Cozy and Critical
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Unfortunately, while Harmony: The Fall of Reverie is a gorgeous, finely tuned visual novel with an affecting story and clear care put into every inch of the game, dissonant mechanics and sometimes confusing narrative choices are that more glaring. The result is, frustratingly, an excellent game dragged down by some of the same things that make it so excellent.
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L-R: Sally, Frank, and Gavin
I really, really, really want to like Sunday Gold.
I should. It’s a retro-futuristic adventure/heist game taking place in a dystopian city based on ‘70s London Gangster tropes. The art style is an odd and impressionistic one similar to Disco Elysium, one of my favorite games of all time. And the idea of planning heists and putting together evidence to take down a megacorporation is brilliant, especially with the setting details placing the monolithic Hogan Industries at the center of everything from shady pursuits to violent sports. Even some of the mechanics are interesting, with various minigames used to represent the main characters’ abilities. But looking at those mechanics reveals the underpinnings of Sunday Gold, a game fighting itself and the player every step of the way. And unfortunately, that brings the whole package down, somewhat. So in the interest of honesty, I apologize, but I have to be true to my impressions.
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If you like life sims, if you like games you can sink hours into satisfyingly, if you like visual novels or weird stories or branching plots, I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is the game for you. Jump on board the Stratos when it finally launches, a new life awaits you in the offworld colonies.
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Sweet Transit, a new rail simulator/citybuilder currently in early access, is a deceptively frustrating game. From the start, it presents itself as something of a pleasant, relaxing, folksy builder game, with a bluesy americana soundtrack by Ely Robbins, a Western-style aesthetic with its laborers and “beginning of the rail era” atmosphere, and soon you’re set loose on a gorgeous map to build your first centers of industry, and, from there, slowly conquer the New World by connecting it up with trains. However, somewhere around building your first train you find yourself somewhat in error, and this was the point that I began to have flashbacks to when I used to try programming in Python.
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By all accounts, I should like Cloudpunk. The vast neon-swathed cityscape evokes the best moments of Blade Runner, complete with the murmur of dystopian advertisements in the background. The flight controls are simple and smooth, allowing you to change height and swing through the city with ease, trailing twin neon contrails as you swerve around Asian-inspired buildings and avoid cars. It’s actually kind of relaxing, even at its most tense, sending you through gorgeous neighborhoods and actually letting you get out to explore them, having conversations that serve to deepen the world and helping various people with their problems. And lastly, it’s the kind of everyday-job noir-flavored experience that I’ve always loved, tasking you with doing a relatively low-level job as the plots around you darken further and further, as seen in such games as VA-11 hall-A and Night Call, among others.
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Sometimes you just need something quick to play. Something addictive and engrossing enough that you can get deep into it, but just light enough that you can disengage if need be. Something that can be played a little casually, but has a lot of depth and action. And directly in that sweet spot is Dead End Job. It’s a roguelike shooter with a ton of style, a good sense of humor, and easy enough controls to learn. But between the variety of enemies, the arcade-style combat, and the large number of perks and items strewn across its levels, it’s far from a basic experience. It’s something fantastic for if you want to get lost for a little while busting ghosts, or if you just need something for a quick burst of gaming.
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Disgaea is a series that’s been around for a while, an absolute tactical-strategy juggernaut that’s made its bones on unique gameplay, a vast array of characters, and an absolutely wicked sense of humor. The fifth numbered sequel (Sixth game if you count D2) in the series delivers on all of that, with two snarky morally ambiguous heroes taking on the threat of a massive army poised to take over the Netherworlds and rule the afterlife entire. But while you can certainly expect all the usual hallmarks of Disgaea— Fourth wall breaks, snarky heroes, wacky humor, talking penguins— the game introduces some interesting new systems and classes while still giving you all the power to take the fight to the Netherworlds and conquer the lands of the dead in the name of revenge.
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Monster Monpiece, the latest game from Compile Heart, is something of a departure for them. There's no obvious grind, no weirdly implemented combo system, and it feels significantly different from most of their other games. All in all, it's new territory, and at first, it felt like they'd learned something from the process. Maybe, I thought to myself, maybe I've just suffered burnout from too many samey anime-style JRPGs. Maybe this time I'm wrong.
Read MoreA few months ago, I reviewed an ambitious early-access game known as Zombasite. I was quite impressed with it back then, a title with staggering depth and a very low learning curve, where you could participate however you liked. It had an interesting mechanic with warring clans and an impending zombie apocalypse, and it was a lot of fun. It also had a lot of problems, some serious UI issues, and a definite problem with being overwhelmingly huge. It also couldn't quite make up its mind as to what kind of game it wanted to be, instead deciding to be all of them at once.
Read MoreHaving been an afficionado of adventure games over the years, I understand that they aren't without their difficulties. For every Monkey Island or Space Quest, there are four that take the route of Phantasmagoria* and about six different games featuring puzzles with solutions that read like poorly translated stereo instructions. While it's the easiest genre to design for (no combat algorithms or anything like that, clean narrative with a few branches) it's also one of the easiest to screw up. All it takes is one puzzle where processor speed determines difficulty, or pouring whiskey into the gas tank of a car to fuel up a spaceship, or an infuriating pixel hunt and instantly people will throw up their hands and uninstall in annoyance.
Read MoreOkay, so for the past few years, there's been a franchise known as Hyperdimension Neptunia. The general conceit is that the games industry is anthropomorphized as a land called Gamindustri, ruled over by warring goddesses who have "console wars" to determine supremacy and games companies are depicted as anthropomorphized anime characters.
Inexplicably, this has grown into a massive franchise of games, one of which is Hyperdevotion Noire, an alternate universe game where the anime goddess representing the Sony systems has taken over everything.
It's also not very good.
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Marble Mountain, the new game from LightningRock Studios, is relaxing. With its bouncy synth soundtrack, bright color palette, and levels with just the right amount of challenge, it isn't the frustrating grind of most other arcade style games, but offers more challenge and depth than the average casual game. It's the perfect chillout game, the kind of thing you can do when you just need a break from everything. While not without its flaws, it's just a low-key, fun game, and that's really all it needs to be.
Read MoreBlood Alloy: Reborn from Suppressive Fire Games is an arena-style platform shooter with a 16-bit aesthetic. It promises fast-paced gameplay, fully traversable terrain, swarms of enemies, and an awesome soundtrack. And, for what it's worth, it delivers on at least some of those things. But overall, the game is a weird, messy thing. It's an arena shooter that behaves like it's a platformer, a game that requires more precision than either the controls or the game type allows for. But even if this were all, its flaws far outweigh its strengths, and the game ultimately falters in spite of itself. But more, as always, below.
Read MoreOverfall is a game with a lot of good things going for it. It has a distinct art style, an excellent modular story engine, some interesting tactical combat, and a very dynamic setting. It's a game that promises a staggering amount of depth, especially when one gets into it. It's a big, expansive game with a big expansive map and big expansive ideas.
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The title screen, with the dreaded population counter
I'm playing The Flock to lose.
The Flock is interesting in this regard, as there is a global endgame condition, and that condition is "lose or make others lose enough times." The count starts at something like three hundred and thirteen million "population." When the population counter reaches zero, the game will no longer be on the market. The more people who play or the more players who die, the more the population counter goes down, and the closer the players get to endgame.
This is actually pretty interesting to me. I'm always interested when something is difficult to find, or permanently out of reach. I kind of find this more interesting than the actual game itself. So I'm playing The Flock to lose.
Read MoreI will give the twisted minds behind the Warhammer 40,000 universe credit, they at least know what they're doing with atmosphere. The series, a reductio ad absurdam of pretty much all science fiction and a little fantasy, is known for its rich atmosphere and utterly insane character designs. (Well, and codex creep, but that's for another article) It's a huge, bombastic setting of spaceships the size of former Soviet republics and ten foot tall warriors with six lungs and specially made ribs.
Regicide, by comparison, is a tactical strategy game taking some of the elements of Chess and mixing them with XCOM and Warhammer 40,000. It's not nearly as expansive or as utterly batshit as the source material it takes from, but in its own weird, restrained way, it does manage to be a lot of fun.
More, as always, below.
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The Red Solstice is a tactical 8 player co-op survival game set in the distant future on Mars. I can see how, in the heat of the moment, with all cylinders firing and everyone trying to figure out a tactical position against the alien hordes, it could be pretty cool. I'm sure there are guilds out there who would do great, shouting orders to one another and locking down a position, mowing down shrieking monsters as they run straight at you. But then there's a part of me that thinks it really missed the boat. A big part of me, actually. And it has to do with independence.
Read MoreI don't like having to pontificate on things like this. I get that it's my job, but it's kind of annoying when I can see the game for what it is, see where it could possibly be, and then be forced to lament that it wound up like this.
Galactic Inheritors is a game that seems like its ambitions exceeded its grasp. It might just be the way the game presents itself, or it may be that it seems like a very intelligent 4X game with some definite perks to it. That those perks are weighted down with a variety of bugs, strange design choices, and just in general failure to seem like an interesting game is more of a tragedy than a delight.
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This game has broken me
I've tried every possible angle of attack, from sarcastically framing it as the perfect game for the "offended set" to long pontifications on exactly why this game was made and managed to be released through Steam when it's clearly a quarter of a game. But in the end, I keep coming back to the person whose words have impacted my life far more than anyone's should have, especially his: Roger Ebert.
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