Last week Nintendo finally rolled out the Nintendo Switch Online feature. I immediately bought a year subscription and downloaded the NES games. I've been waiting since Nintendo Swtch was released to be able to play some classic games on this handheld/console hybrid, which is the perfect platform for them. After I paid for my subscription I opened up the app and took a few old favorites for a spin. Super Mario Bros. is maybe the ur-classic for me; when I think of "video game" it is the first game that comes to mind and I spent many an hour in my early youth playing it along with Duck Hunt and Gyromite. Gradius is arguably my favorite game on the NES, with one of my all time favorite soundtracks. The same is, of course, true for the Legend of Zelda. Both have songs that transport me back in time over 30 years to weekend afternoons in an overstuffed chair with that uncomfortable little gray controller in my hands, transported to totally different worlds while my mom urged me to play outside (nice try, mom!) Of course I've had an NES classic for a while so I could play all three of these games whenever I wanted with a near perfect replica of that old controller on my big screen TV, but what I couldn't do was take them with me to work. Now I can and the low-res NES graphics look fantastic on the Switch's screen. I spent 15 minutes on my lunch break getting nowhere in Ghosts 'N Goblins and loving every frustrating second.

If we're honest the experience of having these games on Switch is even better than I thought it would be.

And it's not enough.

While the games I've mentioned so far are stone cold classics and the selection includes a few more (Super Mario Bros. 3 is amazing; Excitebike is still good fun; River City Ransom is a no-longer hidden gem because everyone knows how great it is) there's also some absolute trash in there. Find me a person who wants to play NES Baseball or Ice Hockey or the gimped version of Donkey Kong that's missing one of its four boards and I'll find you someone operating on pure nostalgia. The Yoshi game is bad. Pro Wrestling is bad. There are a lot of bad games out of a vast library full of really great games, and while some were selected to show off the online two player capability, that doesn't make them less bad as games.

In addition, 20 NES games is a tiny amount. The NES Classic came with 30, and they were better. Would you like to swap out Hockey and Baseball for Metroid and Castlevania? Who wouldn't?

We're getting 3 new games a month, and that's cool, but we're also a year and a half into the Switch's lifespan. This offering is what you give people at launch to mess around with, not after the system is already a mature platform and nobody's scrambling to get a new platform off the ground.

In addition, I want more than NES. I'm sure SNES will be added after a time, and maybe even N64 too (Gamecube seems doubtful) but it will be 2 years from now and a drip feed of games again. Nintendo got things so right with the Wii Virtual Console and has just backslid heavily since then, to the point where there's no way the selection of classic games will even catch up to the Wii U's sad offerings.

The Switch is the ideal platform for playing these classics. It's insane that this is the way they've chosen to present them. I'm not saying Virtual Console was the way to do it, but this isn't either. Especially 18 months after launch. And we're never going to get TurboGrafx 16 games or other platforms. It's like walking into a brand new luxury restaurant with impeccable fixtures and perfect service only to find out that all they serve is warmed over gruel.

As someone who loves classic gaming, dislikes piracy, and has plenty of money to spend on classic games in a convenient format on a console I already own this is just the worst way they could be presented. Will I enjoy playing Double Dragon while I'm waiting for the train in the coming months? I will. But I'll also spend that time lamenting what could have been, if Nintendo cared a little more about doing right by their fans and their legacy.

Nintendo Switch has been a bit of an odd console for me in its first 6 months of release. Because of its hybrid nature it's less powerful than its larger, older, competition, meaning that it never had the new console graphics 'wow' factor that most new systems have during their honeymoon period. On the other hand it launched with Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, which is one of my favorite games of all time, so it also didn't suffer from "crappy launch library" syndrome, like most consoles do, at least not until I finished that beast of a game, along with a few other impressive Wii U holdover games like Fast RMX.

Once I finished those games, though, the system settled into the familiar Nintendo pattern of releasing one interesting Nintendo game every month or so, with a bunch of other "stuff" to fill in the calendar, most of which is on the lower quality side of the spectrum when compared to the indie offerings on something like the Playstation 4. There are definitely some decent independent games on the Switch platform, but they don't tend to be of the polish, scope, or depth of something like Abzu or Nex Machina, or Enter the Gungeon (unless they're ports of older games like Binding of Isaac, which I already had my fill of awhile ago.)

That leaves those aforementioned Nintendo games, and while everything released for the Switch has been of reasonably high quality, those games have been, in my opinion, odd fits with the 'gimmick' of the Switch. That's because most of them have been multi-player, and even online, focused.

The Switch's 'thing' is being a console-handheld hybrid. You can play it on a TV and it will look reasonably good, or you can take it with you as a handheld where it is reasonably portable. It's not ideal for either (a little underpowered in TV mode and a little bit too bulky for a handheld) but it's adequate. The thing is...multiplayer is not what I want from a handled, especially a handheld that doesn't fit into a pocket. I get that kids have been playing system link multiplayer since Gameboy was released, and Pokemon trading is twenty years old now, and I also get that handhelds have had internet multiplayer since the DS and that huge hits like Monster Hunter and Mario Kart have been staples of those consoles. But I'm not a kid with a bunch of friends to play games with on the playground, and even if I was I don't know that I would bring this $300 kind of fragile/bulky system with me (or that my parents would have let me.) It also has not been my experience that internet connections are great in handheld scenarios. I'm sure it's fine in a hotel room or whatever, but my handheld gaming (when it occurs) is done on public transportation or during my lunch break at work. There's no consistent Internet on the subway and Internet at work is supposed to be used for job-related functions, so what I want is a game I can play in short bursts in a distracting environment and still enjoy.

Zelda didn't do that for me because my enjoyment of that game was getting lost in that world. Squinting at the screen under harsh lighting in the subway was not a good way to experience that. Mario Kart 8 is decent on the go, but has very little single player content. I can race a little bit and maybe unlock a car part but there's no campaign or progression. Arms and Splatoon 2 are online focused games (or at least couch competitive for Arms) and I get nothing out of playing them alone.

That meant that when it came to the mobile gaming aspect of the Switch I was either playing a kind of simple indie game or I was just messing around in Mario Kart sort of aimlessly. Neither were ideal. While I started packing the Switch with me every day to work after I first got it, 6 months in it was living under my TV, with the mobile feature largely theoretical. It felt like yet another gimmick that Nintendo built into its console and didn't know how to take advantage of, like motion control (outside of a few specific games) or the Wii U gamepad, which was a dumb idea poorly executed.

Then along came Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. Not only is this a big single player experience that I'm really digging, but it's perfectly designed for mobile play. The game is broken up into relatively short battles, perfect to crank through while on the bus or in between eating a sandwich and getting back into work. The turn-based nature means that it is not super demanding in terms of timing or dexterity, which can be an issue when sitting in a lurching vehicle or just using the smaller, more cramped, controls of a handheld system.

Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle also may be a Ubisoft game, but it has Nintendo fingerprints all over it. It's not just the kid-friendly cartoon aesthetic, the Grant Kirkhope music (Literally sounds like it came right out of Banjo Kazooie only at a higher fidelity, which is far from a criticism) or the pared down design focused on exploration and combat, without the massive sprawling skill trees (there is one but it's small and contained) or busywork open worlds of most Ubisoft experiences. It's also the level of polish (though I've heard there are bugs I haven't experienced any, but independent of that the world and designs are meticulous) and the spirit of fun and adventure that pervades the game. Ubisoft, as a company, has a tendency towards the Grimdark and the hyperviolent, and while I don't have an issue with brutal violence in video games I feel like the scales have tipped too far in that direction. Kingdom Battle shows that the spirit of fun and whimsy lives on in the house that Rayman built, and that the Tom Clancy dark men doing dark deeds aesthetic is only one of the tools in their box. Also there are no towers to climb or audio logs to collect. Yay.

Mario+Rabbids: Kingdom Battle is exactly what I want out of my Switch. Bright, colorful, fun, accessible, and well designed for mobile play. Who knew that it would take an Italian studio working for a French gaming giant to make the Nintendo game I've been waiting for? I hope that the Switch continues to get games like this, including a sequel, and that more of this stuff is ported over from the Wii U and other places. Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker would be a perfect fit for on the go fun, as would Super Mario 3D World and Yoshi's Woolly World. Heck I'd love to see versions of the Mario Galaxy games and even something like Zack and Wiki given a fresh coat of paint and ported over.

The Switch is a great video game system waiting for a library that plays to its strengths. Kingdom Battle is a strong entry in that library, and hopefully a sign of things to come.

Magician Lord and Magic Sword were, for a long time, linked in my mind as similar games I remember liking from my youth. They are both Japanese games from 1990, one on the Neo Geo the other on Capcom’s CPS-1. They are both medieval fantasy themed action platformers with a character who fired projectiles and a ton of creatively designed enemies who swarmed at you. They both feature power-up systems that alter your play-style (Magician Lord features transformations into alternative characters while Magic Sword features companions you can free from behind locked doors.) They both feature interstitial stories between the levels, with the bad guy in Magician Lord taunting you while in Magic Sword your character comments on the level he just finished or gives you a tip or talks about a level to come.

In my memory I liked them both about equally, though I preferred Magic Sword by a small margin. But my memory sometimes plays tricks on me. Sometimes my memory gets it wrong.

Last night I booted up Magician Lord on my Switch, threw a few virtual quarters into the emulator and got ready for some fun mindless jump and shoot action. I quickly discovered something unexpected. No, it wasn’t that I could save 50% or more on my car insurance, it was that I absolutely hate Magician Lord.

I hate Magician Lord!

Now this came as quite a surprise to me. I know for many people games that are over 25 years old are almost impossible to go back to, but I’m not that way. While I love new games, I can go back to retro stuff and enjoy that too. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing Neo Geo stuff on my Switch. I loved Blazing Star, which I don’t think I ever played before the Switch. I had a heckin’ good time with Sengoku, which is kind of clunky to play but is sufficiently weird and zany to entertain, and has some basic beat ‘em up thrills. I played through the much-maligned Shock Troopers 2 and I thought it was pretty solid. I even enjoyed some of the primitive early Fatal Fury games, which are far from great but are at least interesting. I have played enough of this stuff recently that I am not looking back at the ‘90s with rose colored glasses and remembering the games as smoother or better-looking than they were.

Magician Lord is horrible. It’s clunky to control, the character is too big for the precision of the dodging you’re expected to do, the level layouts are convoluted and weird, the animation is almost non-existent, and the music is bland. The whole package is kind of boring and very frustrating. I died constantly (with a loading screen between each death) and quickly gave up on playing more. I remembered liking this game when it was new, but in my opinion it has aged into a frustrating unfun mess. The controls are too sluggish and the levels to punishing for me to have any fun or even want to get better.

I then decided that I should find out if my memories of Magic Sword were equally warped by the decades between when I last played it and now. I had a copy of Final Fight Double Impact on my Xbox One (Backwards compatibility allows me to emulate an emulation) and with a little trepidation I booted it up. Would this be another massive disappointment?

Within a few minutes I had my answer. I had intended to play just long enough to get a sense for the controls but I found myself unable to stop. The music was better than I remembered, the graphics cleaner, and the control was quick and responsive. Somewhere along the line I must have confused the Super Nintendo cart for the CPS-1 version (though I know a gas station near my house had the arcade machine and I played it fairly regularly) because I don’t remember the game looking or sounding this good. The action was quick and responsive, the companion characters were cool and provided variety, and the levels were short enough not to overstay their welcome, with both vicious enemies and platforming hazards to overcome. I killed a manticore and got into the castle. I killed a dragon and got a samurai sword. I unlocked a door expecting to find a ninja to help me only to have skeletons leap out and attack. I found the diamond ring and got a lizardman to join me. Magic Sword gives you a lot more life than Magician Lord, letting you take a bunch of hits between demanding a new quarter, and passing out numerous healing items to keep the fun going. That, plus the more responsive controls, make it feel much more fair and thus enjoyable. It also has RPG elements and your character gets stronger over time as he advances in his adventure. It's pretty advanced for a 1990 arcade machine.

Magic Sword is better than I remembered; a seriously fun arcade platformer that can definitely munch (virtual) quarters on the higher levels but remains engaging and playable. It’s not an all-time great or anything, but I did get sucked in and played longer than I intended, which is a pretty good sign that the game holds up for me.

Magician Lord, on the other hand, is a frustrating mess. I will probably force myself to play it again at some point just to confirm that I wasn't having an off night (I wasn't) but there's no enjoyment for me in that game. I love Neo Geo, but every system has clunkers, even well-regarded clunkers. Magician Lord is one.

It's funny to me how the two games sort of merged in my mind and my affection for Magic Sword was passed on to Magician Lord. Honestly I probably played a lot more Magic Sword back in the day (because I actually like it) so it probably came to dominate my memory out of exposure alone. Sometimes revisiting old games can change your perspective. Sometimes it can remind you why you loved an old favorite in the past, and sometimes it can remind you that hey, 1990 had a lot of great games but it had a lot of horrible stinkers too.

Stinkers like Magician Lord.

Uncharted 4 felt like an event. Here was Nathan Drake, star of arguably the biggest franchise from the last generation of consoles, making his leap to the PS4. After a mostly lackluster exclusive lineup (Bloodborne obviously excepted) Sony was bringing out the big gun. And it was going to be Drake’s biggest adventure yet. His brother was brought in to push and challenge him the way none of the other NPCs really had before, there was a new globetrotting adventure, some new mechanics to, finally, try and freshen up the traversal. Vehicles. Semi open-world segments. The end to Nathan Drake’s saga! It was the perfect summer blockbuster for 2016.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy has none of that hype. It’s DLC quietly expanded to full game size (the eight hour campaign is short for an Uncharted game but not out of line with other modern shooters), with the same mechanics we saw in 4, the same shooting we’ve done 4 or 5 times before, and constrained to a single geographical location and culture. It didn’t even introduce a new main character, instead plucking Chloe from her role as the more interesting girl Nate ditched in favor of buzzkill Elena and setting her off as the main character with a recycled villain as a sidekick. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy doesn’t even try to build the kind of deep supporting cast and complex relationships that the mainline games after the first put together; there are probably a dozen characters with a significant number of lines in the game and that includes the little girl trying to sell you clothes at the very beginning of the game.

And yet it works. It works really well. Uncharted: The Lost Legacy is still Uncharted. It may not have the scope or the emotional resonance of Uncharted 4, but that’s because it’s setting out to do something different from that game. It’s showing us what it’s like to play an Uncharted game without Nathan Drake and setting up a new core of relationships and adventures to possibly continue even while Nathan cools his heels in retirement. Nathan Drake is so closely associated with Uncharted that he became the face of the Sony console family but it turns out that his series can survive and even thrive without him. In the Lost Legacy he is reduced to a few jokes about what an annoying dweeb he is, and the game soldiers on without him just fine.

Part of that is because of how well Chloe steps into Nate’s shoes in this game. Chloe was a fan favorite in 2 and 3, and played by the amazing Claudia Black she was a sexy, fun, exciting character, and a natural choice to head up the next chapter of the Uncharted franchise. As a substitute for Nate Chloe does a fine job. She’s quippy and charismatic like he was but more pragmatic and task oriented, without the dreamy ideas of noble discovery that so often clashed with Nate’s killing sprees. She plays exactly like Nate, down to effortless propelling her body, weighed down with long guns, by upper body strength alone, boosting up her companion and insisting on driving the jeep because “it’s a control thing.” In some ways Chloe is almost a little bit too much like Nate in this game; since you can imagine the script having been written for him and reworked a little for her (not that I think that’s the case) and she plays exactly like Nathan did. At times I wished Chloe was differentiated more from Nate than just by having a much, much nicer posterior and less concern for the ancient settlements she’s trashing than Nate did. But that’s a minor complaint. Chloe’s a great character and I didn’t miss Nate at all during the 8 hour adventure.

As for the supporting cast…I thought the villain was good and…beyond that there’s pretty much (though not entirely) just Nadine. Nadine’s fine. I don’t dislike Nadine. But I also didn’t think she reached the heights of Sully or Sam or even Chloe herself in 2 and 3. The game goes through the expected notes in Chloe and Nadine’s relationships, including bonding, falling out, making up, and exchanging quips back and forth between them as they kill 250 enemies over the course of their adventure. This all works, but I found Nadine’s stoic toughness to be a little bit of a buzzkill compared to Sully’s garrulous warmth or Chloe’s gentle, sultry, mocking. Nadine has to carry a large part of this game’s dialog and while she’s up to the task I didn’t fully warm to her until close to the end of the game. Also, the optional conversations in the game are mostly just trivia, with Nadine saying at one point that she got the information from Wikipedia. It’s an odd choice, and character interactions is probably the place where this game falls the furthest short of what I expect from an Uncharted title. It’s good stuff but it’s not great stuff, and with Naughty Dog this stuff is usually great.

We also don’t hear anything about Charlie, which is too bad. I liked Charlie. Charlie is kind the enigma of the Uncharted story, showing up in 3 as a buddy to Nate and Sully and friend to Chloe, and then kind of disappearing for good. He had good chemistry with Chloe. I miss Charlie. They should bring back Charlie!

Charlie’s not in this game though, and Chloe and Nadine do a fine job together on their adventure, climbing, shooting from behind cover, hiding in tall grass, and doing all the rest of that Nathan Drake stuff without Nathan Drake. It’s a good time. It starts with a quiet walk through a gorgeous urban environment with lots of NPCs around (the game engine is still top notch) and extremely high production values. You feel exposed and vulnerable as Chloe, alone, with no combat controls in that beginning sequence, and there’s a real sense of unease as you watch soldiers abuse civilians and others run and hide in the warren of rain-slicked streets. It’s a look the Uncharted series hasn’t really tried before, verging on Cyberpunk with some of the neon lighting and ominous shadow. I wish they’d stuck with it longer. But soon enough you’re out in a verdant area, looking for ruins that look like they are straight out of Uncharted 4, driving around a jeep that feels like the Uncharted 4 Jeep, including winching “puzzles” and climbing towers that are like the Uncharted 4 towers but without quite as high production values.

It’s a fun, well-worn, formula and it fits like a favorite pair of jeans. The combat style, mixing stealth and melee with cover shooting gunplay, is functional and probably the best it has ever been. The traversal is still a little boring but the grappling hook is back and that at least adds some interactivity to the proceedings, which require you to chain hook jumps together and swing towards the appropriate hand hold. There are some timing based obstacle courses that actually require you to use this system decently well, which is nice. The stealth has also been made more viable by the addition of a silenced pistol, which means that impatient players like me can pick guys off and create approach routes, as opposed to constantly focusing on sneaking up on the target they want to take down and getting spotted by someone else. These are incremental improvements to an already good game, and while I will never put Uncharted at the top of my “best playing franchises” list, there’s a huge difference between this and something like The Order:1886.

If Uncharted 2 plays just okay it looks fantastic. The environments can be a bit samey (and are not well distinguished from those of Uncharted 4) but they still look great. The facial animation is fantastic. The frame rate is steady and everything is incredibly detailed and seamless. It's an objectively beautiful game with huge environments, great animations, and impeccable art design. The sound is a bit more mixed. Sound effects are great and voice acting is, of course, truly spectacular, but the music is curiously lacking. The Uncharted theme is NOT in the game, which is understandable given Nate's absence, but in its place is some pretty generic sounding music that makes very few appearances in the game except for the combat theme. It really could have used some music on the level of the Uncharted theme, or really any memorable music at all. Nobody comes to Uncharted for the music, of course, so some people might not notice the absence, but to me the Uncharted theme is a part of the experience and I was sad not to find it here.

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy does add a few additional small improvements over 4. While there’s a mini open world section again, this time it offers actual optional objectives instead of just treasures to find. It still feels empty and pointless though. While the Uncharted team has figured out how to make small open world maps they still don’t know what to do with them. They basically consist of pockets of hand-built content scattered through a kind of boring open driving area. You drive up to an encampment and kill some guys. You drive over to a puzzle and solve it. The driving is never that fun and the map feels cramped and confusing. The optional objectives offer some of the better puzzles in the game (this game’s puzzle design is a cut above the last few outings in general) but they should have just been in the game as critical path. The driving just doesn’t add anything and while in a languidly paced game like Uncharted 4 it fit okay and gave characters time to breathe. Here it’s just annoying. This is a tighter, more focused, game and doesn’t need the interruption. Not that there isn’t good dialog during the driving sequences, because there is, but the whole thing is momentum sapping. There is a nice call back later in the game, though, which helped me see a little better what the developers were going for. I just don’t think it was worth all the aimlessness.

While the open-world design part of Uncharted 4 is a bigger part of Lost Legacy than it was of 4, the set pieces are slightly toned down. I’ve read reviewers saying that this features the same production values as Uncharted 4 and I think that’s not quite right. Everything feels just a little bit..smaller…for lack of a better word compared to some of the flashier sequences of destruction or mayhem from Uncharted 4, or even 3. If Uncharted 4 is the $200 million blockbuster tentpole movie then Uncharted: The Lost Legacy feels like its $85 million cousin with a slightly pared-back scope. It still looks fantastic and impresses, but a little bit of the bombast and scale is missing. That’s not to say that such bombast is totally missing from the game, but it’s not quite on the same scale as 4, and a lot of the bigger set pieces are concentrated in the last third of the game, like a movie with a somewhat limited budget that knows it has to conserve resources so it can end with a huge bombastic finale (Which Lost Legacy definitely does.)

What’s in the place of the variety and bombast of Uncharted 4 is a more focused, smaller scale story. Uncharted The Lost Legacy reminded me a lot of Uncharted 1. One main location. One villain (though Uncharted 1 sort of had two). Shoot shoot shoot, climb climb climb, quip quip, puzzle, there’s your game. There’s a little less of everything than last time, but that’s not a bad thing and there’s enough shooting and climbing and puzzle solving to make for a satisfying and memorable experience. It’s a good formula. It works. It’s a good game. I like it. I would play another of these next year if they put it out, but I hope they give the series a little bit of a break. Come back with something bigger in scope in a few years, with some upgrades to the gameplay to keep it from going stale. I'd play another game this size, but I'd love to play something that matches the size of Nathan Drake’s later adventures. I’d be happy to play it as Chloe, and I’d be happy to play as another character connected to the series. Perhaps the best thing to be said about Lost Legacy is that it left me wanting more, even five games into the series. I count that as a strong recommendation.

P.S. This game would make a decent introduction to the series for a newcomer. You'd miss some of the references to the old games, but you can pick up the stuff that matters, and it has all the modern gameplay advances that 1 lacks, without the length and reliance on the old games that 4 has.

Enter the Gungeon is planning a new update next month.

This is the second major update to the game, and it seems explicitly intended to make the game more accessible. I think this is a very good thing and hope other games in the genre take note.

Quote:

Our primary focus was to make the Gungeon a more generous place, while retaining options, for players who really engage with the difficulty of the game.

If you tried Gungeon in the past and found it too hard, too stingy, or too slow- this update will be the version for you. If you liked it just the way it was, don’t worry, we’ve got you covered as well.

I count myself as someone who really enjoys the core gameplay loops of Enter the Gungeon but found it a little too difficult and stingy to truly hook me. I have played it off and on since I bought it for PS4 back in April 2016, and I've gotten enough use out of it that I don't regret the purchase, but I haven't come close to beating it and I haven't gotten that deep into its more complex systems, mostly because I find it both A) frustratingly difficult at times and B) too reliant on RNG. Frankly speaking, a run in Enter the Gungeon can be either amazing or frustrating depending on whether you get decent weapons in the first few chambers. You can beat bosses with the starting guns, but it requires a lot more precision and is a lot less fun than if you get one of the more powerful or at least entertaining weapons to play with.

I'm not alone. Enter the Gungeon's trophy information shows that something like 10% of players who start the game actually finish it even once, and as for the post-game challenges etc... they all have strikingly low completion rates. Under 1% of the gamers who buy this game get the platinum, which is very low for a game as good as Enter the Gungeon. (By comparison 4% of players have the Plat on Enter the Gungeon on Truetrophies.com, while 26% have it for Dark Souls. So yeah.) And Enter the Gungeon is very very good. It has responsive gameplay, visually pleasing graphics, lots of fun puns and comedy, and just generally feels polished to a sheen, unlike many Indie games that ship with rough edges.

It's just too damned difficult.

The combination of the reliance on RNG and the VERY high grind factor (each boss drops 1 or 2 pieces of currency and each unlock, of which there are hundreds, can cost as much as 8, and the unlocks just populate items into the dungeon, they don't actually guarantee you'll EVER see them) mean that people play the game, enjoy its polish, and then move on without seeing a lot of the content they paid for.

A lot of other roguelikes are similar. Rogue Legacy, which admittedly has been on Playstation Plus, skewing the numbers, shows only 13.6% of players have beaten the last boss, let alone done the optional content. A lot of other Roguelikes are the same way. They are too difficult for the playerbases they are attracting. I did finish Rogue Legacy but not Flinthook, which is another roguelike I really enjoyed playing but fell off of because I wasn't making enough progress.

There are some people who will read all this and say "Good! These games should be hard to finish!" My response is...grow up. Games, like any other form of media, should meet their audience where they are. While you're never going to have everyone who plays your game finish it, the goal should be that at least 60% do. Having games where almost nobody gets to the end means A) you're spending money creating content that most of your customers just won't see and B) you're creating something that dissatisfies your customers before they're done with it. Both are bad.

And in the case of roguelikes it's often the curve that's the problem. Could I get good enough at Enter the Gungeon to beat it? I absolutely think so. I can pretty reliably get to the third floor and I've been to the fourth and bosses get easier as you see them more and learn their patterns. But the grind and the feeling of lack of progress makes this experience not all that fun. It's made worse by the fact that the shortcut guy's costs are outrageous (for a shortcut to floor 3 he wants 3 pieces of armor at once, which is EXTREMELY RNG reliant and requires near perfect play to boot) and that you can have runs where you play for 20 minutes without getting 1 good gun. It's frustrating and annoying and it's, frankly, bad design. An easier more generous version of this game would be a BETTER version of this game. I'm glad they're making one.

Don't make me waste my time practicing over and over just to see the base content in the game. I don't find it fun, and the trophy information shows that MOST people don't find it fun. It's design that appeals to a few hardcore fans (who are disproportionately concentrated in the game development and media community) and alienates far too many.

But what's to be done about those hardcore fans? Shouldn't there be games for them too?

Yes, of course, but there are lots of ways to make games that appeal to both the hardcore and the more casual. Difficulty levels can help with this. Optional content either during or after the game can provide different challenge levels (and Enter the Gungeon has a bunch of this, even though its base critical pathway is too difficult for most of its players.) DLC focused on just the hardcore can work. And of course the occasional game that's focused on just the masochistic (or hyper skilled) audience is fine. But a whole genre being focused on them is a bad idea, and Enter the Gungeon seems to recognize that it pitched itself at a level where its audience can't meet it.

As gamers get older a bunch of things happen. A) Their reflexes slow. Not so much that they can't play games anymore, but enough that games on the higher difficulty curve become less accessible. B) They have less time to play. That means less time to learn a game and grind it out. C) They have more money. That means a lot of things, but among them is they have less patience for a game that doesn't feel rewarding.

Game designers (many of whom are single people in their 20s and early 30s) should recognize their audience and build games appropriately. And then they can add stuff to challenge and engage the most hardcore. But if 90% of the people who were interested enough in your game to buy it don't end up finishing it, you done messed up.

Roguelikes as a genre have done messed up. To the point where many people don't even want to deal with them anymore. Part of it is about the nature of the genre (which prizes replay value over the quality of the experience of each run) but I think part of it is the difficulty too. Who wants to buy a game when they know they'll likely fall off halfway through?

Kudos to Enter the Gungeon for trying to address this problem. I hope more games in the genre do so moving forward.

Note: Every time I post something like this a bunch of people from the "I like games hard and I don't care about other people's experience" school show up. Okay fella, good for you. I feel like I've addressed that point so if you want to make it please engage with the argument that games can be built for both the mainstream and harcore audiences through optional content/difficulty levels/targeted DLC. Also, every time I say games are too tough, and bring up objective data to support it, I am told to Git Gud. I love that and its very constructive, so please let me know I need to Git Gud in the responses.

Agents of Mayhem is the kind of game that makes you question whether you’re wasting your life playing video games. That is a harsh indictment, and I stand by it, but ultimately Agents of Mayhem isn’t a terrible game. It’s a game with good ideas, good intentions, and insufficient resources to make those ideas work well. What you end up with is a game that was just fun enough to keep me playing but annoying and boring enough to give me a feeling of emptiness when it was all over. Unlike something like Horizon Zero Dawn, which created a unique and special world and told a gripping story, Agents of Mayhem feels like a whole bunch of filler holding…nothing together. It’s all mortar and no bricks.

The concept behind Agents of Mayhem, however, is rock solid. Combine Crackdown with Overwatch with a G.I. Joe super agent aesthetic and let the player loose in a futuristic Seoul, full of side-missions, giant buildings, cute little mascots, and big explosions. In order to keep things fresh Agents of Mayhem serves up 12 characters (with more to come as DLC, including a scummy Gamestop pre-order deal for Saints Row favorite Johnny Gat) with differing abilities and characteristics, and lets you roll with 3 of them at a time (except for some agent specific missions.) This system works decently well and while the game would definitely be better with co-op, I didn’t feel its absence too powerfully. If you’re feeling bored you can always change your squad up to use someone else, and I did this several times before settling on a trio of characters I felt complimented each other and sticking with them through the last third of the game.

I was glad the game let me change things up on my own, because Agents of Mayhem can be boring. It can be very boring. The mechanics are not the problem (more on that in a bit), though they don’t help much. It’s a pretty straightforward run and gun third person shooter (no kneeling behind cover here, though some agents can cloak and run behind a corner out of danger.) Each agent has one weapon, which they can change a little bit through the “gadget” upgrade system, one special ability on a cooldown (such as shooting a bullet that induces fear in an opponent, or shooting a cluster of grenades) and an ultimate “Mayhem” ability that takes a very long time to charge up, or can be charged through a randomly dropping powerup. The Mayhem ability are supposed to be huge tide turners, but they mostly fall flat for me. One lets you shoot your chaingun without it overheating. Another induces fear in everyone around the character for a few seconds. They’re useful, but since you spend almost all your time fighting clusters of cannon fodder all it means is you can defeat one of those groups faster than you would have otherwise.

While the play styles vary between the agents (there’s a sniper with a bow, a ninja with a sword and shuriken, the chaingunner, a guy with a short range ice gun that freezes over and can be smashed into the ground for an AOE, a turret and electricity gun character etc…) there’s not a lot of variety within each character. The chaingun lady feels pretty much the same fully upgraded as she does when you first get her, and with your limited move set there’s not a lot you can do to change up your playstyle with her. The gadget upgrades might add damage over time to a weapon, increase the clip size, or change the status effect it inflicts, but with a few exceptions they don’t change the way a weapon feels or plays. That means that the variety has to come from level and task design, and here Agents of Mayhem falls very very flat.

Agents of Mayhem repeats itself relentlessly. If you do a task once, other than in a boss fight, you can be pretty sure that you will do it again, likely in the same mission, and then again later in the game. Some of these simple tasks will be done again and again over the course of the game, to the point that they elicited frustrated sighs from me whenever they came up. Boy I hope you like blowing up clusters of explosive barrels because Agents of Mayhem loves to ask you to do that over and over again. I also hope you like delving into identical cookie cutter dungeons (called lairs) that are all gray and ugly, and fighting waves of enemies in them, because that’s Agents of Mayhem’s favorite trick. Sometimes there’s poison gas and you have to hit a few switches to escape to the next room. Sometimes the game literally just tells you to move on to the next room and you don’t have to do anything, which can make a supposed balls to the wall action game feel like the world’s worst walking simulator. There are some strings of missions where you delve into the same looking dungeons, completing the same objectives, over and over to the point where you might think you’re playing a horrible indie roguelike or a game from the very early PS2/Xbox era. Remember the library from Halo? This is much, much worse, though no one lair is quite that long (and the combat is not nearly as fun as Halo’s was, either at the time or now.)

In addition to the repetition, Agents of Mayhem is full of jank. I encountered multiple bugs ranging from minor to a bluescreen crash of my PS4, and even when the game is working as intended it’s full of clipping and weird NPC behavior and cut scenes that trigger far from seamlessly. It needed significant polish and it’s clear that this was shipped either to meet a deadline or because the publisher didn’t have faith in it and didn’t want to spend any more money. To be fair, it is a completable video game, and not even a bad one, but it doesn’t feel finished.

And it’s not just the quickly made cookie cutter missions or the bugs that make it feel unfinished. There’s something very off about a lot of systems in the game. For example, you collect gadgets to modify your agents and “cores” to upgrade their abilities throughout the game. I ran out of gadgets to collect at about the half way mark (since I had them all) and I ended the game with 54 cores in my inventory. Considering that you only need 36 to fully upgrade your whole squad, that seems like a really weird balance (to be fair I did search for core fragments because I love Crackdown style traversal resource gathering, but the game was passing them out like candy by the end in loot chests and end of mission rewards.) On the flip side, none of my agents reached max level, and I was constantly low on cash to buy base upgrades and other items. The game gives you XP and cash for every mission, but it usually gives you about $2,500 and 2000 XP, whether at the start of the game or the end. By the end of the game you can get $1,700 just from blowing up a group of enemies, so having such a piddling sum as a mission reward just feels weird.

There are also 4 different character upgrade systems, a host of skins for characters weapons and vehicles (though I only collected a tiny percentage of those) and additional half baked systems like a world map where you can deploy characters to collect miniscule amounts of resources (basically useless), contracts, which require you to meet certain specific objectives either on your own or with other players in order to collect miniscule amounts of resources (basically useless), and a territory control metagame where you take over bad guys towers and then they take those towers back (both useless AND infuriating.) Finally there are overpowered consumable weapons that can be purchased for ingame currency and can do anything from unleashing a nuke to kill everyone to reviving your whole squad if you wipe.

All of this, plus the cut and paste dungeon design and plans for adding agents, make me think that this was planned as a free to play game at some point. It doesn’t have any free to play hooks at present, and I am not sure what you would want to buy, but the concept of “quantity over quality” for so much of the content and the various types and levels of currency make me think that there were plans to make this free to play but it was decided it made more sense as a traditional $60 game.

It’s not worth $60. I would have been happy at about $20, but honestly I would probably have been just as happy to skip it altogether. It’s not that it’s totally without charm. The basic gameplay is fine. Unlike others I enjoyed the (very cheaply made) animated cut scenes; the voice acting is good, the graphics are reasonably nice (though the world is not very interactive and there was more pop-in than I expected on my PS4 Pro) and though there’s not enough music the music that’s there is pretty good, including a couple nice nods to K-pop (though this game should CLEARLY have a ton more K-pop.)

There’s also fun to be had in the story missions, which have a lot of the repetition of the rest of the game but at least also offer some unique encounters and story beats, and do create the feeling of playing through a season of a low budget G.I. Joe rip off (albeit with more cursing and blood than a cartoon like that would ever had.)

But the gameplay I’ve described as “fine” also feels pretty dated (this really does feel like a Crackdown sequel from 2011, except for the graphics and complex loot systems) and the open world activities are such garbage that just traversing the city collecting shards and loot chests is pretty much the only fun to be had outside the mission structure. The driving is functional but nothing more. The humor and writing ranges from bad to okay to the occasional line where I said “eh, alright, that was clever.” The connections to the Saints Row universe, other than a couple characters from the games, are extremely minor.

It’s also not a very long game. I probably put 15 hours into it, and that was with unlocking all the characters and (regrettably) sampling a bunch of the side missions. I didn’t die once either (individual characters did but not the whole team), though I let the game set the difficulty for me and it never went above 7 so I probably could have bumped it up. I didn’t want to, because the problems this game have wouldn’t be solved by increased difficulty. Increased difficulty won’t make those cut and paste dungeons any less repetitive (or fix the inexplicable secret rooms that have no loot or purpose for existing inside the already boring as hell dungeons.) Increased difficulty won’t fix the bland side missions (or some of the story missions) or add some decent music when exploring the world (seriously, the game’s lack of interesting sound much of the time is a real problem.)

It’s an empty experience and when I was finished I felt myself wondering “Why did I play that? Why did I finish it? Why didn’t I read a book or listen to some music or just take a nap?” The game held my attention but at the bare minimum level, and nothing about it was ever satisfying or thrilling or joyful. Compared to something like Zelda, which felt like a portal into another world of adventure and whimsy, or even Quantum Break, which at least told a semi-competent story, Agents of Mayhem has that cheap off-brand drugstore chocolate feel to it. It’s sweet enough that it’s not unenjoyable, but when you’re done you just feel like you should have bought something more enjoyable if you were going to take in that many empty calories.

I was in the mood for a low-key open world game that wasn’t as intense in either story or gameplay as Horizon: Zero Dawn. I wanted another Sunseet Overdrive. I wanted Saints Row 2 again. Volition didn’t want to make that again, though. They wanted to make this. And they did. I’m just not sure who it’s for.

Quantum break is a mess. Its core concept, “what if we interspersed a television show in between acts of a video game?” is intriguing, but executed in a very strange way. When I first heard this idea I assumed that the video game would have limited narrative within it, and the story would be located in the TV show episodes. This seemed potentially smart. Video games are not always great at telling stories so why not outsource that function to a better storytelling medium? Games do it all the time with cut scenes, and this would be far from the first game to use live action actors in those cut scenes, but it would be structured with more room to really let the story grow and provide background to the action.

That’s not what they did.

Instead Quantum Break is a normal video game with a normal video game story and then also a television show that tells a story that’s adjacent to the videogame story. Some characters overlap and the events go on concurrently, but for the most part it’s a different cast, different (though intersecting) plot and, most importantly, different stakes. Quantum Break the video game is about a disaster caused by a time machine and the battle between a scrappy group of survivors against an all-powerful corporation while the world ends around them. Quantum Break the TV show is about corporate intrigue and building up characters who don’t really matter in the video game and looking relatively good and glossy on a low budget.

It's a bad mix. It’s a bad mix because the TV show characters are clearly not the heroes who are going to save the day (it would be gutsy but also dumb to put the player in charge of the secondary character) and because it disrupts the pacing. It’s also a bad mix because the TV show is at the quality level of a bland but professional cable TV show or straight to Netflix movie. It’s not embarrassing but it’s kind of boring and none of the main actors are overly charismatic or interesting. When Lance Reddick is in it the show is better, but Lance Reddick is in it for a couple scenes an episode and then it’s back to mediocre basic cable stuff. Watching two professional but kind of bland actors flirt does not provide sufficient reason to pull me away from my video game.

You also end up with what feels like double the story the game should have (since there are video game cut scenes in the game, and lots of collectibles with important story bits in them too.) There are entire chapters of the game where you don’t fight anyone but just walk around, reading things, talking to people, and learning about the game world. Layering that on top of the TV show was…a lot.

It would have worked much better if Quantum Break was just a normal video game with interspersed live action cut scenes.

All that being said, the game part of Quantum Break is pretty good. It’s also a little bit of a mess, without the level of polish and tightness that defines a great game, but it’s fun and stands out from the crowd. In a world where every third person shooter feels the need to be cover based Quantum Break says “Nah, I’m good” and creates a gameplay loop based on using time powers and dashing around, creating shields and freezing enemies and feeling like a super hero instead of cowering behind a chest high wall waiting for your health to come back. There is a cover system in Quantum Break but it’s janky and I didn’t really use it. Instead I rotated through the various time powers, all on their own cooldowns, and killed dudes with style; stacking bullets in pockets of frozen time and dashing behind armored enemies to blast their weakspots. In most games when you see a group of enemies clustered up (but too spread for a grenade to take them out) you have to pick them off carefully from the outside. In Quantum Break you can zip through them, killing a few as you pass, and then dashing away, like a fighter plane making strafing runs. Quantum Break does go a bit overboard by having recoil render most guns extremely inaccurate after the first couple shots in a burst, but at least it’s in the service of trying to get you to engage with the game’s systems. If you play it as a slow and methodical cover shooter you’re going to have a bad time, but if you run and gun and cycle your powers it’s a unique and interesting take on the shooter genre.

Quantum Break also has some very basic traversal mechanics (albeit at least not of the “guide your character over the obvious handholds” flavor of an Uncharted or Horizon: Zero Dawn) and some “puzzles,” by which I mean areas where you hold Y to rewind time for a specific object and then use it as a bridge or an elevator or something. These are kind of stylish, but I would have appreciated a little more to do for these sequences. We’ve had 3D time/dimension shifting puzzles since at LEAST Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver, and it feels like we’ve backslid in the last 20 years. Most games consider “walk up to object Y and press button X” to be a satisfactory “puzzle” these days and it’s just not. If you’re worried about people getting stuck then include a hint system. There are much better ways than simplifying all the gameplay out.

If the combat is good and the traversal is…acceptable…then what really makes Quantum Break fun are the environments. In addition to rejecting cover mechanics, Quantum Break definitely rejects the rule that shooters must take place in a brown and grey desaturated environment. The graphics aren’t technically great, but the colors pop and the environments are convincing and interesting. Sequences where time starts to break down are especially cool, whether it’s wandering through a lab where everyone else is frozen or trying to make it through a mid-collapse structure with time freezing and unfreezing. It's some of the most creative visual design I have seen in years, and for me the game was worth my time just for the chance to explore and interact with those areas. Quantum Break realizes that it’s a video game and can put the player in fantastic and unique environments. I would have liked to see it go further, but what it does is pretty neat.

And Quantum Break is pretty neat. At least it tries something different, even if the experiment isn’t totally successful, and it has enough Remedy weirdness and vision to be a decent time. Is it an unqualified success? No. It has pacing issues, control issues, a predictable story, and frankly, not enough gameplay for its length. I felt like I spent maybe 30% of my time in combat, if you count the TV show, and that’s just not enough for a game that sells itself as a shooter.

There also came a point, near the end, when I realized that the story of one of the companion characters was a lot more interesting and meaningful than that of the main character. I kind of wish the game had been successful enough for DLC so we could have played as Beth, fighting for survival at the end of time. She has a better arc than Jack and, frankly, deserved to be the “star” of the game. What’s more interesting, a dude who gets time powers because he happens to be brothers with a genius, or a woman who spends her whole life training to stop a disaster, only to find out it can’t be stopped, but she keeps fighting and training anyway, even as her mind breaks down? Jack is a bland, if serviceable, protagonist. Beth is actually kind of interesting.

But I recently played through The Order: 1886, and while that game had cool environments and great graphics and nothing else, Quantum Break has more going for it. A better story, much more lively combat, and a world that felt much less technically proficient but a lot more lively and exciting. Hell, Quantum Break has some of the most dynamic and exciting cut scenes I’ve seen in a game, which is ironic considering the TV show is so bland.

Do I recommend Quantum Break? Not for $60, that’s for sure. But for $20…yeah, I think I do. You have to be willing to put up with some boring sections and some jank, but if you’re in the mood for a bit of a throwback third person shooter with enough personality and unique mechanics to get by, it’ll fit the bill. It’s not good enough to be a “pillar of the lineup” exclusive (and definitely not good enough to go toe-to-toe with Uncharted 4), and I can understand why Jeff didn’t like it (especially since he hates inaccurate weapons), but it’s a solid B-tier game with good production values. Plus it’s got Lance Reddick in it, and that’s never a bad thing. Never a bad thing at all.

I want to start by saying that I don’t dislike Aloy as a character. I think she’s inconsistently written and can be a little annoying at times (as many video game characters can) and that the voice acting was…only adequate…but I mostly found her likable, smart and pleasant enough. She was fine.

My issue is that the game sets her up to be something truly special. A fascinating weirdo the likes of which we’ve never seen in gaming. And then it abandons that to make her a fairly routine open world game protagonist. I felt a profound sense of disappointment when I realized that they weren’t going to do anything with their premise, and I never fully recovered during the course of the game. Horzion Zero Dawn could have had some of the most memorable character interactions in years. Instead it has a bunch of good but forgettable stuff, and a standout performance by Lance Reddick, who is by far the most interesting character in the game.

Here is what I mean when I say that Aloy doesn’t make sense:

Aloy isn’t socially awkward: This was my biggest surprise in the game. The tutorial section takes great pains to set up how Aloy is raised by Rost alone, a man who is himself pretty stiff and awkward in social situations, and shunned and abused by everyone else. She has fewer than five meaningful interactions with other people her entire life (except for some dealings with a shady merchant) until her 18^th birthday. Despite this Aloy is not only a warm, empathetic, person, but always knows the right thing to say in the right situation. She even has quips and clever remarks. Who taught her this? It’s learned, or at least practiced, behavior, and it’s not like Rost has a great sense of humor. One would expect her to model herself after her “father” and be stiff and self-righteous, the only type of human behavior she’s had a chance to observe up close. Instead she’s super empathetic and insightful. Even funny. How does she even know how to put psychological insight into words? Rost sure didn’t.

I thought Aloy was going to be a fascinating socially awkward nerd who spent her whole life practicing for one competition and was completely stunted in other ways because of it. Nope. She’s a sometimes sassy empathetic urban twenty-five-year old from today.

Aloy isn’t angry OR ingratiating: Aloy has been shunned and abused her whole life. She is driven to find out why, but she doesn’t resent it, and sort of shrugs it off when it’s over, letting bygones be bygones. This is not natural behavior for someone who has always been an outcast. She should either be bitter and angry about her treatment, or super ingratiating and trying to show everyone how awesome she is so they’ll finally keep her around. You can’t go through an experience like that, especially if it’s your ONLY experience, and not be shaped by it. Aloy goes from being an outcast girl to being an important person not just with the Nora but in the huge Carja empire and adjusts easily and fluidly. That’s just not how people work. The game seems to realize this at the end when Aloy rejects being labeled the savior of the Nora, but she does so with insight and sophistication, and it’s too late. Once again, she’s way too well adjusted.

Aloy doesn’t care that much that Rost dies: This is a smaller thing, but given that Rost is basically the only person Aloy knows at the start of the game, she takes his brutal death incredibly well. She asks about him a couple times, and mentions him, but mostly she just shrugs and keeps trucking. He’s the only person she loves. The only person she’s come to rely on. The only person she knows. She should be constantly talking about him and referencing him. Instead she finds out where he’s buried and then later asks about his story but that’s it. I realize it would have been annoying to have her talking about him non-stop the whole game, or even worse despondent and depressed over his death, but a few more mentions, even in her internal monologues, were warranted.

Aloy understands the “past” world way too well: Aloy is raised on the fringes of a small tribal society. Everything she even knows about THAT society is learned from the outside looking in, or from Rost describing it to her. I’ll accept that she’s literate (for unknown reasons, since the Nora don’t seem big on books and it’s unclear why Rost would teach her to read, living as marginal hunter-gatherers) and has the focus so she knows a few facts, but she has no formal education. Her ability to grapple with and understand the significance of what she learns over the course of the adventure is completely unbelievable. At one point she calls Elizabet “Doctor Sobek” indicating that she somehow grasps the way our educational system works and grants degrees and special titles. As far as I can tell she’s never even seen a school. I understand that having her act like a “tribal” woman constantly asking Sylens to explain things would get old soon, but her level of sophistication was totally immersion breaking for me. She instantly understands the dynamics between Sobek and Faro, and what they were arguing about, and his level of wealth, all of that. Once again, she acts like a smart twenty five-year-old from our time, not an eighteen-year-old tribal outcast. Also she can collect meat from the storage lockers of the ruined installations and that’s just gross.

I understand that Aloy is a clone of a supergenius and people will use that to explain some of this away but it doesn’t work. That’s not how “genius” functions. Genius needs to be nurtured in some way, exposed to concepts and ideas, even if through books or the Internet. And eventually genius needs interactions with other humans to grow and reach its full potential. Aloy’s genius has been focused on hunting and preparing for the proving, so it makes sense that she excels at those things and is the best of the best. That’s how Elizabet should manifest in her. Having her also be great at stuff she’s never been exposed to or even thought about is sloppy, mediocre, writing.

There was another way: Aloy could have been a much more awkward character. She could have said the wrong thing, been headstrong and scornful, and reflected her stunted, weird, experiences. That wouldn’t stop her from being a hero or doing any of the things that she does in the game, but it would have made the interactions more interesting and unique. It would have been truly memorable if when people asked Aloy for help she always said something slightly off, or was confused why they couldn’t handle it themselves, the way she and Rost always did. It would have been great, and funny, if when the Carja king suggests Aloy could replace his warrior-lover she said “I do not wish to mate with you” or something instead of showing subtle, psychological, understanding of what he’s going through. It would have been nice to see Aloy befuddled by the before-humans and their soft, complicated existence. Why did they war when they had everything they could want?

It’s a missed opportunity and it’s one of the reasons that I think Horizon Zero Dawn’s story is just above average, and not great. Aloy isn’t a character, she’s a collection of traits and a totally independent personality. But she could have been much more.

Full disclosure: I have played a few hours of Yonder but not completed the main quest. I think I’ve seen what I’m going to, though, and most of what the game has to offer.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles starts well. Your dude (or dudette) is on a ship, gets a little bit of story about some ancient curse on the island he's headed towards, and then bam, shipwreck, wake up in a cave, meet a neat little sprite dude, and you're off into a beautiful world. It reminded me a bit of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (and a bunch of other games) in that you wake up, climb out of the tiny starting area, and are presented with a gorgeous vista to explore. See that mountain, you can go there, that sort of thing.

Yonder is also like Zelda in that there's a ton of random stuff to gather in a world teeming with life, and a lot of openness in how you approach the game outside the main quest. There are a few roadblocks you'll need to clear but you can mostly go anywhere and do anything when you're done with the tutorial.

But Yonder is not like Zelda. It’s not like almost any game I’ve played. It is, in fact, kind of a busywork simulator. It takes all the boring stuff you usually do to make the fun stuff easier/more fun (like gathering materials and crafting to improve your weapons, or farming and mining to build your cash reserves) and says “Here. That’s the game.”

Yonder is a game for people who love fetch quests. It’s a game for people who like exploration without challenge or reward. It’s a game for people who like collectathon platformers because of the collecting, not the platforming.

It’s not that Yonder doesn’t have good attributes, because it does. The game looks nice. Your character moves at a decent clip and all the areas in the game have distinct aesthetics and are compact enough to get through quickly. The problem that arises is that there just isn’t enough to do, and there isn’t enough to motivate you to do it.

The game’s activities are simple and shallow. You can fish, but the fishing game is at the level of Animal Crossing, without that game’s museum or bell economy to motivate you. You can farm, but all that gets you is barter and crafting items. You can gather and craft things and…none of it is mechanically interesting or inherently fun. It’s busy work for the inherent reward of busy work.

Yonder’s story is simple and boring, and while the world has lots of characters, few of them are interesting and all of them are shallow. There’s a comedian girl who is searching for an epic joke and a scientist girl who talks about animals, but those are about as memorable as “characters” get, and they are not sketched in beyond those basic character traits. Everyone else just gives you trading advice or fetch quests. You can hire people to work on your farms (through feeding them, since there’s no money in Yonder, which is a very bad choice I’ll explain later) but all that does is keep you from having to pick up animal poop and do the harvesting yourself. If Yonder had a compelling story or interesting characters you wanted to help it might give a little flavor to the bland and repetitive gameplay, but it doesn’t. When you arrive at the first town a simple text screen tells you that the townspeople greet you warmly and you have a nice stay overnight. When you meet the guy who is meant to help you fix the eponymous cloud catcher he basically just says “we need to fix the cloud catcher” and that’s it. It has all the flavor of a salt-free saltine. It has all the depth of a crepe. It is as engaging and enticing as a used gum wrapper lying in a gutter.

But even though there’s not much to do in Yonder the things there are to do are a hassle and really inconvenient. The game has multiple fast travel systems but one can only be used at night and the other requires solving simple fetch quests to active the “spokes,” which are inconveniently placed. Unlike in Zelda or Horizon Zero Dawn you cannot just warp to the places you’ve accessed, you need to find a stone mouth to go into, load into the hub area, and go through another mouth to emerge at the other end. It’s not a huge deal, but it’s annoying when you need to run back to your farm to drop items off…because the game has limited backpack space.

That’s right. Yonder, a game about gathering things, limits your backpack space. Significantly. It’s not a tiny inventory but it’s small enough that if you try to pick up all the stuff you come across in the game you will fill it up quickly. You can store some of this stuff in a chest at one of your farms, but this means running all the way back to a location that may be a few minutes from an unlocked fast travel point. The farm also has limited storage for unknown reasons, so eventually you will fill that up, and while Yonder has trading it has no currency. You can “buy” things by trading items for them (and the value is denominated in a currency that does not seem to exist so you can balance your trades) but you can’t just sell your junk. This is a terrible design system. First of all, Yonder requires you to collect lots of junk for random quests, and you never know quite what you’ll need. You may run across a stone head that requires you plant trees (meaning you need tree seeds) or a city where the guild master demands blueberries. Hope you didn’t throw your blueberries in the trash an hour ago! Secondly, Yonder has crafting materials that can only be purchased, not gathered or crafted. That means that you constantly need to keep valuable items on hand as a form of currency in case you need to purchase something. Letting you cash in items for in-game currency, like every other game, would make all of this significantly more convenient.

Eventually the combination of tedium and everything being a hassle leads to frustration. You just want to move the story forward on its glacial pace but doing so requires so much low grade busy work that, if you’re like me, you find yourself groaning at the screen and becoming irritable.

The game’s design also feels haphazard at times. One of the major side quests involves clearing “murk” (a purple mist) from areas. Your ability to do so depends on the number of “sprites” you’ve collected, but the number required can vary wildly within the same game area, with murk requiring 16 sprites to clear existing a few hundred feet from murk that requires only 5. There are also cats to collect, but many are just sitting on rocks out in the open. Shouldn’t they at least be a challenge to find or get to?

I couldn’t help but think of Knack, the launch PS4 title I recently played through, while I played Yonder. Knack is not a very good game, and its story and characters are insane, but I found it much more engaging and entertaining than Yonder. Knack may be too demanding for its aesthetics, repetitive, and weird, but at least it wasn’t aimless. Yonder feels aimless. Even the characters in the world don’t seem to care much about what you’re doing. They occasionally mention the murk or thank you for doing some chore for them, but for the most part they seem disinterested. After a few hours, so was I.

I understand the concept of a “chill” game or a “podcast” game and I get why for some people Yonder works for that, but I grew to dislike and resent this game over time. It’s just all the parts of other games that aren’t very fun. Many games ask you to do chores for rewards, be they cool weapons or bits of story. Yonder just asks you to do chores. If I’m going to wander around gathering stuff I might as well play Minecraft where I can build cool structures and discover underground temples and lava flows. Or just aimlessly play some Street Fighter Alpha 3, which is mechanically engaging and still looks nice after 20 years. Even recent walking simulators I haven’t liked haven’t annoyed me like Yonder did, because at least they had a story, even if it didn’t resonate with me.

Yonder is like digging through a box filled with packing peanuts, and nothing else. It’s like a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread with no filling. It’s a dead end corridor where the only thing to do when you get to the end is turn around and go back.

Yonder feels like a game for very young children, except that it doesn't really have that aesthetic, it doesn't explain itself well, and some of its crafting systems are obtuse and complex enough I can't imagine a child not finding them both frustrating and inscrutable.

They made a beautiful world that’s not too bad to move around in, and they filled it with lots to do, but failed to add game mechanics or a reason to do any of it. It’s a shame, but most of all it’s really really boring.

I didn’t like Gone Home. At the time I thought that was because I played it too long after its release and after it had been spoiled for me. Some games just have their moment, and if you don’t catch them then you can’t go back. There were other things I didn’t like about it too. I didn’t like the fact that your character was following another character’s story, instead of learning her own. I didn’t like the character being followed, or find her story compelling. I thought the environments were not super attractive and the 90s kitsch was cute but also a little annoying. I came away from the game thinking “Really? This caused that big a stir?” It’s not that I hated it, it’s just that it didn’t resonate with me. I found it a little bit boring.

But I loved Firewatch, and I loved Night in the Woods, which is not strictly a walking simulator but shares many elements with the genre, so I was excited for What Remains of Edith Finch. What I heard about its macabre sense of humor and absurdism seemed right up my alley. I went (mostly) media silent on it, picked it up just before release and…it drifted into my backlog for a bit. But last night, after I finished Horizon: Zero Dawn, I pulled it out, intending to at least start it as a major change of pace from Horizon’s open world action.

Instead I finished it and…meh. Didn’t do much for me and definitely wasn’t worth the price. And this time I can’t blame it on coming to it too late or having it spoiled. This time I had pretty much the experience I was supposed to have. So why didn’t I like it?

What Remains of Edith Finch is as close to a Gone Home clone as you can find in a genre that’s all about presenting a unique environment and story. You play as a young woman returning to an empty family home to explore the environs and learn what happened to its inhabitants. The house unlocks bit by bit, with secret passages and routes, and you learn much of the story through notes you find stashed around the dwelling.

The key difference between What Remains of Edith Finch and Gone Home is that while Gone Home focused on a grounded story of a particular character, Edith Finch tells surrealist tales of a bunch of the Finch family members and how they met their various demises. And unlike Gone Home where the story played out via audio logs, in Edith Finch you get to actually play through the vignettes. It promises to be like an Edward Gorey or Tim Burton book brought to life, with a rambly old house and lots of delightful little deaths.

It promises, but it doesn’t really deliver. What Remains of Edith Finch lacks the courage of its convictions. It gives you the rotting old storybook house and then tells a bunch of stories with various styles and tones. This creates variety in both visuals and sort of gameplay, but takes away from the cohesive feeling. What Remains of Edith finch is also a lot less gloomy than I expected from the house and description, at times being even lighthearted.

What Remains of Edith Finch also isn’t only a walking simulator. It has a bunch of minigames in it that you play as you experience each character’s death. These range from a not very good first person platforming segment to a kind of boring kite flying simulator (I guess walking was too intense?) to a segment where you walk around but actually have a weapon you can use, which makes it kind of like a real video game, only it sucks.

That’s too harsh, but the various playable segments vary wildly in complexity and quality. The first one starts quite promisingly with a variety of play styles (though they’re pretty janky) and a cool little fantasy tale from a child’s mind, but most of the later segments cannot match it. You fly a kite. You swing in a swing. It’s not walking but that doesn’t make it fun.

That’s not to say they’re all bad, A couple of the lengthier experiences have enough complexity to at least feel clever or interesting, and there are a few moments that genuinely delighted me, mostly relating to the imaginations of very young children. The main story in the house is also presented well and has its moments, but it’s very short too and the whole game can be wrapped up in less than two hours. $20 for a two hour experience is a lot to ask, and when that experience is mediocre its way too much to ask.

I think, in the end, though, the reason I didn’t like Gone Home and What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t because they were short or had simplistic gameplay. It’s because the player characters are pretty irrelevant to both stories. They walk through a house, they learn about the actual, important, people, and that’s it. What Remains of Edith Finch does more to build your character with her monologues, which show up as text in the environment in a cool effect, but in the end it doesn’t amount to much. She isn’t all that interesting and this isn’t really her story. It tries to connect you to the other family members by having you play their stories but that didn’t work for me either. You spent too little time with them to really get to know them, for the most part, and…I didn’t care. I said that aloud to the screen multiple times. “I don’t care. Get on with it.” I was bored and disconnected. Not a good sign.

Firewatch and Night in the Woods, on the other hand, tell stories about their main characters. You learn about other goings on as well, of course, but both Henry and Mae are dynamic people with goals and problems and I connected well with both them. It propelled me through the narrative and involved me in those games, which made everything else much more interesting. Both games also presented larger areas and bigger stories, which let me settle in and get involved in the world. Night in the Woods features a side activity where you steal pretzels and feed them to rats, and you have to go do it every day until the narrative wraps up, and it’s super repetitive and not great mechanically, but damn it I cared. I cared about Mae and I cared about her rats and I wanted to make both of them happy.

What Remains of Edith Finch didn’t make me care. It felt like I was going through a museum, viewing the various exhibits and reading the plaques and being bored. I don’t think video games are a great way to tell this kind of story. They’re best when they’re focused on the protagonist (if there is one) and what they’re doing. I’ve never played Street Fighter and wished I was playing as one of the guys in the butcher shop in Chun Li’s stage; holding a chicken and watching the fight. What Remains of Edith Finch and Gone Home make you background characters to the real story (though What Remains of Edith Finch does try to change that dynamic) and that’s not a good method of video game storytelling for me. I’d rather read a book or watch a movie if I’m going to be a passive participant.

Still, What Remains of Edith Finch isn’t a terrible game. It has some nice visuals, some good writing (though not consistently so) a decent environment and some moments I genuinely enjoyed. The short run time means it’s not around long enough to miserably drag. I wouldn’t strongly warn anyone against it. It’s short and not totally unpleasant and it was clearly a labor of love. I wish I liked it more than I did. Who knows, maybe you will.