I figured it's high time I get started on all these Itch.io games that landed in my lap recently. For disclaimer's sake, I was going to look at Serenity Forge's The King's Bird this week but decided last second that I didn't want to be playing a very challenging platformer in 30 degree heat, and so made a lateral switch to Vertical Reach's Tangrams Deluxe: a relaxing puzzle game that explores the spatial awareness fun of tangrams.
I first encountered tangrams, or at least the video game version, with the excellent Neves for Nintendo DS. A tangram is a puzzle consisting of seven shapes - two large triangles, one medium-sized triangle, two smaller triangles, a square, and a parallelogram - which can be rearranged to form a wide variety of images. Puzzle games based on the idea tend to give you the outline of these images first, and then task you with inserting all the pieces so that the outline is completely filled and none of the pieces overlap each other. It's one of those types of puzzles your brain is either adept at solving or isn't, though it does get remarkably easier with practice as you notice certain repeating solutions and learn the relationship between the pieces. For instance, the square, parallelogram and medium triangle all have the same area as the two smaller triangles combined, so the latter can be used to create any of the former in a pinch. It's also best to start with the larger triangles, because there are fewer places for them to fit, and then work from there.
One of the few tangrams that stymied me for a little while. Just a weird assortment of shapes in the bottom half there. (I think it's supposed to be a bird?)
As such, though Tangrams Deluxe has over 200 puzzles, you move through them at a relatively brisk pace. Once you've placed a few pieces it's usually obvious where the rest of them will fit, and the game's straightforward mouse-driven (or touchscreen) interface makes it simple to quickly orient and place them. It's also fairly lax about filling the image outline perfectly: usually, the shapes will click into place as soon as they're all in close enough proximity. However, where Tangrams Deluxe falls apart for me is in the myriad smaller choices behind this UI which, though relatively minor gripes, collectively add to a more irksome whole. These include: giving every individual tangram piece their own drop shadow, which is the same gray color as the image outline and creates a bit of visual confusion whenever you place a piece; whenever you win, you get this obnoxious soccer whistling chant remix of the main music, and its noisy discordance goes counter to the usually serene BGM ambience of puzzle games; and the game sorts all its image puzzles into broad categories (rabbits, boats, houses, etc.) so that, when moving through the puzzle list in the default order (there's a "next" button after every puzzle if you don't want to go back to the menu each time), generates a lot of repetition. It just feels like the game got the essentials right and botched it with the small finishing touches surrounding them.
Still, a puzzle game that I could master almost immediately was appealing in a sort of lazy summer exercise sense where I'm really not in any state to take on anything more advanced right now (grateful that I didn't try to get way into Sokoban or something). I'll chalk this up as a vacation week and maybe attempt something a bit more demanding next time. Or I'll just play another easy explormer and have a grand old time looking for the double-jump or ground pound. Not like y'all can't stop me.
Like many of you, I was fortunate and privileged enough to drop down some money for Itch.io's recent Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality: not only a worthy cause in aid of those protesting the murder of George Floyd and several others, but a cause that attracted an unprecedented number of contributors from larger, well-known Indie teams to passionate hobbyists: 1,391 contributors to be exact, who collectively put forward 1,704 video games, table-top rulesets, asset packs, and other media for charitable souls to enjoy.
Needless to say, that's a lot, and many of us have been spending the past week or so gingerly picking through this heap of treasure for anything that piques our interest. I've personally added about fifty new games to my "Indie Game of the Week" backlog - enough for an entire year of blogs, so look forward to those - but there's many more that were either too small or too weird for a full review. That brings us, laboriously, to the point of this series: each of these entries will look at five games that will probably go unobserved by most as they'll understandably gravitate towards the established hits instead, and see if they're worthy of more attention.
Kintsugi
"The Japanese art of repairing broken ceramics with gold," or so its Itch.io page explains. A short, simple game that is functionally similar to a jigsaw, and perhaps more specifically to the glassware-themed Glass Masquerade, in that you simply assemble pieces of broken ceramics together so they fit in the right places, at which point the game fills in the gaps with gold resin to hold the new construct together. Easy to a fault - the game has the items fall apart in front of your eyes, so it's not like you won't know where all the pieces go - but with a deliberate sense of catharsis between its chill BGM and the Zen aphorisms that accompany each completed puzzle.
There's only five of these puzzles total, so the game's about ten minutes long if that, but it's a cute little thing that highlights the oddly rewarding calmness and determination that comes with rebuilding after a catastrophe, even if said catastrophe was as relatively minor as dropping a ceramic duck on the floor.
The text below is a common Japanese proverb about perseverance: working hard on something for a long time before you can expect to see results. I completed this puzzle in thirty seconds, but the sentiment's appreciated.
Mobility
Mobility is a pint-size masocore platformer that's sort of riffing on Super Meat Boy and N++ with its tight controls, minimalist look, and frequent emphasis on building and controlling momentum. The goal of each of its stages is to hit every platform at least once, which are collectively framed as you fixing a ship by tinkering with its systems (it's not clear if these platforms represent programs inside a computer or something less abstract). Part of the puzzle of these levels, then, is intuiting a route first and then executing on that course as quickly as possible.
The game's masterstroke is how it presents its difficulty system: there are four tiers, and each of them subtly changes the dynamics of the platforms to make the level easier or tougher: on the easiest setting, you merely have to get close to the platform to activate it, and this includes hitting it with your head; on the second setting, which is the default, you have to stand on a platform or touch it while sliding down its side to activate it; on the third, platforms will vanish after a second or two upon leaving and there's no longer any checkpoints; on the hardest, the platforms electrify instead of vanishing, and present a hazard if you need to get past them to more platforms. These challenge settings will also slightly modify your route: you can't double-back with the last two, and the electricity might mean going out of your way to hit a remote block early so you won't have to do so later on when it's more dangerous about.
Like any good masocore, most of the focus is around time trials and the post-game records reflect this. You'll score better on a ship by lowering your overall time across all its levels, and you'll incur a penalty for finishing it on anything but the harshest setting. There's some longevity to it - there's about twenty-seven levels total, which took a couple hours total to beat - though it's still a bit too short for a full IGotW blog. I really started to resent some of its challenges towards the end also, especially the final boss and a particular level that focused around momentum-building "acceleration fields" that I could never reliably use right. Kind of a pain, honestly, but only in the same way ever other masocore has been. I think it definitely rates if games like the above or Celeste are the type that can keep you hooked, even if it's only through sheer frustrated stubbornness.
This level only has the one path, but it's easy to hit the platforms out of order and mess yourself up. Well, unless you're playing a mode where they don't all turn fatal shortly after you touch them.
Islands: Non-Places
I've encountered a few games like Islands: Non-Places before, but I stopped covering them frequently with the Indie Game of the Week series as these are the types of Indie games, or perhaps interactive experiences, that don't really suit a beat-by-beat review of its mechanics and features because there aren't a whole lot of either. What Islands: Non-Places does - along with the likes of Windosill, GNOG, Hohokum, and most of Amanita Design's catalog - is give you a tableau with a handful of interactive hotspots and lets you watch how the space slowly transforms with each click, sometimes in the aid of the critical path and sometimes for the sake of an immaterial (in terms of progression, at least) surprise. They're also deconstructions of how interactivity can play a part in the player's relationship with an environment, taking all the jumping, climbing, pushing, pulling, sliding, and other verbs a game's control scheme and mechanics might allow for and instead replacing them with a single all-purpose tap of the mouse button which can produce any number of unexpected effects.
Islands: Non-Places in particular feels like it was borne of the concept of being in a relatively quotidian and mostly urban space (a parking lot, a hotel foyer, a convenience store fridge, an ATM, etc.) and letting your mind wander after a busy day, fantasizing that this everyday object or environment is some small part of an incredible, unseen ecosystem or mechanism. By tapping the lit-up parts of each of Islands's initially unexciting and dimly-lit settings, the scene might suddenly become submerged underwater, or a plant pot in the middle of a circle of chairs might rise to reveal a massive subterranean root system, or an entire apartment complex emerges from the ground like the dwellings in Neon Genesis Evangelion. The interactivity of these scenes is always rudimentary and limited - there's usually only a handful of things you ever need to press, and the game has them pulse to indicate when they're ready to go - but watching the myriad ways in which the scene might transform is kinda cool. There's ten (or eleven?) of these scenarios to see (the game takes about an hour total) and there's something about the hazy low-lighting and uniform color palettes that is always striking, evoking a sense of reaching the end of an exhausting work shift and hovering between the realms of the waking and the dreaming. It's not much of a video game as we understand the term and all its associations, but still rad.
Something oddly pleasing about these tiny apartments and garages and the way they fit together, but then I remembered this is just how it is for many millennials in cities. Bet you'd still have to pay $3000 a month in rent even with a car sitting on your roof most days.
Sidewords
Being a writer, or at least playing one on the internet, I have a deep love for word games like Sidewords which prioritize a player's vocabulary as well as their puzzle-solving prowess. With Sidewords, you have a relatively simple premise: by using the letters on the horizontal and vertical axes, the goal is to fill a grid with words. You can use as many of the letters as you want, though you need to use a mix of the vertical and horizontal letters to complete the parts of the grid where they intersect. The other important rule is that you can't use the same combination of horizontal and vertical letters twice: once you fill in part of the grid with a word, you can't overlap any part of it with the next. That might mean taking apart a larger word that filled in 80% of the grid in one go, because there's nothing you can do with what remains. Vowel scarcity is a common issue.
I guess I said simple and then launched into a bunch of obfuscated nonsense, but it's far more intuitive than I'm making it sound here. It also gets much tougher as the axes grow in length the further you go, requiring longer words or multiple shorter ones: the former is what you strive for for the sake of keeping the screen tidy and using as few "moves" as possible, but the latter makes itself present more often as you struggle to fill in those remaining blanks.
I also didn't anticipate how long this game would take. I'd completed the first set of thirty-six, just about managing the last few, only to find that there were seven more groups of puzzles of the same size. While the ruleset is relatively simple, I can't imagine the game will get any easier from here on out. Unfortunately, at the higher levels it's less about wordplay and more about finding all those semi-obscure Scrabble words to use to fill in tiny gaps, and you frequently have to finish a puzzle with an assortment of random three- and four-letter words (it won't allow two-letter, alas) that you've maybe never used or never seen before, but was happy to accept when the in-game word-checker gave you the go-ahead. I wish there were more occasions where you could slay the board with a single huge word, but those are preciously few and far between (though their scarcity means you don't often consider if there's one available).
I was quite pleased that I eventually found this solution, especially as I'd kept putting "cart" before "horse".
Kids
Well, here's something odd. Another one of those "interactive installations" (that I ironically didn't need to install first) where the gameplay boils down to clicking on things, and sometimes certain things in a certain order, before it moves onto the next scene and a new set of hidden objectives. Kids is a little too abstract to describe with a plot summary, as all you do is corral a group of little white blobby dudes into holes, through passageways, deeper underwater, settle arguments between them, and choreograph the occasional Mexican wave. The whole affair is depicted in stark black and white with a hand-drawn animation style and takes about thirty minutes to see in its entirety.
Clearly, it's one of those games with A Message. Not the usual kind of A Message seen in video games either, where the action has to stop every five minutes to tell you that racism is bad (doy) or that we need to treat each other better and not jump to pessimistic conclusions (doy) or the military-industrial complex might not be something we want to help flourish (doy, doy). No, this is A Message that feels a little more subtle in its delivery and a little more open to interpretation. Are these "Kids" because they're getting mindlessly fed through these systems and hardships, symbolically represented as abyssal pits and esophageal tunnels, that we adult generations are purposefully building for them to suffer through (a la Pink Floyd's The Wall)? Are they "Kids" for their desire for the comfort of conformity in these large interchangeable groups, even when that conformity is regularly deleterious to their burgeoning individualism and creativity, and even their well-being? Are they "Kids" because they embody that curious mix of innocence and cruelty that comes from operating mostly on instinct instead of precedent, until they're taught otherwise by the role models in their lives (represented here as the person behind the mouse clicks)? Or are they "Kids" because they keep being dumbasses and jumping into holes, like a dumbass kid might?
Anyway, I thought this game was interesting but I sure am glad I'm not playing it for the sake of a review because I definitely feel like I have the wrong set of skills to properly expatiate what it's going for. Tap dudes, make them fall down holes, have fun.
Oh hey there, highschool flashback.
The End!
That's it for what may end up being the first of many blogs of a similar size and scope. It's going to take a long time for any of us to process the full extent of this incredible bundle, and I know many folks out there have been tossing out recs and kudos for hundreds of games in this collection. Just to add to that outpouring of affection somewhat, I want to quickly list the games in the bundle that I've covered in past Indie Game of the Week blogs if you wanted some more convincing:
Oxenfree (IGotW #8): A leisurely-paced supernatural mystery adventure game where you set the emotional tempo, picking dialogue options to tune the protagonist and her attitude to your role-playing preference. Loved the atmosphere.
2064: Read Only Memories (IGotW #13): A point-and-click detective adventure game designed in a Japanese style, specifically that favored by Kojima's Snatcher and Policenauts. Featuring the voice of Dan Ryckert and many others.
Octodad: Dadliest Catch (IGotW #53): Can't say I loved grappling with this game's infamously strange controls, but with the right audience and the right frame of mind I don't doubt it can be hilarious.
Hidden Folks (IGotW #73): Absolutely charming Where's Waldo type of enormous hidden object game. It's worth scouring each of its enormous tableaux to see all the little animations happening. It's like an always surprising ant farm, almost.
Puzzle Puppers (IGotW #81): A cute and unassuming tile puzzle game about hungry, stretchy doggos. Gets increasingly elaborate, but never too difficult (for better or worse).
Celeste (IGotW #98): While I don't think I'll ever like masocore platformers, Celeste made the most concerted effort out of any of them to win me over with its beating heart and hearty beats.
Minit (IGotW #99): Get as much done in your many minute-long lifetimes as possible in this cute monochromatic adventure game. If nothing else, this game helped me focus on one task at a time, something I often trip up on in big open-world games and RPGs.
GNOG (IGotW #150): Namechecked this above. You spin these little dioramas around, clicking buttons and pushing sliders until everything opens up. Sweet and satisfying.
A Short Hike (IGotW #162): The perfect summer vacation game - warm, relaxing, good sunny vibes, no particular goals in mind, and it's over before you know it or wish it.
The Hex (IGotW #163): From the twisted mind behind Pony Island comes another game focused on the meta surrounding game development. Very hard to predict where it's going at any moment.
Anodyne (May Madness 2013): A curious Zelda-like puzzle game with a personal story to tell and some gnarly visuals to take in, raising it above the usual imitators. The sequel's even better (and weirder somehow).
Pikuniku (Go! Go! GOTY! 2019): A puzzle-platformer physics-y game made in the same kind of brightly expressive cartoonish style as the LocoRoco games. I thought it had some pretty funny dialogue.
Thanks for reading, and have fun finding some buried treasure yourselves.
Finally, a game emerges to answer the age-old question of "what if Zelda was a girl?". Blossom Tales: The Sleeping King is about as straightforward a Legend of Zelda clone as you could conceivably make, though without necessarily feeling all that stale or uninspired. This is opposed to games like Ittle Dew or The Binding of Isaac, which repurposed the iconic top-down dungeoneering format of the original The Legend of Zelda to create something familiar but given over to its own unusual directive: Ittle Dew wanted to be a puzzle-focused Zelda game that minimized its other facets, while Isaac concentrated on the combat and built itself a procgen run-based frame to go around it. A few more (Oceanhorn, Treasure Adventure World) have even tried to adhere to the blueprint of The Wind Waker, with its more ambitious 3D exploration, cel-shaded visuals, and ocean sailing mechanics. I guess what I'm saying is, it sounds like just aping the original Zelda or the improved but still archetypal A Link to the Past wholesale sounds like the most obvious idea in the world for an Indie game, but there's actually very few Indies that have gone that fundamental with their imitations.
Yet, even closely following in those footsteps as it does, Blossom Tales ain't half bad. It controls well, it offers a pretty decent challenge (healing items seem way too plentiful, but then that's always been the case for Zelda too if you're patient enough to keep running around for potion refills and new fairies to bottle up), it has cute graphics and an even cuter framing story of an old man reading his grandkids a bedtime story - the commentary from the grandfather and kids will occasionally interrupt the game's narrative, Princess Bride style - and despite feeling like I've seen all its tricks and puzzles many times before, I can't say I'm not enjoying my time with it.
Both kids offer suggestions for the enemies currently attacking this camp of druids. The player eventually decides which one is right.
Blossom Tales has you control Lily, the newest yet already the most competent recruit of the Royal Knights of the Rose. Everything is flower-themed in this kingdom, including the special treasures you're eventually sent out to procure to awaken the titular sleepy monarch from his enchanted coma, and I'm getting the sense that this a game designed for younger girls without talking down to them or underestimating their video game skills; though the inclusion of a young boy as one of the children, who is just as enthralled with the story as his sister, also suggests that this is an adventure anyone can enjoy. An example of how it creates this tone: the central Rose Kingdom is absolutely filled with colorful butterflies that flutter around each screen, giving the place a tranquil vibe that gives no hint to the tumultuous events to come. Until Lily acquires her sword at the castle's knighting ceremony, these butterflies are peaceably left to their own devices. After she gets her sword, she can mow down as many as she wants; they'll drop the same cash and health refills any enemy or patch of grass might, so it's not like the game discourages you at any point. Likewise, though Lily is introduced as the bastion of purity and grace, she can immediately start robbing people's houses of their useful treasures and Grampa will be quick to amend that to his telling of the story. It's hardly the most subversive example of this genre, even if you're just sticking to the core Zelda games, but it's quick to turn Grampa's idealistic romantic fairytale into a world regulated by some kid-ordained pragmatism.
A standard A Link to the Past trap room, but a tricky one when you're so early in and only have three hearts to work with. Blossom Tales isn't exceptionally tough, but it doesn't pull its punches either.
I'm about two dungeons in and all I can say so far is that there's some impressive meat to this, even if said meat isn't always filling. There's a half-dozen collectible side-quests going on, always some new upgrade or tchotchke to buy, lots of hidden caves and holes to find or treasures to dig up, and the dungeons are remarkably long (though at the moment they all exist on the one plane, rather than the multiple floors of most Zeldas) and filled with plenty of tough traps and encounters to overcome. It also adopts A Link Between Worlds's intelligent feature of an energy bar that slowly regenerates on its own and governs weapons that usually require their own inventory stocks like bombs and bow/arrows, encouraging you to use these items liberally while fighting and exploring without also letting you spam them like crazy. It just feels like a solidly made game in this specific format, if not one that has a deep supply of innovation of its own to draw upon. I'm curious to see where it goes and to keep following that loop of finding heart pieces and fighting bosses and so on, though I hold out little hope that it'll find a way to surprise me. Fingers crossed, I suppose.
Sega's war on Nintendo in the 16-bit era was largely won by persuasive marketing, at least outside of Japan, but there was always an undercurrent of technological one-up-manship. The Sega Genesis came roaring out of the gate with a "does what Nintendon't" promotional campaign, highlighting the difference in power between itself and the NES when it released. After Nintendo answered with the much beefier Super Nintendo Entertainment System in '90-'91, Sega looked to the fledgling CD-based peripheral of its other Japanese rival, the PC Engine/TurboGrafx, and determined that would be the next battlefield. In the holiday season of 1991, Sega of Japan released the Mega-CD: an accessory that would not only allow the Mega Drive to play CD games, but offered some much needed hardware boosts to even the playing field.
Unlike the Sega Mega Drive, the Sega CD (its North American name) is a totally unknown quantity to me barring the occasional Giant Bomb Make My Video sighting (and shoutouts to @brad, as I know he's been delving through this library of late). While I had friends with Mega Drives (I wouldn't buy my own until many years later) none of them seemed willing to shell out for this expensive peripheral, and I think by the time it was coming out over here in the spring of 1993 there was already a lot of skepticism surrounding it. Most, though not all, of the prominently featured games for it were sketchy FMV titles like Night Trap and Sewer Shark, and I want to say that Sega was already considering pulling the plug on new Mega-CD game development by the end of that same year. I may be speaking with the benefit of hindsight though: it's just as likely that everyone I knew was hyped for it and simply didn't have enough allowance saved up to grab it.
Well, hey, working on this feature and these wiki pages seems as good an excuse as any to finally try this thing out. For this inaugural feature on the Sega CD, we're covering the fourteen games released between December 12th 1991, when the Japanese Mega-CD launched, up until the middle of 1992 where the Mega Archive is at, presently. Something very notable here, and rare for a console launch even if said console is a peripheral, is that the majority of these games are third-party. Sega produced just three games for the Sega CD in these seven months, while most of the rest came to us courtesy of Wolf Team, Game Arts, and Telenet Japan: companies who had already found a home on the Mega Drive. There's a few highlights in this first batch, but overall it's some meager offerings for a device that cost 49,800Y (~$500) at launch.
The standard Mega Archive feature will return after a much longer break, but when it eventually resumes with the second half of 1992 I'll be tossing in the occasional Sega CD-focused entry like this to make sure it's keeping up with its brother.
I realized I've waxed poetic enough already but before we start, there's the small matter of three Mega-CD games that have already been covered on the Mega Archive, as all three later received cartridge versions:
Sol-Feace, a sci-fi shoot 'em up by Wolf Team covered in Mega Archive XVII as entry #266 (as Sol-Deace).
(Heavy Nova and Sol-Feace were also Mega-CD launch games. Of these three, only Sol-Feace saw international releases. In the future, any game that debuts on Sega CD will be covered by this sub-series instead of the Mega Archive.)
Premise: The good ship Nostalgia has been damaged by an explosive, and is no longer what it used to be. Can the protagonist get to the bottom of this terrorism mystery before the ship gets to the bottom of the ocean?
Availability: Nope. Various contemporary computer ports, all Japanese.
Premise: The Funky Horror Band has rolled (beamed?) into town, and someone needs to run around fetching them Danishes and hooking up their amps. Could that someone be you?
Availability: Nope. This was Sega published so it didn't turn up elsewhere and for several reasons nobody thought to localize it.
Preservation: This was a fun game to research. Funky Horror Band was a stop-motion puppet musical show created by Japanese music giants Victor Musical Industries (they sometimes published games too, but oddly enough not this one) that featured a band comprised of bizarre alien creatures: sort of a combination of Emmet Otter's Jug-Band Christmas and GWAR. Near as I can tell, this is a traditional turn-based JRPG with a generic anime protagonist where the Funky Horror Band inexplicably turn up as NPCs and ask you to complete quests for them, and has a musical theme throughout: instrument cases instead of chests, enemies named after American rock bands, and so on. It's apparently nothing to write home about as a RPG, but as a vehicle to show off the Sega CD's redbook audio chops you could do worse than getting a real band with real music involved. Well, "real" in a very tenuous sense.
I'm just going to post a music video of these guys, because this shit is kinda wild:
Premise: Those dastardly daimyo are at it again, taking over Japan while no-one's watching.
Availability: Nope. It did, however, see a 1995 SFC remake/remaster with a new title (Sengoku no Hasha).
Preservation: It didn't take long for the Sega CD to have its own Sengoku strategy sim. Created in the image of Koei's Nobunaga's Ambition series - "Tenka Fubu" was Oda Nobunaga's own credo, and translates to "rule through military force" - Eiyuutachi no Houkou ("Roar of the Heroes") is as impenetrable as the rest of its ilk. One notable trait of Tenka Fubu is that it was the first Sega CD game developed by Game Arts: one of the few developers who would find great commercial and critical success with the system, though not with this game in particular. We'll see them again in just a little bit.
Premise: The WonderMega is here, and with it is a bunch of crap Sega found in a desktop folder somewhere and threw together onto one disc.
Availability: Nope. It's a pack-in title for a semi-obscure console SKU that wasn't sold separately, so it might be hard to find.
Preservation: The WonderMega was the first hybrid Mega Drive and Mega-CD console unit released in Japan (it was called the X'Eye in the States), and for the pack-in Sega thought it might be an idea to toss a few of those Sega MegaNet Game Toshokan downloadable games together in a bundle. As opposed to, say, actually good Genesis games like those found in the later Mega Games compilations. Included here are Flicky (previously seen in Mega Archive Part VII, entry #102), Paddle Fighter (Mega Archive Part VII, entry #112), and Pyramid Magic (Mega Archive Part X, entry #146) as well as newcomer Quiz Scramble which would soon be sold separately as Quiz Scramble Special (see below). In addition to those, the disc also has four karaoke numbers on it which you access via the Sega CD's music player, once again taking advantage of the platform's redbook audio. Not much of a collection, but then the Mega-CD hadn't yet found a worthy enough killer app to be "pack-in material".
Premise: I honestly have no idea. Rescue the princess?
Availability: Nope. No localizations, no ports, no interest in either from what I can tell.
Preservation: Wolf Team were no strangers to RPGs, though they're still a few years from the one that launched them into the stratosphere (1995's Tales of Phantasia, which I seem to bring up every time we cover a Wolf Team game). "Fhey Area" is I think meant to be something like "Fayaria", as in a generic fantasy kingdom name, but the game case itself has "Fhey Area" written down the spine so who am I to argue. Notable for having voice over and animated cutscenes, like most CD games of this time, but only for the opening cinematic. I don't like to call any game half-assed, but Wolf Team did release this in the six month gap between two other games (Earnest Evans and Aisle Lord) so either they had the interns handle development or the alpha disc fell out of a truck and they decided to stick their names on it. (Thanks to @pepsiman for helping me figure out the weird title!)
Premise: What if Phantasy Star but with boobs? That's more or less what Cosmic Fantasy promises, and Sega CD owners could get in on the ground floor of this franchise with this enhanced remake of the first two games.
Availability: Nope. The original TurboGrafx-CD version of Cosmic Fantasy 2 was localized by Working Designs, but none of the others were (at least officially).
Preservation: The Mega-CD is already shaping up to be a decent console for RPG fans, especially as the CD format could allow developers to tell stories as lengthy and as cinematically as they wanted, thanks to all that extra storage space. It is, after all, one of the major reasons why Square went to Sony's PlayStation with Final Fantasy VII. The raunchy and goofy Cosmic Fantasy games were fairly well liked on their native PC Engine platform, and getting both in the same package like this with much needed improvements to the combat engine probably struck its many fans as a good deal. It's also a cynical means of siphoning away the install base of the only other CD console racket in town, but Sega didn't get to where it was by playing nice. Too bad for all those Cosmic Fantasy fans who chose to jump ship: future sequels remained PC Engine exclusives.
Premise: Death Bringer is the world's shittiest Santa Claus. Maybe don't open any of the presents he left under the tree.
Availability: Nope. Well, you could buy some untranslated, less feature-rich PC versions of the game through Project EGG if you wanted to go the trouble.
Preservation: All right, I love RPGs and all, but this might be too many all at once. Especially as they all seem to be coming from the same developers. Death Bringer is the first of two first-person dungeon crawlers released in a row, designed in the classic Wizardry/Might and Magic style, and is modern enough to include an auto-mapping feature for those of us who get lost easily. Unlike Telenet's other Sega CD games, this was a pre-existing title that had already graced the major Japanese PC platforms of the era, but it's not the same Death Bringer that came to Amiga and Atari ST. The Sega CD would not be a stranger to this typically western style of RPG: as well as Aisle Lord, next on the list, it'll also eventually see ports of Might and Magic III: Isles of Terra, Eye of the Beholder, and Dungeon Master II.
Premise: They're gonna need a clean up on aisle five once your band of rampaging heroes are done tearing up the place.
Availability: Nope. Contemporary review scores don't seem glowing, so I don't know if anyone's in a rush to restore this "lost classic".
Preservation: Oh Lord, they're teaming up now. Wolf Team and Telenet/Riot really putting the work in for the Sega CD's first few months, certainly more than the one joke game and half-hearted compilation Sega themselves put forward for the first six months of their new baby's existence. Aisle Lord's another first-person RPG as I mentioned above, but Wolf Team took a slightly different approach to the UI: your team is visible at all times while exploring and fighting, the latter using a real-time/turn-based hybrid system where you can pause and direct the action as often as you want or just let your characters handle things automatically (depending on, perhaps, the enemy's strength). It's all very like Drakkhen, oddly enough, which isn't the sort of accessible game that typically engenders imitators. It also features the rare combination of both anime and FMV cutscenes, so... get you an Aisle Lord who can do both.
Premise: Relentless trivia! In Japanese! Probably based around the current events and pop culture of early '90s Japan! Good luck!
Availability: Nope. There's a lesser version included in the WonderMega Collection (above).
Preservation: It's odd, I really expected there to be more trivia games around after the success of HQ Trivia, but besides the occasional You Don't Know Jack there's not a whole lot coming out any more, at least in the major console/PC spaces. Japan's always loved this genre and there's plenty of quiz games to be found on any given platform; the Sega CD will see many more in the future. Quiz Scramble Special's story is... not easy to ascertain, and I imagine that would be the case even if I could understand the language. Suffice it to say, Japanese literacy is a requirement for this one.
Premise: Silky Lip must balance schoolwork with her double-life of being a powerful sorceress living in a magical alternate dimension. Man, relatable.
Availability: Nope. There's a 2008 remake of sorts, but... well, read below.
Preservation: Ah jeez. Look, there's nothing too salacious about this magical girl anime-inspired adventure game starring an elementary school student, but there are some visual choices with regards to shot angles - especially during the intro cutscenes - that perhaps should've been reviewed by a committee of social workers and cops from the sex crimes division. While it isn't an RPG, strictly speaking, it does have some aspirations towards hybrid status with what I believe are some rudimentary character building and combat mechanics. I think the goal is to increase your magical girl value to outperform your rivals in some big contest, but I couldn't get too far through it. Sadly, like her big sister Valis, Silky Lip was eventually sold off to unscrupulous pornographers after Telenet Japan folded. I sincerely hope they at least aged her up first. Ugh, moving on.
Premise: Young Alex dreams of being a legendary Dragonmaster like his hero Dyne, and gets his break when he wakes up one day as the protagonist of a beloved JRPG. Usually a good sign.
Availability: The Silver Star's been remastered and remade a few times, first as Silver Star Story Complete for PS1 and Saturn (the former was localized), and then more recently as Lunar Legend for GBA in 2002 and Lunar: Silver Star Harmony for PSP in 2009. Silver Star Harmony is probably the one to buy, unless they decide to remake it again.
Preservation: OK, so it's evident Lunar means a lot to many, though to my chagrin it's one of my biggest JRPG blindspots. Unfortunately, The Silver Star, Silver Star Story Complete, and Silver Star Harmony are all priced in excess of a bajillion dollars most places, so it doesn't look like I'm going to get my shot any time soon. While the rest of the above list of early Mega-CD RPGs were experiments creating narrative-driven games with the new capabilities of the CD format, The Silver Star was probably the first to truly take advantage of what the format could do, with a level of presentational craft and focus on storytelling that is still appreciated to this day. While I'm no Lunar-tic, I do have a fervent appreciation for Games Arts's follow-up of sorts, Grandia, and how that really delivered on an infectiously fun, swashbuckling atmosphere. It's clear the developers believed that RPGs should feel more like big escapist fantasies, and less like accountancy spreadsheets where numbers continually go back and forth. (Also, how wild is it that it took this long to find another Sega CD game that released in North America?)
Continuing a mini-series within IGotW I could pragmatically name "free shit I got from the Epic Game Store," Sundered is one of the only games I'm aware of that defines itself as a "roguevania". That is, an explormer game that procedurally generates the majority of its map after every session (or, more accurately, every death). For the record, I've seen this specific hybrid a few times before, albeit without the distinctive genre moniker: Rogue Legacy, for example, will gate you off areas of its dungeon until you've sorted out bosses elsewhere, and randomly generates its hazard-filled fortress every time you move down a generation. However, Sundered's structure is such that it's only partially randomized: certain rooms will always exist in their designated areas on the map, though they're linked together by these larger "blank" map areas that have a random assortment of rooms and pathways through them, including dead ends. Your destination is usually clear, especially as the map helpfully indicates "ability gates" (if not the specific ability you need to surmount them) for you to return to, though the actual routes to them are ambiguous and frequently perilous.
Right off the bat, there are aspects about Sundered that I like and others I like less. We'll cover the former first, since it's the smaller of the two lists. Sundered's combat engine is complex enough that stats play a significant role, though not quite to the extent of an RPG: you can upgrade your total health, armor, stamina, the number of curatives you can carry at once, the number of "perks" you can equip at once, and others. The way you do this is by returning to the hub area of the game and feeding currency - earned from defeating enemies and destroying jars and chests - into an expansive skill tree, with new nodes increasing in price the more of the tree you unlock. Additionally, most of this skill tree is locked away until you have acquired additional traversal abilities, which isn't so much serving to put limits on how powerful you can grow between game milestones than it is to keep this huge skill tree at least somewhat manageable to navigate. While you can walk back or warp to the sanctuary, where this skill tree can be accessed, you're most likely to revisit it immediately after being killed while exploring. As a bit of serendipitous timing, where you're suddenly given the means to greatly enhance your fighting chances after a defeat, it's a neat masterstroke of the game's sense of pacing. You could, theoretically, be so good at the game that you rarely ever have to visit the sanctuary and upgrade, in which case there's no real urgency to do so, but the moment the game starts getting a little unmanageable and finally overwhelms you, the option to make things easier is promptly presented to you. I also think the game looks gorgeous, with a hand-drawn realistic animated style carrying an Asian flair that, as a package, almost resembles Avatar: The Last Airbender. I had to turn down some of the more ostentatious settings, like particle effects, to maintain the stable framerate an action game like this demands, but it's still picturesque as heck and character animations flow beautifully. Likewise the sound design is decent, with the calm ambient background sounds replaced by sirens when shit's about to hit the fan, and a spoken language I'm not entirely sure I can identify (and I suspect is invented for the game).
The skill tree is a lot, though most of it won't be accessible right away. In fact, this little corner here is it for me right now.
Then there's all the elements I'm either still gradually warming to, or don't ever see myself appreciating even with more time spent with the game. Naturally, most of this is tied into the game's more roguelite-focused mechanics. Most prominent is the way the game handles enemy encounters: these maps are generally devoid of enemies until you hear that aforementioned siren in the background, at which point it's time to stop whatever exploration or platforming you were doing and stand around clobbering hordes of a very scarce number of enemy types for several minutes. Enemies just flood whichever areas you happen to be standing in when the time arrives, and will persist in chasing you across the zone until you eventually decide to deal with them, which you'll want to do because it's hard to focus on the game's moderately challenging platforming - a whole lot of wall-jumping and trap-evading in particular - when you're getting swamped with very persistent mobs who can all traverse the local environment far easier than you can. Though the combat itself isn't so bad (I appreciate any combat system that has dodge rolls with ample i-frames) it's not all that exciting either, and I find I appreciate it more when the game lets me take in its levels without the interruptions, as tranquil as they are. It reminds me of how Castlevania II for the NES would regularly interrupt whatever you were doing for a dialogue box about curses before making the game a much tougher battle for survival until the morning mercifully arrives: that dialogue box always felt pushy and rude in a weird way, and an unwelcome harbinger of harder times ahead. Really, it's the jarring way that the game goes from a leisurely stroll to this staggering, frantic fracas at the drop of a hat, rather than maintaining a steady mix of combat and platforming throughout like other explormers. I'm also left cold when any procgen is used for level design like this, where environments just come off as samey and nondescript because there aren't any specific level design decisions being made barring those rare templates where they might hide a chest behind a fake ceiling or a floor tile you can jump down. I think back to my time with Bloodstained, and how rooms might have certain little areas that I can't yet reach that I make mental notes to return to, and how satisfying it is to fully chart a specific part of the castle once I have the means to do so. When most of the map is wiped upon death, it feels a little dispiriting to keep starting over, even if I've little reason to return to those early areas.
The blue areas are the "permanent" parts of the map, while the bigger gray squares (and the smaller black boxes within) are entirely refreshed upon death.
I can't blame Sundered and its devs (Thunder Lotus Games, also behind the equally pretty but only so-so gameplay-wise Jotun) for doing what it wants to do, which is introduce procgen to explormers in a slightly less intrusive way than it's been done in the past. That there are these "fixture" rooms on the map to head towards, many of which have icons to indicate that a new traversal ability can be acquired or that I've since found the key to get past the obstacle there, means I can still appreciate some sense of progress, as does filling out more of the skill tree when I inevitably lose track of how my health is doing in the midst of a chaotic melee and get booted back to the sanctuary. One smart notion for exploration's sake is how you have a small amount of shield that regenerates after a few seconds; it's usually not enough to rely on to brute force your way past dangerous trap rooms or take a lot of punishment when you're completely swamped with enemies, but it's enough that you don't feel like the game is whittling down your health bar constantly. If you're cautious enough, and use the dodge roll judiciously, you'll probably emerge from most enemy encounters without a scratch, and the shield is one of many aspects of your character development that you can improve through the skill tree. I haven't died nearly as much as I make it sound like I do, and the first time it happened was only because I accidentally triggered that most debilitating of status effects: Windows's regrettable "Sticky Keys" tool that booted me out of the game to deal with it, which I've since finally disabled for good. Other issues, like the difficulty of getting any controller to play nice with the game, is mostly on me and my lack of resourcefulness when it comes to solving technical issues. I don't think I'll throw in the towel on Sundered just yet as I feel I've almost matched the beat of its peculiar rhythm, but I can't say I'm fully sold on its approach to hybridizing these two popular Indie genres either.
All right, I've seen this phenomenon often enough that it's time to come up with a terrible name for it. "Truncapable." There you go. An adjective that describes any Indie game inspired by big-budget RPGs that must truncate many aspects out of necessity due to less resources and a smaller development team, while still capably delivering on the layers of complexity and enjoyment those originals offered via some resourceful game design. In other words, an Indie-fied spin on a classic that makes serious cuts, and yet feels fresh and playable due to some smart choices.
We've seen this previously in this feature with Aarklash Legacy (IGotW #92), Victor Vran (IGotW #137), and most recently Death's Gambit (IGotW #170): in each case, there's an accompanying major budget (if somewhat old) game or series by which they're influenced. Aarklash is riffing on the Infinity Engine series, in particular the way they balance tactical real-time action with turn-based planning, and focuses less on elaborate D&D character builds and systems that would be a nightmare for a smaller studio to implement or balance and more on last-second dodging of enemy projectiles and maneuvering to make the best use of circle and cone AoEs; Victor Vran is a loot RPG that offered a slimmed down version of Diablo with fewer possible builds, instead focusing on strong weapon diversity, more defensive options by way of evasive dodging and jumping, and challenging bonus objectives to pursue; and Death's Gambit is a stripped down Dark Souls that retains the gothic vibe and corpse runs while reducing the size of its world, switching to 2D to incorporate some explormer elements, and making the classes feel more specialized including one that operates on Bloodborne's "press the retaliation to recover lost health" mechanics.
Yeah... it's not hard to figure out where Fell Seal is coming from.
Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark is the newest Indie game I've played to use this sort of approach, as it's evident after the initial battle that the developers have more than a fondness for venerable PS1 SRPG cornerstone Final Fantasy Tactics. Characters progress by earning "ability points" for their current class, spent between battles, and mastering these classes eventually unlocks new classes for them to explore. Units add to their versatility by combining their primary class with a sub-class - incorporating the ability tree of a previous, currently inactive class to bolster the current - as well as passive skills and counter abilities, some of which are more effective with the right class/build. The Job system is frequently lauded as one of the Final Fantasy franchise's greatest innovations, and it's heartening to see an Indie try their hand at it, albeit in a somewhat truncated (or truncapable?) fashion.
I love this breakdown of earned ability points, and as I elaborate below the "vicarious learning" and benched unit totals are much appreciated features.
Playing the game, it feels like a slightly less mechanically-rich Final Fantasy Tactics. (Or, to put it another way, like a Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.) Flank and rear attacks do more damage, but a superior height difference doesn't. You can push enemies off cliffs for additional fall damage or into water to drown them, but you can't, say, hit a partially submerged unit with electricity magic for more damage than usual due to the added conduction. It's a little bit of a shame but a totally acceptable compromise given just how complex FFT was, and remains even to this day. Instead, Fell Seal finds its innovations via some clever convenience and accessibility routes. A few examples: instead of a stockpile of items that you're ever cautious about burning through, items in Fell Seal operate like Estus Flasks in that they all refresh after a battle but their usage is still strictly limited. This gives you ample reason to toss out anything you might have if it'll help without worrying that you'll need it for a future boss fight, but conversely prevents you from spamming potions and instead encourages you to rely on healers (or someone with a healer sub-class, at least). Items also cannot be bought, only upgraded with the game's crafting system - this means you can eventually earn stronger versions of consumables and/or use them with more frequency, but only if you're diligent about obtaining spoils. Another player-friendly concession is in how Ability Points are earned: characters not only gain AP if they're not part of the battle, albeit in smaller amounts, but earn AP in their allies' classes in addition to their own via "vicarious learning". This not only allows you to progress towards unlocking classes without temporarily forcing, say, a magic-focused class to switch to a combat role (which they'll be weaker at due to their stat distribution), but also encourages you to develop a team of diverse talents so all those vicarious learning AP bonuses get spread around less-used classes like rangers and druids. There's also an injury system that replaces permadeath (unless playing on a higher difficulty setting) in that a fallen unit will receive a stat penalty in future battles unless they sit one out to recover. This again has the double application of a suitably harsh punishment that won't undo hours of character development put into some expendable merc, as well as a reason to keep a larger team of back-ups around to step in for those who might need a break.
Fell Seal is doing its best Final Fantasy Tactics impression for both the combat and story, and bless it for trying even if it occasionally feels like an amateur production re-enactment of the War of the Lions, but for all the ways it simplifies things for the sake of a more streamlined and Indie-approachable product, it smartly compensates for those shortcomings with its intelligent ideas. Its character models, though they might resemble the avatars of some long-forgotten social media MMO, allow for a great deal of visual customization to help personalize your team (though you cannot change the appearances of the main characters, which is probably for the best). The pixel graphics are so detailed that I might recommend having a hefty resolution before playing, as anything less than 1050 pixels on the vertical axis makes the action feel way too zoomed in unless you choose to scale down the graphics and lose some of the image quality. I can't say I've ever faced that particular problem in a pixel-based game before, but it's probably a sign of the times more than anything else.
In addition to a host of visual customization options on the right, the player can also add custom portraits to the game if they have a certain someone in mind. I just hope a ninja class opens up eventually.
I'm only five hours in, but I'm going to stick with Fell Seal for a while longer. I'm invested in the story, such as it is, and in seeing what the more elaborate classes are like once I've addressed their demanding prerequisites. While its not quite as well-written, exciting, or as complex as Final Fantasy Tactics it's the best approximation I've seen of the Squaresoft nonpareil outside of a Tactics Ogre or Nippon Ichi Software title, which is all the more impressive given the limited means these developers must have had. I don't think "truncapable" will catch on as a term, but the Indie RPGs it describes definitely have a future if they're all as carefully considered as this.
It wasn't that far past the previous blog when I remembered why I stopped playing loot RPGs. The constant influx of treasure and character progression micromanagement is a fetching enough Skinner box but the wafer-thin story and combat encounters can make these games drag on for infinity, and it doesn't help that there are systems in place to ensure it can keep going for another loop or twenty. I don't mean to decry Iron Lore's Titan Questspecifically for this, though it does tip its hand during its unexpected final act - one that begins immediately after completing the Titan quest that the title refers to - in how it makes the finishing line stretch on and on into the far distance. They then further exacerbate these final act doldrums by designing all the checkpoint fountains and teleporters to be much further apart than they are in the three previous acts, adding nothing to the long treks back to your gravestone to reclaim the XP you'd lost upon death given that enemies don't respawn unless you quit the game.
I'm getting ahead of myself, though, jumping to the end-game when then there was plenty more between then and when I posted the Titan Quest Intro blog. As I predicted, the Greece chapter is but one of several, the others taking place in Egypt - and, like in Diablo II, a region that featured a lot of sand and at least one occasion in which you had multiple tombs to explore but only one had the critical path forward - and "the Orient", which encompassed Babylon (presently Iraq) before moving across Nepal, Mongolia, and China. The aforementioned final act takes you back to Greece before embarking on a thorough exploration of the land of Hades, passing by Styx, Erebus, Elysium, and taking the fight directly to the wayward Lord of the Dead. I'll say that this final chapter was at least visually arresting, as any depiction of the underworld usually is, but it was already long past the point where I wanted to be done with the game.
The Greek underworld was a little more varied than the endless deserts of Egypt at least.
What also didn't improve was the game's general stability and quality level. Glitches abound, from the major (crashes, stuck on geometry, treasure falling through floor) to the minor (visual glitches like ragdolls collapsing into boneless beanbags, or special effects turning into a bunch of unrendered squares before fixing themselves), but they were all ubiquitous and unrelenting. It strikes me as very possible that little was done to patch up the console ports of this remaster, presumably as there was an anniversary-based deadline to keep and THQ Nordic wanted to bring back some of that sloppy THQ magic from beyond its well-deserved grave. Other annoyances include inventories that don't sort on their own - when you get the "inventory's full" alert, you can usually go in there and hit "sort" a bunch of times to miraculously find some space - and the marvelous way the game half-assedly integrates the Ragnarok DLC content. I'll elaborate: Ragnarok added a few new items to its roster, particularly thrown weapons like boomerangs and chakram as options for a ranged warrior who doesn't care for the languid attack speeds of bows. However, it doesn't remove it from the core game if you don't have this DLC, so these weapons sit in stores where they remain unpurchaseable, taking space away from weapons you could potentially use, and these weapons will also regularly drop from chests (again, removing something usable from the treasure pool) where they cannot be picked up. There aren't any text pop-ups, but the models can be plainly seen (along with a colored "shine" that indicates the rarity) if you zoom in around the chests. It's an obnoxious way to reduce the overall quality of the core game experience for everyone except those willing to fork out extra for the game's additional campaign.
I've slammed Titan Quest enough for its mistakes, but there are moments of design brilliance that help rise it up among its loot RPGs peers and make it a little more bearable to play. The first and most significant of these are the extra inventory bags you earn after major milestones in the story. Going from one inventory page to four means far less travelling back to the nearest vendor hub, and that goes double if you eventually decide - as I did - to leave all the white-tinted "common" treasure behind. I had much longer, uninterrupted periods murdering my way through a rogue's gallery of mythical beasts with this convenience. I feel like the game could've badly used a dodge roll of some kind - perhaps it's available in other skill trees - but you can just about evade most enemy projectiles before answering with your own in the brief window between their shots, which made some of the ranged elites and bosses a bit more exciting to tussle with. I also liked the game's relic and artifact system, and not for the reasons you might expect: relics can be constructed by combining specific enemy drops, and these relics can be combined with equipment to improve it or combined with other relics to create artifacts, should you have the right recipe. The scant likelihood involved with finding the right relics and recipes meant that actually making an artifact felt like a big deal, even if its bonuses were fairly nondescript. Towards the end of the game you starting finding recipes for Greater Artifacts, which required combining several of the lesser ones you may have already built. I sadly didn't have the means to make any of those, but it's the sort of hook that someone might want to chase if they intend to play through several cycles (and there's a means of sending equipment to your other characters via a transfer feature from the storage NPC, good both for sending half-finished artifacts as well as powerful equipment that's non-applicable to your current build). These are perhaps standard features for most modern loot RPGs, but I was still glad to see them in the more antiquated TItan Quest regardless.
Hmm... I'm good on the "same again but harder," thanks. Maybe if the game was less than 50 hours long.
Other features like a day/night cycle seemed at first like a novel way to highlight the passage of time, especially when you enter a dungeon during the day but emerge at dusk, but it only served to make certain areas - especially swamps and thick forests - almost visually impenetrable in the dead of night. Perhaps with a means to illuminate yourself and your surroundings in a simple, unobtrusive way (no reserving inventory space for torches, for instance), or at least the option to rest until morning, this feature would've made more sense. The side-quests were a handy way to make some cash and XP on the side, but I generally didn't have to go too far out of my way for most of them: they usually boiled down to fetch quests and mid-boss hunts. Still, the few that actually gave me stats or skill points to use were worth seeking out and completing.
I don't think Titan Quest is a bad game by any stretch (though I might advise folks stay away from the console ports and stick to the PC version) but it does make it clear to me if it wasn't before that I've lost my verve for this particular sub-genre of action-RPG. I suspect playing Ys might've spoiled me somewhat, since no loot RPG I've played has matched its sense of speed and tactical maneuvering (though the closest in recent memory was the excellent Victor Vran: a game that popped out of nowhere to surprise me).
That's also going to do it for May Millennials this year as well. Spending half this month on Gothic II was not my intent setting out, though it was easily still my favorite of the three games covered in this year's May feature. I think if we do all this again, I might leave off the slightly bulkier CRPGs like Titan Quest and Gothic and look for some more truncated adventures for a bit more variety with these blogs. I kinda miss the days when I ended up playing over 20 games in a single month, albeit rarely to completion: there's still a lot out there I want to see, from this century and previous, and I can't be letting slogfests siphon away what game-playing time I have left.
It's been a hot minute since I last checked in with Danish developers Die Gute Fabrik ("The Quality Factory", far as I can tell), having played their 2011 platformer Where Is My Heart? at some point in 2014 and forgetting to review or blog about it, a rare lapse on my part. I can tell you that Where Is My Heart? was largely about community and spirituality, and the more point-and-click focused Mutazione from last year has shades of that also but with an added ethnobotany angle to it.
In Mutazione, the player is Kai, a young woman visiting her grandfather's home on the titular island for the first time. The grandfather, Nonno, doesn't have much time left and Kai has grown up hearing stories of Mutazione's close-knit community from her mother Gaia, though she's still less than happy about being wrenched away from her previous summer plans - she's a would-be swimming athlete in training - to watch an elderly relative she doesn't know slowly pass away. Turns out Nonno is a bit craftier than that: his years spent as the island's shaman, in addition to his background as a biologist, has given him a keen knowledge of the plants of the island and which ones might serve to prolong his life. Kai helps him prepare what he needs while spending time with the island's other inhabitants, the majority of which are mutants born of an apocalyptic meteor collision some fifty-plus years before the game begins and is alluded to only sparingly for the first few hours of the story in a nice bit of conversational verisimilitude (after all, it's ancient history to most of these people, so why bring it up?).
It's integral for a setting like this to feel "lived-in" given how much time you spend in the same handful of locations, and Mutazione does a fine job with that by way of these cross-sectional interior environments.
While Mutazione does have its mysteries to solve and goals to follow, it's also a markedly unhurried game. The island of Mutazione is the type of isolated, beautiful, and cosy place where time seems to stand still; Kai's interactions with the community, which can be as involved as the player wishes to get (Kai herself has a number of dialogue responses for the player to choose between, generally binary choices split between being introverted and reticent or extroverted and gregarious), make up the bulk of the game even when most of them aren't required to push the plot forward. Time moves after story-significant encounters (not unlike the original Gabriel Knight) and the player is given a clock icon instead of the usual dialogue or interact icon to indicate when an interaction will shift time ahead a segment, from morning to noon to afternoon to evening to night. However, the player is free to explore and see how concurrent story arcs are progressing with the other villagers prior to pushing ahead. The scattered villagers will move around to pre-determined locales across the island, talking to their friends, waiting for Kai to stop by, or trying to relax. There's much you can miss if you aren't thorough, but at the same time not a lot of it feels essential unless you're finding yourself caught up in the lives of Mutazione's population.
There is a kernel of gameplay in Mutazione, separate from walking around and talking to people, and this comes in the form of Kai and Nonno's botanical diversions (sounds like a shampoo when I phrase it like that). Early, Nonno teaches you how to use his shaman drum to create music to help certain plants grow. By collecting seeds of plants with a... similar taste in music, and planting them strategically around Nonno's small garden, Kai can quickly grow them with the drum and harvest their seeds (to plant more in the future) and fruit (needed for potions). This mini-game is simple enough and only has a few appearances, but has enough variety to make for an effective means of breaking up the more story- and dialogue-heavy adventuring. It's not too dissimilar to the mixology of "cyberpunk bartending action" visual novel VA-11 Hall-A in its execution. That's not to say the dialogue parts aren't compelling in their own right, though: each character is going through something of a minor drama in their lives, whether it's the enormous teen golem Tung's abandonment issues and his projects of building a boat and founding a band with his feline pal Miu, Ailin and Graubert's rocky relationship and how Ailin's pregnancy is exacerbating those cracks, the lonely child Bopek and his lack of friends his own age, your mother's unadventurous childhood friend Claire and her unrequited affection for local bar-owner Spike, and many more threads that slowly make themselves known and play out with Kai's observance and occasional input. It can be a bit soap opera-y at times, though not in the exaggerated sense of everyone having amnesia and an evil twin; more in how peoples' lives are often more fascinating in those smaller relatable moments than in any enormous, fantastical life-or-death contexts.
This game is very geared towards what the kids call "vibing", and it's never more apparent than in this horticultural mini-game where you play your jellosa shrubs airport jazz muzak to help them bloom.
I will say that, true to its intent and aesthetic, Mutazione is a leisurely-paced game with little in the way of "incident" for better and worse, depending on how eventful you want your interactive entertainment to be. It might ramp up towards the end - I'm only about three or four hours through it, which is about halfway according to HowLongtoBeat - but I suspect it'll maintain this chill and relaxed attitude throughout. I've been playing Kai as an honest and open person, and I'm wondering if that hasn't affected the way Mutazione's citizens communicate with her, and if they're more open with their hopes and dreams in turn. I don't think I'll play the game over as a quiet moody teen who doesn't get along with anyone (had my fill of that with my own youth) to see what's different, but despite wanting to see how the story proceeds I have found myself visiting the many screens of Mutazione to make sure I check in on everyone before I shift ahead to the evening or the following morning, even if it's never strictly necessary. It's wild that, for a game set on an island built on the ruins of a prior civilization with a population of mutated rock and bug people, that's all about using magic to grow herbaceous curatives, it manages to feel this down-to-earth and human. If you like your talky adventure games to be verbose and full of empathy and themes, it's worth a look.
Yep, Titan Quest. I had a few other very in-depth RPGs earmarked for the final May Millennials slot of 2020 - and believe me when I say I'll have zero problems finding another four '00s CRPGs for next year if I go this route again - but I opted instead for a well-regarded if a little antiquated (in several senses of the term) loot RPG just so I could mindlessly run around killing things and grab colored treasure while listening to podcasts. After the intense focus required for Gothic II (the nail-biting duels) and Arcanum (trying and failing to figure out what the heck its deal was) I needed something a bit lighter to see out the month. Hell, to see out this particular pandemic situation we've all been imprisoned by. Two months of this shit has me plenty frazzled already without me adding to my anxious woes by grappling with an ancient RPG that was originally released alongside a manual the size of a phonebook.
It also doesn't hurt that Titan Quest received a big graphical remaster semi-lately, and an additional expansion campaign to go with it. Like the God of War and the Assassin's Creed franchises, Titan Quest's developers saw it was best to follow up a Spartan carving their way through Ancient Greek mythology with a visit to the primordial Scandinavian hinterlands with all its Aesir, Dark Elves, and Jotun skulking around the nine realms. Sadly, I won't be covering Titan Quest: Ragnarok today - we don't do "timely" here on May Millennials - but I can at least talk about my early experiences with the core game, or specifically the enhanced modern iteration of same.
After these chests suffered a touch of loot emesis, I now have the enticing prospect of teleporting back to town twice over to hock all this vendor trash. There comes a point in any loot RPG, and I'm already close to it, where all the white-colored items can feel free to rot in the sun.
Any worries I may have had regarding betraying the integrity of this feature by covering a 2016 release based on a 2006 game were immediately assuaged by how Titan Quest absolutely still plays like a 14-year-old Diablo clone. Not necessarily for the worse, mind you, as it has a purity to its design that hearkens more to Diablo II than Diablo III, for which much more emphasis was put on the more fanservice-y meta aspects of the genre like NG+ loops and ever-increasing loot rarity. The console version of Titan Quest doesn't quite acquit itself as much as I would like, but my time with the game eventually improved after finding a way to bind skills to the face buttons instead of the D-pad (the former is so much more preferable, and yet seems to be an afterthought seeing that the UI to do so was practically buried; possibly a later patch added it in?) and while I sit here impatiently tapping my fingers maybe I'll begrudgingly admit the load times between town portals aren't that much longer than they perhaps ought to be for a decade-plus old game, but even if I'm enjoying the game more now after having adjusted to its quirks there's definitely parts of this port that feel just a little bit sloppy. See the screenshot below as an example.
As for Titan Quest itself, I've been pleasantly surprised by a few of the game's unique choices when it comes to character development in particular. For one, you don't initially pick a class, just the name and gender. When you level up for the first time, possibly after trying a few of the different weapons, you then decide on a "Mastery": a skill tree that might focus on a few weapon types or a few spell trees, and one or more of the three primary stats of strength, dexterity, and intelligence. I wanted a ranged character so I opted for the Hunting Mastery, which has a set of skills for both the bow and the spear. The game has instantaneous loadout switching, so I'm inclined to have a melee spear and shield set just in case enemies get too close, but am otherwise focusing on the bow and its related skills for the time being. New, stronger skills within a Mastery can be accessed by improving the Mastery's core skill, which is a passive boost of the most vital stats for that particular build and also handily serves as an example for your direct stat distribution (done separately). What's more, you get an additional Mastery at a later level, presenting a whole heap of possible combinations to explore. I'm considering bolstering my archery damage with another martial-focused discipline, but there's something to be said for branching out into one of the magical schools to append elemental damage to my arrows. Something to consider as I edge ever closer to unlocking that boon.
The Mastery system is a neat feature that lends itself to some versatile, bespoke builds. Hold on, I just need to give my DS4 controller a once over to see where it's hiding a "left mouse button".
Everything else just feels like perfectly perfunctory loot RPG gameplay. Plenty of stuff to find and equip and craft, large roaming packs of monsters to crowd-control, both health and mana regenerate on their own to get you back in the fray (albeit pretty slowly unless you've been focusing on equipment with regen boosts or have a stack of potions handy), and the game likes to pepper in the occasional "hero" monster among the rabble to keep you on your toes or toss out a cave or similar side-area full of treasure to distract you from taking the critical path to the next hub portal/vendor/storage zone and the next primary quest of the game's story progression. It feels like I'm going to eventually leave Greece, seeing as the entire country only makes up "Act 1" of the in-game world map and chapter selection, so I'm curious to see where else the game might go. I mean, where else has Titans to slay? Tennessee?
I reviewed the first Anodyne some... six years ago? Damn. Well, some six years ago I encountered a game that was outwardly riffing on The Legend of Zelda, as many Indie games have before and since, but soaked in a surreal and deeply personal veneer that was at various points relatable and utterly foreign, like reading through a stranger's poetry of falling in and out of love with people you've never met. Anodyne 2: Return to Dust's writing is of a similarly flowery sort, and concerns a young woman - Nova - who is birthed by an apparently benevolent creator deity named The Centre in order to purify the world of the toxic and mutating "Dust": a microscopic force of chaos and entropy that infects hosts from within and turns them into monsters before eventually destroying them completely. Nova is gifted with the ability to shrink to minuscule size, allowing her to go "nano a nano" against the Dust virus directly with her trusty vacuum pack.
What's immediately striking about Anodyne 2 is its use of 3D graphics, deliberately low-poly, for its "overworld" sections full of bizarre NPCs to talk to and uneven terrain to traverse with some mildly in-depth platforming, but when it's time to shrink down and access a dungeon the game reverts to the standard 16-bit top-down look it sported in the original Anodyne. The dungeons operate the same as they did previously, with a handful of environmental puzzles and enemy encounters to resolve with Nova's vacuum before fighting a boss and removing the source of the host's Dust infection. The dungeons in this case are the interiority of the corrupted NPCs Nova meets, each of whom need to be internally cleansed of the Dust before they can return to normal. For a while, the game operates on a standard system where you obtain key item "cards" and earn dust from dead enemies and occasional dust devils, both of which can be deposited to power up a device that eventually permits access to new parts of the world with more NPCs, thus perpetuating the gameplay cycle. However, and I'm loathe to discuss what happens in the mid-game in any detail, this familiar cycle is suddenly upended and the ultimate goal of the game becomes that much more ambiguously defined.
This dungeon would probably be the best introduction if you just wanted a taste (as it were) of the game's whole vibe. The actual first dungeon is hatching from your own egg, however.
This might feel like a stretch, but Anodyne 2 feels in tune with something like Matrix Software's Alundra for the PlayStation. Like Alundra, Anodyne 2's dungeons aren't so much physical but metaphysical, existing within and based upon the tortured psyches of the NPCs they pertain to. Like Alundra, Anodyne 2 isn't above constantly pulling the rug out from under the player's feet when they've settled into a comfortable rhythm, insisting that further progress won't be as straightforward as it once was and that this journey is likely to be marked with unexpected tragedy and suffering at any turn. Like Alundra, it looks like it'd feel right at home on a PlayStation 1 console (though in Alundra's case it wisely side-stepped any quickly-dated polygonal graphics, though the same unfortunately cannot be said for its inferior sequel). Alundra was a formative title for me, as the first instance I can recall of a Zelda-like game that did enough different to not feel like a flagrant clone, and so even if the similarities were unintentional I appreciate Anodyne 2 taking a comparable step towards something unknown and untested.
I also think that Anodyne 2's script, though very serious when it feels the need, is also pretty funny at intervals too. Calling the NPCs idiosyncratic feels like the mother of all understatements, and they're just as likely to have some truly powerful names to go with their abstruse polygonal appearances and eccentric personalities. Whether you're shooting the breeze with musician Faye McCool, trying to answer the incessant questions of the ebullient Rayray Boatshoes, or helping the creepy epicurean and tongue demon Gustine Papellum overcome his insatiable appetite, these very distinct individuals and Nova's own newborn naivety and insecurity result in some entertainingly strange conversations marked with profound koans and wry meta humor.
I have a few reservations with the game - the overworld can be a little too expansive and empty to be much fun to explore, even with Nova's zippier "rideform" mode, and the camera controls are about as adroit as they were in the PS1 3D platformers the game's hearkening back to - but I love its heart, and I love the Zelda-esque gameplay core with its peculiarly-themed dungeons, each of which is dominated by a similarly themed puzzle type (a dungeon for a scientist's robotic "clone", for example, involves a lot of puzzles focused on a shadowy doppelganger you can trick into hitting switches and killing itself). With the mid-game revelations in full swing, I'm now looking forward to seeing how the whole thing ends and meeting even more phenomenally-monikered weirdos with Dust-related problems to quash.
I could live for a hundred years and never be as rad as Rayray Boatshoes and her love of emotional video games.
(PSA: I don't know who needs to hear this, but as this was an Epic Game Store giveaway I was forced to cobble together a solution to take advantage of Steam's screenshot feature and Steam Controller support. Turns out this is very easy to do if you just add the Epic Game Store Launcher itself to Steam as a non-Steam game. EGS still needs a lot of UI/UX work to get to where Steam is now, but this is a handy shortcut for the time being.)
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