I'm sort of tying up a thread I began at the start of this month with the blog entry for Ara Fell (IGotW #177) where I ruefully reconsidered my stance on RPG Maker engine games and how I may have missed out by turning my nose up at them as a matter of course. The fodder of many a discount Indie bundle, most RPG Maker games are rudimentary facsimiles of JRPG classics back during the genre's 16-bit era heyday, with little narrative or mechanical innovation to call their own. However, that's not universally the case. I ruminated on this a little after writing about Ara Fell (originally made in RPG Maker 2003) and how there are so many other stand-outs I'd somehow forgotten about: weepy adventure games To the Moon and Rakuen, which used the top-down perspective to tell their stories without the engine's concomitant turn-based combat system; Yume Nikki and Corpse Party, which did something similar but with horror survival as the gameplay substitute; the exceptionally well-regarded LISA or Jimmy and the Pulsating Mass, two RPGs I've not yet played but plan to; and this week's entry, SeaPhoenix's The Lost Art of Innkeeping, which also utilizes the engine of RPG Maker MV in a way its developers Enterbrain could not have foreseen.

As the name suggests, the goal of The Lost Art of Innkeeping isn't to plunder dungeons as a burly adventurer but to be the welcoming home-away-from-home for same, with protagonist Elinor fixing up and repurposing an old manor her eccentric Aunt Agatha left her, turning it into a hotel in order to pay off Agatha's immense debts. As with another anime business simulator, Recettear, the game recommends playing with a strict month-long time limit in which to pay off your balance due, forcing you to make smart and frugal choices to ensure maximum profits (though a "relaxed mode" alternative is also available). As guests show up, you need to modify your vacant rooms to best suit their requirements and preferences, and the game's complexity grows further with the amenities: these are fixed costs that apply to every room, like providing breakfasts or hiring help, that might lower your income for that day but could help to improve your inn's reputation and may even be cancelled out by the additional tips you receive. The game also continually provides tasks for you to do, from high priority missions like earning the next highest star rating to smaller, narrative-focused goals like chasing away a ghost or digging deeper into your aunt's affairs to find out what happened to her supposed fortune.

I'm not going to say it's an overly dense game: events tend to play out in a specific order along with unlocking new areas, facilities, or amenities, and appeasing your clientele is fairly straightforward once you get used to everybody's schedules and what they're looking for, and the game's "world" is only a handful of screens from the rooms of your hotel to the local village and its establishments. You start gaining more money towards the end of the game as your hotel improves in stature and renown, and there's many opportunities to make even more money if you keep your ear to the ground. The game's achievement system gives you some idea of what other possibilities exist, with a few extra guests and surprises for new game plus, so there's some degree of longevity even if you make your goal target and pay off the bank in time on your first run. Though I successfully completed the game it felt a little touch and go for a while, especially as I stubbornly felt the need to reach for the more challenging achievements regarding completion states (like never raising the prices of rooms, which definitely cut into my bottom line). There's also the fact that almost the entire game is built from third-party graphical and audio assets either included with RPG Maker MV or found freely online: this isn't so much a condemnation but an indication of the developers' level of budget. Considering the whole game is about the challenges of making ends meet, I found myself a bit more sympathetic about utilizing "programmer graphics" than usual.

For all its budgetary flaws and shortcomings, The Lost Art of Innkeeping is capable of what life-sims like Stardew Valley do at their best: give you multiple reasons to get up in the morning. I'm speaking more figuratively, of course; there's plenty of little diversions beyond the gameplay core of arranging room furniture and wavering over hiring the chef and maid for the day despite the costs, and each fresh day tends to bring with it something new to check up on in the village, or a hint about a secret basement room, or the means to open up the entrance to a cave network behind the manor. New guests, though none are written particularly deeply, come with new recurring storylines and sets of variables to consider for their next visit, and spending money to make money is always a valid if worrisome consideration even if it's as minor as putting up curtains or giving the local baker cooking lessons. It's sweet, silly, only as stressful as the player wants to be, and full of enough ideas to fill its month-long calendar. I had a great time with it overall, and I could see it becoming a precursor to something much more in-depth and confidently built (with original assets, even) if it finds the support it deserves.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Everyone's naturally abuzz about the upcoming localization of Yakuza: Like a Dragon, otherwise known as Yakuza 7, but after starting 2018's Yakuza 6: The Song of Life over the weekend I've noticed that even prior to Like a Dragon's paradigm-shifting absence of the Dragon of Dojima and the introduction of a whole new turn-based structure to combat, the series had already been undergoing some major changes. Yakuza 6, which released between the Kiwami remakes, feels considerably different to its more immediate predecessors in part because the developers wanted to tell a more intimate story about Kazuma Kiryu, his suddenly-comatose adopted daughter Haruka Sawamura, and her apparent infant child Haruto without losing focus with multiple character perspectives and the feature creep that continued to expand Yakuza's enormous catalog of incidental content from sequel to sequel.

As such, the game is streamlined in myriad ways, and I'm finding myself split between appreciating a condensed Yakuza experience that doesn't sacrifice that vital balance of serious drama and silly distractions, and missing a whole suite of side-activities and optional objectives that the developers deemed superfluous. That isn't to say that Yakuza 6 hasn't seen its fair shake of new improvements and features to compensate, just that a great culling has commenced; its victims, numerous and unexpected.

Gone, But Not (Yet) Forgotten

It occurred to me when building this list of activities that once graced every new entry but no longer is that I don't actually "miss" most of them in the conventional sense of being unhappy that they're absent. it's more to do with how I approached every Yakuza playthrough with the same mental checklist of goals to chase and "game completion" targets to hit, despite having little chance of ever reaching that coveted 100% for one obnoxiously grindy reason or another. The lack of each of the following carries with them a gap in that routine that I find myself a little further adrift, even if my actual mood when completing them in the past was often more obligatory than joyful.

In this era of open-world padding concerns, in which we commend each new genre entry that bucks the previous trends or attempts a more concise approach while in turn decrying to some degree "old souls" like Sucker Punch's Ghost of Tsushima or any of Disgraced Developer™ Ubisoft's upcoming projects for steadfastly adhering to rote filler and map icon emesis, Yakuza 6 has definitely made smart downsizing choices here. Doesn't mean I can't call them out for trimming all that delicious, flavorsome fat regardless:

Phone Box Saving

A positive example of modernization finally hitting the Yakuza series. Y6 is, I believe, the first Yakuza game where all saving is done automatically on a regular basis. You can also make manual saves too, in case you need to go to the dark side and save-scum a situation, but the game lets you make these saves anywhere (provided you aren't in a fight or a mini-game). Definitely an appreciated change, and it's not like public phoneboxes make much sense in 2016. Likewise, there's no separate storage system: Kiryu now has pockets a mile deep.

UFO Catchers

I really wish the Yakuza games had found more to do with the UFO Catcher prizes besides letting them sit in your storage box once you'd caught one of everything. I would've enjoyed having somewhere to set up a little shrine of Sega-branded stuffed toys, even if it would be hard to imagine Kiryu putting any effort into something as cute as that (then again, he spends a lot of this game inside a mascot costume and playing with local cats, so you never know). Instead, since they serve no practical purpose and I guess the developers were sick of everyone complaining about the physics involved, they've been removed from all the Club Segas to make room for "Easy Mode" cabinets of Super Hang-On and OutRun. If I want my own Opa-Opa, I'll just have to play the Fantasy Zone machine like everyone else.

Pool

This one hurt. I love some video game pool, even if I'm terrible at it (pretty lifelike then), and knocking around balls in the mature smoky atmosphere of Yakuza's bars was a great means of slowing down a little and enjoying the nightlife of Kamurocho without having to punch out a dozen portly thugs in tracksuits every five minutes. I usually tried to complete most of the pool challenges in every game, and I particularly liked the "puzzles" where it set up a specific shot that you needed to figure out. The real salt in the wound is that they dropped pool but kept darts.

Cards/Gambling

This feels like a big absence because of the traditional portrayals of yakuza. My knowledge of old yakuza movies is somewhat limited, but there's a common romantic image of them spending their time gambling in seedy dens with hanafuda card games like Koi-Koi or dice games like Cee-Lo and Cho-Han. In fact, these den of iniquities usually played a major role in the Yakuza series, from The Florist's lavish underworld to the city's homeless putting together a multi-floor casino in an abandoned building they'd taken over, though the parlor games themselves were always incidental. I never did get a hang of how scoring works in Koi-Koi, though the dice games were simple/fun enough for a few minutes. (Could be they're just really well hidden in Yakuza 6...)

Shogi

Bye, Felicia. (Mahjong's still around, but at least I know the rules to that.)

Golf

Maybe it was unrealistic to expect Yakuza 6 to bring golf back since it was already relegated to a driving range in Yakuza 5, but Kiryu is old now and there are certain expectations for men his age. I guess they never really found a way to "Yakuza it up" like they did with cab driving or wild animal hunting. I'm not saying they should have Kiryu rework some punk's face with a 7 Iron in a bunker trap every other hole, but maybe a more exciting user interface could've done the trick.

Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey

Only around for one game and then gone forever. Your time came too soon, Sexy Bathrobe Air Hockey.

Lockers

Well, sorta. They've been replaced with big safes that have nearby keys you have to find first. Same deal, but fewer in number and with way less running around involved. I can't tell you how many cumulative hours I've spent looking for tiny twinkles on the ground so I could roll the dice on some sweaty locker treasure. Going from something like 50 or 100 keys per game to just ten makes much more sense, and now the sparkly items I keep finding are these weird photographs of past Yakuza characters instead. It's a new mystery to solve, and honestly that was the best part of that sparkly scavenger hunt.

M Store

Looks like Poppo finally won the war of the conbinis in Kamurocho, because they have twice as many branches in Yakuza 6 and M Store has vanished. The only thing left of them is an empty storefront on Nakamichi Alley. At least there was a safe key in there: I like to think of it as a reward for all my years as a valued patron, for as much good as it did. (In gameplay terms this kinda sucks because the two stores had slightly different inventories, but that's been less of a concern in Y6 so far with its lack of inventory limits and more emphasis on vending machine drink buffs.)

Magazines at the Conbinis

Related to the above. The Yakuza games have always prided themselves on their verisimilitude to Japanese urban life, and one way it could inject some realism was with a rack of modern-day Japanese magazines for you to peruse in any of the game's convenience stores. They weren't magazines you could read: Kiryu (or whoever the protagonist was at the time) simply gave you a rundown of the type of content each periodical covered. Later Yakuza games even let you check out the smaller nearby rack of manga. Kinda fun, but if I was looking for places to cut content and didn't want to jump through the usual hoops to ask a bunch of publishers for permission, I guess this would be an immediate consideration for some spring-cleaning.

La Marche

Haughty, up-market luxury goods store La Marche has long been a staple on the lengthy Showa Street that makes up the bottom edge of the Kamurocho map. I believe this is the first game where they've become inaccessible. They've revamped the hostess system so that gifts aren't a concern, so there's no reason to pop into La Marche any more for Italian handbags and French perfume, but I miss just going in there to loiter and make the cashiers nervous about the big unfashionable yakuza dude in their midst.

Champion District

The lack of La Marche, M Store, and Ryugujo (The Dragon Palace, aka the homeless-run casino) is bad enough but they even had to take out the entire Champion District. This cramped labyrinth was home to several bars and a common place to find substory triggers and collectibles in previous games, so I'd always make it a priority to sweep it whenever I was passing by. It never really served any purpose you couldn't get from Bantam and Kamurocho's other bars, but I liked the vibe of those tiny hole-in-the-wall drinking establishments. Apparently the whole district is being "renovated" during Y6, so I'd be curious to see if it shows up looking completely different in Judgment. Or if it's just a parking lot.

Coliseum

There's no Underworld that I'm aware of, so that means there's no underground arena either. A major timesink in any Yakuza game, the goal here is to beat each tournament to get the best rewards and truly test your fighting prowess if you're at the point where you're stomping all the games' bosses (unlikely, but you might just be that good). The real reason you're there is to take on every one of the randomly-determined rogue's gallery of underworld fighters and weirdos, which often included American boxers, hulking Muay Thai warriors, luchadors and pro-wrestlers, nerds with laser swords and grenades, clowns, serial killers, an actual fucking bear, and legendary Konami composer Akira Yamaoka in Michael Jackson cosplay. I'll miss getting to fight that crazy bunch again.

Still Around, But Different

These mini-games have been significantly reworked, to the extent that they're hardly recognizable any more. This is another part of Yakuza 6's process to streamline and modernize a lot of the content it has hauled over from sequel to sequel, though I'm here to weigh in on how much more improved these activities have become.

Darts

All right, so I may have intimated earlier that I've never really cared for darts either in or outside of video games, but the analog stick finesse that so often buried any chance I had of improving at this mini-game has now been replaced with a more accessible timing gauge. All you have to do is hold the cursor in place - there's a small amount of drift, so you can't just wait for the timing slider to line up forever without readjusting the aim - and then let it fly once the timing gauge is dead center. Not nearly as tough as it looks, though it's rare that I get all three shots where they're supposed to be. It's tolerable, which I'm thankful for because Y6 has a few darts-related substories.

Fishing

The Yakuza fishing mini-games have always resembled those in other JRPGs: you cast a line, wait for a bite, and then reel it in while adjusting for the fish's behavior. Final Fantasy XV is probably the apex of this particular type of mini-game - I can only assume the devs spent so long tweaking it that they forgot to write half the story - but Yakuza's version was always decent enough. Y6's is very different, however: Onomichi's spearfishing is a first-person, on-rails shooter set underwater against many aquatic opponents that I've taken to calling "Panzer Lagoon." It's way more intense now, though it's easy to get bored of the same three levels. Still, you can make a huge amount of cash with the right gear and money is always vital in the Yakuza series.

Hostesses

Y6 has done something interesting with the old hostess mini-game, which relied a lot - to my chagrin - on your social and conversational prowess. This effectively boiled down to a lot of multiple choice prompts in the middle of dialogues, the outcome of which either involved you getting closer to your partner or her calling the cops. In Y6, you have a selection of dialogue prompts that you play like cards, switching out your hand whenever you find yourself with useless options. Some of these dialogue cards still lead to multiple choice scenarios, but for the most part you're actually working with stacking bonuses: each card is either plainly conversational, stylishly "dapper," playfully sexy, or has a goofy party vibe. Huh, pretty much exactly like the four Ninja Turtles even.

The End!

I'll spare you from going through every Yakuza 6 side-activity, but suffice it to say there's a lot that's been tossed out or reworked. It all ultimately works in Yakuza 6's favor however, keeping itself a more tightly-paced experience, as does the Yakuza team getting over the idea that everything must carry from game to game in case there's some really annoying fan out there who'd be mad if you took anything out (I realize the irony of that statement, trust me). After the bloatedness of Yakuza 5, though, Yakuza's been trying to find the right balance to keep the series' reputation as a prime screwing around simulator without spending an obscene amount of time and resources revamping all these legacy mini-games for each new console generation (Yakuza 6 being the first PS4-exclusive). If a Yakuza game only takes me 50 hours instead of 100, that's probably for the best. I tend to get carried away.

In conclusion, Yakuza 6 is pretty awesome and I'm not at all mad that they took out pool, even though I really liked the pool. Totally not mad. At all.

I'm going to have to come to terms with the fact that the greatest impediment to this feature - beyond my brain's fun little trick of making my own typos invisible to me - is that my system simply can't keep up with even the 2D pixel-art games coming out these days. That, along with my limited options for a system controller (currently the Steam controller, which might be one of the most poorly designed hunks of plastic I've ever held), meant that I really couldn't give MO:Astray the old college try it deserved. It's a shame too: the game was a gift (albeit not a gift code aimed at me specifically) so I was really eager to give it its due for my patron's sake.

Created by a Taiwanese Indie team, MO:Astray is a puzzle-platformer with a curiously incongruous presentation and a slightly awkward control scheme, both of which I'll discuss a little later. The protagonist is an amorphous blob that an enigmatic voiceover eventually starts calling "MO," and a lot of the early game is spent bouncing around and maneuvering past obstacles and hazards with a combination of catapult-hopping and special abilities that MO acquires as the game progresses. MO:Astray isn't a true explormer, as each of the game's stages have a linear path and are disconnected from one another, but there are the occasional collectible health upgrades and lore-related items off the beaten path if you're inquisitive enough to look for them. It's one of those games where you're given very little information from the outset and must piece together what happened from the subtext of where you go and what you encounter.

The reason I found the presentation curious is that most of the game has a very... I guess I'd call it serene vibe with its soft ambient synth and attractive-looking environments that make great use of lighting and particle effects. This relaxing atmosphere is greatly at odds with the setting itself: either a ship or a planet colony that has been infected by a mysterious gas, leaving all its former inhabitants (mostly scientists and test subjects) as horribly mutated zombies. Even the corpses that aren't ambulatory and instinctively hostile towards you leave gruesome scenes behind, and the game will occasionally allow you to see flashbacks of how certain members of this doomed laboratory died, bleeding from all orifices as the vapors transformed them into something inhuman. One major mechanic of the game is the ability to bounce on a creature's head and temporarily take them over: in gameplay terms, this allows you to access switches built for human hands or "persuade" your bodyjacked victims to set off traps for you Abe's Oddysee-style, but it's always kinda horrific to watch. Not just conceptually, either: by hitting the activate button while possessing a foe, you can read their personnel files and last sapient thoughts. This gives you insight into what these people were working on, their opinions on fellow scientists or the local environment, and how they ultimately met their ends - this info can sometimes be useful but usually just sad and upsetting. None are more heartbreaking than when you possess the Geemer-like wallcrawler enemies, who were invariably all young children transmogrified by unconscionable experimentation and almost every one of their last thoughts were of childlike panic and pain and confusion. It's... a lot to swallow, but thankfully while you still need to possess these erstwhile kid-bugs to traverse the environment you aren't obligated to pry into their innermost feelings.

Speaking of traversing the environment, the game uses a targeted catapult system for movement akin to something like Dandara or Angry Birds where you aim the right analog stick a direction and hold forward (or back, if you want proper slingshot controls) a certain amount to apply power before releasing and flinging yourself airborne. This technique is mostly used for passing over obstacles or wall-climbing, as you can just sludge around normally on solid ground. MO can affix itself to walls and ceilings too, but only briefly: it's usually enough to wall-climb a narrow shaft or use the ceiling as a brief stopping point to cross a gap, though it can also be used to put yourself out of harm's reach in a pinch. Unfortunately, this movement system is easily the worst part of MO:Astray. The dotted-line arcs aren't as accurate as they're depicted, because gravity starts pulling you down far sooner than you'd expect, meaning most jumps after the initial second or two are a crapshoot because you can't effectively do those calculations in your head. More often, unless the distance you're trying to bounce between is very small, you'll miss the target and simply plummet straight down to earth (or into a pit of spikes, as is more frequently the case). A mid-game acquisition of a double-jump brings with it its own problems: if you have some serious lag, which seemed to follow me around at all times in this game, your timing will be off upon hitting the second-jump prompt and it ends up being useless. There are points where you need to move quickly, perhaps because some falling debris is chasing you down an elevator shaft, and these catapult controls and the fine-tuning they need are woefully inadequate for the level of split-second accuracy that is required - this type of hurried platforming might've been more approachable if time slowed down as you were aiming, or something to that effect. I got stuck in a room with two crushing blocks going around an endless circle for what felt like an hour, simply because I couldn't command the sort of dexterity needed to escape them with the jump-aiming controls provided: it the first time the game had ever thrown anything that difficult at me also, so I was unprepared for it on top of these technical issues. Excuses, excuses, I know.

There's aspects of MO:Astray I'm utterly fascinated with, as its sci-fi horror and gore are frequently uncompromising in their grisliness and totally at odds with its gentle music and cutesy blob protagonist and voiceover (who speaks in what sound like little girl gasps and hums with subtitles underneath, probably to make localization easier) and I'm loving the way a full picture is slowly forming as I keep reading the brains of dead/dying people and picking up little hints here and there of the catastrophe that ensued, if not yet my role in it or who my talkative benefactor might be, but trying to actually make progress has become a Sisyphean prospect I'm really not in the mood for. This might be one I come back to later when I have fewer technical issues weighing the experience down, even if it might not amend my reservations entirely, because there's definitely something special going on with this odd little slime game.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

I've got some time between major backlog games right now, so how about another five hits of short and sweet delights from the mega-sized Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality? I imagine I'll be chipping away at this enormous batch of games for many years to come, which is why I've been tossing several smaller games together so as to better highlight what the bundle has in store (and to shout-out the generous devs who freely lent their creations to a noble cause).

Be sure to check out the first two parts of this rapid-fire round-up here (Part 1) and here (Part 2). (Disclaimer: These games have been selected based on their perceived length and depth, though I'll be the first to acknowledge it's not always easy to tell just how much they have to offer.)

LaserCat

LaserCat's fun, if a bit on the light side (heh, laser humor). Your owlfriend has been kidnapped by a space frog wizard and it's up to the eponymous photonic feline to rescue them. Beyond that it's a standard 2D platformer with a non-linear progression that lets you explore the map in any direction you wish. The game's world is pretty huge - a 15x15 grid of single-screen rooms, making 225 in total - and while some of world is designed in such a way that you can only access areas from a specific direction, the vast majority can be accessed through multiple means. It does technically qualify as an explormer, even without progress-enabling upgrades: it's a platformer and you're required to explore for the keys you need to open your owlfriend's jail, so you can't get a more literal interpretation than that.

LaserCat shares a lot of DNA with VVVVVV, and not just in the way both games are presented like a classic single-screen ZX Spectrum platformer with drily witty room names. Both have carefully considered the appeal of Spectrum paragons like Jet Set Willy and the sense of adventure they evoke with their branching paths to delve and shiny collectibles to find and how these games - at least those emanating from the European/British markets - were often filled to the brim with subtle humor and broad silliness. This allowed designers to embark on ever more personalized creations, vital in a time where 8-bit graphics were approaching a level of complexity that allowed for inchoate video game personalities to form, and so it left a lasting impression on the generation of British kids that grew up with them. A novel aspect to LaserCat, albeit one that is still germane to the era it hails from and the game's sense of humor, is how every key item is attached to a trivia question: get the question wrong, and it'll warp you to a death pit. Keys need to be banked at checkpoints before they "count," so the combination of reaching the keys, solving their riddles, and getting back to safety can often present a challenge. Most of the questions are just excuses for goofy riddles, though, so they're usually not that difficult to answer.

Sadly, the Itch.io version of LaserCat suffers from a major bug where you cannot jump from moving blocks. There are only a few cases where this is an issue, as the game's approach to level design lets you skip by most of them, but one gauntlet of moving blocks in particular is the only means to get one of the game's keys: without it, completing the game is impossible. I'm now sitting at a map menu screen with 99.57% progress and no means to continue, which is exasperating to say the least. Doesn't sound like this bug is still in the Steam version, however, if that's what you end up buying. (3 Stars.)

• LaserCat is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam, and previously available on Desura and Xbox Live Indie Games.

Lyne

Lyne's another puzzle game like Sidewords (reviewed in Part #1) in that there's a hell of a lot more content in here than I was expecting, and I was ready to bounce before I even hit the half-way point because I could tell my brain would've started objecting if I progressed too much further. Lyne is based on a relatively simple premise: draw a straight line between a pair of terminal nodes, including every other node of the same color along the way, by moving around a grid horizontally, vertically, or diagonally without intersecting with any other line. It's a brainteaser format frequently seen in adventure games with "Mensa-style" puzzles, such as those favored by Professor Layton, Puzzle Agent, and any number of HOPAs (Hidden Object Puzzle Adventures).

A game like this works first on repetition, to ensure you have a baseline understanding of the mechanics in play, and then escalation, as it introduces new features that not only force you to incorporate new strategies to supplant the old but gives the designers far more variation to work with for subsequent puzzles. The first major change-up is a special node that requires two lines to pass through it: you have to fully activate it along with everything else before the puzzle is complete which is an extra layer of challenge, but it also allows lines to cross. The second big step is the introduction of a third set of terminal nodes, which requires you consider how to build paths between all three pairs that somehow don't run afoul of one another. The straightforward click-and-drag (or touchscreen, as this game is available on mobile devices) interface and customary soothing tones of the BGM are absolutely typical of this genre, but I guess you don't really come to puzzle games for an out-there presentation: what matters is the content, and specifically the slow burn of incremental variation and the smoothness of its difficulty curve. Lyne is handling both well enough so far.

I was ready to pack it in after the first three groups of puzzles (each "set" comprises of 25 puzzles, and I'm sure the game has at least fifteen sets based on some of the unlockables) but I suspect I could've gone on a little longer before the old gray matter left a Dear John letter and headed off for greener pastures through the nearest ear. The game's also got a "Daily Puzzle" system which, again offers an incredible 50 new puzzles a day. I don't know if there's some algorithm the developers came upon that lets them generate these things, or if the days loop, but I liked how they employed the New York Times crossword's system of giving you an easy time on Monday and ramping it up gradually to a Sunday nightmare. At any rate, I think I'll be picking away at this one for a while yet. (4 Stars.)

• Lyne is available to buy on Itch.io, Steam, iOS, and Android devices via GooglePlay.

Shipwreck

With my limited experience with both, I can say that designing games is a bit like cooking. Until you're practiced enough that you can start letting your imagination go wild, it's often better to follow an extant recipe for your first few forays with perhaps only a few minor modifications. So it is with many Indie games that deliberately ape certain pre-existing icons, usually one their developers played over and over growing up, in that they give their designers the confidence they need to eventually carve out their own niche in video game history. Frequently, those "template games" tend to hail from the Legend of Zelda franchise, and Shipwreck is no exception. Very consciously adapting the rough story outline of being shipwrecked on a cursed island and the more compact level/graphical design of Link's Awakening (the original GB one, anyway), Shipwreck is a no-frills adaptation of the Zelda model complete with the requisite dungeon maps and heart container upgrades.

While I found Shipwreck charming as a microcosm of the Zelda formula, there's no getting around the fact that the game is a little too beholden to the recipe it followed without a whole lot of innovation or quirk to call its own. Many of its dungeons boil down to running through a maze fighting the same two creatures (though these two are different for each dungeon) and occasionally hitting buttons or finding and using small keys. There's only a handful of what I'd call traditional Zelda puzzle scenarios, and they tend to be the same ones we've seen many times before: Sokoban block-pushing to weigh down buttons, flipping switches to alternate spikes that either allow or prevent egress, and dropping down the right pits to access new areas of lower dungeon floors. Graphically and musically it's competent enough - the developers outsourced the latter to a middleware VGM studio and it's pretty catchy - but the game overall sits in the same part of my brain that something like Neutopia does: a very utilitarian ersatz that lacks much to distinguish itself.

I will say there are some risks that Shipwreck takes that occasionally pay off, though can come with caveats of their own. One is that enemies don't respawn (for the most part) and don't appear on the overworld, so you could hypothetically rid the island of its monster problem for good with enough determination. This makes getting back to the dungeon boss that much easier (sadly, the dungeons are huge and lack any kind of shortcuts or warps, so dying to the boss is a major pain) though it's also harder to source restorative items along the way. Speaking of which, I believe the game employs some sort of algorithm to make curatives drop more frequently when you're running low, which was always an adaptive difficulty feature I appreciated in other games. Shipwreck lacks the diversity of items that most Zeldalikes enjoy, limiting the player to their sword, shield, a lantern for dark areas, a crossbow for range, and a pickaxe which more or less functions as the sword but destroys rocks instead of bushes. This also greatly hinders the amount of variation the game can offer with its obstacles. So while there are some nice touches here and there, for the most part it's a whole lot of brown rice: filling but not exciting. (3 Stars.)

• Shipwreck is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.

The White Door

My hopes weren't high for this one, given its downer themes of mental health and the curative properties of maintaining a routine (hits close to home, as they say), but it won me over pretty quickly once I realized what it was up to and how much more a participant it made the player than many other games of its type. The White Door is about a mentally-unwell burnout named Robert Hill who enters an experimental wellness program to cure his depression following some initially-unexplained demoralizing circumstances, and how this treatment involves carefully following a checklist of objectives over the span of a day and then repeating that process for a whole week. Robert wakes up, eats breakfast, cleans himself up, checks in with the nurse, takes on memory tests, eats dinner, has some recreational time, and goes to sleep. He then dreams the dreams of a tortured mind and wakes to a new day of the same routine.

The game builds on the familiarity of this routine early on so it can subvert it later, as you might predict, but it's thankfully not too slow to get going: the game punctuates each day with flashbacks leading up to Robert's depression and has the player act out the narrative by manipulating the current scene (e.g. if Robert's narration mentions a character closing their eyes, the player must physically drag their eyelids down to continue the story). The nurse check-in, memory tests, and "recreation" aspects of Robert's routine are actual puzzles the player must solve too: the first requires gathering information about yourself from the effects you've left in drawers and boxes; the second starts with some simple pattern recognition and escalates in difficulty throughout the week; and the latter could be anything from lifting weights to correctly placing dominoes around a board. The game is always giving you something to do to draw you into Robert's healing process, while subtly and eventually not-so-subtly hinting at something untoward going on at the eponymous care facility.

I've noticed a slow trickle of these routine-based horror games (or "boo-tines," as I probably won't be calling them again), most notably Konami's creepy corridor simulator and prelude to broken dreams P.T. which inspired the majority of the rest, and they all work their magic by establishing the familiar and then twisting it into something decidedly unfamiliar. It's then you realize that the familiarity you were comfortable with wasn't actually that comforting at all, and the clues were always there that something was awry and that the bad news is only making itself more overt as you keep pressing on. I also really like the clean way the game presents itself: a lot of white space is used for Robert's spotless guest chambers, with only judicious flashes of color here and there, and the dull hues eventually become symbolically tied into the narrative. The game horizontally partitions itself so that the left side is usually given to moving around a zoomed out and more encompassing viewpoint of Robert's quarters while the right side is used to zoom in on the nearby environment (the computer, a table, the bathroom sink, etc.), which of course is another familiar element the game can mess around with later. It also has some fun with its 1970s setting, which is otherwise incidental. The game's story is one of those that is ultimately up to interpretation - a storytelling device I'm not always so hot on, but the way the normalcy and stark visuals gradually fall away to reveal the deeper waters beneath is very cleverly done, as is the developers' decision to constantly keep the player busy with handiwork so they never lose focus. (4 Stars.)

• The White Door is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam.

WitchWay

We're back in explormer territory again for WitchWay: a laser/block puzzle-focused exploration platformer from a group of four experienced Indie developers who have since gone their separate ways (the lead, Andrew Gleeson, worked on Titan Souls while the rest are attached to other similarly well-known Indies). Dropped down a well and left to her own devices, a witch must find and then use a magic wand to command magical purple blocks to help her escape. These blocks can hold down pressure pads, carry the witch to allow her to reach new heights, and are eventually able to stop or reflect lasers to activate switches.

The game ends fairly abruptly after it starts messing around with lasers about a couple hours in, though there's some added longevity in terms of collectibles: each room has a secret "eye" (these wall eye symbols are usually used to indicate when a switch has been pressed) and there also are eight bunnies hidden around the dungeon and a handful of well-guarded artefacts. WitchWay is an explormer much more in the vein of a Knytt Underground or Full Bore in that there's no combat to speak of, and progress is instead gated by solving the puzzles in each room. I quite like these more cerebral pacifist takes on the genre, especially when alternated with something far more RPG or combat heavy (like the recent IGotW candidate Sundered), and WitchWay has a typically cute compact pixel look that can occasionally make it tough to get the full scope of a room - not so handy when the switches and blocks could be in any direction - but at least allows for some detailed sprites. I appreciate too that getting your careless ass killed when trying to maneuver around the insta-death lasers or spikes simply respawns you to a moment before your demise, rather than resetting the whole room and forcing you to start the puzzle over.

Unfortunately, I can't say I had a great time with WitchWay throughout. Part of that is the conscious lack of a map system: you're meant to feel your way around the dungeon as it isn't very large and most areas connect to others in short linear loops, but given that there several concessions made to ensure you won't get lost - one is that a small fragment of the map is shown on the wall every time you enter a room, and another is a major map room that also keeps track of the eye collectibles - so the lack of a map you can summon any time is a little dispiriting. WitchWay also has some instability: it crashed pretty seriously three times while playing, to the extent of having to sign out to reset the desktop as it even took Task Manager out of commission. Towards the end I was gunning to complete the game as fast as I could, eschewing the last few collectibles, just so I could avoid another session-wiping hard lock. Even without the technical issues, it's just a little too brief and surface-level to offer much. (3 Stars.)

• WitchWay is only available to buy on Itch.io.

I can't begin to imagine what reasons I might have for gravitating towards a lot of lighter stuff for this feature over the past few weeks, but I'm discovering there's less I'm able to tolerate from the more mentally-taxing fare available. There's a number of games I struck from my immediate Indie backlog after a few minutes of gameplay because I either wasn't feeling it or they took one look at this agéd-ass laptop and stated, quite plainly, "well, this simply isn't acceptable to me, a modern video game." And so it's come to this: Where's Waldo But For Cats.

Hidden Paws is a delightful but wafer-thin hidden objects game in the purest sense - no fancy HOPA-style adventure game puzzling here, no sir - with one significant advantage it has over peers like Hidden Folks or The Tiny Bang Story: each environment is fully 3D, and the player's roaming camera possesses free-form movement that allows them to check every nook and cranny at every angle for wayward felines. The goal of each map is to find a certain number of cats (essential) and balls of yarn (inessential). Finding about half the cats is enough to unlock the next "island" - each stage being a few rocks in an endless white ocean - though you can stick around and look for the rest if you'd like. The game has a generous hint system that gives you the closest non-cat object to one of your missing targets, which may well be the box or car trunk it's hiding in, and there's no time limit or other restrictions to worry about. Cats will also meow when you're close by, so it's not too difficult to narrow down where they might be hiding if you're in the right general area. Overall, it's very deliberately designed to be enjoyed by the casual crowd and/or the very young, though for the latter they might need some practice with the mouse controls: the camera uses all three buttons (left+drag moves the camera, right+drag changes where the camera looks, and the mouse-wheel zooms in and out) in a semi-intuitive but occasionally over-corrective fashion. Even with these concessions though, finding that last cat can sometimes take a while on my third sweep of the island my mental landscape is already beginning to devolve into something like this.

So the game controls well enough and it has a cute concept. I'd also argue that looks and sounds fairly charming too; the former has a sort of low-poly style that works in part due to the effective use of lighting as well as how rarely you really need to zoom-in close to these environments given the distinctive appearances of the cats and yarnballs, and the latter involves some gentle orchestral muzak that is commonly applied to contemplative puzzle games like this. However, it should be said that even with only sixteen levels the game soon starts repeating itself. This is due to the game's lack of discrete 3D assets to build its island habitats around, which I imagine was a major cost consideration during production. You'll be opening chalet windows, car trunks, boxes and crates, and picking through piles of firewood on almost every island, most of the time with nothing to show for it as the developers have already started looking for alternative methods to stump you. There's also almost nothing in the way of the little incidental jokes that Hidden Folks inserted into all its scenes (which, of course, were inspired by the many goofs in the impressive crowds of the original Where's Waldo books). It maybe didn't need to go overboard given that the objective was a serene and wholesome little game about finding lonely cats lost in the snow, but the lack of variance was striking about a dozen islands in.

Developers Manic Hyena seem to be very attached to the concept of hunting (in a nice way) cats across various little 3D diaramas. Since the release of Hidden Paws in early 2018, they've produced two more: Hidden Paws Mystery, which looks to take the player closer to the ground to search for kitties on-foot, and the newly released Summer Paws, which... well, it's the same thing as Hidden Paws, but set in the warmer months. More respect to them if they plan to keep iterating on the concept: it's evident from the first Hidden Paws that while the core makes for a solid casual experience, there's room to grow with more ideas and diversity to keep their audience of ailurophiles guessing. Can't say I didn't enjoy a laid-back time with it, even with these limitations.

Rating: 3 out of 5.

That's right, I'm back on my randomizer bullshit. That chalupa-chomping fart connoisseur Dan Ryckert decided to start a fresh The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time playthrough on his Twitch channel and it's inspired me to investigate if the randomizer tools for Ocarina are as ingenious and rewarding as those available for A Link to the Past. The one downside I foresaw here was that Ocarina of Time is a much larger game than LTTP: maybe not strictly in terms of how much there is to see and do (there's fewer dungeons, if I recall) but definitely in terms of geography. It's part of the reason it wowed so many at the time: just strolling across the enormous Hyrule Field after the Kokiri Forest prologue made it seem like there was a huge world to explore. That Breath of the Wild pulled off the same feat again almost two decades later is partly why it's rocketed up so many "favorite Zelda" lists.

There's a few other odds and ends specific to Ocarina of Time, or at least factors that distinguish it from A Link to the Past, which makes a randomizer run that much more awkward (and maybe compelling?) as a result. My expertise with the game, which really just boils down to "I completed it two or three times years and years ago," does not extend to typical speedrun strats: glitch exploits, sequence breaks, and the memorization of every chest location are all way beyond my limited familiarity with the game. Thus, I don't expect I'll get to the end in any kind of competitive time; however, I still do intend to get to the end, even if it takes the most circuitous route to get there. It remains to be seen how much of that process I intend to immortalize here as an LP though: I want to show off some of the randomizer's quirks (and how they pertain to the game's already extant quirks) as well as some of the bad decisions I've made w/r/t the toggles you can switch when generating a randomizer seed. Speaking of which...

The Randomizer

I found this site quickly, which suggests there's a pretty big community around this already. If you're unfamiliar with randomizers in general, most of them are specifically "item randomizers": they fill a pool of key and inessential items, usually the contents of chests or prizes won from bosses and mini-games, and then redistributes them. This works especially well for Zelda games and explormers, because they're both heavily dependent on specific items and upgrades to make progress. If you don't have the right item, progression is temporarily stymied... unless you picked up an item you weren't supposed to have yet, at which point you can either use this unexpected boon to jury-rig alternatives to the traditional solution or jump ahead in the game's critical path. (I created a much longer series on ALTTP's Randomizer here, and then tried a bunch of other randomizers two E3s ago, if you need more of an explanation of how randomizers can affect a playthrough in many unforeseen ways.)

Anyway, getting to the Ocarina of Time randomizer specifically: there's a few really boneheaded decisions you can make here that I want to show off once the LP gets started below, but in general it's super robust with the sheer volume of features on offer. It even has a multiplayer "cross-world" co-op mode, which randomizes your world's items with those of everyone else joining you. That might mean that your game's hookshot is in your friend's world, and you have to wait for them to find it before you can use it. I'm not sure I have anyone in my life I'd be able to convince to try that, since randomizers are already niche enough, but I'd love to see it show up on Giant Bomb or a GDQ someday (needless to say, there's a Link to the Past version also).

(EDIT: I guess I wished upon the right shooting star or something, because there will actually be an OoT Randomizer Co-op run at SGDQ 2020 this August. I swear I only heard about it this morning.)

Some of my favorite toggles in the standard single-player randomizer include skipping less fun (and randomizer irrelevant) sequences like sneaking through Zelda's Castle as Young Link, both of the races (Epona and ghost Dampé), and the climactic crumbling Ganon's tower escape. These toggles mostly serve to save time on speedruns, but they weren't my favorite parts of OoT so I'm happy to lose them. You can let the Sheikah Gossip Stones tell you where items are if you're stuck, though if you don't want to make it too easy you can set it so that you need the right item first. You can make the game even harder with enemy damage boosts or fewer starting hearts. You can randomize the note order in every song, making them amusing cacophonies that are almost impossible to remember. You could even add Triforce pieces into the item pool and instead turn the game into a big randomized collectathon: by finding them all you win the game (the randomizer suggests this for the cross-worlds co-op mode, since there's more item pool slots to go around). There's more I want to introduce in my LP though, so I'll cut the explanation off here.

Suffice it to say, one of the most popular titles in video game history has a suitably complex and intelligent randomizer program to suit. I always enjoy any excuse to warp my own nostalgia like this, even with all the headaches that are about to ensue. And oh boy are they.

The Playthrough

Episode I: The Deku of Many Things

OoT NOoTe #1: Yes, you can choose to randomize the Kokiri Sword along with everything else. However, there's also a toggle to eliminate that little jerk Mido, who blocks the entrance to the Great Deku Tree until you have a sword and shield in the vanilla game. I toggled the former without toggling the latter, which meant the sword had to be obtainable before I could leave Kokiri Village and continue the prologue: hence, it's back in its usual chest as there's nowhere else it could really spawn. If I were a little more adventurous, I could've also randomized shop inventories; in that case, I'd probably have to buy both the sword and the shield before the game let me continue. (If you're unlucky enough not to find the sword early in a seed that has randomized its location, you have to make do with Deku Sticks for general combat instead. You burn through those things fast, often literally.)

OoT NOoTe #2: OK, so another one of the randomizer's options is to blend in dungeons from Ocarina of Time: Master Quest. Master Quest was an extra mode offered by the GameCube port of Ocarina of Time, which was given away as a pre-order bonus for The Wind Waker. It shuffled the dungeon layouts to make them more challenging, but didn't really use any new content besides a handful of assets dummied out of the original Ocarina of Time; thus, it didn't take much for sharp modders to recreate those changes in the game's original ROM for the sake of this randomizer. When generating a seed you can decide how many Master Quest dungeons are thrown into the mix - between zero or all of them - or set a random value.

OoT NOoTe #3: One major difference between Ocarina of Time and Link to the Past are the gold skulltulas: one hundred sneaky spiders with pre-determined locations across both Hyrule and future Hyrule. They appear in overworld locations (though usually only at night) as well as dungeons, and each of them produces a gold skulltula token upon death. The idea being that you collect enough of these tokens to uncurse a rich family in Kakariko Village, who give you things like wallet upgrades after certain token milestones. Now, in randomizer terms this means a hundred new items could potentially infect the item pool; I believe you can choose to keep the skulltula tokens out as a default setting, but this idiot over here - as an inveterate invertebrate hunter - chose to keep them in.

The repercussions of this decision have proven to be dire. Not only do most chests and rewards now provide near-useless tokens (there's always a chance a gold skulltula family gift turns out to be something vital, like the bow, so I gotta keep getting them) but there's a chance that any gold skulltula in the game might drop something important instead of a token. In fact, several will in the upcoming screenshots.

OoT NOoTe #4: Ever heard of a Keysanity run? I did one for Link to the Past here. In short, it assigns every dungeon's map, compass, boss key, and small keys to the global item pool. That results in cases like the above, where I find a dungeon item for a dungeon I've yet to access (the Forest Temple is an adult Link dungeon). The compass and map aren't such a big deal - dungeons can be cleared without them - but shuffling the keys is a much bigger obstacle to progress. You cannot complete a dungeon without its Boss Key, and you can't expect to get too far without enough keys either. It's for this reason Keysanity runners usually do all they can on the overworld first, since otherwise they'll be dipping in and out of dungeons depending on the limited number of keys they've found. (Fortunately, the three major Young Link dungeons don't require keys.)

Just to reiterate: Keysanity (a portmanteau of "key" and "insanity") runs are an extremely bad idea for neophyte randomizer players. I've no clue why I chose to do this to myself again. Especially when combined with the skulltula thing.

Episode II: Hyrule More Like Whyrule

OoT NOoTe #5: I feel the need here just a moment to reiterate the early game's progression, for the sake of those who haven't played Ocarina of Time or simply no longer remember the specifics. After completing the Great Deku Tree dungeon and leaving Kokiri for the first time, your goal is to meet Princess Zelda and obtain two things from her and her attendant Impa: an invitation to get you past the guard in Kakariko Village who blocks the way to Death Mountain and the next dungeon, and the Zelda's Lullaby song which is needed for a bunch of different triggers, including the entrance to Zora's Domain. After that, you can visit Death Mountain and Zora's Domain unimpeded for the next two dungeons. Just need to wake up Talon to get into the castle in the first place...

OoT NOoTe #6: Yes, you can randomize how many cuccos you need to save. I could've sworn I set the number to random, but I still needed all seven. Worth the time and effort, as you can see above. For the record, there's a bunch of Deku Shields in chests (and thus the item pool) because they're easy to lose if you're dumb enough to block fireballs with them.

OoT NOoTe #7: There were at least a few ice traps in the original Ocarina of Time, which were chests that simply froze you in place and drained a bit of your health. The randomizer can insert even more of them into the item pool, leading to unfortunate gotcha moments like this. Irritatingly, ice traps can be found anywhere, not just chests: you can grab an item in the wild and it'll suddenly reveal itself to be another ice trap. The game managed to trick me with the promise of a bottle, even (since I didn't get one from the Cucco Lady, and nor will I from Talon and Princess Ruto for future reference).

Now that I have access to Zora's Domain and Dodongo's Cavern, the game's opened up just a little bit. I can also go visit Lake Hylia and the entrance to Gerudo Valley, or go commune with the Great Fairies of Hyrule Castle and Death Mountain. Nothing guaranteed, but enough possible item spawns to get me a little further on.

I might resume this playthrough later if anyone's interested, but I think you get the gist of the sort of mental gymnastics a randomizer run regularly cajoles out of the ol' gray matter; doubly so when you're stupid enough to include rules like "mix in all the Gold Skulltula tokens" or "randomize all the dungeon items too." There's so much punishment you can put yourself through, but it's been a super rewarding exercise thus far regardless.

Use the link (not that one) at the very top of the blog if you want to try generating a seed yourself, perhaps with some gentler variables, and I'll see you again should I ever stop picking up rocks hoping to find a boss key underneath.

For years, I've been fascinated with the Steam icon for The Little Acre, with its vaguely Bluthian doggo and moppet staring at some unseen treasure, and I'd occasionally spot it whenever a Steam sale rolled around at some ridiculous discount. It belongs to my beloved old-school point-and-click adventure genre and seemed well-received enough, so I decided to slake my curiosity a few months back. The Little Acre is the product of an Irish developer, Pewter Studio, marking only the second time I've tried an Indie from the Emerald Isle (after Gambrinous's Guild of Dungeoneering, though I should probably count VVVVVV designer Terry Cavanagh also). However, The Little Acre's Gaelic roots become immediately obvious with the game's full voice-acting, which features many a brogue, and the pastoral charms of the titular cottage setting.

The Little Acre follows both Aidan, a widower looking for work to support his rambunctious daughter as well as looking for his missing wayward inventor father Arthur in the meantime, and said rambunctious daughter Lily, a would-be adventurer who has courage and imagination to spare. Poking through Arthur's old workshop, both Aidan and Lily are separately teleported to a fantasy world named Clonfira which changes their proportions and presents all sorts of magical dangers. The game tends to alternate between the two playable characters fairly regularly, sometimes in a manner of seconds depending on the story's pacing at that moment, and generally finds ways to limit the usual inventory puzzles this genre is known for. A lot of the time, with the exception of scenes set at the Little Acre, you don't even need to leave the current screen to complete the immediate puzzle and move the story forward. There's also a few puzzles of the other, brainteasery kind, but they're simple enough. Intended for a younger audience, the game also has a generous hint system, though there are a few puzzles that rely on quick timing; usually of the old "temporarily distract someone while you complete an objective behind their back" sort. I noticed a lot of the secret achievements tend to involve completing these timing puzzles on the first attempt.

There's no getting around the elephant in the room, which is the game's duration: as well as animated like a movie (really, it's some great work, especially with Dougal the dog and his attempts to keep Lily from harm) it's about the length of one too. There's a speedrun achievement to complete it in an hour, which isn't beyond the realm of possibility even on your first playthrough. The ending is abrupt, but earned at least, and ends in a way that leaves room for sequels without necessarily demanding one (it's implied that the original denizens of Clonfira found pathways to lots of worlds, not just our own). Overall, I think there's a commendable level of craft behind the visuals and the voice-acting is adequate, and I particularly liked that the interface already highlights hotspots in the vicinity when you first load an area and removes them once they've served their purpose. It did glitch a few times, where I'll occasionally be unable to reach the save menu (I think it still auto-saves, and it's only an hour long even if it doesn't) or the subtitles will vanish or I'll try to activate two hotspots at once and confuse the game for a moment, but nothing that really stands out as too deleterious. Just a wholesome little fairytale of a graphic adventure game that frequently feels like the prologue of a grander story.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

I'm going to be picking away at the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality for some time to come yet, having already appended my Indie Game of the Week backlog to account for some 70+ new games. However, the bundle has many more items of a smaller and/or freeware nature that I'd have trouble building a whole IGotW blog around but fits quite nicely in a group setting like this. So here's another five games you can try yourselves if you have the bundle (and if you missed out, they're not all that expensive - two of them are even free).

Also, be sure to check out Part 1 of this series.

Cuckoo Castle

A mini-explormer, made for the 2015 GBJam (a Game Boy-focused Game Jam; not to be confused by our own "GB Jam," Giant ROM) by a three person team. I assume Indie devs, especially those pressed for time, gravitate towards the Game Boy aesthetic because it means a smaller canvas for pixel art (160x144 typically) and not a whole lot in the way of in-depth color coordination seeing as there's only the four tints. Cuckoo Castle's kinda cute, but like other micro-sized explormers (e.g. Xeodrifter) there's not a whole lot of what normally makes explormers compelling and it's of course very short. I also didn't care for the combat too much, especially the way that zombies would keep appearing beneath your feet and how little room you had to work with.

Cuckoo Castle manages to couch the usual explormer formula (or explormula) of acquiring traversal upgrades to expand where you can visit via a character switching mechanic. By warping back to town (via any of the pig statues, which double as save/restoration points) you can change to a witch character with ranged spells and a double jump, or a bugman character who can fly and attacks by spawning these little pillbug followers. You also need to unlock the witch first by saving her from the game's first boss, whom in turn is the only one capable of finding and rescuing the bugman. The ultimate goal of the game is to rescue ten missing villagers (though there's supposedly more) and defeat Dracula, who frequently finds his way into games of this genre. Took me about an hour, and while I didn't always have a great time I respect the precise level of craft put into this compact thing, which I imagine is akin to building a ship in a bottle. It had a half-decent soundtrack and the graphics, though limited, had the occasional visual flair like some flickery torchlight or rainfall hitting the ground as you ran by. As an explormer it's probably not entering the upper echelons of the already packed Indie hall of fame, but as a Game Jam product made in a couple of weeks (with a little bit of post-deadline patching) I think it's worthy of accolade.

• You can play Cuckoo Castle for free on Itch.io even if you missed the bundle, either by downloading the executable or playing it via your browser of choice.

Inkanians

I picked up Spelunky in the Summer Steam sale, just because Rorie's been playing a lot of it for the site and I was tempted to start getting into those daily challenges to see if I could keep up with the Boss of Bosses, and while I've no intention of getting so deep into it again that I'm challenging Yama every other day I did notice something about this particular puzzle game while browsing through the Itch.io bundle. Specifically, the blocky, vaguely Central American protagonist of this puzzle game very strongly reminds me of those asshole trap "Thwomps" from Spelunky's late-game temple levels. Could it even be possible to sympathize with these smushing villains were I in their slidey non-shoes?

Inkanians's premise is a simple one: slide around the screen and collect all the gems, avoiding hazards like skull blocks along the way. If you've ever seen one of those puzzles where you push blocks across ice where the block won't stop until it hits something, that's pretty much what this game is in its entirety. Naturally, my head started spinning about 35 stages into its 60 stage total, in part because the game has a lot of mechanics to introduce (including a clone that mirrors your actions and is fatal to you if you should collide) and juggling multiple of those simultaneously makes an already challenging proposition even more so.

Inkanians also has this striking visual style, which uses a monochrome color scheme (many shades of gray at least) but an oddly intense amount of detail for such a functionally simple premise. Some realistic torchlight flickering (which is starting to become a theme this week), effective lights and shadows when applicable, and whenever your Thwompy hero hits a wall it produces small dust clouds from the neighboring blocks. No music, but plenty of loud "thonks" as your Incan deathtrap pounds against the walls which, honestly, can get a bit cacophonous if you're quickly retracing steps to get back to where you messed up on the last attempt (or, at least, a little before). Overall, I don't think you could do a whole lot more with this premise that Inkanians doesn't provide you, and while my interest was piqued by the totally incidental Spelunky comparison I'm not really a fan of this type of puzzle set-up. To me, it's like Sokoban or those light beam refraction puzzles: something I probably could do having less of in general in action-adventure types like Zelda.

• Inkanians can only be bought from Itch.io. A demo version, featuring 25% of the levels, can be tried for free.

Little Comet

I've no real interest in the sport itself, but something about video game golf (especially mini-golf) has this relaxing, almost soporific effect on me where I just hit this zone of Absolute Geometry. I suspect it's because the game physics always boils it down to something akin to a puzzle game, where you can reliably work with constants - your little golfer guy unerringly hits their yardage with each shot, provided the player does their part in hitting the various power gauges at the right intervals - and then figure out the minimal number of shots at the right tangents to sink the ball. Theoretically, pool games put me in the same state, except I've never been able to intuit the correct deflection angle when the cue ball connects so I just end up getting annoyed about bouncing the same ball off the cushions for ten minutes straight.

Little Comet's whole aesthetic and premise immediately reminded me of two pieces of media: the first is perennial SNES favorite Kirby's Dream Course, the connection largely due to how exasperatingly cute the two games are, and a 1991 episode of Red Dwarf named "White Hole" where slobbish everyman hero Dave Lister takes it upon himself to play pool with planets, forgetting that the variable gravity wells of celestial objects makes planning such a proposition the exclusive domain of hyperintelligent AI (in fact, he wrests control from one such AI to make the shot himself, which miraculously still works). Little Comet's conceit is mini-golf with the added wrinkle of planetary gravity wells and other space phenomena, with each course sometimes requiring extra steps like hitting a button or knocking a soccerball into a goal for whatever reason.

While this is a fun idea in practice, as a means of setting up a bunch of unpredictable courses, Little Comet isn't a whole lot of fun to play. That's no fault of the interface, which uses an intuitive slingshot motion where you hold away from the direction you want your starry protagonist to move towards and hold it further away the further you wish them to move (I particularly liked this control scheme in The Game Bakers's Squids, which used it in a more combative action-strategy format). Likewise, all gravity wells and their effective ranges are clearly demarcated by a dotted circle to let you know where and when they'll apply. However, navigating these gravity wells for the sake of slingshotting around a planet or moon very rarely goes the way you'd hope, and sometimes it becomes a struggle just to escape a planetoid once you're trapped within its gravitational influence, let alone then go on to reach the hole's par score. When you start finding courses with multiple gravity wells to maneuver past this particular star-crossed mini-golf format goes from mild frustration to a very strong sensation of not wanting to continue.

I feel like this has been the end result of any puzzle game (or puzzle scenario within a game) that decides to incorporate gravity wells: I recall my spotty time with Osmos (one of the earliest Humble Indie Bundle games), or more recently with the deeply flawed Outer Wilds and trying to land on that damn solar platform, and deciding I'd rather be doing anything else than trying to contend with the unpredictable nature of the endless cosmic ballet. Well, at least Little Comet is adorable; if you collide with a planetoid too hard you give it a boo-boo!

• Little Comet is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam. It can also be bought for iOS and Android (via the Google App store).

Marie's Room

I wasn't going to include Marie's Room because I discovered that it isn't optimized for lesser video cards, and thus unplayable for me, but it caused such a bizarre problem that I figured it'd be just as interesting to discuss that as it would be hearing about my adventures rifling through the belongings of some girl in a similar vein to Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch. Given that the game is freely available on both Itch.io and Steam both and will likely take about an hour to complete, there's no lofty investment here so there's really no need for any written pre-amble from this guy about whether or not to try it out. Hope you have a better time with it than I did.

So, back to that issue. Turns out, on lesser graphics cards - mine's some integrated piece of Intel HD crap that came with this laptop - the game is almost pitch black. None of the extant light sources work and there are no in-game illumination options as far as I can (not) see. There is sticking the gamma way up on the menu, but that just turns the pitch blackness into something closer to pitch navyblueness. While you can still interact with the various journals, photos, and other keepsakes strewn about Marie's titular room it's sort of moot if you can't actually see where they are. The dev(s) were in the Steam forums trying to collate some dxdiag files to narrow down the problem last year but apparently gave up, so we have yet another case of an Indie PC game that simply isn't compatible with older/lesser tech. I could stick it on the same pile as the others I've come across while doing the Indie Game of the Week feature, most notably The Bard's Tale IV, Obduction, Cradle, The Witness, and the more recent The Room ports or Stories Untold (both of which still had IGotW reviews, though in retrospect I probably should've skipped them given they weren't working right).

But hey, since I'm almost certain the game is about some dead kid, maybe the devs were making a point however indirectly about leaving the past in the dark, and that exposing them to the warm light of day might only serve to cause more heartbreak and regret. Now that an effort was made at an interpretation, I feel I can probably move on. (For disclaimer's sake, I also tried The World Begins With You, mostly because I'd just bought The World Ends With You: Final Remix and thought it fitting, but ran into a similar graphical compatibility problem.)

• Marie's Room is free to download on Itch.io and Steam. The Steam version has achievements and paid soundtrack DLC.

Perspectrum

The last game today is a puzzle-platformer, the genre that would define the Indie development scene for many years. Perspectrum uses the traditional elements as a means of transforming the surrounding environment, and through that mechanic the player is able to traverse a series of locations all branching off a hub village. The goal of the game is to collect spirit fragments, which are used to open a door that leads to the endgame.

These spirit fragments are scattered across the overworld itself and its many side-areas, and navigating this world can be a bit of a chore due to the way its world is built upon multiple doorways that lead to different areas. Some zones, like the library, make it easy for you: the central library area has about a dozen books, each of which either leads to a puzzle with one or more fragments to collect or an NPC who dispense with a bit of lore about the setting (a mountain) and the story (the mountain is sick, and the spirit that once resided within has gone missing). Other areas, like the cistern, are a massive maze of passageways and doors, some of which link up in smaller nexuses or just lead to dead-ends with fragments. With no map, it was a little tricky to navigate. The catacombs, meanwhile, have these floating ghosts that carry elements with them: the goal is to use their influence to make elemental pockets to proceed, but I could never figure out how to move beyond a certain point involving an underwater door surrounded by bracken (the bracken is removed if a ghost with the green/toxic element touches it, but there's no way of getting it down there without running afoul of the toxicity yourself).

There's also the matter of the visuals, which are evidently the result of a phenomenon widely known as "programmer graphics". I'm generally not bothered by a lack of graphical finesse if the gameplay core is fine, which is more or less the case in Perspectrum, but it's definitely not winning any beauty contests. Most NPCs and details are far too small to leave an impression, leaving mostly barren dirt tunnels and flat water bodies as your primary settings. I liked the soundtrack, which was melodic and atmospheric if a bit xylophone-heavy, though the sound design was rough: no sound effects whatsoever, besides a very discordant mic scratch whenever you died and were reset to the last entryway. Presentation is not Perspectrum's strong suit, then, though I can't say I disagreed too much with the game in the middle. Bit fiddly with wall jumps (especially where there's an overhang, since squeezing through vertical gaps with the walljump's wide clearance is like pulling teeth) and I'm definitely missing a tutorial or something on how to deal with those catacomb levels, but otherwise a fine little game that could be the precursor to something greater, or at least something more substantial and attractive.

• Perspectrum is available to buy on Itch.io and Steam. Itch.io has a free demo version to try.

Whenever I see a 16-bit pixel JRPG on Steam I'm often hesitant to dig any further, knowing that every new edition of RPG Maker always brings with it a host of zero-budget games from well-meaning hobbyist developers that are looking for their start on the platform. The few exceptions tend to come from established developers like Zeboyd, who not only know how to modernize the genre but deliver on its strengths with some exceptional encounter design and many quality-of-life innovations, and now I can safely add Stegosoft Games to the same whitelist if Ara Fell is any indication.

Set on a picturesque floating island - recalling Baten Kaitos, Granstream Saga, Skies of Arcadia and many others - known as Ara Fell, the game follows teenage ranger Lita as she gets caught up in an ancient conflict for the beleagured aerial landmass between the vampires and the elves. She eventually acquires a party of allies and embarks on a world-encompassing journey to collect vitally important shiny trinkets, as per the usual, though the game's writing is at least capable enough of injecting some welcome humanity and wit into this otherwise clichéd plight. Lita herself reminds me of Trails in the Sky's Estelle Bright: an outgoing young woman who is quick to bring the hammer down on obnoxious behavior, but allows herself moments of vulnerability and immaturity befitting her age. The rest of the cast isn't quite as nuanced, but still likeable enough.

The true star of the game is just how meticulously designed it all is. That's immediately evident by the striking visuals of Ara Fell, which are full of detail and color and little animated flora and fauna everywhere you look. It's one of a few pixel-based games that managed to cause my PC to slow down just from the sheer number of objects on-screen. Each scenic area is full of resources to gather, secret entrances to uncover, treasures hidden behind every nook and crevice, and incidental side-quests around so many corners, even if broadly speaking the world itself isn't enormous. The battles, too, have undergone the Zeboyd treatment where so much rides on mastering the individual team-members' skills to control the battlefield; I almost wished I'd played on a higher difficulty setting just so I'd be forced to more carefully consider every move. All this said, the game isn't incredibly sophisticated or all that long in length from what I can tell; it is an Indie project, after all, so we're not talking the butt-numbing 50+ hour playthroughs of the SNES and PS1 eras it hearkens back to. Probably for the best, since I had other games to play this week.

I'm a sucker for good game design, and Ara Fell has it pouring out its pointy elf ears. Enemies all visibly wander the environment and won't actively attack you unless you prompt a battle, allowing you to easily skip past them if you feel you're already levelled up enough. Equipment isn't bought but instead upgraded from what you're wearing already: you can still shell out for the upgrade materials or simply come across them naturally while exploring or after combats, but most of these components won't be available until the game progression is ready for your team to power up. Skills all have alternative paths to suit the player's ideal team build and the special stones needed to power them up are rare on the ground, and often well hidden to boot if not prohibitively expensive, creating a distinct sense of value and necessitating tough decisions regarding what to prioritize. The gauge needed to cast spells and special abilities regenerates every round and starts at its maximum, so there's no need to hold back against regular mobs, and likewise your party replenishes all health after a battle (something I've noticed has become the norm rather than the exception in modern RPGs). Optional mini-boss encounters are everywhere and usually warn you first in case you haven't saved in a while (though there is an auto-save, of course), side-quests are as likely to drop valuables and XP in your lap as they are to unlock a character's higher class abilities, and there's a series of items called "Relics" that do nothing but sit in your inventory and provide permanent passive boosts to your party. It's been a joy just exploring each area of this highly-detailed world seeking out these treasures and making the next story boss encounter that little bit more manageable (though, as I said above, I may have been better off going for a higher challenge level given how much easier I've inadvertently made things).

I'm still only partway through the game, but I've finally gathered a full party and now feel more confident to take on some of the optional encounters I'd been passing up before. I've also acquired a new means of traversal, which should permit passage to some treasures I wasn't able to reach before, so now I'm eager to double-check the previously visited regions of the game's vaguely open-world setting before I press on to the next story destination. Ara Fell's definitely opened my eyes to how many smart developers there are out there who grew up loving these games as much as I did, and it has me wondering if I should stop turning my nose up at those Steam games with this overly familiar aesthetic.

Rating: 5 out of 5.

How has 2020 been so far?

You know that scene from Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey where they're falling into an endless dark void and screaming the whole way, and then they eventually get bored of screaming and play 20 Questions instead? I'm around there.

OK, but how about in terms of games?

Well, I don't play a whole lot of new stuff and miss out on the zeitgeist frequently, which so far this year hasn't been as much of an issue as it has been in the past (Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Last of Us: Part 2 felt like two undesirable extremes on the Mood-o-meter spectrum). I've got a few 2020 releases I'd like to pick up eventually, but between some Steam/PSN sales and that enormous Itch.io bundle I'm set for video game purchases for quite a while. However, I have been availing myself of my monolithic backlog as per usual, so this year's been a busy mix of slightly aged games I've long been meaning to get around to. Like the following:

Luigi's Mansion 3

Back when I still doing my monthly round-ups, which were getting so bloated with random pop culture observations that I figured I should stop foisting them on this poor website, I talked about my expectations for Luigi's Mansion 3 going in after burning out spectacularly on Dark Moon, the second game. Dark Moon's chief issue was one of heavy repetition: to complete each of the game's many discrete mansions, you had to complete the first little area, and then get kicked back out to Gadd's hideout, then complete that first little area again and move on a bit more, then get kicked back out to Gadd's hideout, and so on in such a manner that every mansion took three times longer than it ought to. Cynically, I assumed this is because there wasn't enough content for Nintendo's liking. Oddly, this is a deterioration that hampered a completely different horror-themed franchise: Tecmo's Project Zero/Fatal Frame series, which started declining around Fatal Frame III with its frequent revisits to the same locations.

Anyway, Luigi's Mansion 3 was a return to form, fortunately, focusing once again on a single mansion with a whole bunch of thematic variation. I enjoyed my time with it, even if it felt a little more disconnected with the way its floors worked. The first Luigi's Mansion had that Resident Evil vibe with the way you might be deep within the Spencer Mansion and suddenly open a freshly unlocked door to find yourself back in the foyer, with quick access to the earlier parts of the game; I kind of missed that interconnectivity in LM3, even if this new system probably made it more convenient to get around and revisit previous locations for collectibles and whatnot.

I feel like the best way to summarize how I felt about Luigi's Mansion 3 is by doing something very unfair to it, which is to compare it to Two Worlds: a duo of CRPGs that once referred to itself as "Oblivion killers" that turned out to be anything but. The first had some... rough edges, to put it mildly, that the sequel buffed out until it resembled something you could actually compare to The Elder Scrolls without laughing. However, without those rough edges, that sequel didn't have much of an edge at all. Two Worlds II won't sit in the memory in quite the same way even if, overall, I probably had a better time with it with fewer irritations borne from its bizarre game design decisions. Luigi's Mansion 3 is the same: way slicker, way more imaginative and varied with its level and puzzle design both, and obviously a lot better looking... and yet I'll probably forget everything about it by the end of this year.

The Outer Worlds

I'm sure I went deep on The Outer Worlds in some previous monthly check-in also, but The Outer Worlds definitely had a sense of a smaller but more complete package. Something devised by a smaller team with less time to work with that instead dedicated their schedule to creating a very solid but relatively short game in lieu of something crazy ambitious and barely functional. "Barely functional" has been a persistent challenge for Obsidian Entertainment in particular, who have always had this reputation of delivering on deeply flawed (purely in the technical sense of being buggy) masterpieces.

The Outer Worlds, to its credit, ran almost perfectly throughout, and I attach this to how it had fewer moving parts than most big first-person open-world RPGs of its ilk, especially those from Bethesda. It had a fully realized late-stage-capitalism-infested zeerustic aesthetic, some well-defined companions that were equally fun to shoot the shit with as they were to shoot at shit with, and enough RPG bells and whistles to make progression entertaining enough to seek out ways to boost your XP in whatever small ways you could. It always felt like they were doing a lot with a little though, between the limited number of foes and locations to visit, like it was the prologue to something far greater that Obsidian could create with the same engine if this one did well enough.

I'm generally in two minds when it comes to this approach (though maybe "approach" should be in quotes, since making a game smaller in scope is often a financial reality rather than a conscious decision) of making more compact games out of engines that could allow for much more. This was the case with Saints Row the Third and Pikmin 3: sequels that you could argue benefit from having way less of everything for a more focused playthrough that won't demand 50+ hours from the more obsessive players who need that 100% completion accolade, though could also be said to have suffered from the reduced scope and ambition. If you cut Skyrim's content by a third, would it still be as good? You'd have less to see before you were finally done, but that would also mean having... well, less to see. As an adult with ostensible adult responsibilities to draw me away from gaming time, I'm appreciative of more compact video game experiences on the whole. However, when said compact games feel like smaller and lesser versions of bigger competitors it almost feels like I'm missing out. Obsidian's never going to be the kind of company that can throw many millions at a project the same way Bethesda can (though maybe that'll change now that they're property of Microsoft) and I definitely prefer the outlandish notion of an Obsidian game that actually works at launch, but despite offering a universe of infinite potential it instead felt... finite. Very finite.

Trails in the Sky: Second Chapter

I'm not sure when the tides began to turn on Falcom's humble Trails franchise (itself a self-contained series within the lengthy and venerable The Legend of Heroes franchise) but I started hearing a lot more about it in recent years, to the extent that we now have honest-to-goodness Trails in the Sky content on the Giant Bomb website. Granted, it appears to be just the one video of an aborted full playthrough of the trilogy that starts the whole Liberl-Crossbell-Erebonia Trails arc, but I'm thankful we got even that much.

It was due to this sudden rise into the zeitgeist that I finally opted to continue from where I left off with my Trails in the Sky FC playthrough way back in 2014 with Trails in the Sky SC (or Second Chapter). Despite a six year gap, I rejoined Estelle, Joshua, and their bracer friends having missed nary a beat, picking up on its deeply tactical turn- and grid-based combat system, its elaborate element-focused Orbment Grid character development, and mission-based structure that affords an episodic approach to the central story arc and plenty of humorous asides and tough optional encounters. Within moments I recalled who everyone was, from party members to antagonists to major NPCs, and where their characterizations and personal arcs had advanced to by the end of the first game. I attribute this to how the writers (and localizers) did such a good job fleshing out these characters and this world.

One big secret to Falcom's modest success, besides how superbly written these Trails games are, is how it's never shy about a challenge. Falcom diehards will regularly tell you to play on the next hardest setting after normal, and then tackle the unique NG+ bonus difficulties for "the true experience", and Second Chapter was where the gloves came off for this specific franchise. Because it starts where the previous game left off, it means you begin around level 30 and have full access to the range of techniques and "limit break"-style ultimate attacks you were using to clobber the last game's final boss, so Second Chapter happily tosses you into the deep end from the get-go and continues to ramp up from there. Some fights require such a specific strategy that it's easy to find yourself overwhelmed until you suss it out. Even when that's not the case, there's a lot that rides on how well you control the battlefield, and the turn order as well. The latter is a factor not only in managing how frequently you attack compared to your foe(s) - some are very fast, and you need to address that before they stomp you - but in managing certain bonuses that appear in the turn order. If there's a bonus that boosts critical damage or heals a moderate percentage of that character's health coming up on the turn order bar, you want to make sure to jiggle the turn order around any way you can so that one of your characters receives that bonus and not the enemy. One great way you can do this is by activating a character's ultimate attack, since you can do this at any point in the battle and it'll interrupt whomever was going to act next. There's a wealth of tactical options that First Chapter spent a long time building up to, for the beneficial sake of slowly acclimatizing the player, that you have full access to as soon as Second Chapter begins. For that reason, Second Chapter feels a whole lot more engaging right out the gate.

The rest of Second Chapter's strengths reside in its storytelling, and how that narrative proceeds from the first, so I'm loath to get too deep into all that for the sake of spoilers. I'll just say that the first game gives you a very strong reason to want to jump immediately into the second, while the second feels like it ends on just enough of a final note that the third game in the game series, Trails in the Sky the 3rd, will instead mostly consist of tying up loose ends and setting up arcs for the later Trails games to pursue. I've still got a while before I reach Trails of Cold Steel III - the most recent (localized) entry, and the eighth overall Trails game where Trails in the Sky Second Chapter is, of course, only the second - but I intend to keep plugging away at this franchise for the foreseeable future. Ys will always be my sword-slashy and metal-thrashy first Falcom love, but I can't deny that there's vital RPG elements that Trails delivers on far better than Ys can.

God of War

I somehow managed to hop on angry pop just before the news broke out that the next Assassin's Creed would go from Spartans and sandals to a more Norse source, taking a route previously followed by Titan Quest (and its Ragnarok expansion) and, of course, this widely acclaimed, non-numbered God of War sequel. As one of the few remaining PS4 exclusives that isn't in the process of making its way to Steam either explicitly or in rumor only, God of War boasts an impressively detailed open-world filled to the brim with mythology based on the Jotun, Aesir, Dark Elves and many other supernatural entities that Kratos can pull apart at his discretion, and is buoyed in this by, well, a boy, but also a combat system heavily focused around Kratos's new magical returning axe. It's such a simple idea that it's a miracle that it hasn't been used to this effect before, excepting perhaps Link's boomerang, that you have a singular weapon that never leaves your side and can do damage on the throw and on the return if you time it just right.

What makes God of War such a stark comparison and contrast both to The Last of Us Part 2, to suddenly get all topical, is in the ways both try to paradoxically decry and glorify violence, especially as a last resort. It's clear the two studios are close associates in philosophy and game design both, if Cory Barlog's championing of Druckmann's pushback against both the critical response to TLOU2 (or rather, the very few outlets with anything actually critical to say) and to the growing public disdain for exploitative crunch periods alike, and both seem very set on the idea of allowing players to have their murder cake and eat it too. I realize it's a little unfair to compare the two, especially given the two year gap, but there's something about the fantastical violence of God of War and the increasing reluctance of Kratos and his part in it that rings far more palatable than the melancholia of TLOU2's world on the turn, even if mushroom zombies aren't really all that less extraordinary than draugr. I'm still not sure if I want to play a second of TLOU2, and that was before its chief designer started brigading any and all vocal critics on Twitter to shut them up, but I'd jump at another God of War in this vein in a heartbeat.

Digressions regarding more contemporary games aside, I feel like I'm always on the cusp of giving up on open-world games entirely. They all suffer from having so many different collectibles and bonus objectives strewn about their enormous maps, and I can never seem to stop myself from finding each and every one before I'm sated with the playthrough, so there's almost this feeling like I'm partaking too much in the "vice" aspect of video games where I'm only doing something out of obsessive habit and not because I'm enjoying it. Yet games like God of War or Sleeping Dogs or Marvel's Spider-Man or Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain come along so regularly, where such huge exciting strides are made with how these open-world games choose to interpret the player's freedom to go anywhere and accomplish so many different objectives, that I can't find myself dropping my association with the genre. By many metrics, it's the most important - if sadly ubiquitous - format of high-budget game development out there right now. I think I can happily excise anything coming out of Ubisoft though; they're not so keen on innovating with this genre, it seems, so much as delivering the same content to a legion of undemanding fans who want the next AC or Ghost Recon to be just like the last one so they don't have to exhaust themselves learning anything new (I'm excepting Rorie from this, because while he is the only Uplay+ subscriber I have ever known he is also way deep in that Magic: The Gathering hole and I've never been able to figure the rules of that game out). I might have a Ubisoft game coming up further down this blog though, so I'm one to talk.

Xenoblade Chronicles 2

Yo, speaking of open-world games that just go on and on, have you fine folks heard about Xenoblade Chronicles 2? The first Xenoblade Chronicles reinvigorated my passion for JRPGs of a certain scope. While smaller and more niche-happy JRPGs had certainly done their job keeping my interest, and the industry in general, on life-support throughout the late '00s after the end of the PS2's JRPG Silver Age, Xenoblade was the first game to come along in a while to make me feel like the genre could keep on evolving and reaching ever new heights, and not just tread water to deliver the same old familiar fanservice. That's being reductive of the handful of JRPGs actually innovating at that time as well, but they were few and far between and fairly esoteric.

Of course, for a time Xenoblade was relatively obscure too. For a long time it was a Japan-exclusive RPG for the Wii, despite being produced by second-party Nintendo studios and with an enormous budget, until the hardworking weebs of Operation Rainfall convinced Nintendo to first publish it in Europe, which is more or less the global game industry's testing grounds for weird shit, before an eventual North American release. Since then it's been a premium item for Nintendo fans, and I know a lot of folk were excited for its recent Switch remaster. Xenoblade Chronicles 2, meanwhile, could skip all that grassroots petitioning and become one of Nintendo's flagship properties in various Nintendo Directs. It was frequently in the conversation when it came to the Nintendo Switch's early library, along with Super Mario Odyssey and The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (if perhaps hyped to a lesser extent). Turns out Xenoblade 2 wasn't quite the masterpiece that the original was, but still exhibited many of the same qualities. Those include an expansive open-world that the player could explore at their leisure, revisiting to take on higher level mobs in riskier areas for the treasures to be found there, and taking on dozens of side-quests that they could resolve at any time. The suite of quality of life features crossed over, including changing the time of day and instantaneous fast travel, and some very involved character progression systems to get lost in for hours at a time.

However, it also felt like every new addition had some kind of caveat attached. The Blades, for instance, which combined character weapons with personalities you could build story arcs and dialogue scenes around were an ingenious invention; however, the method with which the game doled these Blades out often relied on gachapon mechanics which have no place in games in general (in my view) but especially those that don't have any kind of commercial "free to play" aspect that might warrant boosting the rarity of desirable loot. Having many different titans to visit instead of just the Bionis and Mechonis of the first meant more variation with the scenery and with their denizens, but I missed being able to stand in a field and spot a different part of the same colossal creature ahead or below, or another titan eerily looming large across the horizon. I might even prefer the "black sheep" Xenoblade Chronicles X to XC2, just because it had so much sci-fi weirdness going on and a soundtrack that was less orchestral than it was intensely stupid Japanese synth hip hop. XC2 isn't bad at all - I wouldn't have dropped almost 160 hours into it if it was - but it certainly didn't capture the same sense of playing something crucially reinvigorating to the ailing JRPG genre that the first did.

The Surge

Strap yourselves in, because The Surge protector has logged on. The Surge is part of a mini-series of game picks I've been playing this year, or will play, because their sequels have since come out and are approaching a reasonable price. (Another 2020 example is Wasteland 2, since Wasteland 3 is due to launch sometime in August.) The Surge, for the uninitiated, is an action-RPG built very deliberately in the FromSoftware Souls style and comes to us courtesy of Deck13, a German developer who had tried their hand at this format before with the mediocre Lords of the Fallen. Changing venues and thematic genres from a grim medieval kingdom to the smouldering remains of a technology and engineering focused corporate headquarters gives them a bit more of an edge in the wider market of these "Soulslikes," as does a few intriguing tweaks to the usual character progression formula which, in some cases, directly tie into the new opportunities presented by the setting.

In Souls games and most like them, you build your stats by collecting a resource dropped by enemies which you can lose if you happen to die and then fail to recover them from where you died. This resource is used to pump up stats, from damage-dealing variables like strength and dexterity to life-preserving vitality or magic-enabling intelligence and "arcane." The Surge eschews a lot of that traditional character-building for what turns out to be a very versatile system of power-ups called "implants", some of which can be switched on the fly but the majority only assigned at rest points (instead of bonfires, these are heavily signposted "Operations Rooms" - there's one per region, and each map has ample shortcuts to get back there in a hurry). What you are buying with your level up resource is simply a higher cap for these implants, allowing you to equip stronger versions of them and - though you need to upgrade your cybernetic "rig" to accommodate them - more slots for implants in general. While it means that your character never really gets stronger in the conventional sense, the diversity in which they can improve their fighting prowess or survival abilities is truly vast, and there's no end of optimal combinations to find and work towards.

The other aspect of your build that your "Core Power", as this upgradeable limitation is called, is to equip stronger armor. Armor with higher defense usually means suffering a few setbacks, like slower attack speeds and higher power costs. If you wanted to tank it, which is a viable strategy here as it was in the Dark Souls games, you'd be decreasing your ability to recover quickly or the number of healing items on hand (as they too are part of the implant system). It's a pretty decent risk vs. reward system that sacrifices the complexity of an advanced character build in the standard sense of stats and numbers for the sake of one with more skills, both passive and active, and more agency in how they prioritize for certain situations. For general exploration, for instance, I'd equip implants that boosted how much tech scrap (the souls/currency equivalent) I earned from enemies as well as increased movement speed and a really handy gizmo that bleeped when hidden items were in the vicinity. When it came time to gear up for a boss, I'd go all in for defensive skills and health items; I'd usually need about two or three times the amount of the latter than I did for general exploration.

I could go on and on in this vein, as The Surge proved to be deceptively in-depth with its systems. I could talk about an infinite-use healing implant that instead draws from your "energy" bar: a stat that usually governs finishers and special attacks, and only builds up when you hit enemies. I could also talk about the way you could have character builds based around absorbing a lot of energy fast and holding onto it for the sake of these energy-based heals. I could talk about how you acquire a drone and can fit yourself with tons of drone damage-boosts, moving them from what is the equivalent of a thrown rock (basically no damage, but will distract an enemy and pull them away from a pack) to a weapon that can reliably clobber even bosses and, again, runs from your easily-manipulated energy reserves. There's the large amount of audio logs and environmental storytelling; the game is less dependent on item descriptions for its mostly hands-off narrative and instead feeds it in through these logs and looping video screens instead. There's of course the most famous aspect of the game back when it was still getting shown around, which is how you acquire new cybernetic limbs by severing broken versions of them from enemies with brutal finishers, and then spending crafting resources to build your own. I was surprised by how quickly it drew me in and I'm looking forward to trying The Surge 2, hearing about how it fixes a lot of problems folks didn't like about the previous (despite its many innovations, it can be a bit buggy and awkward at times). Sometimes when a non-Souls Souls game comes out and people are talking about it, it's only because they're starved of that sweet loop of death and more death and willing to try any alternative, but in The Surge's case it's a legit piece of software, definitely on the same tier as a Nioh or a Salt and Sanctuary.

Picross S and Picross S2

Jupiter's Picross S series, which is simply what they call their Switch picross games to distinguish them from their Picross E series for 3DS eShop, finally went on sale for the first time a few months back. Granted, it was a modest 25-30% off, but I took the opportunity to grab a couple of them to see if they were as slick as they appeared.

The thing with picross games is that they only demand a certain low bar of competency for how they control and the UI, and then beyond that it's more about the gimmicks and puzzle variations they present. A new picross game that offers some 100 or so standard puzzles isn't all that exciting given that this is an industry that has existed in Japan for over 30 years (or about 25 years in terms of video games, starting with Mario's Picross and Mario's Super Picross for the Game Boy and SNES respectively).

Unfortunately, Picross S doesn't have much in the way of frills. It might not need them, granted, but the sole uncommon addition of Mega Picross - which uses a ruleset wherein numbered clues might cross over to two lines instead of one - is marred by the fact that the Mega Picross set is identical to the standard one, the only difference being the clues you're given. Picross S2 fares slightly better due to adding what they call "Clip" Picross: much larger images comprised of multiple smaller puzzles. However, there's only five of these jumbo-sized picross puzzles and they're not all accessible from the outset: you have to complete several pages of the regular puzzles before you unlock all the Clip Picross components.

That these puzzles are all the usual pictures of animals and flowers and household items is disappointing too; I guess at some point Jupiter dropped the pretense of including puzzles based on Nintendo characters for the sake of their console exclusivity. I don't know if I'll ever pick up Picross S3 and Picross S4, or even that newly announced Sega-focused one, though I may change my tune when they drop in price in some far-flung year and I find myself bitten by the nonogram bug once again.

Tokyo Xanadu eX+

Falcom, the developers of Ys and Trails, has been around for a very long time. At least, in terms of a video game company: they started at some point in the early '80s and have been developing weird action-RPGs for as long as I've been alive. One of their earliest was Xanadu from 1985: a game that was the second in their Dragon Slayer anthology series (which also includes the first The Legend of Heroes game), and one of their first big hits. As a way of honoring their past, they've taken to creating a new Xanadu reboot every ten years since. I go into more detail on this ritual of theirs in this retrospective from last year (when E3 was still a thing, even. Remember E3?) but Tokyo Xanadu is the most recent iteration of this process, having originally launched in 2015 for the PS Vita, and was later enhanced (as "eX+") for PS4 and PC/Steam. I'd also never played it before.

So it's immediately obvious what Falcom chose to do with this particular version of Xanadu: make it a Persona game with some Ys-style twitch action-RPG gameplay. Set in Tokyo and following the usual somehow universally-adored but half-asleep self-insert dipshit Kou Tokisaki (who I kept confusing for the similarly nothing-hero Aoi Itsuki, from Tokyo Mirage Sessions, another Persona-like that invokes Japan's capital that I played this year), the game is split between its dungeons - the game has a lot of terminology about these inter-dimensional labyrinths and how they unerringly seem to target future party members by preying on their insecurities - and life-sim elements including hanging out with friends and helping the local citizenry with their problems.

For the social sim aspect, Tokyo Xanadu eschews Persona's calendar/day-planning for a more streamlined "free time" block every chapter, during which you can buy and upgrade equipment, pick up side-quests, and spend a finite number of "Affinity Shards" getting to better know your party members and major NPC allies. Kou even has three stats based on his personality - wisdom, courage, and virtue - that increase with certain accomplishments, though you fortunately don't have to go out of your way to study your ass off ("wisdom" instead increases when you read books, or answer the occasional multiple choice question correctly in class or during investigations). This part of the game feels very "Persona-lite" in that there's no real challenge involved trying to balance a social schedule and is more to do with establishing the world and its characters and giving you some breathing room between what I'll admit are some kinda intense dungeons.

Let's talk about those: Tokyo Xanadu's combat and dungeon exploration is definitely styled on their Ys franchise, which are real-time action games that move at a dizzying pace and require some fast reflexes to quickly take down enemies and evade their attacks. The latter involves a dodge roll with very generous i-frames, while the former is done through melee attacks, ranged attacks, flying attacks (basically just an air dash, which also comes in useful for the platforming (oh yeah, there's platforming in these dungeons too)) and at least three different types of special which all run off their own individual gauges. What's more is that Tokyo Xanadu is based on the more recent Ys games, each of which allow for three-person teams and are built towards exploiting elemental superiority. When fighting through dungeons, it's prudent to switch to the character that has an element superior to the enemy you're engaging, and to keep switching like that for every combat encounter. It eventually becomes part of the rhythm of dungeoneering, quickly switching and attacking and switching again to take on any other nearby enemies. Not only do characters embody an element (and, eventually, two elements each to make it easier to build a suitable team for the immediate dungeon and its inhabitants) but they'll also prioritize certain approaches: Kou's the all-rounder, deuteragonist Akira is more magic-focused and better at a distance, their karate prodigy underclassman Sora is a glass cannon who is very agile and great at flying attacks, hacker otaku shut-in (and male Futaba) Yuuki is an excellent defensive ranged-attacker due to the way he can fire while moving, and so on.

The real bastards are the bosses, which start exceedingly strong and very capable of handing you your own ass with their large-range AoEs and fast movement, and grow increasingly deadlier throughout the game until it oddly plateaus around a certain witch antagonist around the mid-point of the story. I don't mind admitting that these guys caused a number of premature game overs even on Normal difficulty, and were the one obstacle in the way of raising the difficulty as per some recommendations I got from others who had played the game; after all, it's the case in Ys too to play as high difficulty as you feel like you can tolerate because the challenge is often key to the appeal of these games. If I ever decide to take on my NG+ run, which will be on the highest difficulty setting for the sake of the few remaining trophies I've yet to earn, I'm sure I'll be hitting some serious brick wall bosses in no time. Even so, the normally abrasive "git gud" attitude certain character action games seem to have - Tokyo Xanadu rates on the success of each dungeon run based on time taken, the amount of damage taken, and the % of treasure found and monsters slain, for the maximum result of a "S-Rank" - is somehow oddly compelling here in a way that, I think, was Falcom trying to address Persona's and SMT's legendary high challenge levels in an arcade-ish format more germane to what they're all about.

One last odd little thing about Tokyo Xanadu: while the standard gameplay is derived from Ys, the majority of its mini-games (fishing, swimming races, an addictive card game named "Blade") come directly from the Trails series, and Trails of Cold Steel 1-3 in particular. I guess I've got them to look forward to in the near future?

Watch Dogs

Final game update, and one that I'm still playing, Watch Dogs is - like The Surge above - something I only picked up because of its sequel. I realize the two Watch Dogs games don't share a lot in common besides the prominence of a hacker collective known as DedSec and the general open-world gameplay and its focus on remotely operating electronic systems, but I have that same brain thing Vinny has where I don't like to jump into a series anywhere except on the ground floor.

What I've noticed about Watch Dogs is that I actively dislike about half of it, but really appreciate (if not fully love) the other half. A very strong sense of ambivalence has followed me in this playthrough, as I despair of the overly dour tone (another TLOU2 parallel this year) and the way the driving and stealth are complete ass, to put it diplomatically, but I enjoy the little wire-tracing puzzles involved with the collectibles and jumping between camera feeds to find the right angle on whatever I'm searching for. I sort of like the personalities of the world and major characters around protagonist Aiden Pearce, if not the man beneath the Iconic Cap™ himself, and it's amusing the way the game randomizes its Chicagoan citizens and their various personality quirks as determined from your "Profiler" app that automatically targets random passersby for phishing scams and other hacks. It does this odd thing where it challenges your sense of empathy: would you steal from a guy who was undergoing chemo? What if it was something as banal as watching anime or having a stamp collection? If you've answered no so far, what about fundamentalist Christians or people who post on eugenics websites? The game is ever probing for your moral event horizon, and you're going to need some kind of income to buy the better guns the game has to offer. Personally, I had no problem whatsoever stealing from Aisha Tyler, even if I didn't think her work hosting Ubisoft E3 conferences was all that bad.

But yeah, I've heard a lot about how grim and cynical this game becomes in its later chapters and I fear for the safety of many characters that aren't called Aiden Pearce, so I'm taking it slow and enjoying the open world before I get too deep into the story missions. That said, I don't intend to be playing this for more than a week because I've got plenty of better and more recent games I'd like to jump into, one of which is another major open-world game: Yakuza 6. As long as it doesn't demand too much of me with its driving missions - there seems to be a lot, alas, and the skill tree upgrades for driving can only improve it so much - I'm looking to see the credits roll on Watch Dogs, even if I might be ready to bail at any moment.

The End!

That's going to do it for this mid-year check-in. I'm sure I'll keep myself distracted with many more big titles I'm late to the party for, and of course the usual weekly Indies, and I'll try to do these rundowns more regularly so they don't all pile up like this. I just bought Danganronpa V3 and Timespinner, so I'd like to have an excuse to write about those before the year is out, as well as more Falcom stuff (I've been eyeing Trails in the Sky the 3rd on Steam for quite a while) and maybe a few other older games that didn't see much coverage by the otherwise meticulous staff of this website. Until then, just... hang in there everyone. Second half of 2020's gotta be better than the first, right?

...Right?