one (though that one was arguably better). Maybe wait for Kingdom Hearts IV?
• Preservation: We've dabbled in these waters before, but Sega had a competing "Disneyland" to the NES/SNES "Disneyworld" where we'd see the same Disney properties get licensed for both systems but end up as very different games. Usually, at least; there was some overlap with Virgin Interactive's The Lion King and The Jungle Book games, and the Aladdin games for those respective consoles were so similar that it mostly came down to a matter of preference. Nintendo had the backing of Capcom for their Disney-fied adventures, so they were usually ahead; Sega, conversely, lent their version of the licenses to any reliable contract developer they could find, which made the Genesis Disney games a little more uneven. TaleSpin, based on the show of the same name from Disney's wildly successful Saturday morning/afternoon cartoon block (which also included Ducktales, Chip N' Dale: Rescue Rangers, and others), came to us courtesy of Interactive Designs: this generically named company has been featured only once before on here, with the similarly jungle-based cartoon license Greendog: The Beached Surfer Dude! (MA XXI).

335: Gods

• Developer: Graftgold
• Publisher: Mindscape (NA) / PCM Complete (JP) / Accolade (EU)
• JP Release: 1993-03-26
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: 1993-11-26
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Muscles
• Premise: The Greek gods ask a mortal warrior to help them solve the small issue of a coup led by a quartet of guardians. The mortal asks but for one reward: to become a god themselves.
• Availability: Gods fans are in luck - it just got remastered for Steam, PS4, XB1, and Switch. Still a bit of an eyesore, but the modern gameplay tweaks were appreciated by its reviewers.
• Preservation: Much to unpack here. This is the third game from The Bitmap Brothers to be ported to the Genesis - we only saw the previous two semi-recently, with Xenon 2: Megablast (MA XXII) and Speedball 2 (MA XV). However, they were not behind this particular port: that job went to fellow UK outfit Graftgold, which we'll be meeting again later this same episode of the Mega Archive. Like all of The Bitmap Brothers games during their peak in the early 90s, they drew upon a lot of talent external to the game industry: the music was composed by synth musician John Foxx (founder and former lead vocalist for Ultravox, of "Vienna" fame, though by that point Midge Ure had taken over) while the cover art was created by Simon Bisley, a 2000AD/DC Comics artist possibly best known outside the comic book world as the inspiration for Simon Pegg's character from Spaced. The game itself is something of an odd duck: while it looks like a mindless action-platformer, there's a cautiousness that gets ingrained in its players after they rush in and die too easily, with various inventory puzzles to wrap one's mind around. It also incorporates an early version of "adjustable difficulty" where enemies get smarter and hit harder if the player is doing too well (and vice versa). Being the impatient tyke I was back in 1991 when it debuted on Atari ST, I never got too far through it.

336: Home Alone

• Developer: Brian A. Rice
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: December 1992
• EU Release: November 1992
• Franchise: Home Alone
• Genre: Action / Strategy
• Theme: Home Invasions and Child Neglect are Funny
• Premise: Kevin McCallister's been left home alone over the holidays and takes it upon himself to protect the entire neighborhood in this stakes-raising loose adaptation. Remembering being able to leave your home for Christmas vacation? Or for any other reason?
• Availability: It wasn't and won't ever be rereleased, but you can probably get a copy for a few bucks on eBay. Just remember to keep the change, you filthy animal.
• Preservation: This particular Home Alone tie-in was dropped to coincide with the December 1992 cinematic release of Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, oddly enough (which notoriously featured Donald Trump in a brief cameo, who would coincidentally also lose in New York along with many, many other states in the 2020 Presidential Election). I suppose it made sense to release a Home Alone game while the "Castle Doctrine for Babies" iron was briefly reignited (maybe while also tumbling towards Daniel Stern's head). I'm digressing because I don't think anyone could imagine a Home Alone game being all that good; though unlike the generic THQ platformer (for NES/SNES/GB) this version developed by Brian Rice, Inc. puts a correct amount of emphasis on Kevin's trap preparation and resourcefulness. It's more in the style of that NES Friday the 13th game, as half the struggle is getting over to the house currently in peril and saving the day before starting the loop over again. Get there too late, and the Wet Bandits will have completely emptied and subsequently flooded the house. That last part always seemed weirdly spiteful, though I guess it's better than the first draft screenplay's idea of "the Upper Decker Bandits".

337: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

• Developer: Tiertex
• Publisher: U.S. Gold
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: December 1992
• Franchise: Indiana Jones
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: No Ticket
• Premise: Indy and his wacky dad Henry Sr. (R.I.P. Sean Connery, I swear I don't time these things) set out to stop the Nazis from claiming the Holy Grail, and with it the power of immortality.
• Availability: This version is out of print, but you can get the Last Crusade LucasArts graphic adventure game on GOG. It was definitely the superior choice back then. Grab Fate of Atlantis too while you're there.
• Preservation: You know that any Last Crusade game that lets you play the movie's River Phoenix prologue as a fully adult Indiana Jones is going to be good. The first ludonarrative hurdle and they all just faceplant right over it. So, this is one of the two widespread video game adaptations of the 1989 movie that capped the original Indiana Jones trilogy, which on computers were conveniently subtitled "The Graphic Adventure" and "The Action Game" respectively: this game would be the unfortunate latter, which like most action games for home computers at the time is kinda not great. Tiertex, the developer behind almost all versions of "The Action Game", built the Genesis version from the ground up but it still suffers from the same boneheaded design decisions that made this and other versions an overly difficult, frustrating mess. How many platformers have you played where hitting the ceiling (even when it isn't spiked) will cause health loss? We'll be meeting with Indy again one last time on the Genesis in 1994, but... well, our situation won't have improved.

338: Mick & Mack as the Global Gladiators

• Developer: Graftgold, Virgin Interactive
• Publisher: Virgin Interactive
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: April 1993
• Franchise: McDonald's
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Littering is Bad
• Premise: Mick and Mack return to clean up this filthy world of ours, protecting future generations from all the greasy Big Mac fatbergs and plastic cups and straws choking the oceans. Wait, who endorsed this game again?
• Availability: Ironically, I think the majority of this game's copies are now stuffed in landfills.
• Preservation: Told you we'd be seeing Graftgold again very soon. The UK-based devs had a memorably busy introduction to the Sega Mega Drive, putting out their first two games for it within the same month. They'll have one more (Europe-exclusive) release we'll get around to when (or if) we cover 1993. Since it isn't evident from the box art, Global Gladiators is a McDonald's licensed game and the follow-up to M.C. Kids, which was released earlier that same year for NES. Even though McDonald's contributes to more than their fair share of ecological disasters, Global Gladiators has an environmentalist theme that puts its diverse heroes in charge of saving the planet from pollution monsters and other toxic hazards. They do this with a slime-projecting gun unfortunately dubbed the "GooShooter." Despite the heavy-handed messaging and licensing grossness, Global Gladiators is still halfway decent: that's because it, along with fellow junk food mascot turned video game hero Cool Spot, was an early project of David Perry - the Virgin Interactive programmer that would later go on to form Shiny Entertainment and create Earthworm Jim. I think I still prefer the block-tossing platforming of M.C. Kids, but for a preachy hypocritical jeremiad that places the blame of environmental collapse squarely on private citizens who don't bother to sort their glass and plastics, Global Gladiators could've been far worse.

339: The Miracle Piano Teaching System

• Developer: The Software Toolworks
• Publisher: The Software Toolworks
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Educational
• Theme: Plastic Instrument Games? Those Will Never Take Off
• Premise: Are your kids are too busy playing on their damn video game box to take their piano lessons? What if I told you there was a way to combine the two, and all it would cost is a month's mortgage payment?
• Availability: Unsurprisingly rare to find, especially copies that includes the pack-in keyboard peripheral (which is needed to play the game).
• Preservation: The Miracle Piano Teaching System is something I've encountered before on the Giant Bomb wiki (via the SNES), but certainly not something I ever encountered in the wild as this 16-bit piano tutor video game never progressed beyond the United States. I imagine these long, chunky boxes took up real estate in Babbage's stores up and down the US in the early '90s, turning off any prospective buyer either because of the $500 price tag (adults) or by being an educational game full of stuffy classical music (kids). It has a few contemporary tracks in there too just from perusing the playlist, but it's mostly the stuff you'd expect from a piano teacher: Chopsticks, Ode to Joy, and so on. California-based educational game maker The Software Toolworks will only appear on our radar once here for the Mega Archive, but they'll show up a few more times on the Mega Archive CD once that returns. Elsewhere, they're celebrated (if that's the right word) for Mario is Missing! and Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing.

340: Chakan: The Forever Man

• Developer: Extended Play
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: February 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: '90s Comics in a Microcosm
• Premise: Chakan, the Forever Man, has all the time in the universe but little patience left for living. His only means of earning a final death is to rid the mortal world of the evil forces that plague it.
• Availability: No ports, no rereleases, no successors. Really more of a Chakan't these days.
• Preservation: Sure, let's chat about The Forever Man for a spell. Created by cartoonist Robert A. Kraus, Chakan is a swordsman who was too awesome and cool to die, but has now lived so long that he suicidally rushes into peril to finally end his centuries-long existence in honorable battle. The video game adaptation was the last to be worked on by Recreational Brainware, which we last saw with Taz-Mania (MA XIX). Extended Play, a company created by many of the same people, existed just long enough to finish the development Brainware started on Chakan before it too dissolved and its founders went their separate ways. Notorious for its difficulty and dark, trippy visuals, Chakan left an impression on the many who rented it from Blockbuster but could never beat it. It had a few interesting ideas for mechanics too, including a potion mixing power-up system, a (then rare) double-jump, and a multidirectional swordfighting system where you held the attack button and moved in the angle you wanted to strike, which kinda made Chakan look like he was directing airport traffic. There's been a few unsuccessful attempts to revive Chakan since, most notably for the Dreamcast in 2001, but fans are still hoping a reboot will happen someday. (For way more detail on Chakan's development than you could ever want, check out this article on Sega-16.)

Something I've encountered a few times of late is the "non-RPG RPG Maker game": a case of a resourceful developer taking software meant to help in the creation of turn-based RPGs in the Dragon Quest/Final Fantasy mold, and instead dropping the combat element entirely to tell a conflict-free story with the occasional adventure game puzzle. This week's entry OneShot is such a game, presenting the tale of catperson Niko (their gender is deliberately ambiguous) as they carry a "sun" to its final destination in order to save a dying world with the help of the world's god.

While direct comparisons could be made with the likes of To the Moon and Rakuen, I think OneShot is atmospherically closest to Toby Fox's Undertale, largely due to how both games use their quiet moments both as a means of reflection for the characters - Niko talks to their god a lot, who happens to be you, the player - and to highlight the fleeting beauty of an otherwise dark and decrepit land. More so, though, is the way that both games appear to engage the player directly with some meta trickery, most of which I'm loath to discuss in detail to preserve the surprise. Suffice it to say, when the game recommends you play in windowed form, it's best to acquiesce because there's a lot you might miss just outside that window.

To circle back to the type of game this is, OneShot is entirely driven by its puzzles. Most of these involve the inventory in some way; you find items, helpfully given a sheen to distinguish them from the set dressing, and figure out where best to utilize them. This can often mean combining items in the inventory as well. The game is narratively broken up into regions, and these also serve to limit the amount of real estate you have to work with to solve puzzles; something I've referenced in the past as a player-friendly "compartmentalized" approach to adventure game puzzles (as opposed to many older cases, where the size of the world keeps growing and so too do the number of hotspots at your disposal until there's simply too many item/hotspot combinations to contemplate). OneShot will require the occasional "Layton puzzle" too, though these are few and far between. To invoke Undertale again, imagine the type of puzzles Papyrus would throw at you, only in this case they're halfway competent and might require some thought. Some are even baked in to the aforementioned meta trickery, though that's as much as I'll say about those.

As you may have surmised, it's hard to talk about OneShot without spoiling a lot as so much is in the telling of the tale, but I can at least speak to the game's tone and emotional depth. Niko is a true innocent: a child who is dragged into this savior business involuntarily, and dreams only of returning to their village surrounded by wheat fields to see their mother again and eat her amazing pancakes. A lot of the game's emotional impact rides on the player's sympathy for their ward for this reason, especially as the game picks up in its intensity, and it's hard not to feel for Niko in particular with your many conversations and from slaking their own considerable curiosity (a quality I imagine is just purr for the course when it comes to feline hominids). Likewise, the denizens of the fading world the two of you are exploring are equally sympathetic, many trying to make the best of an increasingly dire situation and still greeting Niko with friendliness and a helping hand: partly because they recognize them as the world-saving "messiah", but also out of genuine kindness. For a game about the end of the world, it is endlessly wholesome and reaffirming about the value of life; it's no real surprise in retrospect that it was included in Itch's Racial Justice and Equality bundle from a few months back.

To bring back Undertale one last time, both games found excellent use in otherwise "minimal" pixel art. That's not to decry the art itself, which has a distinctive style in both games, but rather in the way that long stretches of the game have almost nothing to see, by design. By making use of empty space not just as a time-saving design measure but as an indication of the emptiness of their worlds, playing lugubrious synth in the background to evoke feelings of desolation and loneliness, they make effective use of their basic environments to tell these slightly downbeat stories. Conversely, the places filled with life - dwellings with living owners, for instance - are packed with little details about the person or people living there, in stark contrast to the great emptiness outdoors. You can learn a lot from each of the game's major NPCs just by looking around their rooms and reading item descriptions of the bric-a-brac lying around or posted on walls. I've always found that sort of environmental character building compelling, even if I often feel slightly weird about rifling through other people's stuff (an never more so when they're around to actually yell at you about it).

Ultimately, much of what makes OneShot special can't easily be conveyed in a review, and definitely not one taking pains to avoid spoilers. If you're acquainted with the world of narrative-driven adventure games made in RPG Maker via any of the several examples mentioned above then you might have some idea of what to expect in brief, though certainly not the full breadth of what OneShot has in store. I'd highly recommend trying it out for yourselves without reading any more about it, especially if you happen to have acquired it the same way I did.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

I had to curtail my usual Tuesday rundowns of old-ass Genesis games this week due to being tied up (in a good way, but not in that kind of good way) by all the Giant Bomb Extra Life charity streaming last weekend. (Speaking of which, thanks to all those who got involved, either with your own streams or supporting others as donors and/or as an audience.) Instead, I've decided to write about a game that has almost completely absorbed my November thus far and may well continue to do so for a few more weeks at least: Team Ninja and Koei Tecmo's Nioh 2.

For those unfamiliar, Koei (back when it was still on its own) originally found its fame and fortune through a strategy simulation series named Nobunaga no Yabou, or Nobunaga's Ambition, which was set during the Japanese Sengoku era (1467-1615 by our calendar). While he was the nominal protagonist of the series, Nobunaga Oda was simply one of many playable daimyo, or feudal lords, vying for control of the Nihon archipelago. The Nioh games revisit the same conflict from the perspective of an agent with some connection to the Japanese otherworld of the yokai, which is invariably related to the human machinations behind the Sengoku conflict. Nioh 2 specifically has the protagonist be the unnamed product of the uncommon pairing of a human and a yokai, who finds him or herself involved with the years-long rise of the scrappy but shrewd rogue Tokichiro as he eventually becomes a certain major historical figure, all the while surreptitiously pursuing the mysterious villain behind his/her yokai mother's murder.

The Nioh games are quite flagrantly built upon the action-RPG blueprint established by FromSoftware's Souls franchise, though taken in some more oblique directions - as if the original series wasn't obtuse enough - to both better fit the themes of yokai powers and the warfare typical of feudal Japan, and to distinguish itself from Souls and its other imitators. The first Nioh, released 2017, burst out of the Torii gate with a host of new ideas and features as well as an entirely new format for the burgeoning "Soulslike" sub-genre, and it's assumed Nioh 2 expects a certain amount of familiarity from its players (though, it should be said, has an entirely unrelated plot) in that it took Nioh's template and added several extra layers of complexity and character development largely related to the protagonist's half-yokai heritage. The best comparison I could think to make is that Nioh is the Castlevania: Symphony of the Night to Nioh 2's Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow: by establishing a protagonist with a much stronger connection to the netherworld forces, and introducing mechanics that have them relying on the very powers they're fighting against, you create a more compelling diagram for character advancement and, arguably, a more intriguing personal story to boot.

For the sake of keeping things somewhat focused here, I want to talk about Nioh 2's many systems in brief to give you some idea of the complexity involved. As stated above, Nioh 2 takes all of Nioh's extant systems - its many weapon types with their own individual skill trees, the stance system, yokai mechanics, player revenants, ninja and onmyo jutsu, the many services available at the blacksmith, etc. - and layers on top several more regarding the player's unique connection to the yokai (to wit: acquiring and attuning Soul Cores, traversing the Dark Realm, and the Yokai Shift ability). I'll try to balance brevity with adequate expatiation as I go through this list of features, since my intent here is to demonstrate the broad learning curve and mechanical depth of the Nioh series without necessarily suggesting that it's all too much to internalize; after all, I'm managing it so far, and I'm an idiot. Demonstrably so!

(TL;DR: I'm about to get very geeky about Nioh's mechanics, in particular those that aren't shared with games of a similar format.)

1. The Mission Format

Arguably the biggest departure from the Souls franchise, which I'll be referring to a lot despite that being the number one video game critique faux pas, is that Nioh uses a mission-based structure where each of its "stages" exists in a bubble irrespective of the others. This runs counter to every other Soulslike, of course, which take place in one large contiguous world map barring the occasional "Painted World of Ariamis" situation where you're temporarily whisked off to a self-contained area. Nioh is further split into "main mission" stages, which are fairly large, and "side mission" stages which are either smaller unique areas or are greatly diminished versions of the main mission stages (usually with many previous areas now gated off and inaccessible). Once you've completed the main objective of the stage, usually a boss fight, you're free to exit back to the hub. The hub area is entirely menu-driven and includes a shrine, which also exist as checkpoints in stages and allow you to level up and change loadouts, as well as vendors, an index of yokai, major characters, and story synopses you can refer back to, a dojo for training and tutorials, and the mission-select map screen.

The mission-based structure gives Nioh a very different feeling of progression to the Souls series, for better and worse. Instead of making gradual progress across an immense world, discovering shortcuts back to earlier areas and working your way through alternative paths, a single Nioh 2 stage is a mostly linear affair (though handy backtracking shortcuts are still plentiful) that you never need to revisit unless you missed something important or end up in a different version of it in one of the side-missions. Where it becomes both a strength and a weakness is in how the game is built in such an episodic way that it's easier to place it aside for a longer hiatus; with Souls, you're always developing a mental map of your current understanding of the world, and trying to keep in mind half a dozen alternative paths you've abandoned either because you lacked a key item or because the enemies were too strong. The Souls games are thus harder to put down for extended periods, because so much of your continued progress relies on that kind of transitory information. In Nioh, however, each map is different or - in the case of side-mission revisits - have a completely different assortment of item and enemy placements that makes any prior geographical knowledge redundant.

We'll be making it clear as this list continues that you probably don't want to leave Nioh alone too long or else allow your familiarity with its mechanics to atrophy, which might spell disaster as the game's challenge level continues to rise, but it is overall more conducive towards choosing to play the game sporadically.

2. The Stances

Honestly, stances don't play as large a part in the combat as intimidated outsiders seem to believe, or at the very least they're not as hard to wrap one's mind around. There's something almost bewitching about the concern of being in "the wrong stance", or that your combat potential is diminished by eschewing the stance aspect completely for the sake of always being in the "neutral" mid-stance. I will say the latter works just fine if you really don't feel like screwing around with stances, but I think this system is better understood if you came to Nioh via Bloodborne (given Nioh 2 is still a PS4 exclusive as of writing, an audience overlap is probably more likely than not). In Bloodborne you have two "stances" based on the trick weapon system: any given weapon can be in a smaller, faster form or a larger, slower form, and there are mechanics for switching on the fly even in the middle of combos. The stances work the same way here: the high stance is slower but does more damage and usually has more reach (a lot of this is conditional to the weapon type you're using, incidentally), while low stance is usually the exact opposite. Low and high stance can also apply to where your opponent is situated: low stance is great for smaller enemies or those closer to the ground, like the "dweller" zombies that drop to all-fours, while high stance can involve a lot of overhead attacks that can catch flying enemies or those which have weak spots high above you (say, the gigantic One-Eyed Oni cyclopses).

(As if to help onboard the Bloodborne crowd, one of the new weapon types introduced to Nioh 2 is the Switchglaive: a weapon that should prove familiar to Bloodborne players in that it changes between three forms (via the three stances) of saw (low), saw-spear (mid), and scythe (high).)

Where stances arguably become more complex and more specific is in how each weapon skill tree has separate branches for skills that only apply to low, mid, or high stance. This changes the behavior of those stances in turn, as some become more effective for counter-attacks and others for evasion or blocking. High stance usually has some charge moves, which do even more damage in exchange for a period of build-up. And, again, this is all highly conditional to the weapon type you're using. Given that you're probably going to stick to just one or two weapon types - each one relies on a different stat to boost its damage output via weapon scaling, and there's little to be gained by raising all stats evenly - it's worth experimenting with all of them at first to see which ones you want to stick with. I mean, obviously I went with the aforementioned Bloodborne weapon, but there's a decent mix of common and exotic types to try, the latter including the tonfa and the hard-to-use-but-fun-to-master kusarigama.

3. Yokai and the Dark Realm

The above two are the big differences between Nioh and its competitors, and the expanded yokai mechanics are the big difference between Nioh and Nioh 2. All the enemies in this game can be roughly categorized into two groups: human and yokai. Human opponents fight like you'd expect them to, allowing for the fact that they have different weapons which have distinct attack animations, but the yokai are much more varied in their designs and their combat approaches. One major distinction between the two groups is that yokai cannot regenerate Ki (the game's equivalent of stamina) naturally, but can do so by creating "yokai realms" - circular AoEs of negative energy that recharges them and drops Ki restoration speed for humans - that the player can extinguish with a "Ki burst" (right-trigger the moment after swinging a weapon; it also boosts your Ki restoration rate if you get it perfect).

New to Nioh 2 are Dark Realm zones: areas where the "yokai realm" effect is active everywhere. Dark Realms can only be extinguished by defeating the yokai generating it; usually the largest and toughest one roaming around the area. Fortunately, as a half-yokai, the protagonist isn't entirely powerless, as they can fall back on their yokai nature to survive. These gifts include the Yokai Shift - this works like Devil May Cry's Devil Trigger or Yakuza's Ultimate Heat Mode, in that the protagonist is temporarily indestructible and has access to much stronger attacks but only for a limited duration - and Yokai Abilities, which has the protagonist summon a yokai for a single attack. The stat that governs this, anima, is typically restored after defeating yokai and acquiring their "Soul Cores" - which is also how you summon them - so you can rely on these skills a lot in yokai areas and especially in Dark Realm zones where it regenerates even faster. (I generally hold back on Yokai Shifts until the boss, however.)

It's certainly a lot to take in, more so if you're new to Nioh and have everything else on this list to consider, and it took several hours before I'd grown used to having these yokai powers at hand and could integrate them into my tactics along with items, jutsu (magic), and the stances and light/heavy attacks. Having them around has certainly made life easier though.

One last note about yokai: there are some fun ones that respond to gestures (emotes) and items, and it's worth finding out which ones those are. Make them happy, and they'll drop all their loot and leave without a fight.

4. Soul Cores and Guardian Spirits

I mentioned Soul Cores above, and they're one of the many ways you can customize your protagonist. It starts with the Guardian Spirits: spectral protectors, usually shaped like animals, that accompany most of the game's major NPCs and will eventually follow you also (via "spirit division"). Each of these Guardians can equip two Soul Cores, which are sometimes left behind by dead yokai, and provide you with two yokai summon abilities in addition to a bunch of passive boosts not unlike those found on equipment. You can even fuse multiple Soul Cores of the same kind together to increase their effect. This is where the Aria of Sorrow comparison is most keenly applicable: by equipping the right souls to your particular playstyle, you can really get some mileage out of their Yokai Abilities and their passive boosts alike.

Something I've not tinkered around with much yet is how each Guardian Spirit has a class: Feral, Brute, and Phantom, which roughly correspond to three builds your character might have: the fast attacker with minimal armor that relies on dodging more than blocking; the heavy tank that is the exact opposite; and the bow/magic-user that prefers to keep their distance if at all possible. I've been sticking with Feral because that's been my style with Bloodborne and the previous Nioh, but Phantom seems compatible to what I've got going on here build-wise too so I might try one of those out.

5. Jutsu

I completely overlooked Jutsu in Nioh 1 right up until the end of the game, whereupon I decided to go for all the weapon/jutsu specific trophies. Jutsu works like priest and mage magic in the Souls games, in that you have a finite pool of "spell picks" (Vancian magic strikes again!) that you prepare beforehand at shrines (the bonfire equivalent). Instead of holy and arcane magic, though, you have ninja and onmyo jutsu: ninja jutsu tends to involve a lot of projectiles, stealth, and poison/debuffs, while onmyo jutsu is mostly putting elemental damage on weapons or resistances on armor, though with a few magical projectiles too. However, both the ninja and onmyo skill trees are far more elaborate and offer many more customization options for players to use once you get deeper into them, and by increasing the power and capacity of your chosen jutsu type the player can use many jutsu skills simultaneously. It's perhaps better suited for multiplayer given the sheer volume of jutsu types can make practitioners dangerously unpredictable, but having that boon in the PvE single-player is still handy.

Since the Switchglaive uses the magic stat for damage scaling, which also determines the strength of onmyo magic, that's where my non-weapon character development has been focused. The various yokai types respond differently to each element, but I've been getting a lot of mileage out of lightning in particular. I'm now wielding lightning ranged magic and a lightning buff, with both water and "purify" (which has a flat bonus against all yokai types but does nothing against humans) as back-ups in case I'm fighting something lightning-resistant. Should be worth pointing out that, like Souls magic, the jutsu aren't something you can rely on as your sole damage output given how few of them you can have at any time. They exist more to complement your normal melee style, and best applied when you have a bit of distance or a moment of enemy recovery time to toss something out, like the rest of the consumables. Endlessly renewable consumables is the best way of framing them, I suppose.

The wildest thing I've found related to jutsu is that, because you need more item shortcuts to really make use of a full repertoire, you can actually add more item shortcut wheels by simply going deep into the game options menu and turning them on. I guess the game defaults to two (out of a possible four) to keep the shortcut function from being too cluttered? Suffice it to say, if you've ever played a Souls game, having four of those shortcut menus - each of which has four slots to correspond with the four D-pad directions - gives you quite a lot to work with. Provided you remember where you assigned your healing elixirs...

6. Blacksmithery

This is already running long and I feel like I could be here all day with the blacksmith facilities, but it's worth emphasizing just how fully it takes advantage of the game's loot system (which follows the same rarity rules as a lot of loot RPGs, including how item rarity determines how many passive boosts a piece of equipment can hold at once). In short, then:

• Buy/Sell: Self-explanatory. Selling might not always be the best option for your vendor trash though.
• Forging: The reason you'd go to a blacksmith. By disassembling vendor trash into their core materials, you can use those materials to craft a randomly determined piece of equipment close to your current level, based on a specific "model" of a weapon or armor type (say, if you wanted a full suit of ninja clothes). Materials have rarity ratings also, and higher rarity materials mean a greater chance of the forged piece also being rare.
• Soul Match: If you really have money to burn, you can soul match your current weapon to a second one of a higher level, transferring that level over at the cost of using up said secondary weapon. There's a few reasons you'd want to do this, but it can get prohibitively expensive if the item is rare.
• Refashion: Despite "Fashion Souls" being a huge concern to many, very few Souls games actually let you change the look of your equipment thereby allowing you to turn your presently equipped mishmash of different armor sets into one cohesive style. Refashioning is a cheap way of making any piece of gear look like any other piece of gear, provided you've encountered it before. It also means you won't have to resort to holding onto a piece of crappy armor because you prefer how it looks on you.
• Temper: One of my favorite buried menu options is tempering equipment, which essentially lets you burn one moderately rare material to change any piece of equipment's passive boost into a different one. If you're good for fire resistance or simply don't care about it, for instance, you can transform it into something else entirely - maybe a boost to HP or extra weapon damage. The material in question, umbracite, can easily be farmed from disassembling moderately rare vendor trash.
• Remodel: This remains locked for most of the game, and is incredibly expensive to do, but will allow you to change the damage scaling of a weapon. That is, if your current weapon primarily uses the strength stat to determine damage, you can switch it to, say, skill or constitution instead. This is an excellent way to start branching out into other weapon types that maybe never had the scaling you wanted, and seems best suited for the end-, post-game, or NG+ runs.
• Disassemble: Self-explanatory, and probably a better value proposition for rare vendor trash. The cheaper stuff you might as well hock, or give away to the Kodama (Kodama love free shit).

It's no overstatement to say that's much more you can do with your garbage beyond simply selling it, and I didn't even get into passive boosts that can be inherited or equipment set bonuses. Nioh 2 is, as it is with most everything else, pretty intense about its equipment micromanagement.

7. Agyo and Ungyo

One last tidbit to send us off is the Agyo and Ungyo (two halves of the Buddhist concept of Nioh, or twin deva guardian statues, after which the game is named) system, which carries over from the first Nioh. These are simply two lists of in-game achievements that reward you with reputation once earned, and tend to involve killing a certain number of foes with a specific weapon, or with a specific element, or of a specific enemy type. The big earners tend to be challenges like defeating a boss without getting hit, or completing stages without dying or using the shrines to recover, or killing enemies with your bare hands, many of which become a lot easier if you return to the early game at a much higher experience level.

The benefit of earning reputation is that they unlock permanent passive boosts to that character's profile. It's not unlike the achievement system used by the later Borderlands games, but very easy to miss all the same. I think I had about twenty bonuses stacked up the first moment I remembered it existed.

Anyway, I've exhausted almost every topic relevant to my Nioh 2 playthrough (I didn't even touch the online features beyond player revenants, since most require PS+) but I'm not dismissing the possibility that there's even more features out there that I've either somehow ignored or haven't been unlocked yet. Nioh 2 is a very dense game, not just mechanically but also narratively as its story flits through several decades of history, but I think if you take the time to learn its nuances it can be something very rewarding. It occurs to me that something similar could be said for the Musou games that Koei Tecmo also makes, via its Omega Force subsidiary, but I'd prefer not to think too hard about that. I'd rather deal with the supernatural yokai horrors of this game than the existential horrors of being potentially curious enough to invest in the Dynasty Warriors series. Halloween was last month, c'mon now.

A stressful Indie puzzle game during a stressful election week may not seem like the brightest of ideas, but Wilmot's Warehouse - the organizational puzzle game from Hollow Ponds, the creators of Loot Rascals, and Richard Hogg (who was not created by Hollow Ponds just to be clear) - has proven to be the right kind of stressful; that is to say, that once I'm in that game I am fully focused on it and not, for instance, any results that might be slowly rolling in from Georgia or Pennsylvania like the world's slowest Katamari.

Wilmot's Warehouse is a deceptively simple game on first blush. I'm not talking aesthetically, since there's no deception there: the game has a minimalist style where the protagonist is just a box with a face and every piece of inventory is a similarly sized box with a crude or abstract graphic to distinguish them, which is the perfect kind of uncomplicated, denotative shorthand you'd need for a game like this. More that the rules of the game start plain but continue to adapt as you keep acquiring new types of stock. As the resident warehouse pusher (not a whole lot of other similarities to Sokoban beyond the thematic, fortunately) it is the player's job to organize the titular warehouse and deliver requested stock items to the staff at the reception window as quickly as possible. When you have a few dozen item types stashed away in your warehouse space, it's easy enough to keep track of where they all are and have them close at hand. When you pass a hundred types however, which might at any given moment have between one and twenty instances apiece, the logistics of keeping everything close and efficiently stored becomes much more of a pipe dream.

The brilliance of Wilmot's Warehouse is that whatever organizational style you choose, and whatever criteria you use to keep the stock items categorized, must continue to evolve as you "unlock" new merchandize. For instance, I've been keeping rows of inventory organized by color; if someone at the window asks for an item with a light purple background, for instance, I'm aware that I keep those items on the due western section of the warehouse (if imagining the entire space as a compass). However, I've gotten to the point where these rows have extended almost to the most southern end of the warehouse, which means travelling that much further to deliver orders. Likewise, some colors are more common than others - I have way more light blues than any other hue, for instance, which makes their demarcated zone of the warehouse far more cluttered - and some inventory types don't easily conform to a uniform color. Some, like a box with red, white, and navy blue stripes, don't really fit in with any of the color schemes - since there are very few white background types, I've been keeping them there just as a default.

The game's loop is split in such a way that there are frequent pauses to catch your breath. It plays in sets of three shifts: each shift starts with you ferrying the requested items to the counter, and you have ninety seconds to do so. After that, you have three minutes to take the freshly delivered shipments and sort them into your extant inventory in its current organizational format, moving blocks around in groups without unsettling any of the rows or columns of your pre-sorted stock. Whether you're ready or not, the staff show up to ask for more items, and this loop continues a total of three times until you get a "stock take": an infinite period of time to sort the warehouse before you press on with the next set of shifts. Between each shift you also have the opportunity to spend upgrade stars: these are earned from providing the more time-sensitive stock items first, and then a few more based on how quickly you can provide everything requested. Early upgrades are incredibly useful: the ability to carry more boxes at once; the ability to rotate what you're carrying to maneuver large groups easier; more space in the warehouse to work with; or a speed burst to get you around faster. Later ones then become handy but with caveats: a map that shows you the entire warehouse is only available in the top right of the area, which means you need a clear path to it and can't really rely on it when you're in the thick of things; a robot named Borky that can be assigned to move new deliveries to where identical instances are being stored, but if you're keeping things in neat rows it may not necessarily put items on the end but rather to the sides; or a pager that tells you what the staff at the window want before you move up there to see for yourself, but it won't tell you what the high-priority requests are and it's important you fulfill those first. The last few upgrades are useless: a timelapse of your playthrough thus far and an extremely expensive pair of dungarees that I'm not convinced will do anything besides change the look of my sprite. It's a system that offers vital boons early on, when you're still a little unconfident about your organizational chops, but isn't something you can rely on late in the game when the pressure is at its highest. Of course, by then, you won't really need the stars as badly as before.

I can't help but wonder if it was genius foreplanning or a touch of serendipity (good game design is usually a mix of both, given the amount of tweaking involved) that makes Wilmot's Warehouse that little bit more intense after every shift, as you're eventually forced to toss out old ways of thinking as untenable and scramble for a scheme that will suit the new reality. Even while you're in the midst of its timed three-shift gameplay loop, it's never incredibly demanding; it's only afterwards in the calm of the storm, when you have time to ruminate and double-guess yourself, that the game is at its most insidious. After all, it'll be during this stock taking time that you'll consider spending an hour moving boxes around for a new and improved "system" that the game will have its hooks in you deepest. Whether you decide to organize by color or by theme ("nautical" seems busy, as does "animals"; though where does that put sharks?) or decide on long rows of identical items or opt for generally squareish "zones", or decide whether to keep the warehouse's central north/south thoroughfare free to make it easier to move with large amounts of inventory or start filling it up because you're running out of space close to the window counter: these are all dilemmas you end up making early choices about and then later changing those choices on the regular. I figured I'd like this game because I have a real lizard brain when it comes to organizing and filing, but if anything I underestimated how well the game knows what it means to have that sort of mind and how best to screw with those that have it. Maybe "begrudingly respect" is a better way to describe how I feel about the game than "love", but either way I can't seem to put it down. Could be I just don't have a space cleared out for it yet.

Rating: 5 out of 5. (I guess.)

Welcome back to the Mega Archive, which once again resumes after we took a little break for some Halloween festivities. I'm going to have to work on the next Mega Archive CD before too long and get that caught up, but until then we've still got (almost) the rest of the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games released in October 1992 to process this entry.

The good news is that there weren't any new sports games released on the Genesis this month (which is odd, as Octobers are usually infested with them), but the bad news - or at least the "slightly less interesting to talk about" news - is that we're starting to see the first of the compilation packs. The rest include the usual mix of Amiga migrants (Amigrants?), shoot 'em ups, licensed games, and arcade conversions. Oh, and we also get into the peripheral biz a little bit and indulge our inner Austin Walkers with some mech anime. No big headliners this time, but there's some variety at least.

If you need to catch up with the Mega Archive, here's where we've been so far:

Part XXII: 321-330 (October '92)

321: Batman Returns

• Developer: Malibu Interactive
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1993-02-19
• NA Release: October 1992
• EU Release: November 1992
• Franchise: Batman
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Dead Parents
• Premise: Burton's second Batman movie saw a whole bunch of video game adaptations, most of which came from Konami and were fun. The Genesis game was an exception.
• Availability: How expensive could re-licensing a Sega game based on a Warner Bros. film based on a DC Comics franchise really be, anyway? Probably cheaper now that Warner owns DC, but even so. Just get Rocksteady to make a new one.
• Preservation: I've honestly gained a lot more sympathy for the makers of these quickie licensed tie-ins after all the detailed reports of rampant crunch in the industry and the deleterious effects it has on the quality of the games and the quality of the lives of the people working on them alike. Though it's been spotlighted more often of late, it's been ubiquitous in the industry for decades and usually never more so than with games that have a multimedia synergy deadline to hit (Batman Returns came out July '92 and was still in theaters by late October which, like pumpkins, is pretty much the best time to invest in Tim Burton). So with that in mind, while I will say the five minutes I spent with this game was all I needed, having Sunsoft create an appealing baseline of "side-scrolling platformer/brawler where Batman can use his gadgets to avoid having to deal with anyone" for the 1989 Batman game was probably a balm to a lot of these licensed game developers. Also, I think this game is the beefiest the Caped Crusader has ever looked outside of a Rob Liefeld sketch.

322: Death Duel

• Developer: Punk Development
• Publisher: RazorSoft
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1992
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: FPS
• Theme: Gory Robot Jox
• Premise: In the future, interplanetary trade disputes are settled with giant rock 'em sock 'em robot fights. I suppose it'd be more fun to watch than Space Congress going through several months of Space Diplomatic Administration (though maybe not according to George Lucas).
• Availability: A rerelease is not happening. I don't even know who owns RazorSoft's IPs these days. I'd like to think David Jaffe picked them up after recognizing a kindred spirit in middle-school edgelordery.
• Preservation: Punk Development had long shut its doors and been reborn as Iguana Entertainment by the time RazorSoft put out this, the last of their collaborative works together. This wasn't quite the end of RazorSoft (as we'll discover shortly) but most of their output from here on out will be cheap arcade conversions rather than original IPs, developed with temporary contractors. Death Duel is... well, it's kinda like a crappier Battle Clash without the light-gun and with more gore. The developers made the bold choice to strictly limit your ammunition and force you to restock after every battle with what little earnings you made, which was what I thought was always missing from Battle Clash: having to stop mid-boss fight and start over because you ran out of lasers. RazorSoft's penchant for over-the-top violence is present and correct, as you literally tear your fleshy alien opponents apart limb from limb. The last hurrah from Sega of America's most grody associate.

323: LHX Attack Chopper

• Developer: Electronic Arts
• Publisher: Electronic Arts
• JP Release: 1993-06-04
• NA Release: November 1992
• EU Release: October 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Flight Sim
• Theme: Boxy Whirlybirds
• Premise: Take control of one of the US military's light attack helicopters, or an extremely blocky facsimile, in this port of a PC 3D combat simulator from EA.
• Availability: The ironic thing about EA's Origin service is that it doesn't feature much of their earlier games. Then again, I'm not sure how many folks now would buy a helicopter sim that makes SNES Star Fox look sleek.
• Preservation: Much respect as always for any Genesis port of a 3D computer game that tries its best with its limited hardware. In 1990, a high-end IBM PC was just about capable of running LHX with a moderate framerate; a Sega Genesis has no chance, and slowdown is your persistent wingman throughout this game. Still, we're also talking about a period of time - pretty much the entire decade of the '90s, now I think about it - where the novelty of 3D graphics was so appealing that people were willing to overlook a lot. Just look at Final Fantasy VII. Or Stunt Race FX. Or... what else can I burn here... eh, regardless, I think this is serviceable enough even if it dips into molasses territory so often it has a toll pass, and it gives you your choice of light attack helicopter including two models I'm not sure were featured in other games.

324: Menacer 6-Game Cartridge

• Developer: Western Technologies
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: October 1992
• EU Release: November 1992
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Light-Gun Shooter
• Theme: That Hot "Proof of Concept Tech Demo" Energy
• Premise: Totally unlike any other 16-bit light-guns which may or may not have had a six mini-game pack-in compilation, the Sega Menacer is here with six games that only work with the Sega Menacer (or maybe a mouse, depending on what you're playing it on).
• Availability: I'd hazard a guess that there are more working Menacer 6-Game Cartridges out there than there are working Menacers, so there's probably more supply than demand.
• Preservation: Look, Sega was in an arms race in the early '90s and if your enemy came out with a stupid looking bazooka light-gun you better believe you had to manufacture one too. Far as I can tell, Western Technologies worked on both this game and the Menacer light-gun peripheral itself: we last saw them with Art Alive (MA XIV), but they were renowned tech wizards who at one point brought the Vectrex console into the world with the funding of General Consumer Electric. I can't say the mini-games are all that awe-inspiring, but there's a little more thematic variety here than there was in Super Scope 6, even if the presentation is nowhere near as slick. As was the case with Art Alive, Western Technologies managed to convince the ToeJam & Earl people to let them borrow their characters: Earl (the orange one) is the protagonist of the pack's third mini-game, "Ready, Aim, Tomatoes!".

325: Xenon 2: Megablast

• Developer: The Bitmap Brothers
• Publisher: Virgin Interactive
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: October 1992
• Franchise: Xenon
• Genre: Shoot 'em Up (Vertical)
• Theme: Like a techno remix of the theme to Assault on Precinct 13
• Premise: Megablast your way through the innards of weird alien planets in this attractive but tough Amiga/Atari ST shoot 'em up.
• Availability: This is wild, but apparently a homebrew version was published for the Atari Jaguar in 2016. Its creator was given the consent to release it by one of the original developers. That's as recent a release as you're likely to get.
• Preservation: I'd go through the usual Bitmap Brothers spiel here - top-notch presentations belied middling gameplay, yet they still rated highly in every Atari ST/Amiga magazine of the day - but I already exhausted that vein back when we covered Speedball 2: Brutal Deluxe (MA XV). Xenon 2 is closer to what I had in mind when I say these games can be too flashy for their own good, as it's a vertical scrolling shooter with huge detailed sprites set in levels that have enemies swooping in from every direction that you can easily collide into, and the combination of all three of those things on a system with a 320x224 resolution does not make for a good time. The Genesis port also mangles the title screen music, which was the only highlight on the computer versions, and the framerate's especially lousy. I covered the Atari ST Xenon II in more detail over here somewhere, but it's not a sequel I ever had a whole lot of affection for and this lackluster port really isn't helping its case.

326: Triple Score: 3 Games in 1 / Mega Games I

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: N/A
• NA Release: 1993-08-16 (as Triple Score: 3 Games in 1)
• EU Release: 1992-10-01 (as Mega Games I)
• Franchise: Mega Games
• Genre: Compilation
• Theme: Getting Those Pesky Europeans On Board
• Premise: It's three games in one! What a savings!
• Availability: Individually, Columns is available on Steam, Super Hang-On had an enhanced 3DS remaster (and the arcade version is playable in Yakuza 0 and Yakuza 6), and World Cup Italia '90 is an ancient sports game no-one needs to play in 2020.
• Preservation: The first of the Mega Games compilations, I recently learned that this series was only a thing in Europe excepting this inaugural set that eventually made its way to the States as "Triple Score." Europeans got several more of these Mega Games compilations over the following year, but this first one was intended as a console pack-in for late adopters since I guess Sega had underestimated the European market and it proved more lucrative than they anticipated. This set features Columns (MA III), the Super Hang-On port (MA I), and World Cup Italia '90 (it's supposed to be World Championship Soccer for the US release according to the box art, but they got World Cup Italia '90 too) (MA I) as a sample of what the Mega Drive could do.

327: Chiki Chiki Boys

• Developer: Sega
• Publisher: Sega
• JP Release: 1992-10-16
• NA Release: 1993
• EU Release: 1993
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Platformer
• Theme: Gettin' Chiki Wit It
• Premise: Monsters have invaded the kingdom of Alurea and only a pair of heroic twins can save the day... Oh, one of them couldn't make it? Darn.
• Availability: Showed up in a few Capcom compilations for PS2, Xbox, and PSP, but nothing past that.
• Preservation: Also known as Mega Twins, depending on where you played it, Sega couldn't really retain that name for the Genesis port because it's only single-player; a conversion fumble that had cost Nintendo dearly with the SNES Final Fight port a few years back that Sega was quick to seize upon with their emphatically two-player Streets of Rage. Kind of odd to see the same error come back full circle to Sega, as while Chiki Chiki Boys is as much a platformer as it is a brawler the cooperative multiplayer aspect was a major aspect of its appeal. The original arcade game was by Capcom, but I guess Sega felt it was close enough to Westone's Wonder Boy series - which Sega had published - that they felt they had to port it over themselves. Gotta corner the market on those melon-headed boy heroes (except for Hudson's Bonk).

328: Vixen 357

• Developer: Masaya
• Publisher: Masaya
• JP Release: 1992-10-23
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: N/A
• Genre: Strategy
• Theme: Robot Go Pew Pew
• Premise: Vixen 357, which is not the username of a Tinder catfisher, has you unexpectedly field-testing the new VECTOR mech units after a sudden ambush by unknown foes.
• Availability: Original cart only.
• Preservation: Missed the Japanese-only Mega Drive games? Well, here's a deeply tactical strategy game with mecha for you by our good friends at Masaya. From its Wikipedia article, it sounds like some Front Mission plotting with Fire Emblem permadeath; the latter aspect, rather than allowing you to continue the game with those characters missing from cutscenes, simply hits you with a game over instead so you might have to play a little more defensively to keep the important named characters alive. Masaya also created the Langrisser/Warsong series so this is sort of game is entirely in their wheelhouse. It does have a fan translation for those interested in mecha strategy RPGs with anime cutscenes, and it sounded like we were close to also getting a localized physical version last year until those plans fell through.

329: Kidou Keisatsu Patlabor: 98-Shiki Kidou Seyo!

• Developer: Ma-Ba
• Publisher: Ma-Ba
• JP Release: 1992-10-23
• NA Release: N/A
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Patlabor
• Genre: RPG
• Theme: Cops in Mech Suits, What Could Go Wrong?
• Premise: Popular manga/anime Mobile Police Patlabor comes to the Mega Drive in this RPG from a Bandai subsidiary.
• Availability: Original cart only. Outside of the '90s, the only place you're going to see Patlabor are in the Super Robot Wars crossovers.
• Preservation: The mech games keep coming with this Patlabor tie-in RPG, apparently developed and published by the toyline's producers Ma-Ba (the result of a brief fusion dance by major US and Japanese toymakers Mattel and Bandai, originally established to sell Barbie dolls in Japan). Patlabor the manga/anime was about a near-future police division that used mech suits called labors to combat labor-related crimes, which were typically only used for industrial and construction work (hence "labor") and military purposes. I remember it was always a big deal in the show when a bad guy showed up in a sleek military labor that the heroes had little chance taking on face to face. Ma-Ba's an interesting anomaly we'll see with a handful more anime licensed games; it's weird, but I don't remember encountering Ma-Ba once while working on NES, SNES, or PC Engine pages despite a heavy Bandai presence on all three.

330: Chase H.Q. II

• Developer: ITL
• Publisher: Taito
• JP Release: 1992-10-23
• NA Release: February 1993
• EU Release: N/A
• Franchise: Chase H.Q.
• Genre: Driving / Vehicular Combat
• Theme: *KZZT* This is Nancy at Chase H.Q.. We've Got an Emergency Here!
• Premise: What is the third game in the series, but is actually still just the first, Chase H.Q. II has a familiar batch of criminal scum to T-bone on a busy highway.
• Availability: This "sequel" is Genesis cart only. If you want to drive into other cars at high speeds though, may I recommend the Burnout franchise?
• Preservation: So yeah, this is once again the marketing geniuses working at early '90s Sega adding a "2" to every arcade conversion as if to say, "hey, this is more than just a home port with a few extra bells and whistles, it's a whole new game!" Why they couldn't just put "Mega" in front of everything like Nintendo was doing with its "Super" SNES ports I'll never know. This is really just original-flavor Chase H.Q. with the new feature of being able to choose between a number of vehicles, each with different settings of top speed and damage per hit. What's confusing, at least for wiki purposes, is that there are two other "Chase H.Q. II"s: the actual second game Chase H.Q. II: Special Criminal Investigation (maybe best known for having your partner shoot at dudes from the sunroof) and the arcade sequel Chase H.Q. II which appeared way later in 2007. I still gave it a new page on our wiki, but Taito's not making it easy for us data nerds.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 31st

• Game: Tamashii
• Developer: Vikintor
• Release Year: 2019
• Available: Itch, Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Switch

I'm... not even sure where to start with Tamashii. I guess a reductive description would be Pony Island passed through several more layers of H.R. Giger-esque heavy metal album cover art where the chief gameplay loop is a puzzle-platformer where you create and leave clones behind to activate switches on your behalf. Its artistic ambitions are a lot more elaborate than that, however, and its aesthetic definitely sits in an uncanny realm of deeply messed up imagery. And this came out on the Switch? Huh.

A nameless creature manifested into being by a deity, your task is to use your borrowed power to cleanse the deity's temple of a corrupting influence. This involves travelling to five different chambers - the first and last are fixed, though the middle three can be taken on in any order - and defeating the guardian that awaits inside. As intimated, you have no weapons nor any way to defend yourself from these abyssal demons but you do have a double-jump and a cloning power: the latter allows up to three clones, each of which exists on a timer that can be accelerated artificially. Most of the game's puzzles involve figuring out where to plant these doppelgangers and when best to extinguish them, navigating past hazards and traps to locate one or more cradle-like devices that open the exit. Boss fights range from using these cradles to damage the boss in the brief windows when you are able to do so, or simply running through a gauntlet of dangers as they menacingly pursue you.

The game seems to be very fond of secrets, and I'm sure I didn't find everything the game was concealing from me. After entering a door found through a secret wall, I accidentally wound up selling my soul to Lucifer (hey, shit happens when you go wandering off the intended path). A Morse code-inspired puzzle gave me a set of numbers that would unlock "extra content," though I was unable to ascertain where to use it. The keys to most of these secrets are kept behind branches in each of the first four chambers: at these branches, you are given the option of a "hard but rewarding" route in addition to the simpler intended path. These harder routes offering some of the toughest puzzles in the game, though it should be said that these puzzles are never too challenging to figure out: perhaps harder to execute upon, though, as some platforming skills are required to get the timing and trap-evading down.

But let's just circle back to that aesthetic for a moment: Tamashii (which is Japanese for "soul": though there's not a whole lot of Japanese folklore touchstones in the way of yokai or Yomi-no-kuni or such, I've read the game was inspired by the likes of Yume Nikki, Saya no Uta, and other surreal J-Horror Indies) is filled to the brim with perturbing creature design, most of which is benign and hangs around in the background though others prove to be dangerous if trifled with. It's fond of hitting you with a visceral jumpscare sequence after each chamber, though given each one is the same it loses some of its bite after a while. The bosses are suitably horrific: fleshy monstrosities that regularly fill the screen and turn the already intense visual filters up to eleven. The story's pure apocryphal nonsense, though germane to the type of world this is with its talk of Biblical demons, demiurges, and cthonic powers derived from an ancient, unknowable "truth." Basically, the first Halloween game I've played for this feature that was genuinely unsettling.

Strip away its visuals and Tamashii is a relatively sparse and brief puzzle-platformer that shouldn't take too long even going out of your way for those harder routes, though of course your mileage may vary depending on your capacity to think chronologically as well as spatially. The platforming controls are satisfactory, though I hit a lot of laggy spots that didn't necessarily correlate to how much was going on in terms of visual filters and other effects that usually tank my framerate on this inadequate system. That issue might not exist for most PC players, or those trying the various console ports that are also available. (If anything, the lag probably helped with a few of the less easily navigable jumps.) However, like Daniel Mullins's Pony Island or The Hex or Toby Fox's Undertale before it, it's less about the totally OK gameplay core and more about the trappings around it: Tamashii is a starkly bizarre and macabre adventure that probably requires content warnings out the wazoo, and really ought to be played to be believed.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity: 5 S.T.A.R.S.

That's going to do it for this year's Halloween content! Thanks for checking in, and if you purchased the Racial Justice and Equality bundle yourselves, feel free to try any of these spooky games yourselves. (I might recommend a stiff drink if you go for Tamashii though, damn.)

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 30th

• Game: Forever Lost: Episode 2
• Developer: Glitch Games
• Release Year: 2013
• Available: Itch, Steam, iOS

Welcome back, Forever Lost. We last encountered this escape room adventure game series in Indie Game of the Week (IGotW 183) and after that blog went up I got a nice tweet from the developers, and you better believe it takes the smallest amount of positive encouragement for me to go all-in on your video game franchise. Forever Lost Episode 1 took place in a subterranean insane asylum, creating an elaborate breadcrumb trail of puzzles and items that eventually saw you ascend to the surface above. Forever Lost Episode 2 is here to tell you that the bean-scrambling torture has only just begun: the surface has even more puzzles waiting for you.

There is an overarching story to Forever Lost, sorta, as this episode reveals more about your possible identity and even more implicitly towards why this is happening to you. These snippets are spread across the game's much larger map, which starts at a large estate and progresses into another unlikely subterranean location: a highschool, complete with laboratory and gym, which is hinted as the place where you were educated and presumably transported brick by brick to its present location. In addition to the general sinister atmosphere of being trapped in some insane genius's mindgame, Forever Lost Episode 2 also tries its hand at a few legit if incongruous jumpscares, which I appreciate because the playthrough was starting to feel malapropos to this whole Halloween theme I've got going on here.

As before, your chief ally in this confusing mess is a handy camera and photo album: you can take pictures of anything that looks like a hint, be it a hieroglyph or a set of color bars or a code in Roman numerals; the album then allows you to scribble notes on top of the images you've saved if you need a little more thinking time to put their usage together. It's more important in this game, since the map is so large and you're likely to find clues to puzzles you won't solve until an hour later. Forever Lost continues its bizarre flights of fancy, including an interactive DVD menu and two games-within-a-game that - somehow - allow you to carry items out. The chief collectible here are puzzle pieces: there's a door on the second floor of the house that needs sixteen of them, and many of the puzzle chains eventually culminate in one or two of these pieces. I found myself revisiting that door many times just to keep my inventory from over-cluttering.

Forever Lost Episode 2 is still a touch on the buggy side, unfortunately. There's many glitches (the developer's name may have been a self-fulfilling prophecy in retrospect) and I managed to crash the game a few times trying to mash some proverbial square pegs into round holes. Other issues include odd formatting for photos in the album - any pictures taken while the UV light was active, for instance, resulted in a larger image size that broke the album slot's frame - and I accidentally cloned a few key items which just sat around in my inventory unneeded. It's also pretty slow to move around, which becomes a bit more of a problem when you've expanded the size of the world and have no fast travel options, and the lag between when you clicked an exit and when it made the transition led to the whole thing feeling clunky. Not that lag is usually all that important in an adventure game like this, except the developers did decide to include at least one timed puzzle this time around.

Overall though, while it's less polished than the throng of identi-kit hidden object puzzle adventure games on Steam, it has a certain lo-fi early-00s charm to its presentation, it's a fan of the occasional dumb joke or overly literal clue, and I can't help but get swept up in a multi-stage dopamine kick when I solve something to find an item that lets me solve another puzzle, which then gets me an item that leads to the solution of a third puzzle that I'd been confused about for a while. Half the time you're gliding through this game - if you've already located the draughts board, it's obvious where the draught pieces you just found will go - but the other half of the puzzles require some experimentation or lateral thinking before they click, and it's rewarding when they do. It even has a comprehensive hint system if you're truly and forever lost: almost 180 of them, in fact, each of which gets ticked off as complete once you hit the right trigger so you're not left reading through a whole walkthrough to find just one tidbit that can re-establish your puzzle-smashing momentum.

Besides wishing it was more stable, had more necessary quality-of-life touches (it does at least auto-save after every screen transition), and maybe had a bit more going on in the looks department, I can't find myself disliking this slightly ramshackle adventure series or the way it regularly respects your intelligence (or, more often, your capacity for remembering odd little details). Even though I'm a bit mentally enervated right now, I'll probably check out Forever Lost Episode 3 before too much longer.

• Quality: 3 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.

I realize I'm doing a whole Halloween-themed daily series of late, but nothing stops the Indie Game of the Week. Nor does anything stop Ruth, the heroine of this storybook sci-fi tale about a Norwegian milkmaid who is forced to intervene when an alien spaceship attempts to make off with her beloved bovine one cold morn. This leads to a Space Quest-esque adventure of ingenuity and courage in the face of certain death, as she attempts to rescue the elderly and frail populace of the ship from their greedy queen, who has used the ship's "age machine" technology to sap all their vigor away and keep herself alive indefinitely. Ruth, also, finds herself victim to this intergalactic Elizabeth Báthory, and must figure out how to restore her own youth on top of everything else.

Milkmaid of the Milky Way is a deliberately lo-fi affair, but it finds the beauty in that aesthetic with its impressive, sweeping MS Paint vistas (seriously, they look pretty good in-context) and a soundtrack which is very soothing and melodic. The game does have its moments of tension, and more than a few tricky puzzles (including a handful of timed ones), but there's no concerns about death states and it has a very measured tempo throughout as you take in these wonders through the eyes of a sheltered farmgirl. A big part of the game's storybook cadence involves the decision to deliver every piece of dialogue, inner monologue, and narrator exposition as a rhyming couplet. Between the pixel graphics and its musical and rhythmical flourishes, it has the vibe of an early Sierra point-and-click mixed with that Sword and Sworcery EP action-adventure game from a few years back.

That said, while the game is charming and nails the particular aesthetic it's going for, I had a few issues with it. The first has us circle back around to those rhyming couplets; I find bad rhymes excruciating in ways I can't entirely express, and more than once they've ruined a song by sticking out like a sore thumb. Like the game's "dairy queen" heroine, the developers of the game are natively Norwegian and so there's a few tricks to the English language that caught them out. Said tricks include words that look like they should rhyme but don't: I've included one in the screenshot below, and another example tries to rhyme "year" with "pear". Other rhyming couplets have wildly different numbers of syllables, which throws off the rhythm they're trying to create. The game doesn't have voiced dialogue, which might be a blessing given how awkward a lot of these lines would've sounded but it might also have served the developers in showing them where they messed up. Some part of me respects the hell out of an author for choosing to write an entire adventure game script in rhyming pairs in their second language, but it's still overall a net negative to the game's quality.

The presence of some minor glitches were probably inherent to Unity and the adventure game engine the developers were using; one such instance had me stuck in a walking loop unable to continue. However, since the game appears to autosave after passing through every area transition, it wasn't much of an issue to roll it back. My other complaints are those relating to the evolution of modern adventure games: usability tools like a "reveal hotspots" button or a faster way to move around the world (either via a map of scenes, or an instant area transition function after, say, double-clicking an exit) should be standard to this genre by now. In fairness, the game's not really pixel-hunty enough for the former or large enough to need the latter; my only gripe here is that the two in-game maps are laid out in a mostly linear fashion, requiring you to pass through many screens to get from one end to the other.

It's a little unpolished as a result, but it gave its director a confident voice that they appear to have carried on into Embracelet: a much more ambitious polygonal adventure game with a magical realism theme that released just last month and seems to be garnering a small but vociferous amount of praise. Milkmaid, meanwhile, is a short and sweet tone piece with just enough of that old "moon logic" adventure game puzzle spice to evoke its genre antecedents, and ultimately worth the one or two hours it asks of your time. (Except if you really hate rhyming, I guess; it's not that invasive, I feel I must stress.)

Rating: 3 out of 5.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 29th

• Game: Spooky Ghosts Dot Com
• Developer: Grizzly Wizard Games, Lone Wolf Technology
• Release Year: 2018
• Available: Itch, Steam, Switch

I realize a lot of the games I've covered so far in the Spooktathlon haven't been all that, well, spooky. But today's entry is different; it has Spooky right in the name! Spooky Ghosts Dot Com can be graciously described as a "mini-explormer": the usual map system, upgrades that get you to new places, dead-ends with collectibles, and boss fights that demand you summon every scrap of skill and pattern recognition to defeat. Just, way smaller.

Spooky Ghosts Dot Com is the protagonist's website: a budget ghost hunter service that you can call when the usual guys are too busy or too NYC-based. Getting a job in the middle of the night, our pink-haired heroine (who sort of has a Ghost Sweeper Mikami vibe in that cover art above) enters a clearly haunted domicile, realizes that the client is a ghost himself who confused the site for a ghostly escort service, and decides to exorcise the entire manor grounds of its spectral infestation. If, along the way, she can pet some kitties and eat a whole bunch of Halloween candy, all the better. Because of the game's shorter than usual length, there isn't as much of the circuitous map design or progress-enabling power-ups: there's around 50-60 rooms total, which isn't as many as it sounds, and there's really only two power-ups in the form of a mid-air dash (needed for a few gaps) and a charge beam (which can also blow down barricades). The rest of the items either help you survive battles longer (the aforementioned Halloween candy pick-up also gives you extra HP) or are keys intended to access subsequent areas.

I will say to Spooky Ghosts Dot Com's laser focus, it can be a challenging game. Provided you're playing on the Normal difficulty - which the game defines as the "true Spooky Ghosts Dot Com experience" - you can't heal except at save points, and with a paltry 10 hit point starting total (19 once fully upgraded, though I couldn't help but feel I missed an upgrade until I saw the "100% Complete!" on the post-game results screen) they drain very quickly. Almost nothing in the game hits you for just one HP: it's usually at least two or three, and spikes even more so. The few boss fights are genuinely challenging as a result, as you struggle to avoid getting hit the two or three times it would take to finish you off, applying the pressure to these larger foes whenever there's a gap in their pattern and you have room to breathe. Your laser gun is relatively fast but even while charged does only chip damage, so these internecine battles can demand a reasonable amount of patience and evasive skill. Some boss fights are genuinely inventive also, like fighting a boss from inside its stomach where every part of the screen - including the floor, ceiling, and walls - count as the boss's hitbox.

Visually and audio-wise the game is fairly barebones, skeleton jokes aside, and clocks in at just over an hour on a blind run with a few deaths. I would say that the core is solid enough though, and works as a microcosm of an Indie explormer with a lot more resources and ambition without sacrificing too much about what makes these games tick. It's as paper-thin as Halloween decorations, but even with my brief time with it I felt challenged at every turn and enjoyed taking my time looking around for its handful of scattered items, conversing with an inexplicably buff shopkeeper spook or the genial teleporter cat (who never did reward me for finding all their smaller, muter brethren; I was surprised that particular side-quest never amounted to anything). It joins the likes of Xeodrifter, Mini Ghost, and Gato Roboto as these bite-sized variants of the sprawling Castlevanias and Metroids that define the genre: ideal if you're looking for a quick explormer fix over a lunch break and not hours of squinting at a map figuring out where the gaps are and where you should go next.

• Quality: 3 Stars.
• Spookosity: 2 S.T.A.R.S.

To celebrate Halloween this year, I'm playing through a bunch of horror games that were included in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality from a few months back. The goal is to play and blog one of these horror games every day until the 31st; I've deliberately picked shorter ones to make this work. Each will be rated on their overall quality and "spookosity" in what I'm sure will be a very clinical critique. Let the chills commence!

October 28th

• Game: Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast
• Developer: Bad Chalk
• Release Year: 2016
• Available: Itch, Steam

Well, this game was adorable, and ended up being fairly close to another game I covered recently for my Indie Game of the Week feature named The Lost Art of Innkeeping (IGotW 181). Both concern running a hostel, both were made in RPG Maker though eschews any combat turn-based or otherwise, and both tend to juggle daily responsibilities and financial bookkeeping with timed events and a game-wide deadline (Dead and Breakfast is but a week in length). I think most notably though, is that both games focus on compassion and empathy over the more conventional video game skills: to be a good host, you must attend to the physical and mental (and, in a literal sense here, spiritual) needs of the clients in your care.

Corinne Cross is a college student who is given a task by her mother to housesit for a mutual friend for a week. Julia Styron, the friend in question, recently lost her son Gale who was Corinne's age and has since been hospitalized for her grief. After the first few nights in the house, and meeting the odd old woman who used to run the cemetery and funeral parlor next door, Corinne realizes the ghosts of the recently deceased are occupying the house; what used to be a bed and breakfast for the living is now occupied by ghostly guests who demand a similar level of service. The game then alternates between the daytime, where Corinne can go shopping for supplies and visit Julia in the hospital, and the night-time, when she converses with the specters, attends to their needs, and eventually helps them move on to the afterlife.

The gameplay is relatively straightforward, though it does require a good memory (or a notepad open nearby) to keep track of the items you need to buy during the day and to remember to plant and water the flowers in the garden (Corinne's main source of income), and really exists as a framing device to tell a few simultaneous side-stories about the wayward spirits staying within and the lives they once led. Each spook has an ending to pursue, reached both by spending time with them and assisting with their unfinished business, and the game maintains an easy gameplay loop between what amounts to simple chores and conversing with its characters. It's very basic - which I mean less as a derogatory statement but more in a casual, approachable sense - and takes about an hour or two total even if you do everything, though there's also a New Game+ variant with slightly tighter requirements and additional scenes. It's also saccharine (in a non-cloying way), cute as a button (as you can tell with the graphics in the screenshot above), and absolutely not terror-inducing in any way, shape, or form. Only one ghost wanted to eat my soul, and that was the angsty punk-rock teenager who was soon sorted out with some sisterly bonding.

If your idea of good Halloween entertainment is a charming, bittersweet story about being an empathetic friend to spirits to help them move on, then Corinne Cross's Dead and Breakfast is the breezy Indie hotelier sim for you. Fans of the harder stuff might want to try the Bates Motel Simulator instead, which isn't a real game yet but hopefully might be one day.

• Quality: 4 Stars.
• Spookosity Rating: -2 S.T.A.R.S..