Owl's Fine Reviews

Prolific fiction writers like Lois McMaster Bujold, Stephen King, and Brandon Sanderson are able to pump out so many words a day by greasing the groove. That is, training themselves to write a number of words each day that focus their thinking firmly within the controlled worlds of their respective imaginations. These beloved universes contained in prose feel lived-in and function by a set of rules their authors use to imbue them with real stakes, in spite of their fantastical plotlines. 

These authors describe their creative processes differently, yet each one stakes the efficacy of their writing on living within inspiring moments, riding these waves of incisive thought to driven narratives that ultimately connect with the human experience, regardless of how alien a world or its inhabitants might seem at first blush. 

McMaster Bujold’s famous for not knowing where she’s going when she starts writing a story, a prime example of how steeping in the lusciousness of an idea can spawn surprising narratives for writer and reader alike: “I've described my usual writing process as scrambling from peak to peak on inspiration through foggy valleys of despised logic.”

In a similar vein, King highlights the potential to build connective tissue between reader and writer when setting out to compose a story: “Description begins in the writer's imagination, but should finish in the reader's.”

Meanwhile, Sanderson’s process even sounds a little like playing a video game: “When I write my books, actually I'm known for very logical rule-based magic systems.”

What these paragons of creative output each have in common is an ability to live within their own ideas. They’ve spent their careers learning how to trust the worlds contained in their imaginations and are able to write and publish at such a blinding clip due to the pleasure of their practiced existence within them. Their metaphorical grooves are greased by how they’ve spent years training their brains to be creative as a daily practice.

So, how do we mere mortals emulate this process of imaginative immersion? If we want to try our hand at a regular creative practice but don’t know where to begin, what can we do to help smooth our transition into actually doing the work without putting ourselves at risk of feeling overwhelmed and tabling our dream projects when the rubber meets the road?

Well, my friends. I’ve got the answer. We can train our brains to be creative by playing video games. Let me start with an anecdote, then flesh out what I mean.

I’d wanted to write a novel my entire adult life, but every time I tried, I would end up writing for a couple days before feeling completely overwhelmed and losing myself in a fog of self-doubt before giving up on a project indefinitely. I can’t tell you how many half-baked characters sit moldering in the twisted maze of my file system as I type these very words. Not being able to establish a regular creative practice left me feeling stymied and concerned that my aspirations of writing long-form fiction were nothing but the makings of a sordid pipe dream, the kind old men talk about on public buses to no one in particular. 

To prevent my mind from stewing in its sad goulash of uncertainty, I began playing computer RPGs. Specifically, Baldur’s Gate 3. I played for an hour or two each day, investing my free time in the development of my characters and their relationships with one another, taking particular note of how my decisions impacted the layered narrative that unfolded before my eyes, almost like magic. Or, as Sanderson might say: “logical rule-based magic.” All I had to do was sit down at regular intervals, coax my brain into video-game mode, and enjoy the fruits of the fugue state it inspired. To this day, the punchy sound effect and artistic certainty of the mind flayer transformation undergone by Larian’s logo upon booting up the game cues me into focus. 

Soon, I realized that video games can sugar-coat the initial arduousness of a regular creative practice with feedback loops that provide enough dopamine to our brains to want to invest in them time and time again. Once we’re hooked on a game, we keep coming back, and my experience with BG3 helped me prove to myself that I could sit down at my computer, day after day, to help tell a story.

The way I like to view such games now, as distinct from other inspiring modes of media, are like guided courses to establish a practice of imaginative immersion that can be both routine and fulfilling. Like learning how to bike with training wheels. Because just having the confidence to sit down at your desk in front of a blank screen at regular intervals is a huge part of the battle. In fact, the only way McMaster Bujold can put her full trust in her scramble from “peak to [inspired] peak” is by giving herself the space to do so, day by day, trusting that the next breath of rarified, creative air is just over the horizon.

Video games, thus, have the potential to be powerful training tools in the establishment of a daily creative practice. By learning to tap into their creative “fugue state” through games, aspiring creators can grease the groove that will allow them to eventually take the training wheels off and switch out their narrative-heavy video game for the word-processor, digital audio workspace, drawing program, or [INSERT CREATION TOOL HERE] of choice.

Video games can be a glimpse into what a regular creative practice can look like with enough practice, when used correctly. They give us the ability to live within our favorite stories, and when we’re able to do such a thing, we learn what a lived-in world feels like. It’s the feeling that makes a writer’s desk magnetic. Take it from me. Someone who, at his lowest times, didn’t believe in himself enough to write even 10,000 words of decent fiction. 

At the time of writing, I’ve got over 90,000 done on my first draft of a sci-fi/fantasy novel I’m really excited about. Each day, I sit down to write at least 2,000 words. Any more than that’s a cherry on top of a successful effort. Many days, the writing sucks, but that’s not what matters. What matters is that I sit down and do it every day, and have grown to love my practice. I’m proud to say that I’m a writer, and even more giddy to explain that, without Baldur’s Gate 3 – my favorite game – I’d be nowhere near the writer that I am today. 

When we learn to live within our stories they, somewhat predictably, feel lived-in, and those are the kind of stories I want to spend my life reading and writing. Video games can help us get there, one story beat at a time.

Playing Betrayal at Club Low is joyful and off-kilter, like eating an ice cream sundae on a swing at one in the morning. Or...perhaps trying to infiltrate a nightclub while disguised as a pizzaiolo? The latter encapsulates the plot of BCL, a game whose sole developer, Cosmo D, sets in the same city as his other games: Off-Peak, The Norwood Suite, and Tales From Off-Peak City Vol. 1. The choice is an important one, lending a lived-in quality to BCL’s completely zany premise that helps meld an unexpectedly thoughtful vibe with what otherwise could be seen as another meme game you play for ten minutes, for a laugh and nothing more. 

But BCL holds much more. It plays like a one-shot tabletop RPG complete with on-screen dice rolls, ability checks and upgrades, and branching decision trees whose consequences lead you to one of the game’s 11 (!) unique endings. While a lot of the scenarios you get yourself into as the pizza spy are written for comedy – to match the effect of the game’s gaudy 3-D graphics and sly rejection of reality – many feel actually meaningful in both the anticipation leading up to a dice roll and the content of its outcome. Giving BCL a try in the middle of my second Baldur’s Gate 3 playthrough brought a massive smile to my face. The games represent two polar ends of the CRPG spectrum, showing how rolling dice with graphics can be beautiful, regardless of how complex a game’s mechanics are. 

Speaking of mechanics: BCL’s, too, abstract their nuance to the naked eye. Watching someone play the game over their shoulder, you might think that “Pizza Dice” are just a gimmick and that the only way to get into such an experience would be to put yourself in the mood for anarchic comedy a la South Park or the hamfisted anti-narrative of a game like Super Meat Boy. However, having played through BCL on varying difficulties, I can tell you that there’s a lot more strategy and drama here than meets the eye. That last part, in my mind, is the theme of the game: the wrapping of meaningful depth in something that looks, on its surface, to have none. That’s the basis of Cosmo D’s magic trick as an artist.

We’re socialized from the time we’re born to take in artifacts of life and group them with those we think are similar to abstract the pesky work of meaning and make it easier to refer to things. We do this in games all the time. When I write Rogue-Like, every avid game fan will picture nearly the same thing, and that mental image will be distinct from Souls-Likes and Search-Action games and Puzzlers, you name it. It’s the same with visual art, and all forms of creative expression for that matter. I’m no connoisseur, but even my mind spins up wildly different images when I read the words Pop Art versus ones like Baroque, Dada, and Impressionism. Each one of these phrases spawns an identifying theme within our heads that influences perception, and – with just a single glance at BCL – your mind would likely backflip into exactly the kind of thing you’d think something that looked like that would be. 

But the way Cosmo D has imbued each decision in his game with depth alongside its left-footed humor pushes back on pigeonholing notions of genre in creative expression and playing true to type. BCL shows us that all good art is playful, not necessarily even in its playfulness, but rather in how it plays with our perception of what something can be, how it can and should be seen, and why it matters at all to be interacting with it in the first place. Even the saddest and gravest art pieces play with our definitions of grief and what it means to witness trauma. Even the most abstract play at the margin of reality and dissolution. And, in BCL, you can bamboozle your way into _play_ing iconic pink-haired DJ Chad Blueprint’s electronic mix up on the turntable in front of your adoring friends in the name of clandestine justice. It’s all one and the same.

Rubbing your chin in thought, experiencing gut-wrenching tension, and the warm embrace of a solid laugh don’t have to be at odds in art. In fact, they shouldn’t be. The best artifacts of culture elicit these reactions and a bucketful more. Go ahead and play Betrayal at Club Low. You’ll see.

My head pops off the pillow at the witching hour. I've no idea what time it is, but the darkness showing through the cracked white paint of my room’s shutters tells me it’s still the middle of the night. Perhaps sometime early in the morning, when the monsters come out. I am a timid child. Going to sleep is hard for me, meaning that going back to sleep after waking up is nigh insurmountable. Yet up to this point in my life, I’ve never gotten out of bed in the middle of the night. Some combination of awe and fear has glued me there, hunkering down until I see the sun and smell my mom’s coffee brewing downstairs in the kitchen.

However, this time I am called. I take a few deep breaths and jump out of bed. I’m wearing patterned pajamas, cranes, dozers, and graders falling from my abdomen. One of my favorite books as a kid was called Dazzling Diggers, and my mom’s favorite quote of mine from that time was: “I love levers.”

The air in my room and the upstairs landing is cold and shimmery, as if the night sky had come inside. My parents like to sleep with white noise, and the whir of their fan is an unadorned roar through what otherwise is silence. I creep down the stairs on tippy-toe. I know if I’m caught, by my parents or – worse – the things that creep around in the darkness while we sleep, that my life could all come crashing down around me, my wants and needs swept up like soft flesh in the claws of supervision.

I make it down okay. Nobody’s in the living room. I’ve never seen it before at this hour. The potted plant on its small wooden stand in the corner by the TV looks more like a prehistoric bird. I hear it say my name in a botched British accent. The corrugated squares on the carpet swallow me, their textures making my feet feel numb and gorgeous. I stare at them, but not for long. Otherwise, I might get lost, and I am so very close now. 

Now I open the media cabinet. Now I press that satisfying circular button and feel the warmth of my GameCube’s orange ON light. Now I turn on the TV and fiddle with the remote to shift from the petrifying static of the wrong input to the one that is nothing if not oh so right. 

The familiar whirring of the console’s minidisc. That iconic stinger that goes “dooh bah dee bah di bah dooh bah dooh bah dee bah di bah dooh bah dee bah di ba dooh bah...blump.” A few more button presses and the dulcet tones of my favorite game’s introductory harmonica spin up. Mario and Luigi are tossing a baseball, and before I know it, all their friends are getting involved. I’ve snuck down in the middle of the night to play the 2005 classic Mario Superstar Baseball. 

Is it actually a classic? I’m not sure. Was it my one true love as a child? Absolutely yes. Did my parents come down three minutes later and put an end to my intrepid mission? Indeed. Indeed, they did.

The point of sharing this memory, however, is to access the fact that such anecdotes are far more common than I once thought. On a recent episode of Triple Click, I heard Kirk Hamilton discuss how he used to wake up before dawn to install and play Doom on his dad’s laptop for a couple hours before deleting it from the hard drive and returning the device to its original spot so that no one would be the wiser. It got me thinking about how exciting games are when we’re young, and how playing games is actually one of the first things we do when we come into the world.

Not video games, per se. But for babies and toddlers, everything has the potential to become gamified. Interactions as simple as peek-a-boo or batting at a mobile to those as complicated and involved as learning to read can be viewed as forms of games. Each one challenges young minds to learn the rules of engagement and explore within their parameters. In many ways, learning anything at all is a kind of game, as existing within a set of ever-evolving norms presents challenge after challenge after challenge to be mastered and, thus, overcome. 

This all came rushing back to me while I sat with my mom and grandmother (who we call “Gabba Dot” – “Gabba” because my sister couldn’t pronounce grandma as a child, and “Dot” as a hypocorism of her full name: Dorothy). Gabba was sitting in a hospital bed at her assisted living facility in Falls Church, Virginia. The week prior, she’d gotten up in the middle of the night and taken a fall outside of her bathroom. She broke her jaw and received a large gash to the uppermost limit of her forehead that extended back into her scalp. She spent a few nights in the hospital and was now on the mend back home. My mom and I sat on either side of her. Mom sifted through a deck of cards by Gabba’s bedside, pulled out the jokers, and started shuffling.

Gabba Dot has dementia, and her short-term memory has all but escaped her now. She only recognizes her daughters, and even they’re becoming foggy. Sometimes she’ll introduce my mom to her nurses as her sister or her cousin, though she’ll always remember her name. “This is Beth,” she’ll say. “Come to visit.” Though she doesn’t know me, she’ll often wink at me and comment on my scraggly beard. “He’s got whiskers,” she’ll whisper to my mom, loud enough to be heard in the adjoining room. She’s always been a paragon of positivity, and that hasn’t changed, even after her fall. 

Most of this visit, though, she’s been closed off, eyes shut or gazing into the milky distance, keeping to herself. That changes when Mom pulls out the cards. We play a modified version of War – comparing what we draw from our own little decks three ways to see who has the highest card and, thus, who wins the pile. My mom holds Gabba’s card up to her face with each draw, and Gabba reads the number and suit with swift precision. “Jack of Diamonds, Ace of Clubs, Nine of Hearts.” She takes my pile quickly. Now it’s Mom versus Gabba for the game.

Cards are not video games, but their ubiquity speaks to the human instinct and desire to game at its core. They illustrate the point that, at some moment or another in everyone’s life, they’re likely to have played a game. With friends or family, for money, pride, or – hopefully first and foremost – just for fun. Playing War with my mom and Gabba Dot soon dovetailed with my GameCube memory and got me thinking about capital-G Games as a common language and how the art and joy of play are a certainty of human life.

Games help us learn when we are but days old. They captivate us when we’re young, challenge us as we grow, and keep us company as we fade out. They are a language that everyone can speak and can be scaled to all ability levels thanks in large part to the extent to which they are ingrained in the very act of being human. Gabba Dot will always know what an Ace of Spades is just from a symbol on a sheet of stylized cardstock. She’ll understand that it beats all other cards. Why? Because it does. Because those are the rules. 

A large part of what we were put to do here together involves games. Which brings me to the following questions. What does it mean that some of the first and last things we do in life are games? Do games enhance the function of our brains or encourage their wanderings? And what does all this say about the time we spend gaming between the ages of five and seventy? 

We come into this world gaming, and go out gaming too. That’s because games have rules and rules are concrete boundaries that help us manifest our goals and give structure to our thoughts. We crawl out of nothingness to encounter games because they help us find meaning in a place where there is none. Ever since I visited Albert Camus’ grave in Lourmarin, France, I’ve counted myself among the Absurdists. We believe that life is inherently meaningless, but that every person’s goal should be to imbue their life with meaning, to make their own where there is none, to crackle up a beacon of combusted light where there is only darkness. This philosophy cuts to the heart of why I think and care about Games. Because they are morsels of meaning where otherwise there might be none, concrete experiences to which we can cling even when everything else is enveloped by fog. Instruments that help us welcome nothingness again when our bodies can’t hold us even a moment longer. 

Games enhance the function of our brains when we intentionally engage with their systems. They also, likely, have a hand in turning them to mush when Games help us tune out the rhythms of outside life and provide an escape. Video games have made me feel smart and dumb in kind. Finishing Return of the Obra Dinn had me believing I could be a crack detective, solving unfinished cases through the ages with the sharpness of my wit alone. However, crawling away from my computer after playing Baldur’s Gate 3 too late into the evening makes me feel like I’ve devolved into nothing but a hulking mass of loose flesh and regret. Games fall on either side of this spectrum due to the broadness of the category that holds them. However, at the end of the day, it is my contention that Games enrich our lives, regardless of how much they stimulate our minds, and that’s what matters. Gaming in a nursing home will be a surreal experience that I hope I get to have one day. 

Lastly, the time we spend gaming when we haven’t just been born or aren’t about to die is time well spent. The art of play helps us better understand ourselves in safe environments that encourage us to experiment and explore when otherwise we might be too timid to do so. Games may serve to close us off from experiences in the “real world” at times – I’ll be the first one to acknowledge that (especially after those late night BG3 sessions that leave me feeling like a zombie the next day). But they also provide us with a common language that is the most joyous avenue to human connection I’ve experienced in my adult life. Talking to a stranger about a game makes all the anxiety of a new encounter melt away. Talking to a friend about a game makes me feel closer to them. It’s because, regardless of all the other elements that make that other person who they are – that pulsating life so full of facets right in front of you – you’ve both put time into learning the exact same set of rules and have played within those rules to make unique memories. 

Sharing those memories with one another is sharing a common ground upon which you can visualize and empathize with each other’s experience. This engenders intimacy, and intimacy makes life sweet.

I once heard Polygon.com’s Russ Frushtick say that he wished you could just be a cat in Stray, as opposed to a cat with a robot strapped to its back who does fetch quests for other robots. Frushtick expanded and said he thought the game’s first 45 minutes were its strongest, as you solve light environmental puzzles with your ability to jump, balance, bite, and think your way through and around obstacles. In my mind, the epitome of such gameplay comes when you heft a bucket with your little feline mouth and drop it into a spinning fan to stop the deadly blades and shimmy through, something that could be straight out of the early stages of a game like Playdead’s Inside. However, once you meet and befriend B12, Stray changes. You’re able to store items and communicate with the inhabitants of the Dead City, and this shifts the rhythm of play from a puzzler to more of a linear adventure game. 

Russ was onto something, but I’m going to take his query one step further. What if the Danish studio behind beloved atmospheric puzzle games Limbo and Inside had had a chance at telling the story of our orange tabby? What if Playdead developed Stay? 

Well, chances are the graphics would be different. We’d likely be side-scrolling instead of working on a three-dimensional plane of movement. The darkness of the setting would fit perfectly into Playdead’s wheelhouse, though, and the puzzle possibilities presented by the movement criteria of a cat as opposed to a human would challenge the studio to push its puzzle design to the next level. Playdead would also likely lean a lot farther toward a sense of real danger and death than BlueTwelve Studio – the actual developers of Stray – decided to. This is where things could get hairy. 

Because nobody wants their ineptitude at solving a particular timing puzzle to result in watching a cute little kitty die, much less over and over. That said, I would hope we would say the same about the main character of Inside, a human boy, likely no older than 11 or 12. However, there is particular sensitivity toward violence depicted toward animals in popular media, much more so than toward humans. One could argue that this is the cost of humans starring in the majority of stories that we see, in TV, games, and movies. Writing about this, though, makes me wonder. What does it say that people are more likely to accept seeing a young boy die at the hands of a ruthless machine than witnessing a cat experience the same fate? Have we been desensitized to human death because of the violence we perpetuate with our own actions and/or lack thereof? And the media that we consume? Or does it just make sense because cats are objectively cuter than we will ever be? Something to think about.

So Playdead would have to find out what a game over would look like without having the cat die as dramatically as their previous protagonists. Maybe, if the cat gets overrun by technocrabs, the screen just fades out and you restart at the last checkpoint, and if you miss a jump, you fall out of the frame. Bloodless and elegant. An easy enough fix. 

Then, all we’d have to do is come up with how much Playdead would want to incorporate from the story side of what exists in the real game and how they would communicate that in their patented environmentally-driven way. There are no dialogue boxes in Playdead games. No voice overs or any kind of talking whatsoever. Whereas Stray as we know it today is replete with them. I’d be interested to see how much of the current message Playdead would be able to preserve after shifting the game’s primary form of communication, and perhaps how that message would transform based on its new context. 

BlueTwelve’s Stray is obviously wonderful. It’s won the hearts of millions, with over 4 million copies sold. It lets you do cat stuff. You can make biscuits on the carpet and turn many trees, lamps, and entryways into scratching posts. There’s an entire button devoted to meowing. But it's a linear story game whose graphical fidelity and cuteness are its main attractions. Meanwhile, Playdead could take the title and turn it into something completely different while preserving the game’s overall vibe. A cat on an ominous adventure in a post-apocalyptic city. I can see it now, delicious tension, glorious puzzle-solving, and all. 

Let’s get collaborating, you two!

My journey toward learning how to write about video games has indelibly changed my relationship with genre. It’s forced me to interrogate the benefits of putting pieces of art into different tidy buckets and what happens when that tidiness starts to disintegrate and material from one bucket spills out into the others in a somewhat gruesome mixture of abstraction and meaning. Because the whole purpose of genre is to not have to explain exactly what a creative artifact is like each and every time you set out to describe a new one. It’s a useful way to group similar things together and, through their grouping, convey meaning. However, the genrefication of video games, as performed predominantly by those who talk and/or write about them, has led to genre being used as a crutch – to the point where even the folks talking about them are not quite sure what they mean anymore. In this environment, genre carries less and less meaning until its use is completely shot. Today, calling something an action-adventure game is even less helpful than just describing exactly what the title’s gameplay and story set out to do and how its developers go about accomplishing these aims. While this approach is long-winded and boring, at least it does its best to tell you what the hell is going on. 

How did we get here? Back when video games were first coming to prominence in the 70s, there were so few pixels on the screen that games could only be a few things. For home consoles, you had Sports games and arguably some Adventure games. Arcade games were the ones that were physically located in arcades, so that was simple. Each of these broad categories brought to mind a similarly simple image of what playing such a game would be like. Thus, when describing PONG and Intellivision Hockey, it would be easier to group them into the Sport game genre than describe exactly what the goal of each was separately, with two players trying to put a common blip past the other one’s defenses.

This was all well and good, but games kept getting more and more complicated as time went on to the point where we started having to come up with creative ways to silo their similarities into manicured categories. My favorite example of the brokenness of genre emerged when the western world saw that the progression loops of beloved Castlevania and Metroid titles were somewhat similar and coined the Metroidvania genre. Not only does this term carry no semiotic weight whatsoever outside of the video game community, but it also says nothing about what qualities make a game worthy of being placed within the oeuvre it is meant to represent. Japan did a much better job with this genre, calling it Search-Action. You spend time in games like Hollow Knight and the two aforementioned titles searching for ways to progress through obstructed maps, backtracking, and fighting enemies in action-style combat along the way. Nice job Japan.

But even in my above description, what does “action-style combat” mean? And who gets to decide? The answer to the second question is critics, reviewers, podcasters, writers, developers, and all those who engage in discourse about games. However, the most helpful genre descriptions for me these days allude to other games that folks who aren’t tuned into video game culture would not understand. Sure, a Souls-Like is probably going to include punishing combat and a death mechanic that forces you to return to the site of your demise or face a penalty, with the ability to save and bank your rewards at serialized checkpoints a la FromSoftware’s masterpiece Dark Souls. A modern Zelda-Like is going to feature open world exploration with a detailed physics system and memorable object interactions thanks to smash hits Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. But did I have any idea about these kinds of things when I first started trying to get into video games? Absolutely not, and the ineffectiveness of such categorization when it comes to conveying meaning to broader audiences it’s a major reason why the video game community feels increasingly like a gate-kept echo chamber.

So, what about the folks who write and talk about games? Aren’t they getting something out of genre? As you can probably see from my earlier writings, I tried my best to get into the mindset of what I thought was a responsible way to discuss games. I used genre to attempt to carry meaning and even did my best to define the squirmier genres in the reviews and articles I wrote. It was an interesting way to get my feet wet, but the more I read and write myself, the more I realize that the use of genre when considering video games is futile. Because the most interesting takes on games – the ones that are worth reading – don’t attempt to make broad-strokes claims about the state of a game within the context of a flimsy genre definition. Rather, they confidently express original thoughts about how a game makes the writer feel, think, act, and/or reflect on their playing experience in a way that carries tangible meaning. 

Any old journalist can call a game a Rogue-Like and talk about how interesting it is that you have to repeat the game over and over to get at the core of what it’s trying to say. I know because I’ve done it...many a time. And those kinds of pieces aren’t at all interesting to write, so I can only imagine what it’s like to try to slog through reading them. Additionally, if the only people who can keep track of what exactly a Rogue-Like is are fellow writers and thinkers within the video game community, we end up with an unwelcoming culture that doubles back on itself and crumbles under the weight of its own inability to understand exactly what it is trying to say. If you abstract an element of art enough while critiquing it, its core sloughs off and you're left with an imprecise definition of what something should be rather than what it actually is. 

So, let’s stop erroneously grouping games and instead focus on what sets them apart from the pack. How do they make us feel? What do they have to say about what we’re going through right now? How do they help us and challenge us to interact with memory, interpersonal relationships, destruction, friendship, love? 

Don’t tell me that a game is a Metroidvania. Tell me what exploring and doubling back meant in the context of that gray and rainy day when you were playing it and nothing felt right. There’s futility in genre, yes, but what does this game have to say about the futility (or lack thereof) of writing about this stuff at all? Of the art of play? Of life itself, even?

In an age of abstraction, what we need now are features that attempt to explain what’s underneath, rather than adding to the deluge of dilution that the genrefication of video games represents. Let’s dump genre, and add our voices to a hopeful chorus of specificity, wonder, and feeling.

If you google the term “Waifu,” you’ll probably see some images of scantily clad anime girls and the following definition up somewhere near the top of the search results:

Predominantly referring to anime and video game characters, a Waifu is a fictional female character adored by male fans. What separates a Waifu from a “crush” or something similar is the singular love between one man and his one and only Waifu.

However, before playing through the entirety of Baldur’s Gate 3, I could not wrap my head around what exactly a Waifu was. The sticking point for me was the “singular love” aspect of what the above definition attempts to convey. I am a casual anime fan, but never found myself falling head over heels for one of the characters in, say, HunterXHunter or Fullmetal Alchemist enough to find the depth of feeling within me to fully understand what was going on here.

Even when I started playing Baldur’s Gate 3 and found myself drawn to the stories of characters like Lae’zel – who my deep gnome warlock, Lil Joshie, would end up committing himself to, body and soul – I was not thinking of the githyanki and her fellow party members, Shadowheart and Karlach, as Waifus. Yet there Lil Joshie was, traveling with three powerful women, each with their own tragic backstory, trauma, and romantic intrigue to boot. Each who I, the player, enjoyed getting to know. Each who, in spite of their being merely pixels on a monitor, touched my heart and taught me about what it is I value in interpersonal relationships with humans, tieflings, and psychic aliens alike. 

When I was at my peak of nerding out over the game, probably around eighty hours in, I made a hobby of reading year-old reviews that chronicled its resounding success at launch. I hit all the major publications: Eurogamer, Polygon, PC Gamer, PC Mag, Game Informer, The Verge, Ars Technica, etc. In one of them, I forget which, I read a sentence that referred to some of the game’s protagonists as Waifus. Then it dawned on me.

A Waifu is a character that marches off the screen. A Waifu is a “someone.” Someone you are scared to love. Someone that you do anyway. 

I used to think the term was just a way for members of certain fandoms to take their somewhat taboo attraction to anime girls way too far. And I still do think that the sexual objectification inherent in the neologism and many of its earnest embracers is quixotic and damaging. 

That said, a more nourishing interpretation of the word speaks to how fictional characters can impact us and teach us important things about ourselves and the part that interpersonal relationships play in our lives. 

The majority of video game detractors will tell you that the medium is a vehicle for isolation, an unhealthy outlet for people to escape from their problems into a fantasy where they can act how they please with zero consequences. Baldur’s Gate 3 taught me what a Waifu is. It also showed me how impactful video games can be as conveyors of meaning when it comes to the importance of close relationships between people committed to a common goal and/or to one another. It’s the reason I know my girlfriend is the person I want to spend the rest of my life with, the exhilaration I experience when I step out on the ultimate frisbee field on a scorching hot summer’s day to get better with my teammates, the tears that paint my eyelids when I am graced with a connection between something I observe out in the world and a previously unfelt feeling. 

Waifu is not the best word for these things. It carries hyper-sexualized notions of made-up women whose only defining characteristic is their collective inability to exist in the real world. Most Waifus are adored by their fans due in large part to their intangibility, the sheer exoticness of fantasy. 

However, the writing and acting of a game like Baldur’s Gate 3 can help us reclaim the term, separate it from harmful gender norms, and make it more about the emotional catharsis of connection than its other more dubious connotations. Leading with this connective reclamation will serve to ground us in a place where we can have a healthier relationship with our favorite artifacts of pop culture and ourselves.

In anticipation of upcoming travel and with nothing to play on my Steam Deck, I booted up Persona 4: Golden. It checked the boxes for what I thought would be an ideal diversion from cramped economy seating and long days spent in the car. The game is known for taking over 100 hours to complete, its turn-based combat has been described to me as Pokémon+, and it is generally talked about as the game that launched the Persona series into modern prominence that has seen Persona 5: Royal gain a massive fanbase. It seemed like a natural entry point and a welcome time to take my leap.

So, I played some. Just over 11 hours, actually. In the car and on the plane. I enjoyed combining Personas, leveling up my social links, even becoming attached to some dark horse characters and investing in storylines that helped my path feel unique. But I never really craved more Persona time, and now that my travel is over, I find myself almost dreading the investment it would take to pick the game back up. Keeping track of the weather, when to tend my in-game garden, and juggling the pressures of school and dungeon-crawling all together paint a monotonous picture. While I know I could go on autopilot and probably enjoy diving back in, nothing is calling me to do so.

This realization got me thinking about why we continue playing games. What separates an experience we pick up for a few hours before shelving from one that absorbs our attention through completion? What keeps us coming back to some games and not others? Let’s start with the 4 types of ways games capture our attention: as candy, builders, mysteries, and runners.

Candy: Tight gameplay loops that keep us coming back by presenting rewards that provide dopamine rushes at the exact right times. The games we get addicted to. They’re generally able to facilitate the turning off of conscious thought. Example: Vampire Survivors.

Builders: Games that entice us with the idea of constructing a character from scratch, building their power and loadout until they conquer and/or save the world. Generally very crunchy and mechanic-heavy. Think CRPGs for this one. Example: Baldur’s Gate 3.

Mysteries: One of the most classic ways to entertain: provide a mystery worth solving. Mysteries entice us to find out what happened and why, and – in this case – playing is the vehicle by which we can do so. Example: Curse of the Golden Idol.

Runners: Games that feel so good we could spend time just running around and still enjoy every second. I call this category “runners,” because these are the games we could return to purely for how tactile/tight their controls feel, and I often view this distinction by how good it feels to move around a game’s world. Mario and OlliOlli World are runners, Disco Elysium is not. Example: Lonely Mountains: Downhill.

Before moving on to analysis, I’d like to caveat this taxonomy with the idea that I am writing about games designed to be returned to. By that I mean games that include stories/level-arcs intended to occupy longer stretches of time and/or rogue-likes that beg repeated playthroughs. But there will always be outliers. While the puzzle game genre might not appear to be represented in my above categories, stellar entries like Baba is You could be creatively slotted in to accommodate their gravitational pull. The point is, what I attempt to provide here is a basis for reflection rather than anything comprehensive.

So, what is Persona? I wouldn’t describe it as candy, and it’s certainly not a runner. For, while you can (and will) run around, there is no depth to the action. No rumble, no meaningful variation in speed, no nothing. The movement controls are not notable beyond their ability to bring you from set piece to set piece, battle to battle. Persona is, however, both a mystery and a builder. A series of murders happens in 4: Golden, and it’s your job to figure out why. Meanwhile, the RPG mechanics of leveling up both your Personas and the social links that fuel their development land the game solidly within the builder genre. Then, why did I devour my 110 hour playthrough of Baldur’s Gate 3 while feeling unmotivated to pick Persona back up around the same time? Let’s answer this question by thinking through what each above category needs to keep us coming back time after time after time.

Candy games need either to present many different strategies to win or borrow meaningful progression mechanics from builders. A personal favorite game I would categorize as candy is Slay the Spire. It checks both these boxes, but its strength is in the first. The reason why I keep coming back to Spire is that each run feels completely unique. Since encounters and the path to each one is randomized to a degree, as are the card rewards and loot drops you are offered along the way, the player is constantly challenged to think on their feet and adapt their strategy to stimuli that change as they play. The fact that each of the four characters’ card bases have seemingly limitless options to craft a winning strategy makes me feel like a creative tactician when I play. Meanwhile, the more you win, the more cards and characters you unlock, and you can keep making the path to victory harder and harder each time you prevail. These mechanics are certainly fun, but maybe not quite as meaningful as the second part of my lead sentence references. 

Builder games need to make you feel like they’re worth it, through the promise of progression, a tantalizing story, or both. Baldur’s Gate 3 triumphs as a builder because its branching story is massive, engaging, and gives the player control over its outcome. When you play BG3, you always want to see what happens next, to see how a decision in a big moment could potentially impact the path of the entire epic tale. Its progression mechanics are also solid, allowing you to gain better class abilities and loot and become more powerful over the course of a playthrough. That said, the story is the reason I kept coming back, evidenced clearly by the fact that I had achieved the max level of twelve at the beginning of Act 3 and still wanted to play through all available side quests to see what would happen. On the other hand, a game series like Diablo’s strength is purely in its loot progression system, getting more and more powerful gear and abilities until your character can defeat the big bad and rule the realm. The endless clicker nature of a builder like Diablo also places it squarely in the candy genre, showing how the majority of games that keep us coming back usually combine two or more of our categories for effect. 

Mystery games need to make you feel like a detective, rather than an audience member. This, in my view, is where Persona 4: Golden misses the mark. While its murder mystery concept has the potential to occupy one’s curiosity, the way in which the game handles the unraveling of its mystery dismantles this potential entirely. The only way you’re able to uncover more about the murders in the game’s small-town setting is to advance its linear story until it makes narrative sense for the writers to dole out the next clue. This makes me feel like I’m an outsider watching the beats of a predetermined story, effectively destroying my sense of immersion as a player. On the other hand, experiences like Curse of the Golden Idol, Return of the Obra Dinn, and – to a lesser extent – Detective Grimoire: Secret of the Swamp, enhance immersion by facilitating the experience of thinking like a detective in order to solve the mysteries at the heart of their stories for yourself. Thus, these games are very hard to put down. Even when you take a break from your screen, you’re pondering various clues and how they might fit together. Especially when I played Idol and Obra Dinn, I could not wait to get back to my computer to try out a new combination of clues and/or puzzle over the motivations of a newly introduced character. 

Runner games need to feel amazing. Go play Lonely Mountains: Downhill. You’ll race time and maybe strive to get new bike parts or outfits, but in your heart you’ll just keep wanting to rip down mountains and try new shortcuts to see if you can pull them off. It’s because mountain biking in the game – pedaling and braking, drifting into a hairpin turn, landing from a gnarly crag jump – just feels great. Mario, modern Zelda games (Breath of the Wild & Tears of the Kingdom), and Elden Ring are also all runners in their own ways. Mario because it feels amazing to platform and jump. The modern Zeldas because of just how good it feels to traverse their open worlds, and Elden Ring because of its tight and impactful combat mechanics born from a lineage of FromSoftware staples. There are more to these games than their controls, but it is their controls that facilitate immersion and give us the warm and fuzzies. 

Now, let’s look back on Persona 4: Golden, a game that attempts to be both a mystery and a builder. Its mystery is unraveled through a controlled linear story, robbing the player of the immersive detective experience that mystery games should provide. Meanwhile, as a builder, 4: Golden feels disorienting and monotonous. The promise of leveling up Personas is undermined by how much stronger the fusion process can create them in a much shorter period of time, and the idea of advancing social links between characters competes with what story beats you as a player would rather see. While it might be more strategic for me to go to basketball practice because I have many Personas of the Strength Arcana in my current party, I would rather go to drama club to see how my relationship with my romantic interest Yumi might advance. Where does this leave me? Stressed and unsatisfied regardless of which decision I make, feeling like I’ve left something on the table.

We all have different definitions of what makes us excited to invest time in a game, and that’s what is so fascinating about games as both conductors and conveyors of expression. Next time you excitedly load up a save file or fret about why a certain entry into a franchise isn’t grabbing you the way its predecessors did, I encourage you to think about the categories I presented here, what you might add to their descriptions, and what – in your mind – was left out of this particular taxonomy. 

Bottom line: the more we think about the games we love – and, for that matter, the ones we dislike – the more chances we have to get to know ourselves. And that’s special.

Cobalt Core

roguelike

deck builder

sci-fi

March 30, 2024

roguelike deckbuilder space loop

roguelike

deck builder

sci-fi

Cobalt Core is a stellar roguelike deckbuilder in which you play as cute little space animals caught in a sci-fi time loop. What sets Cobalt Core apart from other Spire-likes is its creative narrative told through unlockable memories. Its sheer volume of customization options for each run - including eight characters each with their own unique decks, and five ships that make use of varying abilities to blast and simultaneously avoid enemy craft - lends the game an impressive amount of replayability.

You start a run by choosing three characters to pilot your ship of choice. After picking one of four difficulty settings, you're thrown back into the timeloop mysteriously set off by a ship called The Cobalt, which your crew used to pilot. As you fight enemies, gain cards and artifacts, and upgrade your abilities through the branching trees of the game's three levels, you work your way back toward The Cobalt, which serves as each loop's final boss.

Once The Cobalt is vanquished, you gain access to a new crew member memory, which you watch in a small cut scene. The story of how the crew got stuck in the time loop - and the answers for how to break out of its sisyphean thrall - is told through these memories. It's a rare and compelling way to make this kind of game about more than just the cards.

Cobalt Core is well-written, its pixel art is gorgeous, and its wide array of enemies and encounters imbues each loop with a sense of uniqueness in spite of a repeated opponent every once and a while. In fact, the game cleverly even makes use of these scenarios, often by having your crewmates address their enemies in a congenial tone with knowledge of their repeated encounters from past loops.

My favorite one of these moments came when, after meeting and defeating a pilot named Spike, my crew met another Spike farther down the line and said his name had to be George instead because "two Spikes is too many." Then, when they saw the original Spike in a future loop, they remembered this saga and told Spike that they had maintained the honor of his name across the galaxy. Moments like these absolutely charmed me and enhanced my experience.

And, while Cobalt Core does struggle at points with its pacing, with successful runs on even the easiest difficulty often taking over two hours, its narrative breadth and cleverness put it right up there with Slay the Spire and Griftlands, my two favorites in this genre. 9/10.

Where it shines:

• Narrative
• Writing
• Memory

Where it fades:

• Pacing (sometimes)

Astrea: Six Sided Oracles

roguelike

deck builder

March 20, 2024

roguelike dicebuilder

roguelike

deck builder

Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles is a beautiful rogue-like dice battler in which you draft a collection of dice you use to purify the creatures of a wasted land and restore it to glory. It makes use of the now classic Slay the Spire format of a branching tree with different shops, battles, and encounters on it as the player makes their way to the final boss of one of the three increasingly difficult maps in the game.

I love this genre and have reviewed a lot of these types of games. Each of them changes around ten to twenty percent of the original Spire formula, so I won't bother you too much about the loop. You fight enemies in turn based combat by drawing cards or - in this case - dice. When you win, you are given more dice to choose from and a form of currency where you can buy upgrades. HP doesn't regenerate until you beat a boss, making it precious and imbuing runs with tension.

Outside of its dice, the way Oracles diverges from the norms of its genre charmed me. Instead of killing foes in the fiction of the game, players are tasked with purifying beings who have been corrupted by an evil force plaguing the land. I ended battles a lot happier seeing purified beings scurry away to a better life rather than having to wipe the blood off my dagger from a murderous encounter with irredeemable beasts. In Oracles, character health is kept in hearts. If your chaos bar is filled to seven or above, you lose a heart. Once you've lost your last heart, you are corrupted. Since the chaos bar has far fewer counters than, say, a health bar in Spire, the dance of purifying oneself versus taking on chaos becomes beautiful and dangerous. Meanwhile, you can deal both purification and corruption to enemies, but corrupting a being that has already surrendered to the evil of the land comes with its costs.

Autonomous sentinels that provide more dice, multiple shop options rather than just one merchant with rotating goods, and six playable characters make Oracles a worthy try if you enjoy Spire-likes and would like a different take.

The art, design, and overall look of the game are gorgeous. It's bright and cute and dramatic all at once. Even the simple act of rolling dice each turn feels nice and tactile. And, of course, using them instead of cards to determine player choice for each turn of battle adds a massive layer of complexity and strategy to the experience.

My dings against this game are twofold. The randomness introduced by the dice mechanic, while often thrilling, can also backfire in pretty major ways and make a whole run feel wasted simply because of a few unlucky rolls. And, while I know introducing an element of randomness is the point here, I play rogue-like deckbuilding games to handcraft and hone a group of cards, dice, or whatever I'm drafting within an inch of its life, to create shining synergies drawn from unlikely combinations. I tried to do that with these dice, and sometimes they just didn't come together. When that happened, it felt like I'd wasted my time.

Meanwhile, Oracles' bosses are balanced in such a way that I was able to make it to the final boss on the final floor before getting absolutely smoked multiple times. This was frustrating as a player. I'm not sure if it was because my dice weren't hitting or I just picked the wrong strategy, but it wasn't what I would call an invitation to come back for more.

These elements aside. I played a ton of this game and loved it. I think you will too if you're willing to blame a couple prematurely ended runs on the cruelty of chance and move on. 8/10.

Where it shines:

• Drafting dice
• Design
• Purification rather than killing

Where it fades:

• Overly random
• Final boss balance

Roguebook

roguelike

deck builder

fantasy

February 29, 2024

roguelike deckbuilder + map inker

roguelike

deck builder

fantasy

Roguebook is a wonderful deckbuilding roguelike that takes Slay the Spire style single-track combat and makes it double. Because, in Roguebook, you play as not one but two intrepid heroes attempting to escape the pages of the titular book within whose pages they've been imprisoned. After all characters have been unlocked, you begin your game by choosing two of four playable heroes, each with their own set of base and draftable cards. This leads to all kinds of really interesting synergies in combat and makes the mechanic of swapping between heroes - and, thus, determining who takes damage each turn - vitally important to master as you make your way through the book's three chapters.

In addition to combo combat, the second way Roguebook sets itself apart is by making its map playable. You can freely traverse the spaces inked in on the map to recover treasure, reach checkpoints where you can draft cards, interact with special events, battle enemies, and more. The gamification of the map comes in the fact that the majority of its hexes are blank when you enter a chapter, meaning that, in order to gain the power you'll need to take on each of three increasingly difficult bosses, you need to fight enemies to collect ink and explore the map by coloring in its hexes.

When you enter a chapter, you're given five brush strokes that unlock a series of hexes in a circle emanating from around your character. When you win battles or discover loot, sometimes you'll be rewarded with individual ink containers that unlock hexes in straight lines or individual morsels for improved mobility. After you're out of brush strokes and ink, the map is locked and it's time to take on the boss.

Roguebook's core loop is one fans of the deckbuilding roguelike genre will be extremely familiar with. You enter combat with non-boss level enemies, fighting your way to cards, upgrades, spendable resources, and permanent artifacts and building up strength until you face the boss. Once you beat the boss, you move on to the next area. Roguebook's map also has a loop. It nests within the core loop between combat encounters and goes as follows: use ink to unlock new areas, explore new areas, gain more ink, repeat. And so on and so forth until you run out of map to explore (or ink to explore it with). Then, the only way out is to fight.

As you can probably tell from tracing these loops side by side, one of Roguebook's triumphs is the sheer number of choices given to the player. While, in other deckbuilding roguelikes, you're usually granted the option of choosing your path along a static map, Roguebook adds interactivity and expanded choice in its ink and brush resources. While exploring the map, each move has consequences and each hex contains a precious secret waiting to be revealed.

Controlling two characters in combat - each with their own card set - spawns an entirely new array of synergies and strategies to make the most of their combined effects. The game offers a progressive tree that rewards consecutive playthroughs by allowing players to increase the chances of encountering bonuses on the map and bolster their favorite heroes. Roguebook's art is pretty good, but the score is even better, and the novelty of the map mechanic is charming, at first.

Unfortunately, that last qualifier is necessary because - although it initially was a fun new element and one I hadn't seen before in the genre - the map traversal in this game ultimately slows it down and distracts from the joy of combat. Worrying about how many brush strokes you have left feels so inconsequential after breathlessly conquering a boss with both of your characters just clinging to life. And yet it's near impossible to progress without constantly hunting for ink.

Another choice I really didn't like from this game was its lack of opportunities to cull cards from your deck. In the majority of other deckbuilding roguelikes, you're given ample opportunities to delete cards that are no longer useful or that take up unnecessary space. For instance, in Monster Train, usually one of my first priorities after getting a little bit into a run is to toss the four weak monsters that players start each run with. The game allows this option to let the player feel in control of their deck and be able to turn over their cards at a reasonable rate.

However, after ten hours of Roguebook, I had only seen one opportunity to delete a card. It came in a random event. This dearth of culling moments led to me either building bloated decks on my first couple runs before I recognized this idiosyncrasy or, in later tries, forgoing opportunities to draft cards late in the game. It's no fun to want to get deeper into a sleek strategy but not feeling like there's room to do so.

Still, I enjoyed the living daylight out of Roguebook, and I'll probably remain trapped between its pages for many moons to come. 8/10.

Where it shines:

• Combo combat
• Music
• Novel map mechanic

Where it fades:

• Inking feels bad
• Hard to cull cards

Monster Train

roguelike

deck builder

February 20, 2024

roguelike deckbuilder with multi-floor combat

roguelike

deck builder

I realized playing Monster Train that rogue-like deckbuilding games are my favorite type of interactive entertainment. The feeling of customizing a collection of cards to accentuate the synergies between them feels extremely rewarding. The genre also activates a latent nostalgia within me for the collectible trading card games I played growing up.

And, while Monster Train didn't woo me as completely as fellow genre standouts Griftlands and Slay the Spire, its polish and ability to put a tantalizing twist on classic linear combat makes it well worth exploring.

Monster Train's story is perfect for what it needs to be. It's there enough to draw the player into the fantasy of the world and establish that world's vibe, but it doesn't extend into core gameplay. Lore abounds but never gets in the way. For what it's worth, the concept itself is also very creative. The stewards of Heaven have successfully invaded Hell, freezing it over and - well, just ruining the party. The remaining inhabitants of Hell, known as the Hellborne, are tasked with transporting the last remaining piece of the Pyre - the sacred (or... anti-sacred?) fire that keeps Hell ablaze - to a new home where it can once again flourish so that Hell can rise again. It flips typical hero-villain tropes on their head. You play as the monsters.

Monster Train's game loop follows the basic conventions of its genre. You make decisions along a map with a branching tree in terms of what booster cards, upgrades, and encounters you're able to access between battles. Those decisions influence the type of deck you're able to build, allowing you to pick between different types of cards, add and remove them from your deck, and upgrade them to your heart's content by spending in-game currency. To progress through the map, you must confront a series of increasingly challenging enemy hordes and bosses before winning a run.

And it is in those confrontations that Monster Train demonstrates its novelty. Unlike a typical card-battler, where you play your hand to battle bosses and/or groups of lesser opponents on a single plane, the titular train in this game plays host to four levels and combat takes place on each as enemies enter and ascend.

Monster cards can be played on the first three levels. The fourth level houses the Pyre, the cargo that your loveable abominations are risking their lives to defend. In this sense, Monster Train blends its deckbuilder roots with a brand of tower defense that sees an increasingly powerful onslaught of foes attempt to withstand player-controlled defenders. Each defender has a size value attached to it, and each floor can only hold monsters whose size values add up to five at most (unless this restriction is loosened by an artifact later in a run). Thus, the player must be strategic about their placement of monsters and how each of their troops synergizes with others that are deployed on their floor.

Some monsters will be particularly useful for doling out massive amounts of damage in one turn. Others will be focused on stacking particular conditions to get stronger as the game goes on. Others still might be particularly adept at dishing out debuffs or feeding off the power of the spell cards you play. There is so much complexity to Monster Train. The deeper you dive, the more there is to explore, as with most great deckbuilders. However, Monster Train's tiered combat system imbues the game with yet another level of strategic depth that will force you to carefully consider each and every one of your decisions in real time, leading to a satisfyingly customized experience with each play through.

Speaking of customization, another cool mechanic that Monster Train brings to the table is the ability to choose both a primary clan and an allied clan for each run. In practice, this means you're able to access cards from two completely different sets of monsters and moves that, once again, opens up a whole new level of complexity and potential synergy. Using Slay the Spire as an example, this would be like playing a run as The Silent while having access to cards from The Defect's moveset. Suffice to say, things can get very interesting very fast.

I also want to credit the developers - Shiny Shoe - here. By adding this primary clan/allied clan mechanic to their game, they introduce gobs of extra work to balance between all possible permutations. But they've succeeded in pushing the envelope. Monster Train's innovations, through and through, seem to be all about adding depth to a tried and true formula. And, for the most part, they succeed. The game's difficulty is also completely scalable, with skill settings and extra challenges galore, making it fun and playable for beginners and veterans alike.

The largest element that detracted from my experience playing Monster Train was how its added complexity sometimes obscures or disincentivizes precise damage calculation, thus leading to imprecise decisions that sometimes cost me my runs. What I mean by this is that having to painstakingly assess every single card played and calculate how that might - turns ahead - impact the outcome of a battle sometimes made my head spin. Specifically, the way the game's major bosses free-float from floor to floor wreaked havoc on my ability to prioritize objectives and forecast the outcome of a battle based on my actions. This ability to accurately predict my odds of victory based on the cards I know I have in my deck is one of my favorite parts of getting deep into games like Slay the Spire, and I didn't feel a similar confidence in Monster Train's battle system.

Additionally, while most everything having to do with the game's clans - differentiation, design, art style, etc. - is stellar, the rate at which you unlock the last couple clans felt a bit slow to me. You have access to the first three pretty much right away, yet you're unable to play as the final two before summoning 350 monsters to unlock the fourth clan and killing 1,300 enemies to unlock the fifth and final clan in the base game. It took me six hours to accomplish the former and just over ten to achieve the latter.

In spite of my gripes, Monster Train is a treat. Enduringly bright. Like the Pyre of Hell itself. 8/10.

Where it shines:

• Concept
• Novelty of combat
• Depth

Where it fades:

• Obtuse damage calculation
• Free-floating bosses
• Slightly slow progression system

Into the Breach

strategy

sci-fi

roguelike

Jan 20, 2024

timely turn-based strategy

strategy

sci-fi

roguelike

Into the Breach is an extremely solid turn-based strategy game. And unlike many of these shiny little chess-likes, its story is pretty interesting too. The conceit is that the human race has been overrun by packs of massive bug creatures called the Vek.

The titular breach is a portal through time that human scientists have opened up. A team of three mechs are sent through the breach to try to defeat Vek forces at a series of strategic checkpoints across a number of islands with variable environments and objectives. As the player, you control the mechs. Each mech has a different special ability that can be used to damage and/or push Vek fighters around a gridded play space. The Vek are trying to destroy buildings on the map (which decreases the energy grid that powers your mechs and causes human casualties), strategic checkpoints (which will impact the reward you get from clearing each island), and your mechs themselves.

If you run out of power - read: if the Vek destroy enough buildings - you lose. If all of your mechs are destroyed, you lose. If you're able to kill all Vek forces or hold them off for a set number of turns, you clear the strategic checkpoint and gain the benefits earned from completed side objectives. These benefits can be anything from grid charges, which heal the damage taken from destroyed buildings, to reputation points you can use to buy upgrades at the end of an island, to power cores that beef up your mechs.

You can upgrade your pilots and carry some of these upgrades through multiple runs. Meanwhile, as you gain more experience, different teams of mechs whose abilities unlock new strategies and advantages become available to you, adding nuance to the game's progression loop. Into the Breach's difficulty level is adjustable, making the game far more accessible. Normal mode had me carefully considering each of my turns and still losing quite a bit.

The game shines in its varied mechanics from mech to mech. Like futuristic chess, each of your three pieces has their own strengths and weaknesses. In order to clear the increasingly difficult boards and stave off Vek invasion, you'll have to take advantage of the unique synergies that arise from using each team's abilities in concert. Into the Breach's genius also shines through in its evocation of sacrifice. Even when you think you've done everything right, the game challenges you to make difficult decisions.

Do I let the Vek attack that building full of innocent bystanders and damage my power grid? Or would it be better to step in front of the attack and lose my mech at a crucial moment in the battle? Do I give up on a bonus objective in lieu of making it farther along in my run? Or will that boon be crucial to success down the line?

For me, there's only so much joy that a self-contained strategy game like this can bring, but if that's your cup of tea. You won't find many better. I would recommend playing it with a mouse, if possible. Some of the controls, when mapped to a controller, can be tricky to differentiate and may lead to mistaken actions in the middle of intense battles where one wrong move can cost you your game. For instance, one time I accidentally shot a building and damaged my power grid when I had meant to move because I had selected my weapon instead of the movement trigger. Clumsy, clumsy Jonny.

Into the Breach is also available on smartphones and currently (as of 1/20/24) downloadable through the Netflix app. Not many downsides to this one besides the ability to make mistaken moves with only one turn reset per battle. Also, when you move a mech and keep it selected, you have unlimited movement resets. However, the second you click off the mech you were controlling, this option to reset goes away and you're stuck where you are. I accidentally let mistakes like these hamper my runs at key moments. Could just be a me problem, though. I'd be interested to hear what you think!

Perfect for picking up and putting down, Into the Breach is about as solid of a turn-based strategy game as they come. I had fun but didn't feel inspired. 7/10.

Where it shines:

• Turn-based strategy classic
• Accessibility features
• Cool art
• Concise story there if you want it

Where it fades:

• Unforgiving on mistakes
• Obtuse move resets
• Chess haters beware

Strange Horticulture

point and click

puzzle

mystery

dark

Jan 5, 2024

point-and-click plant mystery

point and click

puzzle

mystery

dark

I was really excited to play Strange Horticulture because it seemed tailored to my interests in many ways. I'm a cat-loving plant dad who's happiest when it's raining outside. I love detective stories, especially interactive ones.

Strange Horticulture is a game set in Ireland-adjacent geography in which you play as the owner of a plant shop. You have a little black cat named Hellebore who sleeps on your desk. You can see the rain through glass greenhouse windows. And - as the game progresses - a mystery unfolds before your eyes.

You interact with this mystery through dialogue with customers. The game takes place over a couple of weeks, and each day you welcome folks one by one through your doors to exchange gossip, sell remedies, and trade secrets. At the start of each day, you draw a clue card from a deck that will lead you to new plants. The way you get to an area once you figure out a clue that intends to lead you there is by opening up a gridded map and clicking a square that corresponds to a labeled column and row - e27, for instance. If you solve the clue, you are rewarded with a blurb of text and a plant or two. If you misinterpret the clue, you are left to try again. While you can progress through customers with unsolved clues in your inventory, you will come upon one pretty quickly that will need a plant that you can only gain by solving its corresponding clue.

Similarly, you receive cryptic letters and codes throughout the game that you must interpret correctly to gain plants to sell to patrons in exchange for information about other plants. All the while, you're labeling the plants you think you can identify in your book until you confirm them. You can organize your plants on shelves however you see fit. You can pet the cat (and pick up some Steam achievements if you do it enough times - HOORAY). You unlock a few items here and there that let you interact with your core item set differently, but that's pretty much it: get plants, get info about plants, label plants, use plants, rinse, repeat.

Meanwhile, mysterious figures flit about, a series of murders goes unsolved, and cultish mischief reigns throughout the verdant forests, scenic peaks, and small towns on your map. Will you be the missing piece of the puzzle? Or only make matters worse by letting your rare collection of horticultural specimens fall into the wrong hands?

If you think this sounds good it's because a lot of it is. The atmosphere of the game is spot on. Purr-fect for pluviophile plant people like me. The concept of doing a detective point and click game through the mechanics of running a plant shop is strange and brilliant. And the whole spooky vibe the developers and writers obviously worked very hard on cultivating hits home. A huge accomplishment in itself for an indie title like this.

My problems with the game, however, start with the fact that I would much rather just sit and listen to the rain and pet Hellebore every once and a while than actually play through its progression loop. Labeling and organizing Strange Horticulture's variety of make-believe plants felt fun for about an hour. After that, it quickly came to feel like homework, and there isn't enough added to the plant identification process as you progress to make it feel less monotonous.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to interpret these clues that are decently written - judging by the fact that I get close to clicking on the correct square - but imprecise enough that it takes me a couple minutes of clicking around to find the right one for a lot of the clues.

And, here you're probably saying - wait, Jonny, a couple minutes of clicking around? How big is this map? Just how wrong were you? That, my fellow owl, leads me to the worst part of exploring in this game. Every time you click a spot on the 33x17 map, your "Will to Explore" is used up. Then, it slowly begins refilling. The only thing you can do to speed along the refill is to pick up your watering can and water your plants. I would be so much more okay with this if there was an actual plant-care system in the game. But there's not. There's only watering a couple of the same plants over and over to get back your "Will to Explore," to click another spot on the map that - close but no cigar - isn't the right one, only to pick up your watering can once more and go through the entire process again.

That's not even mentioning that a lot of the time I was watering mushrooms in a clay pot. I don't think that's how mushrooms work. And, if it were, the ones in my shop would be terribly overwatered, drowning in my desire to click the map just one more freaking time because that clue has to be pointing somewhere around here.

In a vacuum, this whole watering plants to gain back your "Will to Explore" thing is not terrible. It's even a little cute the first or second time. After all, it's only about twenty seconds of watering. However, when I finally clicked the right square after two or three near-misses, the feeling that I had was one of frustration rather than triumph. It felt like the game had wasted my time. I know that allowing players to click the map willy-nilly wouldn't work great either because then they could stumble upon key locations without having figured out their corresponding clues by spamming the mouse, but I think there's a solution that feels more meaningful for this game. It's just not there yet.

As it stands, even slightly misinterpreting one of Strange Horticulture's scribbled clues can lead to what can only be described as very not-fun Battleship against yourself for a number of minutes. And, frankly, that kinda sucks.

Meanwhile, while the vibe of the game's mystery is cool, it is written in such a way that its interlocking clues and narratives are gratuitously vague until the end of the game when their interconnectedness is told to you rather than implicitly linked within the narrative. This feels all the more defeating when what you've been doing all game has felt so reasoning-heavy. Effectively, you're given agency to solve which plants are which - and don't get me wrong, this is cool. But it's repetitive, and the rest of the game's mystery leaves something to be desired in terms of interactivity.

It pains me, but I've got to give this one a 6/10. I would still recommend buying it and playing some of it to soak in those beautiful spooky, rainy vibes. But beyond that, it wasn't fun or revelatory enough to justify what it was asking me to do.

Where it shines:

• Spot-on atmosphere
• Great concept
• Creative mechanics
• Spooky

Where it fades:

• Feels like Battleship
• Imprecise clues
• Travel credit system
• Gratuitously vague

This past weekend, I played Baldur's Gate 3 multiplayer with my partner and my dad. Making characters was fun as heck. The number of options and attention that Larion - the studio behind 2023's smash hit - has paid to inclusivity is stellar.

Once we hopped into the game, my enthusiasm for the endeavor began to wane. When one player interacts with an NPC or a quest object, other characters are able to listen in, but not meaningfully affect the outcome of the interaction in-game. In combat, even though the turn-based structure of Dungeons & Dragons - the massively popular roleplaying game which Baldur's Gate 3 masterfully recreates - has been modified to be as fast as possible, it drags while your fellow players figure out their moves and execute them.

I know, I know - this is to be expected, right? It's a D&D game, of course there's going to be some waiting around. It's a social thing. You're playing multiplayer.

If I had been in the above mindset, I would have had a lot more fun with co-op Baldur's Gate 3. As it stood, I guess I was just hoping to play a video game, make progress, and experience this story that everyone is so buck wild about. And I think I'll be able to do this in single player, at my own pace. Multiplayer felt hectic outside of battle and glacial in it, and I think I know why.

It's because Larion designed the experience to play like an actual D&D campaign. They're expecting folks who are investing in multiplayer to meet regularly - probably once or twice a week - very rarely split the party, and have some tasty snacks and drinks on hand while hanging out with friends (be it virtually or locally). In this way, they've succeeded. It makes for a unique gaming experience that is an absolutely wonderful introduction to the world of tabletop roleplaying. Leaps and bounds more accessible than starting a pencil and paper D&D campaign and available on the network at all times, Baldur's Gate 3 has opened up a huge new audience of questers to the absolute joys - and pesky frustrations - of the whole shebang.

My partner and I host a weekly D&D session at our house. We tell stories and laugh with friends. Folks are patient with my sometimes rough GMing, and we have a good time. I think since my itch for collaborative storytelling is already scratched in this way, I struggle to enjoy the full Baldur's Gate 3 multiplayer experience.

I adored the time with my family and would play with them again in an instant. However, I think I'll have to stick to single player if I want to experience the game in full. Just not sure I have the patience for another classic co-op D&D night on the calendar. But if you do, this game has my full endorsement. Venture forth!

For the holidays, my wonderful partner Jamie bought me what might be the best gift I've ever received for not having had any idea I could want such a thing before ripping off the wrapping. This gift was a Kirby bath mat.

The only Kirby game I've played in my life is Kirby Air Ride on Gamecube growing up - and, I guess, Super Smash Bros, if you count that. While I loved Air Ride and have fond memories of ripping around in free play on the back of a star-powered motorcycle thing for hours on end, the character Kirby has not factored into what I would count as a meaningful game experience for me for many, many years.

And, yet, I hold the little pink puffball near and dear. Nothing brought me more joy than unwrapping Kirby and displaying it proudly on Jamie and my tiled bathroom floor.

Now, Kirby makes me happy each time I step out of the shower. I towel off with a smile on my face. The rug is so soft and pink and cute. It makes what once was a plain old bathroom into the second or third nerdiest room in our house (which is saying something). I love it.

Examining my love for this gift and Kirby in general has led me to ponder what it is about video games that gives us the warm and fuzzies. More than any other art form, video games have staying power, transforming childhood pastimes into lifelong fixations. Look no further than the Pokémon plushie collection at major conferences like Gen Con - or Jamie and my upstairs media room, for that matter - to see the absolutely massive impact that video game nostalgia has had on entire generations, from Fortnight kids all the way up through sixty and seventy year old adults nerding out on retro pinball tables and arcade cabinets.

Games matter so much to us because they help us feel. They evoke freedom, joy, and even coziness, and the world's most iconic franchises bottle up these feelings and sell them back to us when we wish our lives could be filled with just a little bit more of them each day. Having familiar and beloved symbols from our favorite games in our homes and places of work does fulfill this wish, to a degree. A small feeling of twee-nerd comfort washes over me each time I flip on my Mario lamp shaped like the series' iconic Prize Block or cuddle the Dragonite my friend Jack bought me.

However, video game nostalgia is not all hugs and smiles. The commercialization of nostalgia, a feeling which - I now realize, by my own argument - is but well-aged (even fermented?) freedom, joy and coziness, is big business. It pads the pockets of wealthy people and likely accelerates deleterious working conditions and labor atrocities in countries far removed from targeted consumers. The fact that the majority of franchises I've mentioned here are owned by Nintendo - the industry's premiere purveyor of nostalgia - lends a jadedness to the company behind the world's most well-known and loveable video game characters.

Let me be clear. I don't think supporting Nintendo is necessarily a bad thing. They make games I love, and I want the market to reward them for doing so. Because we live in a capitalist system in which games would not get made if people didn't cough up their sixty bucks for each new release. Corporations exist to make money, and all video game companies take advantage of nostalgia to create longtail revenue streams for their most treasured franchises. Just because Nintendo does it most successfully doesn't mean they should be vilified any more than Sony with its Last of Us statuettes, Microsoft for its desire to put Minecraft on every T-shirt in America, or - say - Epic for making the most popular game in the world in which, coincidentally, Boba Fett can wear Spiderman gloves and dab after shooting John Wick in the face.

And, look - I will always think Kirby is cute. Mario and Luigi anything will never not be cool.

In spite of my more critical analysis above, I can't help but smile when I see Snorlax catching a nap in the aisle at Target, Walmart, or [INSERT CHAIN STORE HERE].

He's green. He's soft and far smaller than he'd be in real life. And he is thirty dollars.

I don't buy him, but I love him. And love, unlike nostalgia, is priceless.

My sister was visiting for the holidays, and the day before she headed back home to Oklahoma, my partner and me grabbed her for a festive happy hour. She came over to our little house. We lit candles, drank wine and ate cheese. Our talk mingled with the rain outside.

My partner, Jamie, is a big nerd, and I love her for it. She enjoys playing video games and indulges my ever-present desire to discuss their cultural relevance. My sister Sarah, on the other hand, has not been known to game.

While she would refute this claim - thanks to her having been the savviest of her friend group during the pandemic and, thus, was the one to create a Steam account and purchase whatever the newest Jackbox Party Pack was at the time - she likes to fill her life with other things.

Which is great. When I tell people about my sister, I always lead with the ways I aspire to be more like her. Sarah is spontaneous and adventurous. I'm more of a homebody who far too often ponders the most minuscule of decisions. My sister is an extrovert who can move to a new place where she knows no one and, within the span of a couple weeks, make a vibrant community of friends. And here I am, an introvert who prefers the solitude of writing.

Sarah's lack of interest in video games is a healthy reflection of her well-roundedness. And I knew that when I bought Unpacking for her as a last-minute holiday gift, it was a speculative purchase at best.

Unpacking* is a low-impact point-and-click game which simulates the positive sensations of moving into a new place without all the stress that comes along with actually moving. The player removes possessions one by one from boxes and decides where they go. Progression is barred until some items are in specific spots, preventing the player from throwing all the items, say, on the floor under the bed. However, the game does allow for some creativity in the way the player sets up each room, and the satisfaction of putting everything in its place does have a singular magnetism to it. This - combined with the delightful pop each finished box makes as it folds up and disappears and the game's lo-fi soundscape - make Unpacking stand out to me as the kind of game that could be perfect for a non-gamer. Especially a non-gamer like my sister who gets immense satisfaction out of organizing her space.

Because walking into Sarah's apartment is like entering the mind of a minimalist who likes crafting and cottages. A purple-red knitted mushroom pillow sings with her meticulously framed and mounted pictures. The bathroom glistens - each soap and lotion in its place - next to an aerial playplace bracketed to an adjoining bedroom wall where Sarah's cats spend hours doing somersaults. Each item you encounter has a purpose. And what screams purpose-driven organization more than a game like Unpacking?

Before Sarah left that evening, Jamie insisted that she sit down and try the game for a few minutes. Sarah obliged and took a seat at my computer. In a matter of seconds we had the game installed and open on screen, Unpacking's light storage and memory requirements checking another box in the good-game-for-non-gamers column.

The game's music thrummed to life a vibe that repainted the edges of Jamie and my little office room in technicolor. Sarah clicked start. She smiled. The first five minutes were about experimentation. She put her secret journal next to a soccer ball in the cabinet. The game didn't like that. The next five, Sarah was in her zone, going through box after box, lining up books by height order on her shelves, deciding whether or not the boombox should go on the floor or the desk.

In the last five minutes, she and Jamie mistook a pallet of multi-colored cassette tapes for something far sillier. I can't remember exactly what. What I do remember is their shared moment of realization, Jamie looking over Sarah's shoulder, their eyes widening, their smiles, their laughter. To steady herself in her glee, Jamie put her hand on my sister's arm. Meanwhile, Sarah's delight bowed her head slightly to meet Jamie's.

Witnessing this moment of physical, sisterly intimacy made that rainy December evening feel comfortable and warm. My chest a hearth, Sarah gave us hugs, and we said our goodbyes. A cheerful fire burns there still. For Unpacking, for family, and for the power of shared gaming experiences to create connective tissue that makes real life feel that much more immediate. That much more present. That much warmer.

When I first heard about Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy on an episode of The Besties, I thought: "Now there's a game for me."

"A cerebral, challenging, meditative yet absurd game for someone interested in engaging with one of the best independent game designers of his era," I thought. And I was right.

Then, this came to mind: "I'll enjoy playing this one. It will be tough, but I'll stick to it and beat it because that's my way. I may not be the best at something, but I am one of the hardest workers. That's how I'll succeed."

Getting Over It* showed me just how wrong I was. About the beating it part, yes. But also about my preconceived notion of "success." In fact, this game helped me take a large step on my journey toward a healthier, more authentic self by beating the shit out of me the few times I tried to pick it up.

Bennett Foddy made Getting Over It as an homage to Sexy Hiking, another painfully difficult game that challenges players to use a simple yet novel climbing mechanic to progress through a series of increasingly perplexing obstacles. Getting Over It is this with better graphics and more interesting trappings.

You play as a shirtless person with no legs who grows out of a cauldron and has a climbing pick attached to both his hands. Players use their mouse or analog stick to move the climbing pick around in order to propel the cauldron-bound character up and over obstacles as they progress up a mountain of miscellaneous objects.

But progress is the wrong term to describe the climbing in this game. There are no checkpoints. If you fall - which you do a lot - you have to re-tread the same path. No second chances. No fail safes. Just fails.

The "With Bennet Foddy" part of the game comes into play when the titular designer actually speaks to you through voiceover when you mess up or do something frustrating. He'll tell you about the game's inspiration, why he made it, and other facts. He'll encourage you to keep going, reminding you that mistakes are what make us human and help us grow. He'll groan right alongside you as you plummet from ten minutes of careful climbing back down to exactly where you were when you started your session, where you have been countless times. In addition to Foddy's voiceover, you'll be treated to old blues tunes and other music that has encapsulated human frustration throughout recorded history.

And it's cute for the first little bit. For the first hour, even. Then, it's frustrating. Then more time goes by and you turn the game off. At least, that's what I did. I thought I would come back to it another time. When I had more patience or read more about the most optimal controls and strategy tips.

Then I'd work on it and beat it, I thought. I am a hard worker. I appreciate Foddy's product, and to show it respect I will solve it before I move on.

I had this in my head for about a week. Then a speed run of the game showed up on my YouTube feed. It was a two-minute long video. After watching for thirty seconds I knew I would never beat the game.

The speedrunner had a golden cauldron - which you probably get for making it to the top of the mountain (or, some might say, getting over it) a trillion times or something. It took him all of fifteen seconds to make it past the part I'd spent over three hours trying to solve. Then he went higher. And higher. Through obstacles precarious enough to make my eyes water. Through entirely different landscapes of pain. Through the twitchiest of conundrums that could probably send you tumbling back to the start of the game if not navigated with the swiftest and most careful hand. Up and up and up and into space.

Then the credits rolled. And there I sat with my new knowledge. That I would never beat or review the game, and - probably, if I was being honest with myself - never even boot it up again. Because... how could I?

Approaching Getting Over It with my original attitude made me dislike the game. I found it nearly impossible to progress. I knew that this difficulty was the game's main conceit, but I thought that I'd be different. I thought that I would overcome. Be one of the few to soldier on and "get over it" like Foddy wanted me to. I thought I would be special. At least, I wanted to be. But I wasn't. I was just another person who gave up.

As I sat with these thoughts, I came to realize that the point of Getting Over It is not to win. Or, rather, winning the game does not have to look like beating it for the vast majority of folks. Instead, winning is to realize that completing something does not have to be the metric for whether something is pleasurable or whether you can appreciate it. In games, in art, in sports, in life, success is the work that one does as an individual to size up how they will be able to take pleasure in how they spend their time and then follow through on that enjoyment in whatever ways feel right to them.

For me, getting pleasure out of Getting Over It actually turned out to be being humbled by it and writing this piece, rather than making it to the top of the mountain and into the stratosphere. Beating the game would not bring me half the satisfaction or pleasure that I get sharing these reflections with you. In this way, writing is my gold cauldron. That said, I don't expect you to get pleasure from reading my words or writing about the game yourself. If pleasure looks like beating something, more power to you.

Success looks different for everyone because every individual is - as the term implies - their own living breathing ball of unique preferences. And, if you dig deep enough into the nuances within, everyone is (at least slightly) different from one another. And that's beautiful.

That a speedrunner who takes pride in beating the shit out of each game they approach, spending hundreds of hours honing their craft, and me - a writer whose patience levels (or lack thereof) are not equipped to play more than three hours of Getting Over It without putting the game down (probably forever) - can both find pleasure and success in playing it is beautiful.

Life does not have to be a series of isolated events that you must complete or see through to their ends. Ends are given far too much mythological importance in today's world. People crave ends. We fear them, yet we want them and put them on pedestals as mementos of completion and closure. But these ideas are constructs that hold no more substance than sweat evaporating off a frustrated gamer's furrowed brow. There is no such thing as an end. Not even death or beating Getting Over It leads to one. There will always be more people and more memories. More moments. Faster, more efficient climbs to chase.

So we may as well enjoy it.

Portal 2 is Valve's charming addition to their acclaimed Portal series. In it, you play as a robot who solves a variety of puzzles by creating portals that you shoot out of your arm. Portal 2's largest leap forward when compared to its predecessor is the game's inclusion of a multiplayer mode.

In multiplayer, you and a friend play as the charmingly curious and awkward robots Atlas (a blue mech with a globe-shaped head and squat limbs) and P-Body (a yellow mech with an egg-shaped head and lanky limbs). You start out in a training area. An automated voice feeds you directions as you get to know your new portal powers - make sure to have your volume on, as the early voice prompts are important cues for not getting bogged down.

When I played Portal 2 multiplayer for the first time, I didn't have my volume on. I was on a phone call with my dad. We were trying to play together and the game was crashing. Once, twice. If there was a third time, I would have bagged it and gone back to Hollow Knight, but the third time was - in fact - the charm, and we were able to drop into our pods and eventually make it to the training area after I spent a few minutes searching Reddit to instruct my dad how to emote.

He was P-Body. I'm not sure how my rendition of Atlas looked since the game is in first-person, but Portal 2's masterful grasp of comedy shone through within our first seconds in its lanky yellow robot's gate. Whenever my dad would move around the screen, it looked like a futuristic Tim Burton character was for some reason tip-toeing his way over a maze of molten marbles. P-Body's walk brought a smile to my face. So did helping my dad play a video game.

My dad is the most tech-savvy person in our family. With a masters in computer science from Johns Hopkins and almost forty years working in technology, he puts his humanities loving wife and children to shame when it comes to installing, uploading, coding, research, etc. Dad grew up loving video games in the seventies and eighties. We still like to set up an old Intellivision in the basement sometimes and play his favorite games from when he was a kid. But the first-person shooter revolution in the 90s with games like Wolfenstein 3D and Doom did not appeal to him. Their gratuitous violence and motion sickness-inducing controls were enough to turn him off from the genre to this day.

To think of Portal 2 as a work that draws heavily from the precedent set by these titles is comical but true. The game's controls for first-person portal generation grew out of the precedent set by id Software and the passionate community of 90s deathmatchers, just as all modern 3D games that use a first-person viewpoint have. It's no wonder my dad had to figure out how to aim.

I, on the other hand, am a product of a modern gaming landscape where the majority of AAA titles are shooters, a trend that's only growing as cash-strapped studios look to pump out games at a furious clip. Nothing sells like violence.

We had a Playstation 3 growing up, and I played Call of Duty: Black Ops for hours. So many hours, in fact, that my parents made me set up in our living room so that they could monitor my vital signs and so that I - in their words - "wouldn't crawl into the basement and shut myself off from the world." I was so into the game that my mom at one point threatened to cry if I played any more. Needless to say my first-person shooter addiction ended that day.

For the rest of my young adult life, I looked back on my time with COD as a complete waste of time. All it did was make me feel intense, feel shame for not being as good as my friends at Team Deathmatch, experience fleeting pride for earning a new skin for a gun or gaining a rank of prestige. These were trivial and negative things that I wanted to leave as far behind my reflective, tree-hugging, writer ass as I possibly could.

But getting back into gaming nowadays makes me feel gratitude for my video game heritage. Because boy did those first-person shooters teach me how to use an analog stick. Two analog sticks at once, actually. One to move my character around and one to manipulate the camera angle. This is a skill that I took for granted, like the millions of folks in my generation who grew up with video games probably do. I took it for granted, that is, until I watched my dad try to play Return of the Obra Dinn with a bluetooth controller on my computer.

Obra Dinn is a first-person detective game. You control the camera and movement with a controller's analog sticks (but don't do any shooting). My dad spent fifteen minutes walking into walls he couldn't see before he called it a day and said he'd read my review on the game to experience it.

I hope I wrote a decent review. This moment made me sad and grateful. Sad that entire generations of gamers are at risk of feeling shut-out from their younger counterparts as gaming tech continues its feverish pace of progress. Grateful that COD - a game that I now, for the most part, detest - taught me how to play.

And that brings us back to Portal 2. My dad and I are on the phone. He's being patient with me. I realize that I'm ordering him around. I try to modulate my tone but, admittedly, still do most of the talking.

The puzzles are dazzling. Their variety, encouragement of discovery, and utilization of Portal's signature first-person portal creation mechanics make them some of the most entertaining puzzles I've ever had the honor of grappling with.

And I got to do it alongside P-Body, my father and fellow robot adventurer. My friend. And even though I'm better at first-person games than he is, he's the reason why I feel enough confidence to spend time playing or writing about video games at all in the first place. He helps me see that passion is reason enough, that aims and goals don't have to feel lofty if they can feel lived-in. That loving video games transcends controllers and the nostalgic titles that we'll always love, if only because we played them growing up. And he made Portal 2 fun.

Griftlands

roguelike

strategy

deck builder

Dec 21, 2023

deckbuilding narrative roguelike

roguelike

strategy

deck builder

Griftlands is a magnificent, story-rich deck builder that utilizes rogue-lite mechanics to add stakes to its gameplay. Its unique combination of narrative depth and strategic variety kept me coming back for more throughout my sixteen hours of logged play. During this time, I played runs as each of Griftlands' three characters, delighting in their mechanical differences and the way that these differences encouraged diverging strategies when it came to building their decks. While at first blush I was mystified by the game's decision to include two decks for each character - one for negotiation and one for battle - and the change in mechanics and verbiage that came along with this choice, I soon learned that this is where Griftlands separates itself from the pack. It's an instant classic that is a must play for fans of the deck building genre and one I'd strongly recommend to pretty much everyone else.

The game's core loop is as follows: talk to an NPC, receive a quest, travel around the map (with random encounters along the way), choose to negotiate, battle, or do a little bit of both as you interact with other NPCs and make your way toward quest completion, gain small rewards to build your deck or enhance your character, travel back to the first person you talked to, gain large rewards to build your deck or enhance your character, repeat until victory or death.

Each story that Griftlands tells feels like a well-written choose-your-own adventure novel with unparalleled interactively, meaningful choices, and the strategic trappings of two deck building games wrapped into one. The game's details feel hand-crafted and full of care, pulling you further into its fiction as you talk and fight your way through a post-environmental sci-fi world. It gives a Star Wars vibe if all magical force powers were replaced with the boxy tech and embattled grittiness of Mos Eisley. If, instead of depicting the classic struggle of good versus evil, George Lucas decided to chronicle days in the life of the galaxy's most eccentric grifters. In this way, Griftlands presents its players with a world that feels at once lived-in and novel. An accomplishment in itself. I can't get enough of it.

You start out playing as Sal, a bounty hunter who returns to the crime-ridden continent of Havaria to exact revenge on a debt-broker named Kashio who sold Sal into slavery ten years prior. Traveling through Havaria feels dangerous - Murder Bay and Lakespit are among the destinations you'll find within its depths - but Sal is prepared. With her two daggers and impassioned purpose, you'll put Kashio in the grave or die trying. Sal's battle and negotiation mechanics are the most straightforward when it comes to the game's deck building elements. Opt for chains of "combo" or "bleed" in battle to tear through enemies. Go for max resolve or dominance in tense discussions to win marks over with kindness or by being cold as ice.

After Sal, you unlock Rook, a retired military captain who now freelances in the putrefied wastes of Grout Bog to earn enough shills to survive. In Rook's story, you play both sides of a tense civil war between technocrats and laborers to unlock the secrets of the bog and make some real money doing so. In battle, Rook wields two specialized service revolvers from his military days. The revolvers take charges to operate, and a lot of complexity is introduced to Rook's battle deck by how to maximize or minimize charge and what effects, then, can be added to his attack and defense maneuvers as a result.

In Rook's negotiations, Griftlands' most charming yet arguably most inscrutable character-based core mechanic rears its head. Rook is a sharpshooting gambler, and the way the developers choose to depict this in conversation is through a special coin. Rook flips this coin when a card effect called "gamble" comes into play. Depending on if the coin lands on "heads" or "snails," a different effect takes place. You are able to swap out coins throughout a run. Different coins give different effects based on flip results. Similarly, various cards will have bonus effects depending on which side of the coin is showing face up at the moment they're played. Needless to say, the coin makes building a deck complicated, and within the first hour of my inaugural Rook run, I thought this level of complexity bordered on the unnecessary. However, once it clicked, it led to one of the most rewarding deck building experiences I've had.

A tip when it comes to this game's sometimes overwhelming amount of mechanical depth: generally, collecting cards that allow you to do more of each character's "signature moves" and/or draw cards is a failsafe option. I think of this as "turning over the deck." If I can keep my deck size small enough and upgrade enough cards, then turning over my deck and utilizing my character's special as many times as possible is bound to produce positive results. For Rook, turning over the deck in battle means gaining a lot of charge and playing cards that utilize charge. Similarly, turning over the deck in Rook's negotiations means flipping his special coin as much as possible. Meanwhile, for the game's third and final unlockable character, Smith, turning over the deck means drinking a whole lot of alcohol and having a dang good time doing so. More on that below.

Smith is the black sheep of a wealthy family. The Banquods are an illustrious dynasty, and Smith's parents expected their children to carry on tradition. Most of them did. Smith's youngest brother joined a merchant's guild, his sister became a military official, and his eldest brother is a Cardinal of the region's local Cult. Meanwhile, Smith chose to party, drinking his way through the posh coastal city where he was raised. That is, until one day when his parents die in a cataclysmic event known as The Breaching. When Smith returns home for their funeral, he is shut out of the Banquod estate by his siblings. For the rest of Smith's journey, you attempt to take control of the estate while unraveling the cultish underpinnings of The Breaching and the city that it forever changed. Negotiations for Smith are fairly easy to navigate. They resemble Sal's in enough ways to gain a foothold and forge a decisive path. However, Smith's battle technique is completely novel and comes with a baked-in learning curve.

Because Smith needs to drink to fight, and drinking from a card effect introduces "empty bottles" into your deck that you can then expend to either draw cards or increase the effects of cards that utilize empty bottles for their maneuvers. Additionally, Smith's jocular party-guy attitude imbues him with a mechanic called Moxie, wherein a counter increases every time Smith hurts himself on his turn. Smith is then healed by the number of stacks on his Moxie counter when his turn ends. It's a complicated yet genius cocktail of mechanics to invoke the spirit of a die hard partier who can also kick a whole lot of ass when he's had enough drinks to be fully in the zone. Smith is able to regenerate with Moxie, but without a strategic approach to his build, he'll lose health far faster than he can heal it. Just make sure to turn over his deck, drink a lot, and utilize his painful yet powerful drop-kicks. It's a blast.

As you play through each character's story and travel around their exquisitely drawn maps, you're faced with a bevy of random encounters that run the gamut of surprisingly helpful to downright shitty. Rook will get stung by a bug that implants a parasite into the back of his neck (and parasitic cards into each of his decks). Sal will come upon a lumin-dog companion animal and then be faced with the decision of whether or not to return it to its owner. Smith will find a sandwich and then be faced with the worker whose sandwich he found. Each of these encounters - and many, many more - occur randomly while you travel between checkpoints on your main quest, and the majority of them provide benefits or strap you with hindering circumstances that can greatly affect the outcome of a run.

For instance, if Sal decides to return her canine friend to its original owner, she'll earn hundreds of shills, in-game currency that she can then buy upgrades with to help better synergize her decks. However, if she keeps the lumin-dog, the character who is asking for it back will hate her, implementing a persistent mechanical debuff and fixing to cause trouble for her as she progresses through her story.

Hate is the negative end of the spectrum of an NPC's feelings about the player-controlled character in Griftlands. NPCs can also dislike you, feel neutral about you, like you, and love you. NPCs who dislike you will aid in battles and negotiations against you but do not apply persistent debuffs or actively pursue your demise if it's not already occurring. NPCs who feel neutral about you do nothing and can be swayed in either direction by your actions. NPCs who like you will come to your aid and help you out with small benefits. NPCs who love you provide a persistent buff that will help you in negotiation and battle.

In general, completing a quest successfully for an NPC will get them to like you. Then, giving them a gift or showing your loyalty will progress their feelings toward you, turning them into love. Similarly, NPCs will dislike you if you don't do what they ask of you or if you go against their immediate interests. They'll hate you if you harm them egregiously or kill one of their friends. Indeed, once you've vanquished an enemy in battle, you're given a choice. You can execute them or spare their life. Sparing their life sometimes comes with narrative implications. However, killing them always triggers the mechanical consequence of another character hating you, applying a debuff, and purposefully getting in your way later on in the game.

One of Griftlands' crowning triumphs is its ability to present players with meaningful consequences at every stage in their journey. These consequences arise from random encounters, conversations with NPCs, and choices made in the heat of battle. Choose wisely - because love and hatred carry immense weight in the Griftlands, and if you're not careful you'll be crushed.

Another special element of Griflands that deserves mention is the interconnectedness of each playable character's story. When playing as one character, it's possible to encounter the other two. For instance, as Rook, you can randomly meet Sal out in the bog and help her with a quest. You can also refuse and potentially invoke her fury by doing so. While these types of details may sound simple, they immediately make the game feel contiguous, as you realize that each of these stories is not playing out in a vacuum but rather in the same world. You realize that the maps are connected. That the same characters overlap between each one. You come to know who wants what and why. There's an intimacy that arises from multiple playthroughs in any rogue-like. Griftlands recognizes this and ingeniously stitches the fates of its playable characters together, imbuing its world with the familiarity that comes with walking through it from three widely varying perspectives, each stemming from a wholly unique individual identity.

You earn card rewards in Griftlands when you win negotiations and battles and when you complete quests. However, there's the potential to win far more than cards. Grafts are persistent items that you somewhat haphazardly drill into your brain to tip the scales of combat and negotiation in your favor. You can start the game with unlockable perks. You gain prestige and mettle on a run to unlock benefits that are transferable between runs even after you die. The game handles this anomaly in its fiction by introducing a mysterious vendor who encourages you to make it "as far as you can" and will assure you that "all must end well." When you die and restart a run as the same character, a random encounter gets added to the pool that allows you to thrift goods from the mettle vendor that have been looted from the corpse you left behind on your previous attempt. It sounds grizzly but is a charming discovery all its own, much like Griftlands at large.

Still, that's a lot of details to keep track of, and my main knock on this game is that the amount of complexity it introduces right off the bat can be overwhelming for even the most experienced deck builders.

The separate negotiation and battle decks are what confused me at first. I had played about an hour of the game on my first run before switching it off. My partner asked me how I was liking it, and I answered honestly that I thought Griftlands was good but getting in its own way.

However, once I stuck with it and everything clicked, it swiftly became one of my favorite games of all time. Therefore, my fellow owl, all I ask is that you give this game 1-2 hours to grip you before making any judgments. For me, that's all it took before I discovered that Griftlands is pretty freaking special. 9/10.

Where it shines:

• Great story
• Meaningful consequences
• Tension-building random encounters
• Mechanical richness from character to character

Where it fades:

• Learning curve for each character
• Slightly inscrutable at first blush

Lonely Mountains: Downhill

roguelike

sports

Dec 17, 2023

mountain biking time trials

roguelike

sports

Lonely Mountains: Downhill is the best-feeling game I've ever played. And, while I'm still in my relative infancy as a reviewer of video games, it is a title well-earned. Because every sprint, drift, and hairpin turn in this game is tactile, powerful, dangerous, and - due in large part to that element of danger - exhilarating. It's meditative, challenging, and chill and - as you can definitely already tell - awfully list-worthy. It's the mountain biking game the world didn't know it needed until German developer Megagon Industries cooked it up oh so nice for us in its 2019 release. And we've been ripping down Lonely Mountains: Downhill's venerated slopes ever since.

The game's core loop is as follows: ride trail, complete trail-based challenges, earn outfits and purchase upgrades with challenge loot, unlock new trails and mountains, repeat. Trail challenges can usually be broken down into time trials and/or crash limits. Time trials prompt players to optimize time between checkpoints down the mountain to complete a trail under a specified time limit. Meanwhile, crash limits encourage safe riding, requiring players to make it to the finish line with under a certain number of crashes for the entirety of their ride. When you crash, you reset to the last checkpoint you reached, unless you're playing in "free-rider" mode - which requires a crash-free ride to unlock each trail's special night level. To succeed in time-trial challenges, players are incentivized to explore, experimenting with each trail's level-design while trying to land tough and creative short-cuts that lead to far more crashes (and laughs) than a breezy ride down the beaten path.

This design naturally encourages exploration and the development of player vision as one progresses throughout the game. By player vision I mean the ability to recognize subtle clues in the game's terrain that signal the potential for time-slashing short-cuts. For instance, the first one of these clues a player will pick up on is the way that gray rock paths signal quicker yet more dangerous routes than its brothers and sisters clad in the forgiving hues of green grass and well-traveled dirt. This functionality in level design is a large part of Lonely Mountains: Downhill's genius, especially because of the gorgeous visuals the game serves up at each and every turn.

The game's low-poly art style and flawless third-person camera work combine to provide players with a singular cocktail of stunning landscapes, interactive obstacles, and joyful discovery. Each rock and tree, however pesky, has been placed with care, coming together to create a unique playground that inspires excitement with each crash, rather than dejection. A restart in Lonely Mountains: Downhill is another opportunity to take in rare vistas, get technical through a myriad of entertaining landscape elements, and find joy and exhilaration in a world made just for you - the intrepid gamer - with one purpose in mind: to rip down some absolutely sick trails. And the game succeeds at this very purpose time and time again, from mountain to mountain, trail to trail, crash to horrifying, frustrating, and - yes, often hilarious - crash. It's a very beautiful game that I have no doubt you'll enjoy looking at almost as much as you enjoy playing it.

Lonely Mountains: Downhill*'s controls are simple and elegant. I would highly recommend using a controller on this one and sticking with the game's default settings - designed for you to steer from the rider's perspective. They feel a bit backwards at first with the third-person camera view, but once you get the hang of them, it's extremely satisfying to put yourself in the rider's shoes, zipping in and out of obstacles, drifting so close to cliffs that your tires kick dirt into neighboring valleys, and riding all out for the hell of it.

My main knock against Lonely Mountains: Downhill is that it's so incredibly good at doing one thing only - giving players a striking mountain biking experience - that it can get a bit repetitive, especially when you feel compelled to go for crashless runs to unlock the night mode of each trail. Additionally, in this same vein, unlocking new bikes can take a while and feel a bit grindy. For these reasons, the best way to experience the game is to just whip around and explore. You'll be so glad you did.

Pick this one up. It's a masterpiece. 9/10.

Where it shines:

• Feels amazing
• Beautiful low-poly art
• Natural exploration incentives
• Perfect for scaredy-cats like me who would never do this kind of thing in a million years in real life; makes you feel like an absolute badass with no bruises, death, or exercise

Where it fades:

• Grindy bike unlocks
• Timing of play sessions limited by inherent repetition

Florence

narrative

graphic novel

Dec 14, 2023

interactive graphic novel

narrative

graphic novel

I played the first ten minutes of Florence with my mom, and that's saying something. She's never had any interest whatsoever in games, unless you count her threatening to cry if I played any more Call of Duty: Black Ops when I was a kid interest.

But, one cold and cozy Hanukkah evening in December 2023, she looked over my shoulder and watched Florence. She saw some of herself in the titular character's story, smiled, said the art looked like a graphic novel. I never thought I'd get to play a video game with my mom and - while this moment was short - it was very meaningful to me. Florence helped make that moment. That's the kind of game that Florence is.

A company called Annapurna Interactive published this game, which is a little bit funny because its interactivity is extremely limited. Florence is a visual graphic novel whose stellar art and even better soundtrack carry the player through the story of Florence Yeoh, a woman in her mid-twenties who struggles with much of what a lot of young folks that age struggle with. I don't want to say too much more because Florence's gameplay is entirely based around its story and spoilers are heartbreaking, but I connected deeply with Florence being stuck in a monotonous routine of working at a job she feels very little connection to, eating, sleeping, and then doing it all over again, all with the pressures of social media in her hand, head, and pocket.

In the limited snapshots that we get of Florence's life throughout this forty-five minute experience, we see her find love, deal with grief and emptiness, cope with the pressure of strained relationships, and eventually find success by getting back in touch with herself.

Florence* is concise, cliche at times, but overall a very cozy and meaningful story that the vast majority of players will be able to see a lot of themselves in.

I've already mentioned just how wonderful the art and music are. In terms of gameplay, most of the interactive elements of the story feel great. Even just helping Florence brush her teeth is pretty soothing. The most clever interactive element are the jigsaw puzzles that simulate dialogue in the game. When Florence is feeling awkward, the puzzles have more pieces. When she finds her flow, they're two pieces that move together with the player having to do next to nothing to make them whole again. When she's calm they have round edges, and when she's angry those edges get increasingly more pointy. The puzzle motif returns in illustrations of struggle that deal with heartbreak and alienating memories. Piecing these scenes together mimics reflection in a way that feels both somber and visceral.

The worst part of Florence's interactivity is it forcing you to mash buttons at two seemingly random and certainly incongruous points in its storyline. In what is vaguely reminiscent of a quick-time event from a AAA title circa the 2010s, the game forces you to spam the A button (or the touchscreen if you're playing on mobile) to - at one point - physically push a character toward their goal and - at another - to get Florence up out of bed after a particularly sad moment in her life. This second instance was the lowest point I experienced while playing the game. What Florence needed at that time was a gentle awakening. Not some angsty white guy on the other side of the screen yelling at her to rise and shine. It completely pulled me out of the fiction in a way that felt unnecessary.

The most important thing that Florence has to say regards getting in touch with oneself to bring color back into the world. For Florence, this metaphor becomes very literal, as - for her - this looks like getting back in touch with the artistic side that brought her joy as a child.

Throughout the story, Florence struggles with herself. She fondly remembers making art but doesn't have enough confidence to identify as an artist. She's gifted a new set of paints which she obviously feels inspired by, but they are eventually buried on her desk under paperwork and other flotsam of adult life. These simple symbols resonated with me in a way that made Florence feel special. Because we all have something we see ourselves in that has gotten buried, and the often painstaking and sensitive process of excavation is the only thing that can bring us - and Florence - back into the light.

So call your mom and tell her you love her. Better yet, sit down next to her on the couch. Go get out your box of paints and learn from Florence. You'll be glad you did. 7/10.

Where it shines:

• Genuinely made me smile
• Evokes a relatable time of life
• Touches emotional themes without wallowing in them

Where it fades:

• A tad formulaic
• Button mashing during meaningful scenes

Bad North

strategy

medieval

roguelike

Dec 11, 2023

real-time strategy roguelike

strategy

medieval

roguelike

Bad North is a real-time strategy rogue-like where you control rag-tag squads of warriors as they defend islands against the onslaught of viking invaders. I initially picked the game up for its minimalist art style that depicts cute little folks warring on teensy land masses suspended in a fog-covered sea. I came for the precipitation, the greenery, and the pastel-colored flags. Little did I know I'd be staying in dogged pursuit of victory.

Because victory in Bad North looks like getting all your little soldiers and their embattled yet charming commanders (who I became very attached to across my runs) to a new home safe from invaders, where they can establish new peaceful lives, raise families, and pursue careers in literature.

The back half of that sentence is not actually in the game, but I can dream. Bad North boils down to using your mouse to click different spaces on a series of islands to move your troops around in an attempt to wipe out boats of arriving vikings before they burn down the island's structures or (worse) slay your commanders. If an island is successfully defended, you get coins based on the number of structures that remain un-pillaged. You can then use these coins to buy power ups for your commanders, better equipping them for future battles.

There are three classes of weaponry in which your commanders can specialize. Archers are useful for picking off enemies from range but will quickly perish in hand-to-hand combat with an opposing melee class. Sword and shield warriors are the most balanced fighters in the game. Meanwhile, pike-wielding squadrons can be run-saving when used to defend strategic positions while standing still. However, they're sitting ducks when on the move.

One of Bad North's crowning achievements is its sense of danger. One of the key ways the game accomplishes this feeling is by introducing a wide variety of viking classes that far overpower player-controlled squadrons if not accounted for properly. While the vikings have the same infantry options that the player has, they also can pull from reserves of giant and deadly viking brutes who throw javelins with devastating precision and speed and pack a major punch in close quarters with melee weaponry.

As you progress from island to island on your way to safety, you're able to see what classes of enemy you'll be faced with on each. However, the number, orientation, and order of your foes is left a mystery, leading to extremely tough decisions that sometimes can feel as foggy as the mist from which the vikings eerily emerge. Sometimes, an island will tease an intimidating viking brute class only to throw one at you. However, other times a seemingly innocuous militia class will overrun your defenses through sheer numbers.

One of the most endearing elements of the game is when you arrive on a new island and are joined by local commanders that you're able to recruit on your journey to safety. I found myself experiencing a surprising amount of emotion for an indie with no explicit narrative arc when an underpowered commander who had just joined my party in this way single-handedly fought his way through a hulking viking brute to save his people from apparent extinction at the end of a blood-drenched battle in the pouring rain. Nothing like an underdog to get my little heart a-pumping. And this game represents them like no other.

That said, Bad North punishes any momentary lapse in focus. If a commander is wiped out, they're permanently dead, erasing what could potentially be hours of leveling up in a certain specialization and leaving your remaining group of escapees vulnerable. Every movement and decision matters - even on normal mode - lest you want to watch your party's biggest strength mercilessly transform before your eyes into its most glaring weakness upon the unforgiving blade of an invading brute.

And yet somehow Bad North also accomplishes a brand of coziness that sometimes even borders on cute. The greenery, precipitation, quaint and folky structures, and overall vibe make it a tempting rainy day at home game.

My partner and I have recently considered adopting a cat, and I think this game would be perfect to play with a cat snuggled on your lap while listening to a storm outside. It, too - much like a cat - can be both snuggly and brutal on its own strange, empowered terms.

While a sometimes uneven progression mechanic and slightly obtuse turn-based movement process mire Bad North's charm at points, it still makes for a very compelling, if punishing journey. It makes me feel like I'm playing chess without all of the inscrutable strategy elements but oftentimes just as much frustration when I lose out of the blue. There's a depth that's couched in a deceptive approachability that makes the game easy to pick up but hard to win. And that's a major accomplishment for an indie.

Some sliders are available at the main menu to make the game a little less frustrating when you die deep into a run. There have been a couple times where I wish I'd turned on the ability to restart an island, for instance, when a couple wrong moves cost me hours of careful progress. So please do turn that ability on if you don't want to have to go back to the beginning for a moment of blissful negligence. Because those vikings can creep up on you, and seeing one of your longtime commanders fall is sadder than you think.

Overall, Bad North has its limits, but it's a good little game that will have you caring far more about your pint-sized warriors and their quest for a new home than you might first imagine. Turn off the blood if you don't want to... well, see a lot of blood. 6/10.

Where it shines:

• Embodies spectrum of cozy to tense
• Simple yet strategic
• Charming art style
• Rainy day vibes

Where it fades:

• Uneven enemy level
• Punishing sometimes to a fault if island restart setting is left off
• Incongruously cartoonish war sounds

Rogue Legacy 2

roguelike

metroidvania

platformer

medieval

Dec 6, 2023

rogue-ish metroidvania

roguelike

metroidvania

platformer

medieval

Rogue Legacy 2 is the most solid rogue-like on the market. If you're someone who is into dipping into a randomized dungeon, using what you find there to get a little stronger, and then doing it over and over again, this game is for you.

It's set in a fantasy world. It's got humor. It doesn't take itself too seriously while simultaneously spooning out a 2-D world full of danger, surprises, and delight on a platter of sound mechanics and joy.

Just like the first Rogue Legacy, Rogue Legacy 2's core loop is encapsulated in a genealogical story, meaning that when you die in the game's dungeon, your next run will be completed by your former character's next of kin. Each of these generations of adventurers identifies as one of fifteen unlockable classes with their own weapon and "talent." A talent is a special move that sometimes costs mana, a resource that lets characters cast magic and is replenished when you bash enemies. Defeating enemies with each class also awards "Mastery ranks" that make individual classes stronger.

This progression system rewards specialization while not guaranteeing that your favorite class will be available for each run, as after you die you are presented with three randomized options for your next adventurer, each with their own class and traits, unique modifiers that change the way both you - the player - and your character interact with the world.

The basic enemies in the game are fairly punishing but with predictable rhythms. Probably the toughest part about them is that, if you touch one, you take damage on default settings, but this can be turned off easily in the menu to make the game more approachable. Bosses are similarly difficult but meant to reflect the relative level at which your upgrades should be in order to beat them. Therefore, if you progress to a boss and run up against a wall while fighting it time and time again, the game is hinting that you should probably go grind for coins to buy more upgrades and slay more enemies to increase your class's rank before returning for your shot at victory. Classic rogue-like.

Rogue Legacy 2's progression mechanics are straightforward, and the game is very easy to pick up and play. There is a bunch to do in the game's dungeon, including special quests and unlockable areas that reward exploration and creativity. My only knock against it is that, in order to progress past the ~4 hour mark you have to sift through a confusing quest journal type thing that the game doesn't introduce in its tutorial to find the hidden secrets of the castle based on what the spirits in these little blue orb things tell you in roundabout ways across multiple runs.

The story is interesting, if obtuse. The music is pretty good, and the art is great for what the designers of the game are going for. As with any rogue-like, stepping out for a walk will be necessary at times because this thing can get repetitive.

Overall, it's a foundational rogue-like with all the bells and whistles for longtime fans and masters of the genre while being approachable and fun enough for new players. I'd recommend it. 7/10.

Where it shines:

• Well-written (with quips-galore)
• Straightforward progression mechanics
• Cute lineage system
• Challenging yet approachable

Where it fades:

• Lots of reading in places where it's not fun to slow down and read
• Lack of controlled specialization option

INSIDE

dark

puzzle

platformer

Oct 18, 2023

dark puzzle platformer

dark

puzzle

platformer

Inside is a puzzle platformer where you play as a nameless, faceless boy in a red shirt making his way through a sinister world. While the game is textless and without dialogue, it can be surmised that the majority of the population has been zombified and taken over by a corporation who is using them for some unnamed purpose.

You start in the forest, treading through dusky pines and stones. Suddenly, you encounter men who, unless hidden from, will take you down on sight. Just for being an assumably unauthorized living person with free will. They have dogs, and the dogs are much faster than you. You're forced to use a combination of stealth and timing to evade them. Inside's starting phase teaches its player the fragility of the boy in the red shirt, a masterfully handled theme throughout the game. If the boy is spotted or run down, he dies. If the boy remains underwater for more than a few seconds, he dies. If the boy stumbles or mistimes a jump and falls from a height, well... I bet you can guess what happens. This realism lends a feeling of tension to the environmental puzzles you're faced with to progress through the game's post-apocalyptic setting.

Because, when it comes down to it, you're just a boy in a red shirt. You can climb. You can swim. You can run and jump a little bit and interact with objects that aren't too heavy for you to lift. But that's about it.

While Inside's crisp graphics lend the game a 3-D feel, its core loop runs entirely within a 2-D plane. It usually goes something like this:

Boy enters an environment where progression is barred, boy manipulates elements of the environment until a door opens, boy passes through door, loop repeats.

Every so often, Inside's puzzles are broken up by moments of tension defined by a chase, an opportunity to evade your oppressors using stealth, and/or the occasional situation where you're forced to hide in plain sight. While they aren't as traditionally puzzle-y as the game's core loop (i.e., push the box, pull the lever, press the button to make the door open), these moments of tension - due to the implicit disadvantage at which the boy in the red shirt finds himself - are puzzles in themselves. So much so that you're often forced to die a few (or - in my case - many, many) times before you're able to find a way around them.

In fact, one of the most miraculous parts of Inside is the way it rewards trial, error, and eventual creative triumph in its puzzles, stealths, and chases. While some of these encounters are easy, many require interacting with the boy's environment in unique ways and/or going back and forth between object interactions methodically in order to find a solution. The game does a wonderful job of keeping the player on the edge of their seat; while a few of its puzzles took me long periods of repetition to solve, none of them ever left me feeling dejected.

I've heard podcaster Justin McElroy speak of the "generosity" inherent in certain games. How a generous game will make the player trust the developer to reward them for their investment of time, rather than wasting it on frivolity and unnecessary grinding. In my mind, Inside is the embodiment of a generous game in its challenging yet satisfying puzzles.

I played the Switch port of this game on a flight from Virginia to San Diego, and then finished it in a coffee shop the next day. All in all, I would guess it took me - an enthusiastic yet historically unremarkable puzzler - around five hours to complete. After I got over my initial worry about the game being too scary (it never was, even though I have a very low tolerance for horror), I was entranced by Inside's creativity and suspense. The only time the spell was broken was when the boy's relatively realistic speed of movement made running back and forth between the more expansive puzzles in the game feel a bit like a drag. There was only so much slow jogging to and fro that I could stand before I had to take my one break. In this case, the otherwise brilliant way in which the developers rigged and animated the boy's locomotion that lends the game the majority of its thrilling near-brushes with disaster made it feel a bit flat.

My only other problem with the game is that sometimes it was unclear whether or not an object could be interacted with, to the point where I had to go around an environment and press the object interaction button until something clicked. That said, this is a relatively small fault that actually encourages exploration and figuring things out for oneself, which could be argued is a benefit in an environmental puzzle game like this.

Let's do a compliment sandwich. Inside's indirect storytelling and message (both surface-level and metaphorical) are top-notch. From the jump, it is the boy in the red shirt against the world, a world that has empowered a few people to enslave the rest, probably robbing the boy of his parents, his siblings, and his friends, erasing his loved ones to create empty shells compelled to carry out the bidding of the privileged few. One of the most touching yet eerie parts of the puzzle-driven storytelling in the game is when the boy in the red shirt finds the power to control the shells, as they help him access the world.

The way the game handles this control is through specialized helmets that the boy can jump into and animate the shells with his movements. This mechanic progresses in an ingenious way that, at one critical point, left me wondering if I was being chased by a group of shambling shells or aided by them. In the end, the shells are the closest thing the boy has to friends. They're his only helpers, the only beings in the world not actively trying to bring about his end. While the shells are masterfully woven into the game's puzzles, they also carry with them a poignant message about loneliness and what it's like to be a child who doesn't feel supported.

The boy in the red shirt's identity as a young kid also comes into play when deciphering Inside's driving metaphor. He is inhabiting a world full of lifeless, plodding bodies controlled by a few privileged people with free will. He feels the most interactive empathy with the shells but is unable to connect with them due to their lack of free will and life force. In this way, the game is a critique of a capitalist ethos that forces the majority of working adults into a kind of shell-like stupor themselves, working paycheck to paycheck in a rat race that leaves only the wealthiest to choose for themselves. From a child's perspective, it's hard to understand where along their journey some adults lose their sense of joy. Unfortunately, for the boy in the red shirt, this reality is brought further into the foreground with each passing second.

Without spoiling anything, Inside also features one of the most meaningful applications of the game design paradigm of turning player fear into player empowerment. It happens swiftly and without decoration. It kicks off the climax that roils through the end of the game and, finally, brings the developer's interpretation of serenity for the boy in the red shirt and the shells full circle.

This is a game for anyone who wants to do a little thinking and is interested in the emotional outcome of a story as much as the puzzles that populate it. 9/10.

Where it shines:

• Realistic locomotion
• Suspense
• Challenging yet solvable puzzles
• Story, message, and emotional payoff

Where it fades:

• Drags more the larger the puzzles are
• Unclear object interaction (sometimes)

Overboard!

mystery

point and click

Oct 14, 2023

point and click you-done-it

mystery

point and click

Overboard! is a point and click who-done-it set on a steamship voyaging from England to New York in 1935. Its setting and cast of characters could have hopped off the pages of an Agatha Christie novel. There's the actress in her twilight years, her businessman husband, a few of his associates, an elderly woman who collects secrets, a wide-eyed paramour, and a ship captain with a mysterious past. What sets this game apart is that, instead of solving a murder, you're trying to pin it on someone else.

You're Veronica Villensey, an aging actress from the West End who throws her new husband off the deck of your ship to his death in the middle of the night. Overboard! takes place the next day, the final one of your journey, as you interact with the various passengers on the boat, attempting to position yourself favorably for when it comes time to name a murderer.

The game is driven by sets of decisions and dialogue choices that lead to different outcomes depending on what time and in which location on the ship these conversations and decisions take place. Indeed, the shining mechanic of the game is its sense of time, as each action or line of dialogue Veronica chooses eats away at the precious time she has to establish her innocence, as the day plays out from 8 AM through around 3 PM. The timing of the game lends an urgency to the player's decisions that make for the kind of tension that affords Overboard! hours of entertaining plays (and replays) as you try to achieve increasingly optimal outcomes.

Because Overboard! was meant to be replayed. While a split-second decision or misremembered detail could land you in Sing-Sing, you'll soon be starting Veronica's day again, shooting for freedom, insurance money, and a clean getaway.

This loop-style play entertained me for about one and a half hours during my two-hour forty-five minute session. The story branches that vary with time of day and character location lead to interesting possibilities that begged to be explored. However, once I'd gotten away a couple times and started re-entering loops to try to pin the murder on someone else, it started to feel like a grind. While the designers include a feature that highlights choices you've made in the past, playing through the same possibilities to get to one decision point you wish you'd done differently can feel overly repetitive. Even though you're allowed to restart each scene once, oftentimes you're not sure about the implications of your decisions until the end of each loop, and by that time you'll have to start the day again to get back to the area of interest. This cycle left me with an hour and fifteen minutes of play where it wasn't the story pulling me through, but rather the nagging feeling that I knew what I had to do outside of one or two details I kept messing up.

That said, these mess-ups led to new story branches that eventually made my desired outcome easier. I was able to pin the murder on another passenger and get the life insurance money from my husband's untimely demise. Then, the game threw another win condition at me, and by this point, I was ready to hop off my computer and take my dog for a walk.

That said, I think Overboard! could occupy me for another hour or two while I pry at the last few unanswered questions in this mystery, and for a game that I was able to get on sale for $7.50, I'd consider this a fun and valuable addition to my collection.

The mechanics and story tree of this game are well thought out and handled with care. The art is solid, if cartoonish. It lends a removed-feeling levity to the idea of trying to get away with murder, which I think is what the game's designers were going for. The sound design is fairly simple and evocative of the 1930s. It hits the spot nicely.

The one point in the game that made me uncomfortable was when one of my dialogue options was to ask an old woman if she "didn't like blacks" based on her suspicion of the black captain of the ship. While the designers of Overboard! would defend themselves from this critique by saying the dialogue is meant to stay true to the time period, I think it was an unnecessary choice by the writers that took me out of the fiction. That said, this is (so far) the only moment of its kind I've found in the game.

I'd give Overboard! a solid 7/10. It will have you wanting to pick up a pen and paper and map out different loops as you attempt to optimize your villainous way to innocence, wealth, and possibility.

Where it shines:

• Handling time
• Story tree
• Novel angle for its genre

Where it fades:

• Repetitive after a time
• Generic art style