I'm back. Sorry.

I originally skipped my log for May because when June rolled around there were a lot more important things starting to happen I wanted to wait until there was a better vibe out there, but if America in 2020 has proved anything it's that The Horror Won't Stop. So fuck it, this stuff is all trivial and usually ignored in the best of times. Whatever. It really just means I have two months to comb back through for this little ongoing column that I've been throwing out into the void. Without further ado:

MAY

Cathedral

I started off May by putting down Cathedral. I really love this game and I think it's a shame it hasn't gotten the attention it deserves. Last I checked there wasn't even a GameFAQs guide for it. But, I found myself hitting a boss later in the game that I had trouble with and decided to stop.

It's weird, I usually only stop playing a game when I hit something that really pisses me off or tries my patience, but I only tried the boss I stopped at a handful of times. I really did feel like I got my fill of it. For a game as simple-looking as this one, I got at least 30 hours out of it.

I would still recommend this to anyone looking for a solid metroidvania, and I think the talisman system is a nice twist on the usual formula. Go buy it!

Kero Blaster

A solid entry from the beloved developer of Cave Story. Kero Blaster is much shorter and straightforward than Cave Story was, but it's a hardly a bad thing. It's a solid platform/shooter and I look forward to playing it again sometime soon. If you're interested in playing this, I would recommend playing Pink Hour or Pink Heaven beforehand to get a feel for what it's like. It's a great little game full of charm.

Omensight

The first thing I remember when I launched this game was "boy, this sure runs poorly for a game with such simple assets." Then I saw that this game supposedly takes place in the same universe as Stories: The Paths of Destinies and it suddenly made sense. Just like that game, it's a top down (3/4?) action game that runs very poorly unless your graphics settings are turned all the way down. However, unlike the previous game, I was able to run this more than once and get to the title screen which is definitely a step in the right direction.

At first I was intrigued by Omensight's unique structure. You play as a some sort of deity thing (I can't remember the proper name) that runs through a crumbling land on the day the world ends. You are then given the option to go back through the day before over and over again following different characters, persuading them to follow different paths and uncover the mystery behind the cataclysm and how you can prevent it. Unfortunately, this is all it has going for it.

The characters in Omensight for the most part feel like stock characters from a story about medieval fantasy warfare. They were all basically fine, but bland and uninteresting. Of particular note, I didn't care at all for Ratika, the one character who is clearly supposed to be somehow charming and quirky, only to feel more annoying than anything else. While uncovering the mystery was the biggest motivator to continue, at some point I stopped paying attention, as I couldn't care about the fates of any of the characters.

None of this is helped by the gameplay. The gameplay is pretty simple on the surface, mashing attack, dodging, and shooting off spells both from your own character and whatever one you happen to be shadowing at the time. I didn't mind it at first, but it quickly started to get on my nerves with just how poorly some of the controls are implemented. Specifically the dodge/dash move just doesn't work well. I often found it too sluggish to dodge attacks or, more often, just wouldn't fire off at all. When it did work, I often found it hard to aim, usually taking me in a direction I never intended, often leading me into a pit of lava. This wouldn't be a problem if it weren't such a major part of the gameplay, especially as the hordes of enemies get harder and harder. At some point, I was just begging to get something else to break up the sluggish and monotonous combat, but it never came. There was never a part where the combat started to feel good.

I tried to stick it out as long as I could, at some point bumping down the difficulty to compensate for the terrible controls, but at the end —by which I literally mean the final boss of the game— I just got to frustrated and uninterested to keep going. Even if I made it all through the game, I still didn't really care what happened to the characters. Still there's promise here in the main conceit and if there were some major changes, you might have something solid. As it stands, I can only recommend to avoid it.

What the Golf?

This is the best golf game I've ever played, and I've played Desert Golfing. It also only nominally a golf game at some point, but that only adds to the charm. Because at the end of the day, fuck golf, this is more fun. The only annoying bit was the overuse of the phrase "Covfefe." What year is this?

The Gardens Between

I couldn't help but be a little wary of this game as it seemed, from the outside, like an indie-riffic game that likely had an unsubtle metaphor about death or coming out of the closet that it would bash you over the head with (it would've helped to actually read anything about it).

To go off on a tangent here that is completely unrelated to The Gardens Between (which is a good game, I'll go into it in a minute): as a gay dude with attitude, I appreciate the need for stories about coming to terms with and accepting your sexual orientation/gender identity, I just find that most games that try to tackle this do it an a very poor, obfuscating way, mostly dealing in a metaphors that don't track to well. It's like the problem with the X-Men standing in for gay people. Yes gay people can be feared and hated for no reason, but they also cannot realistically destroy a city full of people by accident. Anyway, back to what I was talking about.

Luckily, it's not about that stuff at all, instead about a good friend moving away. It's cute, but not too twee, and the main time-bending mechanic is used really well; the puzzles advance in a way that makes sense and never take too long to figure out. It's never too easy, but I also never went online to try and figure out the solution to whatever level I was on. In my mind this is the mark of an excellent puzzle game.

It's short, it's sweet, and clever to boot. Even if one of the main characters is named "Frendt." Luckily, you'd only find that out if you were to read about this game before hand.

Gato Roboto

They made a metroid! With a cat.

Okay, it's more complicated than that, and there's a decent amount of variety between this and actual Metroid games, but it's very much in that vein and in that style. I did appreciate the stark black and white graphics of the games; not only does it stand out, but it made things very easy to navigate. The boss fights are also very hard, but not too much to ever push me away. It can be a little too cute at times, but it's a solid Metroid-'em-up.

Horace

This game is disgustingly British. Seriously, this game is British-as-hell and if that's offensive to you (perhaps you're Irish, I don't know), it is one of the reasons to avoid this game. But if you're not disgusted by the Hated Brits, then you'll probably find it to be a charming story of a proper English robot who loves video games who is trying to find his family. The speech-to-text dialogue works very well, but I can't help but feel the cutscenes are often overly-long and would appreciate it if it were just a series of text boxes I could fast-forward through.

But, that's only one of the problems plaguing Horace. The platforming (which is the main part of the game) doesn't feel great and the character had a tendency to keep going in the same direction even after I stopped pressing on the stick. The first time it happened, I thought it was the game taking control to introduce some sort of mechanic or something, but then Horace just walked directly into a wall of electric spikes.

Of course, there are also the minigames, but none of them stand out too much aside from Rock Band-esque drumming game and they're often more distracting than anything else. At some point (the metroidvania point) I found myself giving up. Besides, I'm fairly certain I could predict what would happen later (robot rights, standard Iron Giant narrative), and the Britishness was starting to rub me the wrong way.

JUNE

And then came June. The good news is that I was rehired at my old job. The bad news was everything else. More police murders, more coronavirus, and a lot more uncovered sex crimes. If you were ever wondering if we all died ten years ago and have, unbeknownst to us, been living in some sort of punishing Hell on Earth, you are far from alone. At any rate, I've been pretty depressed and in a malaise, not really being able to get into any games. I couldn't even watch movies. According to Letterboxd, I only watched two this whole month. Anyway, games.

FAR: Lone Sails

I played this game because Limmy fawned over it, describing it as beautiful. He's right! It's a great little game about heading out into the unknown by yourself, braving the ruins of a once-prosperous world now devoid of life. It's wonderful, and worth anybody's time. It is also thankfully devoid of heavy-handed storytelling that a game that looks like this would suggest. It's one of the better games I played this year.

Kids

I couldn't help but find this game to be a bit of a disappointment, especially when compared to Plug & Play. It just isn't as entertaining as it's predecessor and seems like it is trying to convey some sort of incomprehensible metaphor. It is technically fine, just not great.

Oh, I should also mentioned I tried to play Spyro: The Re-Ignited Trilogy, but something about the visuals made me physically sick. I read online that it was the Motion Blur, but when I turned it off, I still had trouble playing it. I don't know, I think this game may have ruined 3D games for me forever as other, similar games that didn't affect me before suddenly made me feel somewhat ill. I don't know, maybe I'm just getting old.