Adventure games have gone through many evolutions since the Indie market more or less completely took them over from the apathetic AAA industry, but the old point-and-clicks still have their proponents, myself included. Crowns and Pawns: Kingdom of Deceit initially felt like one of those tourist information type games—where a country with very limited representation in the video game industry makes a game about its own culture to stand out—but after getting a little further into it Crowns and Pawns has proven to be a delightful throwback to a certain era of the point-and-click genre. In particular, it feels beholden to the Broken Sword series and its combination of globe-trotting archeological thriller intrigue, obtuse puzzles, and wise-ass sense of humor. The effect is not too dissimilar to the knowing, comedic homages Pendulo Studios tends to make, such as the Runaway trilogy or The Next Big Thing, but if anything Crowns and Pawns is even more tongue-in-cheek about its genre trappings.
Crowns and Pawns sees Milda, a struggling young professional living in Chicago, receive a notary missive about her deceased grandfather leaving her his house back in the old country of Lithuania. Upon reaching Vilnius and discovering that someone had ransacked her grandpa's home it becomes clear that he was part of a conspiracy involving the KGB, an ancestral treasure of the Lithuanian people, possible psychic powers granted by said artifact, and Milda's estranged father whom she hasn't seen since she was a child. The game is loosely structured in what first appears to be a non-linear fashion as you track down keys that might reveal the final resting place of this artifact, but is more guided by circumstance: for instance, finding a major clue just triggered the next step in an unrelated puzzle chain at the point of the playthrough I'm at presently, and since I've no other leads I guess I'm investigating this new development. Puzzles tend to be the usual mix of inventory management and talking to the right people about the right topics, with your local friend Joris always ready to give you a reminder of your current task. You also have your smartphone at hand, which in addition to letting you communicate with NPCs remotely can also be used to track information and link notes together if there's something they have in common. This note combination tech has thrown me a few times; there are occasions where you need to use it to fill gaps in an investigation before it can proceed, but you can also receive important clues if you just go in there every once and a while and see if anything matches up.
This is how you know this game knows its historical roots well, for better or worse. I got all this shit after like ten minutes of playing. I bet I never even use half of it. Ahhh, that's the stuff.
The game looks sharp, using a combination of stylized 3D polygonal models for characters and some attractive background art that keeps itself as close to minimalistic as is viable to not confuse the player with too many details. It also has the usual suite of modern adventure game quality-of-life touches, like a double-click warp for screen transitions—that is, if you double-click an exit you just immediately move to the next screen rather than wait for the walking animation to get you there, though it doesn't work with non-transition hotspots—and there's two buttons for highlighting every hotspot in the area, one of which is the mouse wheel, so that's handy. I kinda consider those two to be bare minimum these days, but I'm always happy to see a developer savvy enough about its audience and what they want to include such features.
Conversely, there's no real hint system (Joris reminding you of your current goal is as close as you're going to get) but some puzzles are better foreshadowed than others. For instance, the librarian's cat is called "Fortuna"—even if you didn't pick up on the hint that the cat's all about tuna, the librarian will straight up tell you once you reach the part of the game where cajoling the cat becomes necessary. Others are real odd: there's a bottle of sacramental wine you need to steal back from a homeless guy by basically turning a regular bottle into holy wine by filling it with holy water and trading it for the real one. However, the bum takes one whiff of this makeshift sacramental wine and declares it too watered down; to convince him, you need to take your invisible ink that you found hours ago and add that to the wine too. I only found out by adding it to the wine out of desperation, since it was the only other liquid I was carrying, but in retrospect I'm not sure how that worked as a solution. It's the nature of any adventure game, Crowns and Pawns included, to give you softballs one moment—the stuff you've figured out even before you've found the items needed to resolve it—and then toss your way some of those messed-up Winnie the Pooh Home Run Derby-ass throws that turn invisible mid-air or warp through space-time that you have no rational chance of connecting with.
Yeah, what gives? I did the thing now give me the thing. Have you never appeared in an adventure game before, Father?
On the whole, though, I've been enjoying Crowns and Pawns's thriller mystery pace, its nods to the genre with understated meta jokes and moments of insouciant mischief (why visit Europe if you can't be an Ugly American every chance you get?), little quirks like being able to change your protagonist's appearance and wardrobe (and it even factors into an early puzzle), a player-determined choice of career for Milda that also factors into a few puzzles, a clean visual style with some decent voice acting, and a level of puzzle difficulty which is occasionally bewildering but not yet something I haven't been able to muddle through with enough time, patience, and feverish clicking (after pointing first, naturally). You'd think after playing like a hundred of these I'd be a little more attuned to the logic processes behind the puzzles this genre tends to exhibit, but I suppose every point-and-click game is subtly insane in its own unique way. Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to take a day trip to Belarus to meet with an informant who knew my father by bullshitting my way on board a hockey fan club's coach somehow. Better get to summoning my inner-Bakalar...
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, that was an abrupt ending, but I'll say the game remained intriguing and quippy right up to its conclusion. I honestly didn't run into any more tricky puzzles after the hockey game I mentioned—which honestly felt trial-and-error-y, but maybe that's because I'm an idiot that wasn't tracking what they were saying about lines and pairs—and the rest of the game was smooth sailing. You never can predict how these games will go difficulty-wise. Anyway, they left it on a semi-cliffhanger (let's say some pertinent information was left unsaid) so I guess they might do some sequels. I'll look forward to them; this was a pretty slick comedic adventure all-told, up there with the likes of The Book of Unwritten Tales series from King Art Games.
Well, well, well, if it isn't that rarest of rare scenarios: an episode of 64 in 64 where I'm having as much fun playing the two Nintendo 64 games as I am writing about them. However, I will be taking my first steps down a potentially dark path by breaking an unspoken rule of sorts, so this entry might prove to be... controversial? At any rate I could use a respite from the heat and high humidity this month so I'm glad I'm not going to have to flopsweat my way through another sumo game or something even more demanding. Will that translate to a better episode? Probably not, but I don't do this for you guys. Wait, no, I absolutely do, please come back! ...Aaaah, rats. Guess I gotta pencil in something impenetrably stupid for next month. Are there any more grimdark fighters that control entirely with the C-buttons left in the list? I guess I'll mac that far lane when I get to it.
Speaking of July, I'll be bringing back my Game OVA feature in the coming weeks so it seemed prudent to do some of that whole cross-feature promotional business and talk about all the anime licensed games that hit the N64. Not surprisingly, since most licensed games are made on the cheap and that often means only having enough resources to develop for the market leader console (that would be the Sony PlayStation, which I'm sure saw hundreds), there actually aren't too many N64 games featuring anime licenses. In fact, I could only find seven of them, and three of those are Doraemon. Now I like Doraemon as much as the next robot cat fanatic but monopolizing half the anime games on the system seems a bit excessive. Needless to say, these are all Japanese-only releases so lord help us and my extremely limited ability to read Kanji if they actually turn up on here. They are as follows (with the order they were released in brackets):
Doraemon: Nobita to 3-Tsu no Seireiseki (20th): The first N64 Doraemon game. Doraemon's a robot cat, as previously stated, and his adventures with the human boy Nobita and his friends usually have an educational, grade-schooler vibe to them. The subtitle means "Nobita and the Three Fairy Spirit Stones".
Super B-Daman: Battle Phoenix 64 (117th): B-Daman were these toys that had recesses in their stomachs that you could use to fire marbles at other B-Daman toys, or really anything you wanted pelted with marbles. The toyline included various extant licenses like Bomberman but Super B-Daman was a bespoke canon that later saw manga and anime of its own, tying into this game.
Doraemon 2: Nobita to Hikari no Shinden (163rd): The second N64 Doraemon game. The subtitle means "Nobita and the Temple of Light". I guess that means they visit a Temple of Light.
Neon Genesis Evangelion (218th): One of the weirder tie-ins, this N64 game based on Hideaki Anno's deeply strange exercise in deconstructing mecha anime uses a lot of badly compressed clips from the show. I forget how it actually plays, but I'm not too interested in finding out either.
Super Robot Taisen 64 (260th): Super Robot Wars 64 isn't so much based on an anime but based on all the anime, at least all the ones with mecha in them. It's the only SRT/SRW game for the system and one of its few strategy RPGs, so for those reasons I'm a little curious to check it out. I still imagine it'll be inscrutable on multiple fronts though (mechanically, linguistically, and culturally).
Nintama Rantarou 64 Game Gallery (317th): Nintama Rantarou is like Naruto for babies (or, well, smaller babies) and was an incredibly popular kids' show that saw many video game tie-ins; five on the SNES alone. This sure looks like a no-budget quickie mini-game collection.
Doraemon 3: Nobita no Machi SOS! (332nd): The third and last N64 Doraemon game. The subtitle means "Nobita's Town SOS!". Sounds like Nobita's town is probably in trouble, then.
If anime is for jerks, then so is disregarding the rules. We better restate them here for the record:
Each episode of 64 in 64 features two N64 games (sometimes three) which I play for exactly sixty-four minutes apiece: no more, no less. Except sometimes it's a bit more because I forgot to hit "go" on the stopwatch app. Whoopsie-dumples.
I picked one of these by the way. The first one, specifically, with the "(Pre-Select)" next to its name. I did not pick the second, "(Random)", because my self-loathing has yet to reach that tier. Maybe one day! Fingers crossed!
Each game then receives four quarterly updates taken while playing and rundowns of where it's from, how well it's aged, and how likely it is to see another day in the sun via the Nintendo Switch Online service. Typical answers to all three, respectively, are "some manner of hole", "not great", and "not great".
We're not touching any game already available on Nintendo Switch Online or announced to be added because that would make things too easy and/or too fun. This is serious research we're doing here. Fortunately, it looks like Nintendo's completely given up on adding more N64 games to the service so we should be in the clear for any potential double-booking. I'm sure "fortunately" is the adverb I wanted to use there.
If you'd like to check out the earlier episodes, you can do so either through the ranking list at the very end or this table right here:
History: In a move typical of Acclaim, Forsaken is a game that was very much aping a then-flavor of the month, which would be Parallax's trailblazing 1995 "six-degrees-of-freedom" first-person shooter Descent and its 1996 sequel Descent II. To set it apart a little bit, Acclaim gave their particular spin a post-apocalyptic flavor and an excellent, suitably late-'90s drum-n-bass/EDM soundtrack from The Swarm, a musical project co-founded by UK TV composer Dominic Glynn. However, in a move very atypical of Acclaim, Forsaken's actually a pretty decent clone that comes close to surpassing its inspiration. It even received a serviceable N64 port, which was extremely rare for the PC-to-N64 FPS pipeline that also included the mediocre likes of Duke Nukem 64, Doom 64, and Hexen 64. It's a minor miracle that an N64 Acclaim game could rise above its station, but perhaps that's not giving enough credit to the developers Iguana UK (previously Optimus Software, later Acclaim Studios Teesside) who did some great work here. The only other N64 game they developed, far as I can tell, is 1999's Shadow Man so we might yet bump into them again. For those keeping track, there were a staggering 31 N64 games published by Acclaim and this is the third of those we've covered after Armorines: Project S.W.A.R.M. and South Park Rally, both random picks that are hovering around the bottom half of the rankings. (Incidentally, Acclaim were the third biggest publishers for the system, after Midway (38) and Nintendo (58) with Konami (29) in a close fourth place.)
Forsaken 64 is a game I swore I owned at one point, or maybe just rented a lot, but regardless it was one of my old favorites for the system and is one of the few remaining games with that sort of personal connection I've yet to feature here. I guess I still have this weird determination to prove that the UK gaming industry could produce globally acclaimed (so to speak) games if we really put our minds to it, beyond the Rare platformers everyone already knows. That said, it's been a while since I last played and who knows how well its multi-directional control stick movement has held up over the years; it's certainly made other N64 FPS games harder to revisit. Only one way to know for sure.
16 Minutes In
Tanks hit hard, but you know what they can't do? Fly. Just hover right over them, they can't do shit.
Man, I forgot how intense this game can be. Enemies are flying at you in all directions and I'm over here panicking because I'm still getting used to the controls. Or re-used to, I suppose. The Control Stick is used for camera movement—unavoidable, given the C-buttons are inadequate for quickly navigating a fully three-dimensional space—the A and B buttons produce forward and backwards momentum, respectively. The C-buttons instead are used for strafing in those directions; a control scheme that works perfectly when the C-buttons are remapped to a modern controller's second analog stick. That leaves Z and the right bumper for your two weapons, the types of which vary depending on what you've picked up (the game has a lot of weapon types). Adjusting to the six-directional movement takes remarkably little time, but it's nigh-impossible to use the C-buttons, camera stick, and face button accelerators simultaneously—it's like patting your head, rubbing your stomach, and scratching your butt at the same time—but maybe that's just something I either get used to trying to juggle, or I alternate between moving around normally to just strafing around in circles if I happen to meet a large enemy force or boss that needs whittling down.
Forsaken's mission structure is essentially a meritocracy: you get different missions at the first main split depending on how well you do, with each split potentially splitting again further down the road. I guess the idea is that you have an "easy" campaign if you limp through that first mission like the neophyte you are and once you've completed all of its missions you can go right back to the start and effortlessly stomp it with all the practice you've had, leading to the harder routes. That first mission simply involved destroying all the enemies—testing both your skill in combat and the ease in which you get around the 3D levels quickly—while the second involved carrying a nuke to the heart of a base and then escaping in time. I'm now on the third map, which looks to be a similar hunt to the first.
32 Minutes In
The mission select monitor, which I guess might double as a virtual pool table. Nuke is the first mission, I'm here because I game over'd.
Ah. Something else that I forgot is that this game uses an extra life system rather than restarting the current mission; it means that you can quickly head back to where you died to recover all your power-ups without resetting the stage, but you can only die so many times before you hit a game over that wipes all your progress. That's what just happened to me on the fourth mission, which had me chasing down a boss called the Metatank but dying before I could reach him. It simply means I'm going to have to be a little more judicious in future playthroughs, taking corners carefully and not allowing myself to become overwhelmed by enemy firepower; if all else fails, just fly backwards out of there and try to snipe them from the corridors. Pride? Pride will just get you killed in the post-apocalypse. That, and a whole bunch of lasers being shot at you.
Needless to say because the screenshot above already says it, but I've had to start over. I did bump up my initial lives count via the options menu and with a more cautious approach to levels I'm hoping to at least make it through the second half of this 64 minutes in one piece. One benefit of restarting is that I now have access to the second campaign set, having replayed the first level with a better result, though I'm not sure jumping into a harder mission set is necessarily going to be conducive to my survival. Still, it's better than repeating missions 2 through 4 again.
48 Minutes In
I've always appreciated the level design in these six-degree games. The way it hides passages and secret areas by putting them above or below you in unexpected ways.
Dang is this game tougher than I remember. Enemies can really deplete your health quick if you're not constantly moving, and having to mentally make the switch to strafe mode over forward momentum takes the old gray matter precious milliseconds I could be spent not getting vaporized by enemy drones. I thought I was real hot shit going with the harder missions after clearing the first with a better score, but that alternative second mission really opened my eyes to how unprepared I was for the game's harder content. It pits you in a battle against multiple other bounty hunters, essentially CPU with the same strengths and weapon variety you have albeit none of the ammo limitations, to chase after this golden orb and escape safely. Those AI opponents made mincemeat out of me in seconds, zipping around so fast I could barely react to their presence. For the sake of my own ego I'll opt for the possibility that these battles are meant for a player that has already beaten the game's easier set of missions and will leave them well enough alone for now.
So a few extra wrinkles I've discovered, besides the whole limited lives thing. One, your secondary weapon has a strict ammo limit, which I already knew about, but the same goes for your primary weapon too. If you deplete the energy meter that your primary weapon runs off, it'll cause its rate of fire to plummet and make you a sitting duck. You have to replenish it with certain purple collectibles (the shield recharges are also purple, but it's no big deal to confuse the two as you'll regularly need both). The other thing is how frequently enemies will collide with you in their dying moments, vindictively dipping your health with these kamikaze attacks, necessitating some distance between you and your enemies: getting too close means taking the brunt of their firepower and this posthumous collision damage both, and that's been a major cause of many deaths so far. For as tough as Forsaken is, there's so much I'm constantly learning about it—between enemy behaviors, more efficient controlling, and effectively using each weapon type—that I can see it being the type of game that has a small amount of content that you might still spend hours eventually mastering. Feels like I'm going to hit a figurative ceiling before too long though, as opposed to all the literal ones I keep flying into.
64 Minutes In
Check out that health bar on the top left. Skin of my teeth stuff. In retrospect, the sexy lady riding a jetbike probably wasn't a choice that offered a whole lot of defensive power.
With that, I manage to make it a little further than in my first attempt and can rest easy knowing some improvement has been made. That fourth mission's Metatank boss, by the way, is dropped directly into the starting room for that orb mission. It's just there for you to handle with whatever weak starting weapons you have, so your options are to peck away at its health slowly in an internecine battle that will unlikely end well for you or just pick a direction and flee until you find a few power-ups. Besides the starting weapon Pulsar, which has some decent firepower once you've found some weapon pods to upgrade it, there's also: the Suss-Gun for a much higher rate of fire (i.e. the spray-and-pray option); the Transpulse for shots that ricochet around making them devastating in narrow spaces; the Trojax, which lets you charge up powerful shots ideal for sturdier enemies like turrets and bosses; and the Beamlaser, which I only saw once, that's hard to aim but punches holes through anything. And those are just the primary weapons: your subs tend to be a mix of rockets and mines, effective in the right situations.
Feels like I was finally getting to grips with the game just as the hour's up, which is definitely promising. What's more is that the game finally let me save after clearing that fourth mission, suggesting the game does have a more permanent means of progress. No idea if losing my remaining lives means being sent back to the save file with a full set or just however many I had when the save was made; if it's the latter, it might be prudent to keep replaying those first four missions until I can do so without dying once. Regardless, we're done here.
How Well Has It Aged?: Foresightfully. Forsaken still plays better than it has any right to, as a N64 port of a PC FPS that's a little more complex than the usual on-foot stuff. Actually adjusting to an environment that goes up and down as often as left, right, forward, and backwards is intuitive in part because the N64's controls are serendipitously suited for the game but also because of small quality-of-life tweaks like how the game will frequently auto-shift your vehicle around so that you're always properly oriented; without this, navigation might get confusing fast. There's a harsh but not insurmountable challenge level, a wide array of power-ups and weapons to find if you're crafty, enemy types that might require fast reflexes and damage control one moment and sneaking around corners and lips for a better vantage point the next (especially turrets, which are just too destructive to fight face on), and a handful of mission types that generally bounce between eliminating all enemies, taking out a boss, or dropping a time bomb and quickly evacuating.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Forlorn Hope. If Forsaken comes to Switch it won't be as part of the N64 Switch Online library but instead directly as a retail game, since it was remastered not too long ago by the ancient FPS restoration crew Nightdive Studios and released on both PC and Xbox One. The Switch feels like it would be a natural home for this remake too, between a revisiting Nintendo fan audience with fond memories of the N64 port and being able to adapt the system's gyroscopic controls in-game somehow to give it an edge over its contemporaries. Easier said than done, I suppose.
History: 40 Winks is a 3D platformer from Eurocom that sees two protagonists, a boy named Ruff and a girl named Tumble, who in addition to obvious parental abuse going by their names alone are also in the unenviable position of being the only two capable of saving Dreamland from the villainous insomniac Nitekap, who in true Grinch fashion is determined not to let anyone else get a good night's sleep if he can't. (And here I thought Spyro the Dragon was the first insomniac platformer.) Worth noting is that, while the game did release on the PlayStation, its N64 port did not come to fruition despite being far enough along that review copies were sent out to (and reviewed by) various gaming magazines of the day. However, in 2019, Piko Interactive did eventually make good on the promise of a N64 40 Winks via a Kickstarter campaign to get carts manufactured.
Developers Eurocom is one of those British companies like Tiertex or US Gold that made most of their early scrip taking Japanese and American arcade games and converting them to the weird home computers us Euros were so fond of, later translating that porting experience to consoles once the Atari ST/Amiga markets dried up. They were also behind a few Midway N64 ports like Cruis'n World, Hydro Thunder, Mortal Kombat 4, and War Gods as well as the two Duke Nukem N64 games for GT Interactive (which also published this game, or were set to) so I have no doubt we'll encounter one of their "legit" releases eventually. (Did you know the "GT" in GT Interactive stood for "GoodTimes"? I sure didn't.)
So here it is, our first ever 64 in 64 candidate that was technically never an N64 game. At least, not in the sense that it was commercially available on the system back when the N64 was still active, though seeing a physical release so many years later does perhaps mean it qualifies all the same. I figured it was worth adding to the list regardless, along with about ten other close-to-done games sourced from Unseen64 and elsewhere, but we'll have to see if this "breaking of the seal" was a mistake or not. It's not like a whole bunch of the random picks I've played so far felt particularly complete either. (Some inside baseball here: I was this close to tossing a few homebrew and ROM hacks on the list too, but eventually thought better of it. I've actually been playing a Banjo-Kazooie/Ocarina of Time mash-up lately that's more fun than it has any right to be.)
16 Minutes In
This thing is meant to be a ghost, but they made it even scarier by having it resemble Glover. Now that's haunting.
Well, this seems... not objectionable? I'm sure I can muster something more encouraging than that with enough time but as a N64 collectathon platformer 40 Winks feels like a very perfunctory Mario 64 ersatz. Controls so far have included a three-hit attack combo and a ground-pound, though it's lacking anything more fancy like a 180 degree turn jump or a backwards somersault. Graphically it's pretty ugly but this is the N64 we're talking about so I guess it gets a pass there: at least things look like the things they're supposed to look like, so that's fair enough for me.
I've spent this first quarter-hour watching the intro, getting the 4-1-1 from a talking alarm clock named Wakey Wakey (I'd love to see this guy and TT from Diddy Kong Racing in a cage match, except I think there are laws against clockfighting), and jumping into the first stage of the first world. Collectibles so far include Zs, which are used as health; Moons, which are used as currency for your scream ranged attack; cogs, which are required to open doors to get further into the level; the Winks, which are the friendly little guys you're here to rescue (the essential collectible, like the B-K jiggies or the SM64 stars); and three color-coded dreamkeys that I have no idea what they open, but tend to be the best hidden. As long as I'm collecting shit I'm in hog heaven, but I am waiting to see if there's much more to the game than some simple platforming and combat. Can't really judge that from the first areas alone.
32 Minutes In
Yo, you see Ruff anywhere? We aren't joined at the hip, lady.
OK, so I've chanced upon a few other mechanics of note. The biggest is being able to shapeshift temporarily through jack-in-the-boxes, the benefits of which resemble those of the caps from Mario 64 (I suspect I'll be invoking that name a lot) in that you get powered up in some way—taller jumps, for example, or stronger attacks—and can only activate certain switches while in that form. I completed that first level, which involved finding two Winks in a haunted mansion, and have now entered the second which has you navigating a maze-like forest. Having health linked to a collectible that can be found anywhere makes it hard to die from just getting smacked around by enemies, but there are a few instant-death pitfalls around too. Thankfully, there's nothing you collect that gets reset upon death but all the same I'd like to avoid a game over mostly so I can sleep at night knowing I didn't get beaten by a children's game (ironically, I guess, given the theme). Oh yeah, I also raced a witch. That kinda sucked, since the course was super small and said witch was rubberbanded all to heck.
I think 40 Winks would've had a hard time standing out against all the system's highlights from this genre had it actually been released—say, Mario 64, Rayman 2, and the Rare oeuvre ("oeuv-Rare"?)—but conversely it doesn't feel quite as ramshackle as a Blues Brothers 2000 or a Chameleon Twist at least. I'll almost certainly manage to rank all the 3D platformers worth a song on the platform before this feature's done—though Earthworm Jim 3D and the Gexes might need to be Random picks only, due to abject cowardice on my part—and I strongly suspect 40 Winks will be somewhere in the middle once I'm through. We'll see if that prediction pans out.
48 Minutes In
The caveperson transformation has a stronger butt-stomp, which is often a better way of dealing with enemies. Did neanderthals dream? Does science know?
I think the sticking point with this game is the combat. It so often boils down to wailing on an enemy and having them hit you back during the cooldown between your combos. Unless there's a way to evade their attacks, getting hurt is unavoidable with any enemy encounter that isn't small fry you can defeat in a single combo; probably the reason why health is so plentiful. By the by, your munchkin protagonist both looks like and controls like a bowling ball with legs so being all evasive and dexterous is out of the question. This third level I'm on, the spooky cemetery, is doing more with the transformation mechanic: I have to hold onto this caveperson form through a number of rooms in order to open the way forward with its enhanced ground-pound—in addition to transformation-specific moves needed to make progress, there's also buttons that have a symbol of the right form you need and that usually means having to figure out where the closest jack-in-the-box might be hiding.
That said, the levels aren't exactly super elaborate open-world affairs, not even that forest maze level I just completed. What tends to be the case is that you'll regularly come across locked doors with a cog total written on them: cogs are usually just found floating around, though you'll sometimes need to clear out enemies or smash open chests to find them. The usual loop of moving from cog door to cog door means there's a limited amount of space in-between where the cogs can be found, so it's hard to get lost in this game or not have any idea to proceed; just poke around in the handful of rooms between the currently locked cog door and the previous one to find whatever you're missing. In some ways it's probably better than how frequently I was getting completely lost in Banjo-Tooie, but it does make the game a bit on the simple side.
64 Minutes In
Threadbear is Nitekap's right-hand ursine and controls most of the boss fights. This one lasted forever because there was five waves of adds. Really hope future boss fights are better.
With the last segment I was able to complete the third and last stage of this spooky world and defeat its boss, a bear riding a spider. I've figured out a few more things about how the game functions in the process: collecting all the Winks is a game-wide goal, but not something that will let you progress to the next world. Rather, that's what the dreamkeys are for: collecting all four from all three stages of a world means opening the way to the boss, which you then need to defeat to access a new room in the hub area that leads to the next world. So, basically, collect absolutely everything or you won't be able to beat the game: without every cog you won't be able to beat the stage, without every dreamkey you won't be able to face the boss and open the next world, and without all 40 Winks you won't be able to take on the final encounter. Fortunately, I'm the kind of nutcase that goes after 100% completion regardless of the circumstances, so making 100% compulsory isn't shifting my approach much.
If we go by that 40 count for the Winks, the seven I have would suggest I'm about a sixth of the way through the game. However, it could be that later worlds have larger stages and thus more Winks to rescue; the hub had five worlds plus the final door so it's probably the case I'm closer to a fifth done. So, extrapolating from that, the game's a lean 5-6 hours long which sounds about ideal. Can't say I hated my time with this one: 3D collectathons are like pizzas, after all, in that even the so-so ones are satisfying enough.
How Well Has It Aged?: Feel Free to Sleep On This One. 40 Winks isn't too bad but there's far better games of its type out there, both old and new, and I half-wonder if the greater competition on the N64 is what gave the publishers cold feet about releasing the game on there (as stated, it did come to the PS1 back in its time, where its main competition was Croc: Legend of the Gobbos and some annoying bandicoot). I think a younger audience might appreciate its straightforwardness if they're having trouble negotiating the more open worlds of other 3D platformers, even if it's lacking in the way of platforming challenges and the mashy combat leaves much to be desired.
Chance of Switch Online Inclusion: Beyond Our Wildest Dreams. 40 Winks did the same thing Forsaken did, above, where its eventual license holders just decided to bank on nostalgia and drop the thing on Steam. Unlike Forsaken, it doesn't appear to have undergone much of a remaster process though. Point is, if it didn't get a Switch release back then it probably won't ever (and it won't be the N64 version for Switch Online regardless).
Retro Achievements Earned: 7 of 71. Figures that 40 Winks would be represented on RA when an actual quality retail game like Forsaken isn't. The Venn diagram of 3D collectathon appreciators and achievement hunters is basically a single circle after all. Most of these achievements are for standard progress milestones, though I'm intrigued by frequent mention of a "hard mode". I didn't see an option for that when starting, so maybe it's a NG+ thing?
Do you kids like your Mega Mans? I know I sure do. I don't generally play a whole lot of Indie games imitating the Blue Bomber's numerous quirks, despite the fact they're almost as popular as all the Metroids and Castlevanias understudies out there. Mostly it's because they tend to be on the tougher side (I swear I'll give RosenkreuzStilette Freudenstachel another go one of these days, and I might even bother to learn how to spell it correctly too). Double Cross from 13AM Games isn't immediately reminiscent of Mega Man X from first blush until you start playing it and then its particular takes on wall-jumping and movement start to feel comfortably familiar. It's also one of many Indie platformers to try their hand at incorporating hookshot-based traversal, using the protagonist's Proton Slinger as a means to propel oneself through the air via a grappling point or snatching enemy projectiles to send them flying back from whence they came.
Said protagonist is enthusiast rookie agent Zahra Sinclair of RIFT: a peacekeeping organization of multiverse cops ensuring the many parallel Earths aren't at risk of any transdimensional banditry or other villainous exploitation. She faces one of the greatest dangers to RIFT yet, a masked supervillain with a grudge looking to dismantle the organization from the inside out by using their secrets and technology against them, and pursues leads across three different Earth variants to track down clues that point to this mastermind's true identity (I should probably state somewhere that this game came out before that Loki show aired, if this all sounds vaguely familiar). The game is set up to allow you to visit these three Earths in whichever order you wish (another Mega Man mainstay) and each world's group of stages are marked by a difficulty rating to give you some idea of the challenge you'll face, while also subtly hinting that it might allow for a more gradual difficulty curve if you alternate worlds rather than complete them one by one. The reason you might want to come back to a harder stage later rather than tough it out in the present is because the game has a set of collectibles that unlocks new passive and active skills for Zahra to use, making the game just that little bit more manageable the more of them you have to rely on. These might include health buffs, added defense, and new combat skills.
It's not good sci-fi without goop all over the walls. Though I suppose there's one other genre that applies to as well.
In a cute twist, Double Cross gives some amount of real estate to its central mystery with interstitial moments on board RIFT's HQ, during which you can talk to NPCs and use their areas of expertise to ascertain the meaning behind the evidence you've found. By having your fellow compatriots weigh in on some new jar of weird alien goop or an unknown piece of tech, you can learn some vital information and piece together enough to unlock where the boss of a world is hiding while in the long-term also gradually put together the identity of the mastermind. These sequences don't require much detective work—there's like eight people you can talk to, and it's usually pretty obvious where their interests lie—but they're an appealing means to break up the platforming levels a little.
Double Cross occasionally feels like it's about to collapse under its own weight with the amount of mechanics it's incorporated into its moment-to-moment gameplay. In addition to a light attack and heavy attack, different combinations of which produce different results, there's also the jump, a very Hollow Knight-style health recovery move that burns off the player's energy meter and takes a second or two of charging to activate, the aforementioned hookshot ersatz, an AoE burst and a long-range fireball that both run off the same energy meter, and a dodge roll that is useful in combat and sometimes necessary for evading fast-moving hazards. All of these need buttons and since there's not enough to go around, the hookshot requires pressing left on the right analog stick while the dodge roll uses right on the same stick. It's a little inelegant at first, and could probably be optimized better without perhaps the fireball and burst hogging the triggers (the other triggers open the menu, which you'd think the game would use the Start button for), but you eventually get used to it. Once you're propelling yourself around from hookshot point to hookshot point and hitting the dodge at pivotal moments it starts to come together, but only just.
It's not exactly Poirot, but the detective investigation half of the game is an appreciated element of narrative depth.
Beyond that though, the game's been a great deal of fun in pure 2D platforming terms and the Saturday morning sci-fi cartoon earnestness and minor adventure game puzzles does lend it the type of personality these dime-a-dozen 2D platformers need to stand out in a very busy market. The upgrade gems give you reason to go back to levels if you miss any, but it does the merciful thing of registering the ones you've found by where they appear in a stage: if there's a gap between the one you just got and the last one you picked up, you'll know whereabouts to start looking for the one you missed. The three worlds distinguish themselves not only by their aesthetic but the types of platforming challenges you can expect to find: the subterranean ickfest Gootopia, for instance, has many puzzles resembling those from Portal 2 where the behavior of the goo covering the walls changes depending on its color (red means it's sticky enough to climb on, blue means you can bounce off it at great heights, etc.). Musically and graphically it's a little plain but certainly not objectionable. The difficulty's a little all over the place, but there's no serious penalties for dying so it's not much of a drag on the harder levels. While it can sometimes feel like it's just about holding itself together, I can't help but appreciate its ingenuity and charm.
We like to joke around here with our silly made-up names for genres, like Zeldersatzes and explormers, but it's really hard to narrow down which of those two perfectly cromulent words best encapsulates what Studio Pixel Punk has made here with Unsighted. Waking up in an underground laboratory, you play as Alma, a dexterous combat automaton built to resist the human incursion on your city. A meteor crashed here long ago, spreading around an enigmatic substance called Anima which granted sapience to all artificial lifeforms, and they've been fighting to hold onto that self-awareness from their organic former masters ever since. Since Alma's an amnesiac, the game takes a little while to get going but soon enough you've got your requisite multiple targets to chase after each at the very end of a long and challenging dungeon full of traps and puzzles. So far, so Zelda, but the game's also big on traversal upgrades and backtracking to a degree most Zeldas balk at.
The game's also taken a page from Hyper Light Drifter's speedy playbook by presenting a combat system that is very much centered around evasion and tactical strikes over brute strength. Swinging away at enemies will likely tire you out fast and leave you exposed to heavy retribution, and Alma can't absorb too much harm in the first place. There's healing items you can use to stay in the fight, some of which eventually regenerate after defeating enough enemies, but it's not nearly enough to let you tank your way through the game. Instead, combat requires a keen sense of timing if you're going to survive; parries out the wazoo, in so many words. The parry guard is very generous when it comes to deflecting damage, lasting around a second and change, but a perfectly timed one will stun your opponent and leave them temporarily vulnerable to some massive critical hits. A common encounter might see you facing down multiple opponents at once, judiciously blocking their fast attacks until you nail a perfect riposte and eliminate that foe from the force attacking you, depleting their numbers one by one. Each enemy has a telltale red glow before they attack, giving you all the visual information you need to put up a defensive stance in time. It's a system that is very punishing when faced with a crowd but one that proves both satisfying and fast-moving when you're practiced enough to pull off those perfect parries on a regular basis. Fortunately, the window isn't quite as narrow as you'd think.
The graphics look great in part because of the visual effects. Check out all that dithering! Who doesn't like a nice dither? Whither the dithering, as I'm often heard to ask.
This overbearing sense of brutal survival pervades much of the game's sensibilities outside of combat as well, for better but mostly for worse. One of the game's most immediately disheartening features is a countdown timer on every single NPC you meet, as well as yourself: this is because all automatons are powered by Anima, which is slowly running out now that the meteor has been locked away by an invading force of humans and protected by shadowy creatures that quickly prove to be an almost insurmountable threat. Time passes normally while you're out exploring, as evinced by a slow day/night cycle, and accelerates whenever you die or perform certain activities: this subsequently gives you a ticking clock to not only finish the game but do so with the minimum amount of casualties by playing it safe and moving quickly from objective to objective. These casualties might include side-story-related NPCs, vendors with unique items or services to sell, cute little guys who are just chillin', and major story characters: really no-one is immune, and while I've yet to confirm it I imagine your own timer running out would be very not great to your chances of completing the game. Naturally, this all bodes poorly for any player who isn't able to keep up with the game's high combat challenge nor any who would prefer to procrastinate by looking for treasures off the beaten path or popping back to earlier areas with their shiny new abilities to see what they can now reach.
In fact, it's one of the most counterintuitive game design decisions I've ever seen for the type of gameplay Unsighted offers, with its large world map to explore and many secrets to find and side-quests to follow. I can only surmise it was insisted upon last second by the studio owner's nepobaby hire so it would look like he was doing something; even if you want to make the argument that everyone's finite longevity adds weight to the hero's journey and especially to their failures, an expansive open-world action-RPG that takes over a dozen hours to complete is typically not the type of game in which you'd introduce such a feature. (Nor, if I'm being honest, the achievement set which would require completing the game something like five times in five very different ways. Who even has that kind of time? Well, if the game has one harsh lesson for us all, it's that no-one has as much time as they'd hope.) Happily, if you can deal with the shame of switching to Unsighted's Easy Mode in all but name, you can turn these timers off and enjoy the game at your leisure without necessarily sacrificing the medium difficulty's more enjoyably challenging combat. I can appreciate a modular difficulty system, at least.
Loveable MechaGranny over here sells you cogs, a useful and inexpensive temporary stat buff item great for upcoming boss fights. That is, unless a certain amount of in-game time has passed, in which case all she has to offer you is soul-crushing survivor's guilt.
The timers definitely put a huge dampener on my excitement to play the game, even when turned off as now I'm no longer playing it "the developer intended way" which has created this awkward rift between me, the player, and the game designers. I'll get over it though, since the gameplay is excellent and the pixel graphics can be occasionally striking when they're not making things a little visually untidy. I appreciate the considerable amount of content that has been put into the game: there's five dungeons, which can be tackled in any order, but also a robust crafting system and a few other side-quests and bonus objectives I've been picking up since awakening in the NPC hub. That there's so many things to spend money on right now, from upgrades to crafting blueprints and ingredients to new gear, gives the game a long tail I'm free to enjoy now that the deadlines are out the window. Combat's tough and you really get punished for mistakes: many enemies take two or three HP chunks off you per hit and you only start with seven, though to mitigate that there's a chip upgrade system that lets you add to HP as well as providing other passive benefits (my favorite so far is one that prevents money loss upon death; no more corpse runs for me). I'm sure I've deprived myself of some quality dramatic stakes by making sure all my vendor friends don't disappear forever or, worse, end up going rogue due to a lack of Mystery Meteor Juice but I find it hard to be too torn up about that. It's an indescribably odd feeling to like a game so much in the abstract and yet find oneself so at odds with what the designers believe is fun; games do have an aspect of that "death of the author" conceit by how often players will cheat or mod around certain obstacles to suit their own preferences (if I can remove item encumbrance or degradation, I'll do so) but I usually err towards incorporating the designers' wishes and intent when playing games. Here, I'm doing all I can to ameliorate their attempts to sabotage a really neat game they made, and boy does that feel like a strange position to take.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: I'll still maintain that in pure gameplay terms this is one of the best Indie Zeldersatzes that money can buy. The upgrades really lend a lot to the traversal even if they're just taken from Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword and placed in a 2D context (specifically referring to the spinning top you ride around and the double-hookshots respectively). Turns out only certain NPCs really matter all that much but it's still heartbreaking to die on a boss or be pushing blocks across the ice for one of those obnoxious puzzles and be informed that your dilly-dallying for collectibles or lack of finesse has killed yet another adorable town resident. So glad I turned that feature off, even if it felt like it made the game easier in so many ways. I dunno, the 4 out of 5 still stands because I can't really figure out half the decisions that went into the design, but the stuff that hits really does hit.
Welcome back to the Mega Archive, still chronologically displaced thirty years to the day as we cover the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis's release schedule for June 1993 in its entirety. A remarkable rarity for this Mega Archive is that we have almost zero crossover with the SNES: it's all going to be system exclusives and PC/Amiga/Arcade ports this time around, with just one exception. The genre breakdown still, sadly, heavily favors sports games with four new ones in this batch of ten, though at least one doesn't quite take its sport as seriously as the others. We also have a few shooters, a realistic (by 16-bit standards) flight sim, a physics-based platformer, a lesser sequel to a NES classic, and a game that will literally play itself if you leave it alone. An eclectic bunch as always.
Next month this feature will see us back in Sega CD territory, catching us up to the end of June and reaching the midpoint of what's proven to be a busy year for both the Mega Archive and the Mega Archive CD. We'll be slipping out of this temporal sync around the same time as well, since we won't see any July '93 games until August, but that was never going to last as we get closer to the end of the year. The Sega Mega Drive was, after all, the highest selling console in the world for 1993 so expect to see a lot more third-party support in the near future.
Speaking of support, you can support this feature by revisiting some of its earlier entries: (Rejoice! No more giant ugly tables, I've put everything into one handy Google Sheet for your perusal. All games and Mega Archive links have been included, and the Mega Archive CD is in there too.)
Premise: Jason McWesternprotag and his adaptable battle tank SOPHIA are back to take on the subterranean forces of evil.
Availability: Since it had an external developer, Sunsoft hasn't seen fit to rerelease it in any capacity and it was produced in short quantities to begin with. Tracking down a copy would be like trying to find a pet frog in a cave complex these days.
Preservation: Ya hate to see it, folks—a sequel to a popular Japanese game made on the cheap by a western studio working on commission. We've already seen that happen before with Strider II a few months back [MA #XXX]. That said, Software Creations is one of my favorite UK developers from that era and this sequel isn't exactly hot trash even if it misses much of what made the NES original so beloved. It kinda feels like Turrican during the side-scrolling sections and Xenon during the top-down sections, though maybe that's my own British biases coming through. We last saw Software Creations with the Double Dragon 3 port [MA #XXVIII], and for Sega owners they're mostly known for MD Double Dragon and a few licensed games like Spider-Man & Venom: Maximum Carnage or The Tick (meanwhile, the more fortunate SNES owners got originals like Plok and Equinox). They also converted both the first Double Dragon and Super Off-Road back in 1992, neither of which I bothered to include in this feature? I'm still scratching my head as to how I could've possibly missed them given I used three separate online lists to compile my own, but I guess I'll have to do some major auditing of this feature in the near future. Can't wait for that.
Wiki Notes: Once again, we have a mystery release date—March 15th, oddly specific for a NA release—with apparently zero evidence to back it up but SegaRetro has two separate citations (from gaming mags, but close enough to legit) for June '93, so that's what we've gone with. It also needed some fresh screenshots (including the all-important title screen) and some body text. Feels like there's more of a story here, but I guess most Blaster Master Baiters (their fan name; not mine) (OK, it's mine) prefer to forget it exists.
Premise: Sometimes in life you just need to throw a heavy ball at some wooden pins that vaguely look like people. Maybe those people are hated family members you only see at Thanksgiving, maybe they're the coworkers that laugh at your business casual shirt choices, or maybe they're Swiss people and you just have a weird thing about the Swiss. Either way, they're all getting knocked over tonight. They know what they did.
Availability: Nope. I don't think any of these companies exist any more.
Preservation: It's our first (and only) bowling game for the Sega Genesis and what a totally ordinary one of those it is. As with golf, there's not much to do but pick a direction, apply spin if you like, and hit a moving power gauge at the desired level of strength. The JP version is less ordinary since it went with this jokey aesthetic which the spoilsports at Mentrix had to redo, dropping the original's anime character designs and the whole "Boogie Woogie" aspect since that was going to be way too camp for the mostly serious North American bowler crowd (though they kept the soundtrack). I just love that JP cover art though. You have the protagonist with his shounen manga headband, his girlfriend, the guy she told him not to worry about, and the homicidal xenomorph invader she told him he should absolutely worry about (who is called Erina, incidentally). Soft Machine we've encountered only once before and will only encounter once again: those games being Top Pro Golf [MA #XVIII] and its sequel Chi Chi's Pro Challenge Golf (which we'll be covering later this entry, coincidentally enough). Visco and Mentrix are somehow connected—the latter released the former's games overseas—and we last saw that pair for the fantasy platformer Wardner [MA #VIII].
Wiki Notes: All these mystery dates are giving me some serious paranoia. Why does the internet think this game was released on Valentine's Day? Is bowling inherently romantic? June is the alternative SegaRetro suggests, but even that seems kinda doubtful. For one, it makes little sense that a heavily reworked localization came out six months before the original unless there was a reason to delay the JP release. Whatever, wiki editing is an iterative process; if the GB Wiki's around in the future when someone figures this date business out, they can absolutely feel free to fix it. (As for the page, it was a skeleton so it needed a little of everything.)
Genre: Dogfighting Sim (not the Michael Vick kind)
Theme: "Highway to the Danger Zone"
Premise: If you have a need, a need for me to repeat one of the two Top Gun quotes I can remember, then I can be your wingman anytime because here's the game for you.
Availability: Some contemporary PC versions that might be easier to find, albeit in a not entirely legal sense via abandonware sites. Otherwise just play a more modern flight sim with F-15s in it, maybe?
Preservation: We've seen a few flight sim franchises try their luck on the Sega Genesis, perhaps figuring that if it could handle super-scaler jet shooters like After Burner then an early polygonal affair from the world of high-spec PC gaming would be just as feasible. Those games include the likes of EA's F-22 Interceptor: Advanced Tactical Fighter [MA #XII] and LHX Attack Chopper [MA #XXII]. There's no arguing that they're struggling a little on Genesis hardware but one benefit here is that this game was already four years old when it made the leap, so the technology's not too much for the MD's 68k processor to handle. They added a few extra scenarios to the Genesis version (or else included those from an expansion) including some hypothetical conflicts with a 1980s Viet Cong or a full on Soviet invasion. I wouldn't have minded seeing a F-15 take on a TIE Fighter or a dragon or something but I guess this is still supposed to be a game to be taken seriously. Boo. At any rate, there's three of these F-15 Strike Eagle games but this is the only one we'll be seeing here.
Wiki Notes: Beefed up the body text and added a few releases.
Premise: Join Bones Jackson and the rest of the team of monsters in the bloodiest football game outside that opening scene from The Last Boy Scout. (I know, that was kinda esoteric. I should probably kill that ref.)
Availability: It became available again via the EA Replay compilation for PSP in 2006. Other than that, your best bet is the Kickstarter remake Mutant Football League from 2017.
Preservation: You push the internal EA Sports development teams far enough and they'll eventually start acting out, putting together a campy horror version of American football where players violently explode whenever they catch a pass because someone stuck a bomb inside the pigskin and bribed the referee to ignore the loud ticking sound. Thus was the ludicrously gruesome, or ludigruesome, Mutant League franchise born. This would be the first game, with the 1994 follow-up making a lateral to the already plenty-violent world of the NHL with Mutant League Hockey. Mutant Productions is like Sonic Team in that they were originally an internal division founded specifically to work on a single franchise. Despite being a deliberately unserious take on football, it was built on the turduckified bones of the Madden NFL series to at least give it some legitimacy as a sports game for those sheltered few just looking to play some normal football with a bunch of skeletons and orcs. I bet they colored inside the lines too, the squares.
Premise: Puggsy, a tubby orange alien, has crash landed on a strange planet and needs to recover all the parts to his spaceship from the locals. Wait... that sounds familiar...
Availability: Beyond an enhanced Sega CD port, nothing recent.
Preservation: We have here, as Gerstmann would say, an "Amiga-ass platformer". Puggsy is every bit the UK video game hero: humble, not much to look at unless you have a thing for sapient nutsacks (a comparison made by the game's official marketing, no less), and is put through the wringer as he attempts to find a way home that doesn't involve a wuss solution like calling his parents to come pick him up like some other extraterrestrial schmucks. However, the game has some impressive credentials: it's one of the earliest puzzle-platformers to use physics, which has now become commonplace in the Indie market. Objects not only serve specific roles, but might also have their uses relating to their composition and weight as well. A barrel can be used as a stepping stone or a weapon, but because it floats it can be used as a bridge too. Also, no, this game isn't an Addams Family thing. I can't be the only one who thought that from the name, especially as there's a Pugsley's Scavenger Hunt for the SNES. On that note, this is our second game this entry that was also slated for a SNES release and didn't get one for various reasons; Genesis fans can rejoice over another exclusive. This would be our second Traveller's Tales game after Galahad [MA #XXI] but we've a few more to discover, one of which is coming up very soon.
Wiki Notes: Needed some major text clean-up due to all the second-person but beyond that just a release and some screenshots. I'll come back to it later for the SCD content.
Availability: R.B.I. Baseball was revived somewhat recently, but it looks to have become dormant again.
Preservation: We're back once again with more Atari baseball, and as if to make an implicit threat they've now moved to annual iterations. This would be the third R.B.I. Baseball to hit the Sega Genesis (and thus the third to appear on the Mega Archive, after R.B.I. Baseball 3 and R.B.I. Baseball 4) and the second to be exclusive to the platform. Still a couple more after this too, so I better find a way to make this MLBPA-affiliated baseball series interesting to talk about. But then, haven't American sports scholars since the dawn of the republic struggled to make baseball interesting? What hope do I have of succeeding where they've failed? At any rate, I won't bore you all with the usual spiel that R.B.I. Baseball began as a graphically altered Famista clone that has long since gone its own way. See you all again for R.B.I. Baseball '94!
Wiki Notes: Skeleton page, so it needed everything.
Theme: Magritte Paintings. Ceci n'est pas une bon film.
Premise: Video games aren't toys, but Toys is a video game. Just not a very good one.
Availability: About as much chance at a rerelease as the movie does of getting a remake.
Preservation: Hook was not the only Robin Williams to receive a video game tie-in for the Sega Genesis, as the Barry Levinson film Toys also managed to earn itself one for reasons beyond reckoning (and there's also Aladdin, I guess). Set in a toy factory under new management, the military-minded Leland Zevo essentially invents drone warfare compelling the deceased owner's carefree son, Leslie, to try to force him out with the help of his soldier cousin, his girlfriend, and a sisterbot. If Hook was seen as too precious with its elaborate set design and its Williams protagonist as too childlike, Toys is the ne plus ultra of those critiques. That said, the movie does have its cult following drawn to its unpredictable nature and a significant degree of surreal style. Plus, there's Joan Cusack. And a really young Jamie Foxx? Anyway, it's one of those movies that maybe needs to be seen to be believed but that sentiment doesn't quite extend to the game, which is this weird isometric shooter thing where you can barely see three feet in front of you.
Wiki Notes: Our only SNES double-dip for this Mega Archive entry. MD-specific releases and screenshots.
Theme: Putting the "Pal" in "Paleontological Nightmare"
Premise: Barney's just out here telling folks about numbers and shapes and colors and shit. The people have to know. But are they ready to know?
Availability: Is Barney still a thing? I don't think this is getting a rerelease any time soon either way.
Preservation: You obviously can't judge something like this by the standards of a real video game, but you can consider how it might function if left in front of a preschool kid fascinated by Barney. In that regard, it actually acquits itself reasonably well: the game has big, colorful sprites that are easy to comprehend, Barney actually talks to the player (and in fact never shuts up) with clips from his usual voice actor Bob West, and if the rigors of walking slowly to the right ever get to be too much Barney will essentially take over and finish the game on your behalf, more or less turning it into an episode of the TV show that you can sit back and watch. Speaking of which, there's a speedrunning category for "no controller" in which I'm proud to claim I've earned a spot on its leaderboards. That is to say, I just left it playing while checking on its wiki page and I think I have half its Retro Achievements now. As a video game suitable for anyone over 4? Oh, sure, it sucks. (Welcome to Realtime Associates, by the by, an American developer that'll show again a few more times with other, better licensed games.)
Premise: That bitch Joanne took the last Gucci handbag during the sales at Macy's and there's only one way this disagreement is going to resolve itself.
Availability: It's on the Sega Genesis Mini, albeit the Japanese/Asian one. The original's also in a Toaplan compilation for the Evercade.
Preservation: Ah, this takes me back. Used to be that every other game on the Mega Archive was a shoot 'em up arcade conversion. The amazingly-named Slap Fight (some western ports changed the name to A.L.C.O.N. instead, the name of the protagonist's in-game organization) is a 1986 Toaplan shoot 'em up that eventually found its way to the Sega Mega Drive a mere seven years later. It's fairly standard as vertical shoot 'em ups go, adopting a power-up system much like Gradius's where you can "invest" building points to acquire stronger upgrades down the road or spend them early for utility upgrades like a speed boost to keep yourself alive in the short-term. It has that clean 1980s arcade game look without a whole lot of visual pizazz, jazz, or indeed razzmatazz but it does look pretty ancient as a result. The claustrophobic amount of screen real estate doesn't help either. This conversion was done by MNM Software, whom we've met once before with their A-Train console port A Ressha de Ikou MD [MA #XVII]. This is the last game the company produced under the MNM brand; however, they did come back in 1995 as Mindware and have been focusing on pinball tables ever since.
Wiki Notes: Just some MD screenshots. We got a wiki duder named Fiye that focuses on older computer games who's done most of the work here already.
Availability: Nope. Endorsed sports games age faster than jokes about WGA strikes. (Support writers, otherwise my jokes are all you'll get.)
Preservation: Another month, another golfing sim. This would be the other Soft Machine game coming out this month, a sequel to their Top Pro Golf [MA #XVIII], and one that managed to pick up an endorsement deal on its way to the States. Juan Rodriguez is the famous sportsman in question, a Puerto Rican native who won eight titles in the PGA Tour during his professional career. Dude had quite the personality: during games, he'd do this little toreador dance with his hat when celebrating, which this game recreates in its intro. The Japanese version doesn't really have any similar flair nor any endorsements, though its tropical theme suggests it's possibly set in Pebble Beach or Waialae. Amusing coincidence is that "Chi Chi", Juan Rodriguez's nickname, is also a semi-formal term you'd use to refer to your father in Japanese. Since golf has always felt like a sport for dads that title kinda works outside of the endorsement context too.
Wiki Notes: Again, the internet seems to think the localized version—which had to add all the Chi Chi stuff, and programming in that fedora alone would've taken several weeks of development—was released three months prior to the original, around March '93. I've gone with SegaRetro's estimate of July, the following month, since it's possible the localization and endorsement deal were in effect while the game was still in production.
If I'd been paying more attention I could've been crafting some ironclad rules of IGotW all this time, one of which would undoubtably be "if there's an Indie Soulsborne or explormer out there, I'm playing it eventually". Mortal Shell is a case of the former, fully immersing itself in the choking fog of mechanical obfuscation and grimdark subtextual storytelling that is FromSoft's "dread and butter" of late. Dropped into an unfamiliar world as a ghoulish being that bodyjacks promising looking corpses (or "shells") scattered around the musty realm of Fallgrim, the player is given the task of procuring important glands from three nearby bosses in order to... well, something will happen, I guess. You know how it is with these games.
Mortal Shell also doesn't feel like an homage to any one of FromSoft's "Soulsborne" menagerie in particular but rather all of them at once. It has Souls's foreboding sense of grim atmosphere and its heavily-armored protagonist (and boy do these guys feel weighty) stomping through the wilderness, it has Bloodborne's dedication to outwitting and outmaneuvering mostly human opponents in one-on-one duels of skill and trickery (almost every enemy I've met has been humanoid at least), and it has Sekiro's little perk of being able to survive a fatal blow and get back into the fight if you're agile enough. Also, like Sekiro, there's no experience or levelling up: instead, you spend the equivalent souls resource (tar, for some reason, which I thought was more a Monster Hunter thing) on new abilities for your current shell—mostly passives, like more health or a short defense buff after killing someone—as well as upgrade any of the four weapons that all the shells are sharing. You still have that open-world freedom of picking a different direction to explore for a while if you're struggling with one area, but grinding things out isn't really feasible if there's a roadblock: you just have to push past it instead, becoming better acquainted with the game's combat system and its quirks. The most prominent of these is the "harden" ability: rather than guarding, you can make yourself immune to damage for a few seconds until you get hit, at which point you've probably staggered your opponent (since they've hit at full strength what was essentially a brick wall) and can apply some retaliatory pressure before they recover. Likewise, a few enemies will use this same ability against you.
I like a tasty parry. Don't think this guy's getting back up. S'fine, more mushrooms for me.
The developers of this game definitely did their Souls homework, as I have no idea what I'm doing or where I'm supposed to go. Explore this large starting swamp area long enough and it'll eventually branch off to three ominous dungeon areas I've been hesitant to get deeper into; instead, I've been trying to cover as much of the swamp as I can to try to get my bearings, which looks to function as a hub given there's a tower in the middle where all the vendor NPCs gather. Even with few landmarks and no compass or map to fall back on (which is customary, of course) I've been able to find all four of the game's shells by poking around the corners of the map: the all-rounder knight the game provides almost immediately, a tougher fellow with some Sauron armor that has a huge HP pool and little stamina, a fragile rogue type with the opposite situation, and a mage with one of those creepy Elden Ring masks that seems to build resolve quickly.
I've yet to figure out what the deal is with resolve. I mean, I understand how it works as a mechanic, just not why it is designed the way it is. Resolve is a resource you gain by damaging enemies and dissipates quickly over time; by earning a "block" on its gauge you can employ a powerful weapon ability that's a bit like supers and the super gauge in fighters (though you need to upgrade the weapon you're using first before you unlock them), as well as a parry that restores some health if you can pull it off. However, the only times you really need these powerful boons are when you're fighting a tough opponent rather than trash mobs; this makes the aspect where you quickly lose any resolve you gain by resorting to a defensive posture seem counterintuitive to its role as it'll rarely be available for those internecine battles where you need it most. The only way I can see to make effective use of resolve is to either grind on regular enemies without getting hurt until you've stocked up enough blocks, which is tedious, or fight the toughest enemies in the game with extreme aggression to stack it up quickly, and if you have the skill to do that without dying you're really not hurting for the advantages resolve provides. (Post-playthrough edit: OK, if you parry someone without resolve it'll fill the resolve faster, so I guess the solution is to get real good at parrying. No sweat, this ain't my first rodeo.)
Literally all I did was try to read a book. What is this, Shadowgate?
Some aspects of Mortal Shell can be exasperating, but I won't dismiss how much it succeeds in feeling like a Souls game. It has that slow burn of gradually building up your understanding of the game whether that's adapting to its combat system, getting a better sense of where everything is, piecing together the lore, or figuring out its secrets. That elusive aspect is what has engendered Souls to so many, as it runs counter to the "show, but also tell" direction-heavy approach in RPGs that has become more the norm. That isn't to say Mortal Shell keeps everything way too close to its chest—the game starts with a pretty thorough tutorial on its combat and other systems—but it's certainly more in the camp of letting players figure out much of what they need to do on their lonesome, by experimenting at their own pace and incrementally figuring things out. I can admire designing a game with that conceit in mind, but I kinda wish it had a bit more of its own personality and didn't just feel like a shorter, watered-down version of one of the most impressive modern franchises in gaming. Definite feeling of "Well, I can just go play one of those instead", especially as it doesn't pull a Nioh in doing things differently enough to offer a sufficiently solid argument for its own existence. (Man, I'm being way too harsh on this thing. It's not bad at all! A mini-Soulsborne palate cleanser for those of us that burned out on Elden Ring might be a nicer way of putting it.)
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Yep, just those three dungeons and a final encounter. The dungeons themselves are each about the size of the hub and separated into two major and one minor section, so the game's a bit lengthier than I thought but well under the 10 hours range if you're not procrastinating in the swamp like I was. The more aesthetically interesting the dungeon the more tiresome it was to navigate, so it was overall a wash for which was best. Beyond that, not much more to amend to the review: even though you aren't levelling up stats the new abilities you earn with each shell does make it easier to take down tougher foes, especially the one that lets you regenerate your Sekiro-style "second chance" if you kill enough enemies: it's thanks to that boon I was able to glut myself on the final boss's adds and survive to the end. For a "Souls Jr." I was pleasantly surprised at its depth.
Hey, we're back again, Doing the Mario. That is, doing a particularly arduous playthrough of Super Mario 64 in which I attempt to earn all 132 of its Retro Achievements. I've since cooled down on achievements as a target in video gaming in general, no longer chasing the things as an excuse to make my numbers go up but carefully studying them before starting a game (excepting the spoiler story stuff, obviously) to determine whether they'll actually contribute or detract from the experience and then factor what I've learned into my playthrough. If a Platinum trophy is feasible with a little elbow grease or a spot of grinding, as opposed to multiple playthroughs or playing in a deeply compromised state ("don't die", "don't hurt anything", "top difficulty level only", etc.) then I'll probably pursue them to increase the overall amount of satisfaction received. Retro Achievements operate the same: in cases like this, even though I've been put through the wringer this time around, it's really enhanced playing through what is normally a game I can complete in my sleep, such is the number of times I've played it "casually". For as much as I kvetch, and kvetch I do, this has been a real fun idea for a feature. I just hope any of that enjoyment translates when reading it too. The writing of words can be tough, my friends.
Part 3 will cover the four courses available on the first floor (or second floor, for those that call the ground floor the first floor). There's no bonus Stars to be had here, barring a single freebie from a Toad, and no other extras like a Bowser fight or a Cap course to worry about. That said, this set does include my least liked course and the one that will almost certainly create the most issues in the overall run—Tiny-Huge Island—so my expectation was to spend a long time working on the achievements for this entry, if perhaps not quite as much time writing them up. The next and last update will include all the remaining Stars and achievements, including some post-game ones, as well as a humbling bonus segment.
(Here's the First Part and Second Part of the Kobayashi Mario if you're just joining us or need a refresher on how any of this works.)
Secret of the Giant Snowman
Snowman's Land is our first stop and it's one of the easier courses on this floor, since despite being a frustrating troll in some ways—why does that damn penguin keep walking backwards?—at least there are no instant death traps or pits I need to worry about. While there's plenty of enemies to tangle with there's only one warp, and it connects two distant fir trees. I knew about it already due to the glitch seen below, and the course is so small to not really need another.
Exasperometer: 1.
Cool Bully
The requisite "beat the boss without getting hurt" achievement for this course works the same way as the bully-related one for Lethal Lava Land: damage, in this case, also includes getting harmlessly bopped around by the bully. Still, it's a short jog to the bully arena and you only need a few hits to knock him in.
Exasperometer: 2.
Red Challenge around Giant Snowman
The first of a couple of shell-riding achievements for Snowman's Land and by far the easier of the two. Just have to get all eight Red Coins without getting hurt, much like the other Red Challenges. Fortunately, they're all pretty much sitting in a row once you get the shell but the tough part is getting to the shell harm-free in the first place: you have to carefully jump on one of those twirly flower enemies in the icy water without accidentally landing in the water, since it does damage over time.
Exasperometer: 2.
One of my favorite game glitches from back in the day. Just running around slapping enemies with your cap like an angry working-class dad.
Cool Shell Ride for Golden Coins
Our first big hurdle for this Kobayashi Mario entry. This was a genuine displeasure. As with Lethal Lava Land, the goal here is to collect a majority of the coins (getting them all is impossible) while riding the shell, without ever leaving said shell as that causes it to vanish until you re-enter the course. Most of the coins come from enemies, which I'll rank in order of obnoxiousness:
Those camouflage purse frog things. You have to get close enough to activate them before they're vulnerable, hit them while they're frantically leaping around, and grab all five of their coins as they explode outwards in random directions. Happily, there's only two of them.
The snowmen. Tricky part here is circling them with the shell, since it's a bit hard to control. They don't send their three coins flying as far as the frogs do, but a real neat quirk of the snowmen in this course is that they respawn almost immediately. Very easy to run into a new one while trying to get the coins its previous incarnation dropped.
The camera lakitu. The game's usual camera problems are severalfold more annoying when trying to maneuver the shell around, as it madly whips around to try to keep behind you. Switching to the Mario camera makes it more stable, but only if you don't try to move underneath where it's stationed. This is made all the worse when you're trying to do tight circles around those snowmen.
The shyguy. Only one, and it drops two coins which you might not even need, but it hangs around a gorge with very strong winds making it a little anxiety-inducing to hit given there's two walls right next to you.
The twirly flower things. No sweat. Just drive right into them and sweep up the coins. Getting all the coins from the ones near the frozen lake can be tough because you can't get any that fall into the water, and many of the rest hang out near walls which can destroy your shell immediately, but they're a walk in the flower garden compared to everything else.
The goal is 75 coins, and the absolute total number of coins outside the igloo is 88: however, this includes the three you lose by getting to the shell and the five on top of the snowman you have zero chance of reaching while riding around, giving you a total of 80 possible coins to work with. You can just about afford a few misses, but it's an extremely tight target to hit.
Exasperometer: 7.
Full Course in the Snowman's Land
I was close enough to the 100-coins Star that I topped it off in the igloo, finishing the full set of Stars. However, there's no way to get the full coin achievement without starting over since the shell required sacrificing a few coins to reach. Now I have to figure out how to get the shell-specific coins without sacrificing coins to reach it. Love a good paradox in the morning.
Exasperometer: 1.
Lifesaver X
Just four of these 1Ups to find and they're all pretty obvious: two are in !-blocks (one inside the igloo, one outside), one is suspended in ice inside the igloo, and the fourth requires climbing the tree on the top of the snowman's head. Grabbed them all while going for the full coins.
Exasperometer: 2.
Just the dinkiest little place. This moment of the all-coins run is when I can breathe a sigh of relief.
Treasure X
Snowman's Land has 126 coins, 88 of which can be found outside the igloo and 38 within. Naturally, the first obstacle is figuring out how to get to the shell area without sacrificing the coins from the flower enemies in the lake. As with most problems in life, the solution is heavy artillery: you can aim the cannon to make it over to the shell easily enough, though it takes a bit of experimentation since you can't see that area from where the cannon is. Collecting coins from enemies is way easier on foot (still gotta be careful of those that go flying away at mach speed from the frog enemies) and then once everything's swept up you can use the shell to collect the two Red Coins under the bully arena (impossible to reach otherwise) and the trail leading to the igloo at your leisure. The igloo coins are easy enough, though I almost lost one after a goomba dropped its coin behind an ice barrier (it eventually moved out again before vanishing, thankfully). Rough but not as insurmountable as some Treasure achievements to come.
Exasperometer: 4.
Chuckya? Chuck-no!
I suspect this is just the achievement writers flexing some hidden tech again. The Chuckyas are the big purple enemies that pick you up and throw you, and if they chuck ya it's gonna hurt. You can, however, escape their grasp by pounding on the jump button or wiggling the control stick: you have to do it a lot though, and if the Chuckya only spins a little before throwing you you'll probably miss the required amount of resistance. I'll admit to never knowing this was a thing before this playthrough, but there's only like three Chuckya in the whole game and the one here in Wet-Dry World isn't much of a threat (which makes it the best one for the achievement).
Exasperometer: 2.
Half-Empty or Half-Full?
Wet-Dry World is an anomaly this far into the game because it's both easy and safe, as opposed to the hazard-laden basement courses and the more dangerous linear death gauntlet courses to come. It's a place to experiment with some neat game mechanics, including the first of two courses where the act of entering it alone can significantly change what it looks like. In "Half-Empty or Half-Full?" the goal is to enter Wet-Dry World in all three of its initial states: almost empty, almost full, and the middle default that most players would be familiar with. Knowing this secret makes a lot of the Stars easier: the one for reaching the top of the course is much faster to acquire when the water level is high, and likewise finding the five secrets takes less time when the water level starts very low since a few are at ground level. (That said, finding the rainbow diamonds that change the water level isn't exactly rocket science.)
Exasperometer: 1.
Do your chucking worst, motherchucker.
Lifesaver XI
Waited until I had a Star to collect in the underwater town before going for Wet-Dry World's Lifesaver and Treasure achievements. Two of these 1Ups are in the town itself—one spawns out of the fountain after you collect the ring of coins around it, and the other's in a !-block—while the other two can theoretically be grabbed simultaneously via the cannon ride over to the town but are much easier to just get on foot. Nothing too weird.
Exasperometer: 2.
Treasure XI
Wet-Dry World has 152 coins, most (107) of which are in the main area and come from !-blocks and other loose coins, along with the 35-40 from the Blue Coin block. The 45 in the town itself are easier to find. No Red Challenge here because it's impossible to avoid "damage" while swimming over to the town, so that's a reprieve. Man, am I going to miss these easy Treasure achievements.
Exasperometer: 3.
Full Course in the Wet-Dry World
And that's Wet-Dry World done. Mostly. Where's that damn warp?
Exasperometer: 1.
Damn, little dude, who hurt you? Oh wait, I did. For your coins. (Why does this guy have coins in the first place? Maybe it's been skimming off the top?)
Secret of the Water Town
Ah. Got a little bamboozled by the achievement writers here. The warp's not in the water town area. It's at the ground floor of the main area, and it warps you directly to the cannon. That would've been a convenient warp to know about earlier but at least I found it eventually. Granted, it was by warping from the cannon area which is backwards to how it's meant to be used but I remembered the Shifting Sands Land warp involved the cannon too and used that tidbit as a launching point (so to speak) to find this one. Let's not talk about how long this took to find.
Exasperometer: 3.
Mystery of the Mysterious Mountain
Tall, Tall Mountain's essentially Cool, Cool Mountain in reverse, as you start at the bottom and are working your way upwards—though in both cases the slides are still downhill, as I don't know how you'd have them work otherwise. Speaking of the slide, this achievement requires getting the Star from completing the slide without ever entering it. It's the return of our old friend, the "hop backwards off a cliff and mid-air kick for enough forward momentum to sequence break" tech, last used back on—coincidentally enough—Cool, Cool Mountain. Just a matter of finding the alcove where the slide deposits you and hopping right in.
Exasperometer: 2.
Secret of the Rocky Mountain
This is one of the better known warps since it gets you to the cannon, which is needed for the last Star on the course (Blast to the Lonely Mushroom). It starts on one of the precarious mushrooms where half the Red Coins can be found, so it's possible to find it accidentally while hopping between them. (Incidentally, there's no Red Challenge on this course either; it's very doable, so maybe the achievement makers simply decided it wasn't challenging enough to be of interest.)
Exasperometer: 1.
They really made it too easy to cheat. At least easier than the slide would be.
Friendly Visit to the Lonely Mushroom
So, yeah, that Star I mentioned that needed a cannon to reach? This achievement is for getting there without the cannon. It's really as simple as climbing as high as you can go and leaping off with a long-jump. Not exactly brain surgery, though I might need some after falling from that height. Saying all that, it did take me two attempts; I actually overshot it the first time, so covering the distance is more doable than it looks.
Exasperometer: 2.
Full Course in the Tall Mountain
That's going to do it for my pleasant memories of Tall, Tall Mountain. Now to make a bunch of bad ones.
Exasperometer: 1.
Treasure XII
Pain. Let me tell you ab- wait, I'll save this self-pitying screed for the Tiny-Huge Island Treasure achievement. To collect all 137 coins from Tall, Tall Mountain is not easy and it's probably the second hardest one of these so far after the horrors of Lethal Lava Land and its high-up volcano bullies. Naturally, the slide presents the greatest trouble: it's the toughest one of its type to finish and that's before factoring in that you need to grab all 62 of its coins as well. (Thankfully, if you die in the slide area you respawn there, so Treasure runs are best started here.) Outside, the remaining 75 coins mostly come from defeating relatively well-behaved enemies like the goombas, bob-ombs, a solitary shyguy (it's what they prefer), and a Chuckya. However, there is one bob-omb that often leaps off the edge of the world the moment it spawns, so if that happens you have to reset the state of the main area by transitioning to a new one, which of course means... jumping into the slide again. I ended up doing the slide three times overall just for this one run. A great time was surely had by all.
Exasperometer: 7.
Just constantly hopping backwards to get a coin I missed. The slow reverse shuffle of shame, as I call it.
Lifesaver XII
The last two courses had a reasonable four 1Ups each, so you'd be forgiven for thinking the same was true here too. Nope. There's eleven 1Ups to get here, the highest of any course, and like always with the Lifesaver achievements you need to sweep them all up in a single run. You better believe there's four of them on that slide alone, by the way, one of which spawns by touching all four corners of the starting room (because of course it does?!). The other seven (!) involve: defeating groups of moles for two; a sneaky one right behind where you spawn into the course; one in a !-box on the dangerous mushrooms; one from climbing the vine wall where the moles are; one from punching a butterfly in an ivy patch high up; and one right next to a small jump past the waterfall. The starting room slide and the butterfly took the longest to find, but I respect how many 1Ups were hiding in this course. If "respect" is even the word I want to use there, as it seems far too positive for the emotions I want to get across.
Exasperometer: 6.
Secret of the Island
If Tall, Tall Mountain was a headache, Tiny-Huge Island is a jackhammer-induced trepanning by comparison. I love the gimmick of this place, where the course has a Tiny side and a Huge side, but otherwise it's just Suffer City, USA to get around and the Stars mostly kinda suck. This warp, however, is one of the easiest in the game to find because it's a utility warp: you'd be stuck without it, as it warps you from the remote island of the Tiny map back to the main island (there's even a single coin floating on top of it to help you find it).
Exasperometer: 1.
Is There a Secret?
Kind of a weird achievement. Just have to read the sign on the tall island near the beach on Huge side. There's two ways to get here: from above or from the cannon (the former is easier but takes longer). The sign itself just tells you how the wooden poles work; that is, you can run around them a few times to make coins pop out. I want to say this course and the first, Bob-Omb Battlefield, are the only ones that have these poles though. Little late for that tip?
Exasperometer: 2.
'Do not feed the Lakitu'? I wasn't gonna!
Mario's Speedrun on the Island
Koopa the Quick's back, which means there's another race you have to complete in under a specific time. Specifically, you need to defeat Koopa in fewer than twenty seconds. The race here's pretty short but tough because of the strong winds and narrow path and twenty seconds doesn't leave much room for error. Had to polish up my rapid long-jump tech to get this one but at least there's no weird tricks or shortcuts I had to learn like last time; it's just pure execution. (Incidentally, you're prohibited from using the nearby Koopa Shell to win the race. Just as well, it'd be kinda messed up to tell Koopa, "Hey, I beat you by riding your friend's empty carcass to the finish line. Send his grieving family my regards.")
Exasperometer: 4.
Red Challenge on the Island
The Red Coins are all in the cave underneath the Wiggler boss fight, so getting them once you're in there isn't too tough (though there's one of those fireball spheres to ambush you). The challenge of this achievement is getting to the cave in one piece, as it requires crossing the whole island. Many opportunities for a mishap.
Exasperometer: 3.
Beetle Squasher
Standard no-damage boss clear. Again, the issue's more about reaching Wiggler without damage than it is defeating it but it can be hard to judge where to bop its head without getting collision damage.
Exasperometer: 2.
Read the timer and weep, you polygonal monstrosity.
Full Course in the Tiny-Huge Island
Grabbing the 100-coin Star to complete this set en route to...
Exasperometer: 1.
Treasure XIII
Pain. Let me tell you ab- ahh, it's not as impactful the second time. But yes. This was an absolute nightmare to earn. I don't think there'll be a harder achievement—that it has the lowest percentage of users that acquired the achievement corroborates this—but the goal here is to find an insane 191 coins. Just to confirm: no other Treasure achievement requirement goes over the mid-150s. If it were just the case that there's more coins than usual that'd be one thing, but the coins here are the hardest to get in the game on top of that. Quality and quantity. As per usual, I've itemized a list of the worst to acquire in ascending order:
The two koopas. Nice and simple.
The large goombas. You have to stomp them with the ground pound for the Blue Coins they drop, otherwise they'll drop fewer coins and void the achievement attempt. Issue here is that they're pretty big, so you need to get some extra height before hitting the ground pound or you'll just kill them normally.
The shyguy and lakitu coins. Just because coins from flying enemies are a little more unpredictable.
The ten coins in Wiggler's boss arena. The only reason these are irksome is because you can't get out of this area once you enter it: you need to make sure they're the last ten coins you get.
The coins from the wooden pole on the solitary island, as visited for the above "Is There a Secret?" achievement. Just annoying to reach it and then you have to worry about that giant cheep-cheep while getting back to dry land.
The various coins in Tiny side hanging very close to bottomless pits. Those platforms are tough enough to navigate when they're in Huge form.
The Red Coins and Blue Coins in Wiggler's cave underneath the Wiggler fight. There's some bottomless pits and you're probably very late into the run when you get here, so a misstep can be heartbreaking.
THERE IS STRAIGHT UP AN INVISIBLE COIN. NO, I'M NOT JOKING AND YES, IT COUNTS.
The little goombas. How I loathe these things. They'll start jogging towards you as soon as they see you like any other goomba but if they smack you they'll explode in a puff of smoke. If they do this, they won't drop their coin. There's around seven or eight across the Tiny side, so for the sake of the player's sanity it's always best to collect all 33 coins from the Tiny side first. I think I attempted this achievement about a dozen times and for ten of those I was thwarted by one of those tiny chestnut jerkasses.
Exasperometer: 9. (Just in the off-chance there's something even harder.)
Lifesaver XIII
Before we're done with Tiny-Huge Island and this month's Kobayashi Mario update, we've got some 1Ups to wrangle. There's ten here so while that's one fewer than Tall, Tall Mountain it's still a whole mess of BS we have to wade through before this dumpster fire of a course is over. The worst 1Ups to collect are the three that spawn from butterflies: if you're not familiar, if you hassle any groups of butterflies whenever they appear one of the three will eventually transform into a 1Up (the other two turn into heat-seeking murder bombs). These butterflies eventually vanish and won't respawn, so if you decide to chase after one and leave the others to fly away there's a 2-in-3 chance you messed up. I call it the Mothy Hall Problem. Since there's three groups total, that rapidly becomes a 1-in-27 chance that you'll get all three 1Ups without a hitch. Others include: three from !-blocks, one underwater near a very dangerous fish with some very cool shades, one inside the cave with the Red Coins, one that activates on the beach after getting two coins, and one from climbing a tree you can blast to with the cannon. At least I didn't have to smush any tiny goombas this time.
Exasperometer: 7.
You need balls of steel to attempt an achievement like this. And if you don't have balls of steel, become one instead.Just to prove I got 191 coins and pulled off a minor miracle. Happy early Wiggler Wednesday everyone.
I am wiped after all that. Next month's Kobayashi Mario will be the finale, as I take on the two notoriously tough courses on the top floor and finish things off with a no-damage clear of the last Bowser gauntlet. Sounds simple enough. After Tiny-Huge Island they might as well be a stroll along the beach.
2023's kind of upended tradition by packing its first summer month with a lion's share of big releases, when really the summer's meant to be peak time for backlog-clearing and beating the heat with some chill "podcast gaming" a la long RPGs and open-world collectathons. Not that I particularly mind a busy release month but I'm not letting that change my usual schedule here; my first Indie Game of the Week for June will be Haven, a relaxing planet-exploration game from French studio The Game Bakers (perhaps best known for 2016's Furi, a future IGotW candidate). Haven sees lovers Kay and Yu escape an oppressive futuristic society where people are matched up by an algorithm and forced into arranged marriages, instead opting to elope to an obscure distant planet and live out their days together in peace. The planet they found, Source, is one that was previously abandoned by colonists and is in a state of instability due to copious seismic activity and a strange, toxic substance covering half the landmasses; even so, the pair are determined to build their new lives here and work through problems as they occur. Kay's a biologist and an accomplished researcher even in their youth, while Yu is the scion of a corporate CEO and an inveterate gearhead who knows spaceships better than anyone: combining their skills, they've been able to survive whatever Source has thrown at them so far.
The general loop of the game sees the pair—who are controlled simultaneously in battle, much like the Mario & Luigi games—explore the planet by riding its flow streams, blue energy waves that connect planets together but in this case also Source's many "islet" landmasses, while working towards both short-term goals like finding food and long-term goals like fixing up their ship, the Nest, so they can travel around the planet more easily. After exploring a while, the player might return to the Nest to rest up, eat a meal, create new medicinal consumables, or otherwise just let the two lovebirds hang out for a while. As experience is tied to the progress of this central relationship, almost anything the pair do together—from fighting enemies to sampling a meal to pillow talk—will increase their levels and make them more effective in battle.
The Nest is the closest thing to home for Kay and Yu and somewhere you really ought to come back to every so often. For one, it's the only place where you can make medicine or level up.
The game's battle system involves real-time attack inputs on timers that can be combined for stronger versions, with "impact" and "burst" moves that affect enemies differently depending on the foe. Some enemies, for example, might be stunned after a burst and can be hit with an impact for significant damage during the stun's brief window; so the strategy there would be to use one character to burst attack while you charge up and hold an impact attack with the other in preparation. You can also use a shield with one character to intercept attacks aimed at a less healthy character, or otherwise have them firing off attacks with impunity. Each enemy type and the game's handful of unique boss encounters all require specific strategies to take down quickly, though as you keep playing more tools become unlocked to make the combat easier; many fights can be skipped or evaded early on for this reason, letting you tackle hostiles in your own time when you're in better shape or have more resources to fall back on. That's true for the exploration as well: some traversal upgrades are directly connected to the progress you can make in much the same way they might in an explormer or Zeldersatz, allowing you to reach new locations, while others offer much-desired conveniences like an in-game mapping tool or fast travel. The game smartly rolls out these new powers gradually to constantly shift the way players approach the gameplay loop, ensuring that the exploring and fighting never feel too repetitive.
However, much of the gameplay exists to serve the narrative, which isn't so much a plot-driven thing than it is an exploration of two characters and their deep relationship. It's a very cute game from a writing standpoint: the two playfully bicker, enjoy exploring together, talk through troubling or deeper subjects, reminiscence about how they got to where they are today (which serves to let the player in on what life was like for them before, what kind of backgrounds they have, and what drove them to escape an otherwise comfortable life to a danger-filled one), and, frequently, get in the mood for some smoochin'. The game is also designed for multiplayer, and focusing on the relationship as much as it does makes me wonder if playing as a couple isn't perhaps the ideal approach to a game like this, much like Hazelight's It Takes Two (though, thankfully, a single-player mode exists for Haven). I think it's very smart, and this is coming from a terminally single person, to start promoting games that couples can play together: it's a way to draw a partner into a hobby they might not necessarily share with their SO, presenting an organic opportunity to do so and grow closer. Of course, they can do this with any co-operative game with a low skill barrier to entry, but to have it be a low-stress game explicitly about a couple perhaps makes a co-op playthrough easier to pitch to a loved one. Haven also recently incorporated an addition that allows you to determine both Kay and Yu's genders, choosing to play as two guys or two gals instead, without fundamentally changing Kay's earnest and curious nature or Yu's playful and resourceful one; not only does this give the game a more welcoming feel but it also extends that whole "let couples play games together" vibe to also include same-sex pairs who might balk at having to roleplay a straight couple rather than something closer to what they have (speaking of which, happy Pride Month y'all).
That thing on the right is basically me whenever they do something like this. 'Like, should I just look away or leave or something?'
Haven's an uncomplicated (but certainly not rudimentary) game about whizzing around an alien planet with your partner being all lovey-dovey between spaceship repairs, improvised cooking with alien fruit, making brand new discoveries, resolving sudden emergencies, petting cute xenomorphs, hoverbooting across mid-air energy flows while doing flips, and cleaning up toxic glowy goop like it's Super Mario Sunshine. There's a certain unhurried pace to the whole game and a huge number of cutscenes where the pair chill out and discuss their day like a couple would, so it some ways it feels like a more naturalistic take on one of these life-sims where you can choose a marriage partner and together take on the daily challenges that come with just being alive in an imperfect world. Wholesome, deceptively deep, and a real relaxing start to my summer just floating around and doing some extraterrestrial sight-seeing.
Rating: 4 out of 5.
Post-Playthrough Edit: Well, unlike the other Haven, this one did eventually have a proper ending so it's already ahead there. The gameplay might be a little thin but some of those optional bosses really push that combat system as far as it will go and I enjoyed all the knick-knacks you could salvage and the follow-up cutscenes relating to them. I also appreciate that, while after watching both endings it was clear which was the better choice, both also gave a solid defense for being the "canon" ending were one to exist (much like a similar romantic narrative with an equally momentous final choice: Life is Strange). On the whole, worth playing through to its end.
You know what's nutty? I update the current year's "Games Beaten" list every month and usually average about five or six additions (mostly Indies for IGotW) along with a summary mini-review and score. This month I'll be updating the list with 28 new entries. I'll also have to go back and add wiki pages for a lot of these, obscure as they are. My intent, of course, was never to pad out my game completion scorecard like any of that matters in the long run but to play as many of these smaller charity-contributing Indies as possible during May as I'd really no other opportunity to talk about them, at least with my slate of ongoing features this year.
Dang, though, I could get used to this. Just a firehose of short, intriguing experiences from various budgetary tiers of the Indie circuit, pushing the boundaries of the genres we know well or revisiting those that have long since fallen by the wayside or else just stretching their creative muscles for a Game Jam of some sort. Even so, I think for June I'm going to start some hopelessly long JRPG (I'm side-eyeing my unopened copies of Tales of Arise and Xenoblade Chronicles 3) and just veg out with something structurally familiar for a while. This month's been a long one, after all, and I also don't want to do a lot of thinking when it's this hot.
Links to previous May Magnanimity entries can be found at the bottom, along with a list of games they cover. The first entry also goes into more detail as to why I spent a month doing all this but I'll say it was certainly not time wasted even with the games that didn't quite click with me. My thanks once again to Itch.io and the many creators who put up their babies for honorable causes.
Yo, I found another explormer in my Itch.io library. Who'd have thunk my eyes would be immediately drawn to that? Strange. Anyway, Sector 781 is much like Xeodrifter in that it's a very barebones 8-bit example of the genre that, while it does have a handful of upgrades, is so rudimentary as to resemble something you could play on a graphing calculator. The game is comprised of three 5x5 zones played consecutively, built around the usual loop of exploring what's accessible, finding an upgrade, and then exploring what was previously inaccessible. Each region culminates in a boss fight that doesn't require much strategy (stand somewhere safe and keep shooting) but I guess as micro-sized explormers go—ones boiled down to their absolute fundamentals—it's not too bad. The challenge level is fairly decent at least.
My big issue with the game, and this is probably owed to the fact that you can play it within a browser too, is that hitting the escape key at any point will kick you back to the title screen. If you resume from here, you start from the beginning of the last zone you visited with none of your health upgrades, which sucks. If you hit escape again while on the title screen the game shuts itself off and you have to start over from the very beginning since it doesn't save between sessions. Since I was trying to pause the game halfway through the last zone and panicked when I saw the title screen let's just say I wasn't particularly thrilled with what happened next. Fortunately, the whole game takes somewhere in the region of 45 minutes tops, but that's still a lot of backtracking. More so than is customary in an explormer, anyway. I try not to let these little technical issues affect how I view a game as a whole but at the same time this particular decision detracted quite a lot from the overall experience. Otherwise, Sector 781's just kinda cute and unremarkable like so many "lo-fi" explormers before it though I won't argue it doesn't have the core of the explormer experience figured out. And, hey, if it's a platformer with a map I'll probably end up playing it at some point regardless of how dinky it may or may not be. I'm just broken like that.
Signalis really opened my eyes (and irises) as to how much the Indie horror game crowd has embraced PS1 low-poly visuals over the past half-decade, and The Black Iris is the second horror game I've covered this month with that style (after last week's Fatum Betula). The Black Iris is a more conventional horror experience though still one that is purely driven by exploration and adventure game puzzles rather than any deeper stealth or combat mechanics. The atmosphere it's able to generate does most of the heavy lifting as far as the horror aspect is concerned, at least. Sent to a remote research outpost in the north of Scotland—having visited Aberdeen, I can attest that it really can feel like the edge of the world up there—the protagonist is to decommission a series of subterranean probes while recovering any video tape logs the station's scientists made about their research. Said researchers themselves are scattered across the area too; you soon learn their current coordinates after starting and can go find them, if you'd like, but given they're not part of your mission here the writing's mostly on the wall about how well they're doing. Turns out, whatever these scientist types were doing up here they ended up drilling too deep, to paraphrase the Lord of the Rings, and there's something not all together wholesome lurking beneath the surface.
If you're familiar with Roadside Picnic, The Color Out of Space, or Annihilation there's a similar oppressive vibe to the landscape here, the feeling of being in a place trapped in a bubble where the laws of reality appear to be breaking down due to a malign, otherworldly presence. The danger is unknown but all too apparent from the general atmosphere of the place and it takes some digging, and a few really messed up corpses wearing the same hazmat suit you are, before anything starts clicking into place. When it's finally time to enter the north cave and track down the titular Black Iris that your former comrades have written about in a state of near madness, there's a heavy sense of something very wrong afoot. The ending actually kinda made me laugh a little, but I'll admit it was a cool way to end a tension-building narrative like this. What playing The Black Iris did do was make me want to watch the Alex Garland movie adaptation of Annihilation, which I'd been meaning to get around to for a while. Not that the movie was a direct influence on this game, probably, but it's certainly of a similar alien mutant vein right down to the little stock video on abnormal cell duplication. No fucked up bears in The Black Iris though, at least none that I could make out.
So this is something I've been seeing more often: prologue games for bigger projects. That is, a small team works on a game that requires so many years needed to develop and so in the meantime they simultaneously work on a smaller game with similar tech and release that as a teaser of sorts for what's to come. Happened to Bloodstained with Curse of the Moon and with Eiyuden Chronicle: Rising, to name two examples. Smart, from a development standpoint, to have something out there generating a modest profit to support the ongoing larger project while also giving people an idea of what that larger project might entail along with building their hype for it. Gunmetal Arcadia Zero—the prologue chapter for Gunmetal Arcadia—is going for a sort of Zelda II/Faxanadu 8-bit side-scrolling action-RPG angle with some occasionally circuitous level design (detours are mostly in aid of earning cash and consumable items, and the occasional hidden shop). You spend the money you earn fighting enemies and finding chests on consumables and new equipment, the latter either replacing your current weapon or otherwise adding to your combat or traversal abilities somehow, say with higher jumps or an immunity to lava. It has a lives system, pretty old-school, but it saves after every stage and checkpoints after the mid-stage mini-boss: losing a life knocks you back to the checkpoint, but losing all of them means restarting the stage.
I ran into the same issues here as I did with Infernax, played at the start of the year, where managing your health and fighting monsters is only around a moderate difficulty level but some squirrely platforming over bottomless pits presents a disproportionate challenge. Definitely close to Zelda II's foibles where you can masterfully take down a boss after a tough internecine battle only to instantly die and be kicked back to the start because of a single mistimed jump or an enemy bumping into you in mid-air and knocking you into a spike trap. In that regard, at least, Gunmetal Arcadia Zero's done its homework. It also has a stronger than average emphasis on story, with multiple NPCs that you keep bumping into with an overarching narrative about two groups of elves—one communing with nature, the other forming a city and trading with the outside world—being forced to contend with an almost alien incursion of strange monsters, led by a hive queen deep underground. The player's even given the choice of guild to join: the warrior-like Gunmetal Avengers or the rogueish explorers the Seekers, the choice of which determines the prices from certain allied vendors (the former's better for weapons, the latter for traversal upgrades). Its punitive platforming irked me more than a few times, but for a brief prologue chapter for a larger game it's robust enough and offers a decent challenge albeit one that seems much more predicated towards not jumping into spikes more than the easy combat.
This was a cool idea for a game, if a little frustrating in parts. If you were to say "Skyrim horse mountain climbing" then enough people would understand precisely what you mean. That is, the process in which you climb incredibly steep cliffs by running at them until your model is magically transported up; the only requirement is that the incline is pointing away from you rather than toward (nor is perfectly vertical). Same general idea behind the gameplay here. You start by getting hatched from an egg, a minor event that lends the game its name but has little bearing on what the game's about, and are then told by a paternal figure to make your way to the top of an impossibly tall nearby structure that reaches all the way up and out of sight. The only rule is that you can't spend too long in view of the half-sun, which causes you damage when its viewpoint isn't blocked much like that one late-game area of Bloodborne (or The Sentinel, if anyone's old enough to remember that). You then have to find a path up, hitting any of the correct inclines to make upward progress. I'll describe what kind of "correct inclines" I mean with some crude ASCII art (the dot represents the player):
. / = Good
. I or . \ = Bad
Doing this, while avoiding the sun's gaze, will eventually get you to the second half of the game where the sun is lower than you are and no longer applies damage on sight, but the climbing part becomes that much harder to compensate with some tricky 3D platforming. Your progress is routinely checkpointed however, and you'll always return to the highest checkpoint even if you should fall to the very bottom of the map: this is not a Bennett Foddy game, after all, but rather one created by a human capable of empathy (I'm just kidding, Mr. Foddy; at least you try to cheer up the players you routinely torture). It's yet another of those low-poly 3D PS1 aesthetic affairs too, which uses its oblique graphics and some great sound design (the sound of the sun burning you to death is appropriately unpleasant, since it's meant to be a deterrent) to give the game a vibe that is somehow both chill and slightly disquieting. I lost track of how long I played but it couldn't have been more than a couple of hours; something about gradually climbing something so massive has a way of causing you to lose track of time. Very interesting and serene experience and I'm glad I gave it a shot, though fair warning that it's a tad on the vertiginous side if that's a dealbreaker for anyone.
Hey, guess who's back on his GL-themed VN bullshit for one last time this month? The Light at the End of the Ocean is a story about an amnesiac woman, referred to by the game as "Guest", and an ornery lighthouse keeper who peels her off the beach after her ship capsized and keeps her company while she recovers. The island's only other occupant is a bubbly woman calling herself "L" who works as an archivist at a nearby subterranean data storage. Though by all appearances a small and unremarkable island, the Guest has been discovering strange things happening to her as soon as she came to, including the ability to touch an item and receive a memory sense of its past by way of a sudden vision. These visions relate to a woman who looks a lot like her, as well as others about a woman who looks a lot like the lighthouse keeper, though set some unknown time in the past. The game's fairly short at around a couple hours in length so it doesn't let the mystery of the island and its inhabitants linger for too long—it's fairly obvious where it's going, especially as a portrait of L and her two sisters spinning thread is a big giveaway to anyone familiar with the classics (or God of War, in my case)—but there's a few branches that allows for some additional endings and other revelations to encourage replays. Man, it feels like I've spent this whole month looking for a visual novel that does the story branching thing to a more significant extent than "pick which one of these love interests you want to pursue".
The ending I eventually received was a sad one, probably the "bad" or "normal" one, and yet it felt so appropriate to the story and its themes of depression and self-destruction that I'm satisfied with leaving it there. Some love stories have that eleventh-hour moment where everything seems to fall apart, only for the finale to kick in and fix everything, yet I've always been drawn to that "this isn't going to work" "false" conclusion because it's somehow more true to life. I realize romance fiction is a form of escapism as much as anything else, and I'm probably revealing way too much about my own love life if failure reads more normal than not, but I think the strength of the genre is that sometimes it feels like everything should go right for the protagonist lovebirds and sometimes it feels like it probably shouldn't. Like maybe the pairing wasn't a healthy one, or one that neither party deserves if there's been lying or manipulation or infidelity involved, or that ending on a break-up or something even more extreme like a Romeo and Juliet tragedy makes it all the more effective a conclusion. I'm really talking out my butt here since it's not a genre I have any keen interest in, just that it happens to be very popular with VN writers if the handful that showed up in these bundles is any indication of a trend, but in this case I'd say the game leaves a strong enough impression with its characters and writing that I could get this invested and be content with a choice like this, for as much of a downer as it might be.
That's going to bring this feature to a close, just as May itself draws to an end and the summer lies before us. Thanks to anyone who has followed along so far and the developers who indirectly contributed, and I'll restart the process of piling up the backlog for next year's May Madness equivalent.
May has a lot of days in it, turns out, and so I've been filling it with as many playthroughs of smallish (1-4 hour) Itch.io Indie games as I can manage. This is all in service of honoring the huge charity bundles Itch.io and its power users started curating around this time three years ago, though really it's an excuse to cut some of my Itch.io backlog down to something could be laughably described as manageable. I didn't even have any Itch.io games this time three years ago, and now the site claims I have almost 250 of them; the easy solution would be to ignore it like I do most of my Epic/Steam/GOG libraries, but anyone who volunteers their creative endeavors for the sake of raising cash for good causes deserves at the very least a shout-out. Albeit the kind of shout-out that might also include a heap of (hopefully constructive) criticism.
As always, links to previous weeks and the games covered therein can be found at the bottom of this and all the May Magnanimity entries. May's just about over now, but I'm going to give myself a little victory lap with the three days that remain and come back for one last half-update on the 31st with whatever I'm able to squeeze in. May's not over until it's over, as we've never said around here.
This was cute. Vignettes reminds me of a little game called GNOG I played a while back, in that it belongs to a very visceral type of puzzle game; visceral in the sense that you're figuring things out by experimenting with objects that you can move around and play with. Like a Rubik's Cube that you'd need to hold in your hand and fiddle with to make any leeway with it, or as close to that sensation as a non-VR game will allow. The goal of Vignettes is to fill a series of paintings each with a collection of random knick-knacks: the way you do this is by taking an object, moving it around in such a way that the angle you're looking at it from makes it appear like something else, and through this perspective trickery you find yourself holding a new item connected to other gateways and secrets to uncover. Progression is as simple as choosing an object from a chest—this chest fills up with more "starting point" items as you complete portraits and earn the keys attached to them—and then using a helpful flowchart to track the objects you've yet to discover. A single object might transform into three or four others depending on the way you look at it.
However, this object discovery process only represents the first layer of the game. There's a page you can visit that shows you a selection of images that include objects you may or may not have already seen. The objects look different in these images and it's your task, optionally anyway, to figure out how to get them into that state. One example would be a little concert hall inside a shell with an orchestra playing: when you find this shell, it's devoid of its main act and by interacting with other objects in the same series (that is to say, all part of the same portrait) you'll free musicians who'll dutifully float off to the concert hall to prepare. Other challenges might involve opening up a locket box by finding a key elsewhere, playing a tune on a trumpet, filling a photo album, and so on. Apparently, completing all these special challenges provides you with a secret website address to check out except it was unfortunately already dead for me; even so, the way you'd have to bounce between several objects to figure out these solutions made for a more engrossing time than simply seeking the objects themselves. The simple visual style and equally simple mechanics would make this a suitable game for little ones, but it also has enough depth to how its perspective puzzles work that I'd recommend it for anyone, especially if they've previously enjoyed chill visual puzzle diorama type of games like GNOG, Windosill, or anything from Amanita Design.
I poked my head into Clash Force back when I was doing my 2017-focused feature Dredge of Seventeen but never got around to finishing it. Turns out it was a pretty short game, so I guess I just got stuck on a tough level. Clash Force is an homage to "Nintendo difficult" NES "run-and-gun" platformers such as Contra and Mega Man, letting you pick from one of three mascot characters that would've fit into any early '90s radical anthropomorph superhero cartoon as they take the fight to the evil robotics genius Crackman and his legion of mechanical minions. It lets you know exactly what type of experience it's aiming for with a difficulty screen offering three options, Normal being the easiest. To reduce the high challenge level there's no lives and you respawn endlessly from the start of the current level, but that's not to say you're in for an easy time: there's a few boss fights in particular that were real swine, and they weren't made any easier by the fact that you always respawn with the base peashooter.
To expand on that, the game follows Contra by offering you several power-ups that change the type of firepower you can project. These include lasers with higher offensive capability and a spreadshot that offers greater coverage. You can also acquire shields which will absorb one hit: if you get hurt without one, you'll lose one of your three hearts (these can be replenished with power-ups too) and lose whichever upgrade you had. As with most shooters with power-ups, you'll have an easier time of things as long as you don't get hit but a single mistake will quickly snowball into a series of them as you lose the benefit of a powerful weapon that can take down enemies quickly before they can retaliate. Worlds are split up into three stages followed by a boss, and there's a small bonus area between each stage that lets you take one power-up with you (though it can be tough to grab the one you want). The game really gets punishing towards the end, especially with the Sonic 2-inspired last world where you have to ride on missiles to get into the boss's flying headquarters. One trouble with the difficulty is that it can frequently feel a bit unfair due to how enemies will spawn almost on top of you depending on where you are on the screen; the high-speed missile sequence is full of those, requiring some shoot 'em up style memorization of the hazards to eventually pass. That said, the infinite respawning and the overall brief length mitigate much of what would otherwise make this game a frustrating and difficult ordeal and it actually felt pretty good to finally beat one of these types of run-and-gun games. Contra and I do not get along, generally speaking.
The Indie horror scene has really become attached to PS1 aesthetics of late. I'd guess in part because several of the biggest survival horror franchises—including Resident Evil and Silent Hill—got their start on Sony's original console, but I also suspect there's something about the surreal obliqueness of those blocky early polygonal models that made imaginations run wild, tapping into our collective fear of the unknown. Fatum Betula isn't a survival horror per se but it's certainly drinking from the same well as those many recent PS1 horror homages with its initially intimidatingly obtuse direction and disquieting visuals. Waking up in a church of sorts, the player finds a tree floating over a pool and a letter in their inventory inviting them to seek a "face in the wind". Hesitate in front of the pool long enough and sure enough a creature emerges from the air, assigning you a task: the sapling you see, the birch of fate (a literal translation of the game's Latin title), is linked to the world state. By changing the type of liquid it rests in, you can change the entire world around it. The goal, then, is to find an alternative liquid source to the stagnant water that sits there now.
The game world is an assembly of zones that may have NPCs, items, and other exits to visit, some of which are more obvious than others. Following any typical adventure game chain of these items and NPC interactions will eventually result in a type of liquid you can use to change the world, with those liquids that are harder to get resulting in more interesting transformations. An easy one would be to kill a poor catperson who is starving to death: they want a fish, but there's one orange-colored fish that is packed with enough poison to kill an immortal. Taking the catperson's blood is a viable option for an ending, though it transforms the world into one of survival of the fittest where no communities or civilizations can form due to the violence in peoples' hearts. Another option I found was to brew a potion of immortality, which in turn can make it so every living thing continues to live forever, eventually floating off into space without memories or sanity after the heat death of the universe. Fatum Betula has a handful of these philosophical conclusions to the game, and extends its longevity by tasking you with finding all of them. Unfortunately, there's no tracker for these endings nor any way to know how many are yet to be found (at least as far as I've been able to tell; maybe it's there's some very subtle markings on the title screen or something) and since most of the routes require the same chain of items and NPCs, you're often required to repeat a good portion of the game over and over to reach the branches that matter. There's a run button to make it easier to get around, but it still involves a huge amount of walking across the same areas and solving puzzles you've solved several times over, so I'll admit to only having enough patience to earn a few of the endings. The ending with the highest number attached to it that I found was that immortality one, considered the seventh, but whether there's an eighth or ninth beyond that I can't say without spoiling myself. Even so, I was pretty much set after three or four. Definitely an interesting spin on a 3D adventure game with plenty of trippy lo-poly visuals to create an unnerving environment, but it's hard to maintain an uneasy atmosphere built on the unexpected and unknown when you're repeating so much of the game again and again.
When a man reaches sexual maturity, there's a question he must ask himself: Do I prefer the dumpies or the bumpies? Well, thankfully here comes a game that caters to both preferences. Actually, I'm just being crude because it's better than being rude: For as much as I appreciate what Dumpy and Bumpy is doing here—hearkening back to a specific type of top-down action-puzzle game that was big on NES with games like Sokoban, Kickle Cubicle, or Adventures of Lolo—there's a certain trick they missed from those older games, and as Dumpy and Bumpy's challenge level increases it's proving more and more to be a fundamental weakness. A fatal one, perhaps. The NES had a limited amount of space on the screen to work with so character movement had a certain discreteness to it, for lack of a better term: characters and other animated parts moved in well-defined chunks. When you translate that to a game where there's a hundred pixels in a single "block" of the game map, issues arise with regards to precise movements and sprite collision and the player's perception of same. It's a hard thing to put into words, but it makes a huge difference to a game's feel when playing: an elusive quality for a designer to get right as much as it is for a reviewer to explicate in just a handful of paragraphs. As such, it's a little too easy to feel cheated by Dumpy and Bumpy when you fail something or are defeated by being off by a pixel, which happens all too frequently. Similar games have figured out this little trick in the past—Toki Tori 2, an excellent 2D puzzle-explormer from way back, is such an example of a game that had these discrete movement "blocks" to make intricate plans of the "pushing this block here while moving over there" type far easier to execute on despite otherwise having a modern resolution size.
With Dumpy and Bumpy you're hitting a wall of annoyance almost from the get go, especially as the game has you chasing a "par time" for each stage for the best result. Granted, the feel of a tough puzzle game like this a real hard balancing act that those developers from thirty years ago made look way easier than it actually was, but that's not to say Dumpy and Bumpy doesn't make some obvious errors too: for instance, going back to that par time thing, actually making the par time won't count as the game wants you to beat it; a minor "eff you" to the player that is entirely unnecessary since they could just decrease all the par times by a single second and let players be happy they "just made it" by hitting it on the dot. The game has its strengths too: the visuals, which are both delightful and have that clean look so important to the puzzle genre where there needs to be no ambiguity with how everything operates and interacts with each other, and the variety of objectives present that includes standard Sokoban block-pushing, quickly dashing around mazes, setting up a string of traps to complete a level in one attack, or those floor puzzles where you have to create an unbroken chain by walking over every tile. There's no questioning whether or not Progamancer has a firm grasp of this long-dormant game format and what makes it tick, it's simply a matter of execution.
Well, here's the requisite yuri visual novel. I'm not sure why I decided this would become a running thing, but at least so far we've had three very different stories even if Amelie belongs to the same supernatural horror sphere as last week's Pale Cachexia. While that game slowly built up the tension and interpersonal drama, this one's more like a short, sharp shock with a twist akin to an episode of a horror anthology show like The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits (it was written for a Game Jam, so it's far from some multiple-hours-long VN that has time to slowly develop). The eponymous Amelie is a young woman from a rich family who has been trapped inside her mansion due to the pandemic—I guess that was a hot topic in 2021, or at the very least viral—but is eagerly anticipating the arrival of her first guest in many years, her penpal Sofia. Amelie's only had her friend Lilika for company, her parents and the mansion's staff having travelled elsewhere when the outbreak happened, and wants to hear more of what's been going on in the outside world. Sofia and Amelie spend some time together, retire for the evening, and then... stuff happens. Spooky stuff, mostly, but maybe a little bit of gay stuff too.
Amelie (the game) is broken up into three routes that play out simultaneously, each following a separate character. Amelie's route, the first, is unchanging in its progression and has Sofia mysteriously disappear the following morning, leaving Amelie devastated that her friend would suddenly depart without a word. Sofia's route, the second, then goes deeper into some odd turns of phrase that might've set off warning bells when you heard them in the Amelie route, such as how Amelie is surprised that Sofia attends university or has taps installed in her home, and can conclude in two different ways based on how "foolish horror movie protagonist" you feel like being with her choices. Lilika's route, the last, then lifts the curtain on what's actually going on (ghosts, y'all) and offers three conclusions. The Rashomon-like format presents a neat bait-and-switch device, while still a mostly linear affair, by using the routes to first lay down the groundwork, ratchet up the mystery, and finally knock down all the dominos. Visually the backgrounds are a little drab, with heavy use of image filters, but the character designs for the three women have this ethereal quality and are given distinct fashion senses that ties into something about their character and their role in the story: Amelie's is cute, graceful, but old-fashioned; Sofia's is contemporary but prioritizes comfort over glamor; and Lilika's is subdued and monochrome but for the long red string she uses as a ribbon. Know going in that it's going to be a bite-sized thing without a whole lot dedicated to colorful prose and character development, and you should be able to enjoy its few spooky twists and turns. (One complaint I have, though, is that it doesn't appear to be on DVD, nor do you cook an egg with a spoon.)
Finishing off this week with what proved to be a deeper explormer than I expected from its goofy title. A young woman living alone in the mountains adores her pet bunnies—all one hundred of them—but something causes them to get spooked by something in the middle of the night and, due to a moment of carelessness, they all escape through an open gate into the wilderness. The mountain is not a safe place to be at night—many shadowy monsters take to the pass when the sun is down—so the protagonist must quickly find and rescue all of her rabbits before the stars come out. The game doesn't so much truck in the usual upgrade-based progression as it does present a large map (four, to be precise) and has you explore as much of it as you want to hunt down the missing rabbits. It's not strictly necessary to complete the game with all of them but there's a special reward if you do. As well as the hundred titular lagomorphs there's also a set of palette collectibles that'll change the protagonist's color scheme, as well as several LGBTQ+ pride-related palettes already unlocked (each uses the associated flag colors). The palettes are a little tougher to reach, but the game mercifully tracks them along with the rabbits for each area.
With the rabbits, the goal is to escort them to a nearby tree stump that warps them back to your homestead. This is done through a combination of environmental puzzles and the protagonist's voice, which can be used to gain a rabbit's attention and then command them to stop and move. Some rabbits have special abilities that you can exploit—a flying rabbit doesn't have to worry about getting over wide gaps, for instance—and some rabbits are well-trained, which gives you a bonus set of commands to work with (a longer jump, a confidence boost that'll let them avoid enemies, etc.). The bulk of the gameplay is contained within these little escort puzzles (if you're trying to rescue them all, anyway) though there's still an ample amount of platforming too. The protagonist is not a high-leaping video game superheroine, so all she can manage is a moderately wide horizontal hop or vaulting up any block directly adjacent within a certain height threshold: the world is designed with these limitations in mind, often requiring you to think about the path you might need to take. Holding the sprint button makes the jumps a little wider, at least, giving you a few options. I'd definitely liken Oh Jeez, Oh No, My Rabbits Are Gone to some other mostly pacifistic puzzle-explormers like the aforementioned Toki Tori 2, Full Bore, or Knytt Underground. It's also probably my favorite of these May Magnanimity mini-Indies I've played so far this month, except it probably doesn't even count as "mini" since it took some five or six hours to find everything. Definitely a pleasant surprise and another lesson to not judge a game by its title (something I'll keep in mind with the upcoming Towers of Aghasba).
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