I wanted a more permanent home for my scanlations of old video game comics, one that's more browsable and stable than them living in social media posts. So my website will now be the hub for links to all my projects but especially the home base for my translated comics. All of my comics now have sub-pages in the Scanlations area, which then link to where the images are hosted. I'll still post here when I do a new one but it will point back to the site. Huge thanks to SirCathyWise for doing so much work to put this together and make it easy for me to maintain.
It seems natural after playing Tearaway to check out what was happening with the Little Big Planet series at that time. Media Molecule had moved away from the series that they launched, and picking up the slack was another British studio, Sumo Digital, who had previously contributed to LBP2 and Vita's DLC expansions. Between the release of Tearaway on Vita in 2013 and PS4 in 2015, LBP3 came out as a cross-platform game on PS3 and PS4 in 2014, with backwards compatibility with cosmetics and expansions from both prior [console] instalments. But what new stuff does it bring to the table with a new developer at the helm?
Naturally it all starts as usual with some high-minded/whimsical blather about creativity narrated by Stephen Fry, before introducing Newton the lightbulb-headed inventor, voiced in an amusing touch by Fry's old comedy partner Hugh Laurie. Your Sackperson/thing, sometimes known reductively as Sackboy, is brought to another new planetoid where the imagination of its inhabitants had been monopolised by some vague evil bozos. Newton foolishly releases them and Sackkid must find the ancient heroes of Bunkum to lock them up again and free Newton from their possession, with the help of LBP2-style NPCs in various themed worlds.
It's been a while since I played LBP2, but it feels to me like Sumo Digital managed to pick up right where it left off. The story levels, all created with the same tools and assets available to players to make their own levels for upload (more on that in a bit...) make good use of the world aesthetics, the usual but still novel three-plane 2D platforming mechanics, and new gimmicks to give you a nice little campaign full of collectibles that expand your creative repertoire. Sure the platforming action can feel janky and at times buggy, but the series has always been like that! So it feels right at home among the Media Molecule games (and the two handheld games that they didn't make as well!).
The big new hook is the additional playable characters aka the three heroes you're recruiting. They're also sack-folk but in various shapes, with different abilities. The doglike Oddsock can run fast and wall jump, Toggle can freely swap between beefy bruiser and itty-bitty bounder which has a few physics implications, and the birdy Swoop can fly freely. The latter especially would break many levels, so their use is quite restricted to particular levels or sections that have been designed around them. I enjoyed dressing them up in their own costumes just as I did for my Sackguy, and they're fun to play around with especially as they're all mostly speedier than the default, but you don't actually spend a huge amount of time playing as them. There's even one level played in top-down 3D as an unrelated yeti character… it reminded me of Spyro 3 which introduced many new playable characters who all felt stretched a bit thin.
Your standard Sackthing isn't neglected in terms of new abilities either. Building on the powerup system that had been expanded in LBP2, you now unlock permanent tools that can be pulled out at any time when needed: a suck/blow gun, a torch, a teleporting orb shooter, the "hook hat" (which isn't too different from just grabbing an object on a rail), and my favourite by far, the jet boots that let you double jump/air dash. They at least are quite fun to use and almost make the whole complicated equipment system worthwhile!
Having access to DLC that I'd previously picked up through the years [luckily] made me realise that some of the new additions were building specifically on the DC Comics level pack that Tarsier Studios had made for LBP2 (and Supermassive's equivalent for LBP Vita). That mini-campaign had a hub space in the Watchtower, and here the worlds have large explorable hub zones from which you access levels, with their own collectibles which can be exchanged for cosmetics in a shop. That DLC also introduced walljump surfaces which have been reworked into Oddsock's playstyle, and a gliding cape that works exactly like Swoop's dive move. Just interesting to note that even these side content things have fed into main game developments.
Anyway, while the campaign introduces a lot of new stuff, none of it has much time to breathe. There's only three worlds in total plus the prologue, and each has just a handful of levels. The final world is the most blatant illustration of the amount of content that was cut during a potentially difficult development, breaking the pattern of "collect a marble in three levels to free the new character" by reducing it to two! The Journey Home level pack by Sumo themselves released a year after the game's release goes a little way to ameliorating this by adding a sizeable level for each of the new heroes while revisiting locations and characters from LBP 1 and 2… maybe they shouldn't have charged separately for it though, because the base game feels very light on content.
Now I must address an enormous issue I've been tiptoeing around. The postlaunch life of this game was fraught with problems, from malicious uploads to technical issues that led to the shutdown of servers for the PS3 version and eventually the PS4 version as well. As of April 2024, all user-made content was suddenly taken offline, literally millions of levels and a huge pillar of the series' identity and purpose snuffed out. In October Sony then completely delisted the game and the copious DLC content from all three instalments plus the racing spinoff from its digital storefront. Everything official and fanmade which had been carried forward all the way from the first game in 2008, all the content, all the creativity, all gone. It's an ignoble end for a series with so much legacy.
So while the game originally was supplemented by official expansions (the ones that hadn't already been delisted for licensing reasons, that is) and countless user-made levels, my experience then was only able to cover what was included on the disc and the scraps of DLC that I already owned. Even those frequently contain co-op exclusive sections, which made me feel rudely cut off from collectibles as well. Basically, it's a terrible time to be an LBP fan and if you want to experience the game properly, get a time machine I guess. Custom servers on modded PS3s may go some way to bringing the power back to the community, but I don't know how much of the old archives have been preserved. I dunno, I'm just feeling down about the whole thing now. LBP3 already was a fine instalment, cromulent enough if disappointingly short, but now cut off from the sources that sustained it, that made it a living and vital ecosystem, it can't help falling flat.
The missing link between Little Big Planet and Astro Bot.
My next "arts and crafts"-based game is this 2013 Vita exclusive, re-jiggered for PS4 in 2015. I played both, since the game's "lead creator" Rex Crowle insists that neither is definitive, and I did find it interesting to compare the tweaks and choices made in each one. This was Media Molecule's next project after Little Big Planet 2, and served as sort of a spiritual successor in its incorporation of creation elements, as well as a tech demo for the Vita and Dualshock 4 respectively (which also makes it a precursor to Astro's Playroom).
The game starts with the bickering of two cosmic figures, the Green Man (voiced by the inimitable Richard Ridings) and the Fortune Teller (voiced by Lorna Brown on Vita in a West Indies-type accent, but recast for PS4 by Alicia Suszka-Fielder with a European accent that I couldn't place). They desire the creation of stories and to that end they need the help of "The You", that is to say you, the player. You're asked to indicate the colour of your skin, as your finger is visible in-game on Vita, as well as your gender presentation (there's only two options sadly, although as far as I could tell, the player is only ever referred to with they/them pronouns! So why is it an option at all?). The You plays a pretty big role in the story, working together with the playable character Messenger, who is your choice of the heroine Atoi (whose curly hair makes for a much more fun design) or the hero Iota.
In a way, the Messenger is the Message, as their head is an envelope that they are ostensibly delivering. Ironically the messaging of the game is a bit muddled about this; for how much they bang on about stories and delivering the message, it never really comes together into a clear theme. What was stronger for me were the story elements within each chapter where you interact with the denizens of the papercraft world, solving their problems as they grapple with issues caused by a hole in the sky and the Scrap troublemakers falling from it. The meta layer just felt a bit confused to me at times, especially when they lean on it more heavily in the third act.
In a world wonderfully made entirely of paper, the Scraps are crude cubic critters who cover the coloured constructions with unsightly newspaper and try to stop you at every turn. The first chapter has you traversing a bucolic valley, helping with a sort of harvest festival, assembling a scarecrow, and ascending a mountain to launch the Messenger into the sky. The second sees you travel through a port town and a treacherous Wendigo hunting ground to a high-tech lab and into underground caverns where the Scraps make their lair. The third and final act has reality breaking down, with a void of blank pages leading to a desert that falls away into cosmic confusion which self-indulgently reflects on the rest of the journey. The final pop-up book style message almost makes the whole navel-gazing aspect of the last third worthwhile; the abstract stuff works better but doesn't really go anywhere.
The game plays out as a mostly linear 3D platformer collectathon, with the occasional small hub area thrown in. The Messenger can pick up and throw things, and learns to curl up in a ball to roll around, but most of the progression and puzzle solving comes from You interacting with the world via various system features. On Vita this means poking through the back touch panel (this usually felt fiddly and awkward) or tapping it to activate various triggers, and swiping the front touch screen to move objects around in the game world. The Dualshock 4 maps some of this onto the central touch panel, and adds a wind mechanic by swiping it. Both also use gyro movement, with the PS4 version furthering the motion controls with a clumsy expansion to the throw mechanic and by using the light panel to virtually project a movable light source into the game, which on top of being used for puzzle interactions can ambiently “clean up” newsprint textures in a satisfying way.
Apart from the "tech demo" mechanics, the game also integrates creation aspects. Often characters will ask you to design an object or symbol which will then appear in the game in various places, which gives your playthrough a nice personal touch. On Vita this uses the touchscreen in a very direct and tactile way, to cut out pieces of coloured paper. The equivalent on PS4 maps this to the touch pad, which is less sensitive and more removed, so my creations there never looked near as good. There's Little Big Planet style customisation features, which let you put various stamps and facial features on your Messenger or certain other characters when prompted… but unlike that game which rewarded you with a steady stream of new unique cosmetics, everything is available here from the start at the cost of confetti, which is given out both as a minor collectible, and in lumps as a reward for exploring or completing sidequests; this method wasn't quite as satisfying to me.
There's also an in-game camera to take photos or selfies which will be plastered around; by photographing colourless objects you unlock their papercraft models, sent to your account on the Tearaway website, so the creativity can flow out to the real world as well. The fact that most everything in the game can actually be made from real paper is remarkable, and having an official avenue to do that is great. Sadly, I found out while playing that these online features will very soon be sunsetted after over ten years, so no more sharing in-game photos or unlocking papercrafts. Thankfully Media Molecule have just recently made all the papercraft PDFs available as a simple download (including DLC but not including the unique Doodle variant skins; I've uploaded the latter here for posterity).
And then there's the real-life photos. The Vita has both front and rear cameras, so it's able to create pictures and textures from images of you and your surroundings, and even include a real-time live feed of your face within the game to represent The You. Technically the PS4 version supports these features to some extent; the official camera accessory (which I don't own) can do some of this, and the second-screen functionality of connecting a Vita to a PS4 (which doesn't work with the PS5, so I can't do this anymore) or using the Playstation smartphone app (I think this feature has been removed, so no one can do this anymore) would have let you or another person use that device's touchscreen and camera for the design stuff… but because it's not guaranteed, it's not emphasised as much in-game on PS4, and in my personal playthrough I didn't have access to any of it. Either way the Vita version is a clear win in the creative aspects for its self-contained integration of cameras and superior touchscreen drawing.
To balance things out, the PS4 version of course lets you experience the vibrant and beautifully crafted paper world on the big screen and at 60FPS compared to the Vita’s 30, not to mention the really rather excellent soundtrack from your good speakers (you do have good speakers attached to your telly, right??). It also expands on the original game’s world with some areas being larger (not always a good thing mind you) and more detailed, and a couple of extra levels. Otherwise there’s a lot of smaller tweaks to how things play out, most importantly a reworked script. While some of the changes are a bit head-scratching (the pig you ride goes from breeding livestock to a hardened warrior, but still mates with another pig at the end of the sequence anyway, or the surreal campervan in the endgame becomes just a nebulous otherspace), mostly they make the overall story stronger, especially the resolution of the Scraps’ arc at the end of act 2, which now involves them creating a giant kludgey Dualshock simulacrum and ends with reconciliation and friendship with the creatures.
It’s hard to say which version is the one to play since they both have strengths and weaknesses. While I found the meta aspect weak overall, it’s implemented better on Vita due to tighter integration of the player via the cameras, and anything to do with creative stuff works better there (except for rotating and resizing elements, to be fair). The PS4 wins out on presentation which is very important to this game where the crafted paper aesthetic is such a big part of its identity, and has refinements to the story and content (plus the paper plane flight mechanic, although honestly I could take or leave that). Even disregarding the external peripheral issues, I personally lean towards the original release as a cleaner and more compact expression of the Tearaway vision, compared to which Unfolded can feel slightly bloated with features tacked on. Also, and this is my final word, on Vita you get to keep the “concertina with hole in it” weapon instead of throwing it away, and I love that it trivialises combat sections which are otherwise pretty clunky, even if they disappear from the game entirely in the third act.
Mason Lindroth's Hylics was a fascinating game, and this sequel develops the concept into a more unique gameplay experience. Although a third instalment is on the way, I decided to roll right into number two.
It turns out that Wayne, the moon-headed protagonist from the first game, is one of many Waynes living at the Waynehouse and training to fight back against the return of King Gibby, who is being revived by his followers. It’s not clear to me how much time has passed but I found the additions to Wayne lore tantalising: new Waynes growing from larvae are found throughout the game, some having been corrupted by the forces of evil; the player Wayne can morph into a more femme appearance; and overseeing the Waynes is Old Wayne, who has become a God-Emperor Leto-style large wormlike creature.
Anyway, Wayne’s job is to get the old crew of Pongorma, Dedusmuln, and Somsnosa back together and defeat the cult whose rituals will reconstitute Gibby (and when that inevitably fails, find the proscribed gesture [ie. magic spell] of the ancient Sages to put him, his twisted fortress, and his reality-altering effect down for good). Again the setting is a very strange post-apocalyptic archipelago, but it’s more 3D rendered this time, especially when you start travelling by airship.
While the equipment system has been streamlined, the battles play out largely the same as before in turn-based fashion, albeit a bit more dynamic with individual turn order determined by speed. Status effects are even more at the forefront of battles, with gains to your damage coming a bit slower. The limited power growth from consumable items makes those choices and loadouts more important to consider, and learning effective strategies and which enemies are more dangerous is satisfying. Again your foes are finite and visible on the overworld, and meat gained from defeating them gives you minor incremental HP gains in the afterlife, which also returns as a more accessible fast travel hub.
“Gestures” return as spells learned from rarely found televisions, with the new Charge spell giving an appreciable boost to each character’s already powerful signature spell. Eventually I opened nearly every battle with Somsnosa’s Wave Artifice—the only attack that hits all foes at once—since enemy health doesn’t display unless they’ve lost some, and they often overwhelm you with numbers. So the RPG elements have evolved slightly in this sequel, making for engaging battles all the way through.
What’s expanded in a much more revolutionary way are the mechanics outside of battle. Your party now runs and jumps freely around smoothly-modelled spaces, and an extended air dash move is very fun to play around with and cover distance quickly. Coins scattered as collectibles contribute to your RPG currency, and there are secrets to be found by exploring the abstract clay-modelled landscapes and structures.
There’s also sequences that shift the genre further. One cool dungeon has the path form from the void at your feet as you explore, and another moves you into a first-person dungeon crawler (I shamelessly consulted map images heavily for this section). There’s also a handful of puzzle-platformer sidescroller levels that have you traverse large open maps to unlock stuff back in the main game. These are a fun change of pace, and they reuse some ideas and assets from Lindroth’s intermediate game Muldulamulom, a mini-Metroidvania made for a Ludum Dare game jam.
The world has a more cohesive design and flow to it this time around; while it makes for a stronger story and exhibition of Lindroth’s clay artwork, and the higher fidelity visuals help the latter to shine all the more, I feel it loses a little something compared to the juxtaposition with the pixel art and homebrew RPG Maker stylings that the first game had. Still, it’s probably best described as a lateral move, exchanging one flavour of bizarreness for another, one with more fulfilled worldbuilding pretensions yet maintaining an effective absurdity. It certainly benefits from less of the nonsensical randomly generated dialogue, or rather transforming that into a story beat that is used as a consequence of King Gibby’s powers. And if nothing else Hylics 2 is such a leap forward in gameplay terms, so I’m now most keen on seeing what the upcoming sequel has in store! Keep it up, Mason!
"A recreational program with light JRPG elements."
While considering games that used claymation, I remembered I'd been recommended this RPG. Mason Lindroth, an artist who specialises in surreal clay models, has made several games adapting their signature style into graphics, including this one from 2015. It plays more or less like the RPG Maker game it is, but a few tweaks to the usual formula and the bizarre world it depicts help it stand out.
I'd be lying if I said I totally understood the plot. As Wayne, who is some guy with a moon face who lives in an isolated house, you have to journey through the very strange world that you inhabit, gathering companions to topple Gibby, the king of the moon. Much of the dialogue and story text employs a form of scrambling, where important nouns and verbs are randomised. This means a good chunk of text in the game reads like nonsense, and you have to go off other cues and implications to get by. It's all part of the game's unique vibe; I'm not sure if careful observation could unlock more context, but for my part I simply ignored anything that had been encrypted in this way and got through just fine.
The gameplay is a little easier to grasp. Your characters' stats may have unusual names but the turn-based battles play out in a familiar way, there's consumable items that restore Flesh (HP) and Will (MP), and shops to buy new equipment. There's no experience system though; armour generally enhances your maximum Flesh, and some consumables raise your stats. There are also no random encounters: contact with an enemy triggers a battle, and afterwards they explode in a pile of gore, so there's a finite number of possible fights in the game. You're expected to die, either from hard battles or running into one of the occasional instant-death overworld entities. This triggers a cutscene of Wayne's flesh melting off, but you wake up none the worse for wear in an afterlife space, which lets you warp back to various spots you've discovered so far. There's also a spot there to cash in collected meat for a permanent boost to your max health, which is essential.
New abilities are learned from televisions. These can and should be revisited when you recruit new party members (the archaeologist Dedusmuln who can use the ancient and arcane water coolers, Wayne's friend Somsnosa who can squish ambient bugs to get stronger and vaguely resembles Hollow Knight's Hornet, and the old knight Pongorma, master of the ambulant skulls) to add versatility to each of their movesets. The status blocking spell Mystic Meat is particularly useful, and applying status effects of your own can make a big difference.
So much for the mechanics. There's some interesting and unconventional twists on RPG mechanics here, but the real strength of the game is the vibe, having your weirdo characters animate weirdly as they trek around a world that mixes the mundane with the surreal, the occasional rigid lines of pixel art structures clashing with the squishy clay surrounds that have been digitised to crunchy, dithered textures. Enemies and NPCs are various kinds of semi-humanoid monstrosities, and the visual effect of each spell you cast is a great demonstration in itself of the game's art direction, where from first person digitised sprites of human hands perform a gesture, and an abstract clay animation plays out.
Subversions of JRPG tropes are nothing new to me, but the unique quality of this game's particular brand of nonsense and artistic surrealism, as well as the flourishes it's able to pull off in its short campaign, make it worth experiencing. Hylics is pure creativity and you love to see it.
With my Gamepad in hand having finished the Wii U exclusive Kirby game, I thought I'd knock off another game that's found only on the much maligned system. The Star Fox series has not successfully advanced its story in 20 years (including the newest rehash that just came out), much to my dismay. The only minor exceptions are two sort-of spinoffs to Zero: Ubisoft including the team and their Star Wolf rivals in a Starlink: Battle for Atlas sub-campaign, and this tower defence novelty that feels like a tech demo for the Gamepad. Developed by Platinum Games alongside Zero and released simultaneously, it tells a new story of sorts set just prior, which I guess makes this Star Fox Minus One.
When you boot the game up you find that you are you, ie your Mii is used on an in-world ID card. So there’s humans (or close enough) in the Lylat system now I guess. They could have used Vanpool’s tech from the third Dillon game to turn your Mii into an appropriate furry character, but no. We also meet Grippy, Slippy’s amphibian uncle, a Texas-style mining magnate. Your job is to defend his mazelike mining bases from an epidemic of thieving robots across a series of planets, finally solving the mystery of who is behind the robotic robbers (turns out it’s Pigma Dengar? And he’s started a mining company to gather resources to fund Andross’s army? Seems out of character, but sure whatever).
Each round sends various robots into the base in predetermined waves. You have twelve cameras stationed around the walls, with laser turrets attached to blow them up before a single one can reach the centre. On your TV screen you monitor all twelve at once, swapping control between them by tapping the diagram on the Gamepad, which can also move and quickly rotate them. The levels start chill but quickly escalate with many types of robots with different abilities, and soon you’ll be frantically swapping around as blips swarm the screen and alarms blare at you.
There’s some creativity with the many robots, and by changing which specific ones get thrown at you as well as the maze layouts, they manage to keep it relatively fresh for “100 levels” (more on that in a bit). Each planet adds a little wrinkle, like oil slicks on Zoness or encroaching vegetation on Fortuna (nice to see the Zero interpretation of it again), although these are so minor that for the most part it’s merely a differently coloured backdrop. There’s also a new addition to lore with Grippy’s secret planet Grippia, which bizarrely has the imprint of his face on it. So that’s goofy.
Apart from clearing levels, there’s another progression track where money from destroyed robots and bonus feats goes towards advancing your rank. This gets you new challenge levels to try (they’re a significant bump in difficulty and add new gimmicks, like mounting your turrets to moving chicken-bots or requiring you to keep friendly frog-bots safe), as well as special turret types that can give you a leg up. Speaking of a leg up, this game also has amiibo boosts that can only be used once per day… oh joy.
The problem with playing this game ten years later is that there’s a whole other multiplayer aspect that is now inaccessible. While the online services were active, you could design your own robot attack plans, and other players could try out defending against them Clash of Clans style, with a whole ranking system and so on. I think this would let you advance the base game battle pass progression, otherwise it would mean a whole lot of grinding. I finished the story and all available challenge levels at rank 29 of 50, with 19 extra levels still locked away and two turret types unavailable. The balance is just way off.
As a demonstration of the Gamepad, Guard is more successful than some others I’ve seen. The robot designs are fairly charismatic if cartoony, and the boss fights are a cool spectacle even though there’s only three of them. It’s obvious this was a small budget project, with asset reuse from Zero and only four voice actors (Slippy often chats with you and Fox shows up a couple of times, while Falco and Peppy are seen but not heard). It would make sense as a giveaway with Zero to take some of the sting out of what a festering rotten insulting mistake that was… yeah it’s been ten years and I’m still not over it… but I’m not sure I’d pay twenty bucks for it.
I've never really got into Kirby games, despite trying several. But the promise of including one in my ongoing journey through arts and crafts styled games, on top of having a unique play control scheme and being that rare thing: a Wii U exclusive, got me on board with trying Rainbow Paintbrush, or Rainbow Curse as it's called in some territories. A successor to the touch-controlled DS game Power Paintbrush (aka Canvas Curse), the clay aesthetic was the other part of the selling point for this. But did it win me over to being a Kirby diehard? Nah, but that's ok.
Kirby is chilling in Dream Land or Popstar or Pupupu or wherever he lives, when all the colour leaves his world via some kind of space hole. Elline the living paintbrush fairy lady thing repaints him so he can move again, along with his friend (I guess?) Bandana Waddle Dee With Spear, who HAL is intent on making a thing. I guess it's hard to motivate Kirby so Elline does most of the work in the game, drawing rainbow paths that Kirby sticks to and rolls along on, venturing through seven colour-themed lands to get to Claycia, Elline's "friend" (I ship them, happy pride month by the way) who has been manipulated by some giant space flea from nowhere, as per usual. Claycia made all the worlds and baddies out of clay, and now because she's gone bad so have they.
The cutscenes in glorious claymation style are adorable, but being silent they can communicate only the most basic of plots. There are storybook pages which are equally adorable that flesh out the story and characters a bit, but getting them requires nabbing the unique page collectible from the end of level wheel, and if you miss it you're simply out of luck and have to redo the level. The same goes for the many missable collectibles within levels that you have one chance to get before they disappear, which is a consistent Kirby trope that I don't get on with; these reward you with clay models of enemies and characters as well as music tracks for the jukebox.
The basic gameplay is drawing paths on the Wii U touchscreen to move Kirby around indirectly (much like Yoshi Touch and Go, which I played recently; another Yoshi/Kirby connection!). You can also tap him to do a little spin attack, or hold down for a bigger charge if you have the star points from the basic collectibles. There's a limit to how much you can draw at a time, but it's not usually an issue. Naturally as you progress clever new gimmicks and wrinkles are introduced, including transformations with different control schemes, but it's always a touch game at all times, and always feels a little fiddly. Technically up to three other players (as palette swapped Waddle Dees) can join in using more traditional controls, but I don't know how that works in practice. Kirby series amiibos can give you a leg up, but in typical Nintendo fashion, you can bizarrely only use them once a day. But don't worry, if there is a section that you're stuck on you will be prompted to skip the whole level! And this despite retaining the vestigial idea of extra lives.
An inherent flaw with the setup is that while co-op players or casual watchers will be able to see the HD visuals on the TV, the primary player must always be looking at the Gamepad in order to draw on it, which means the lovely clay graphics can only ever be seen on that outdated 480p screen. The display is simply mirrored between the two, and so the game is really designed for viewing on the Gamepad; in truth it looks odd on a telly, as the scale and proportions feel wrong. Either way it's an odd choice, taking advantage of the touch capabilities of the Wii U but feeling held back in other ways.
It's also quite a short game. I was able to beat it in a couple of sittings, but it does feel like they wrung all they could out of the conceit perhaps (and it beats the low-longevity tech demo vibe of Yoshi Touch and Go). The game also suffers from Sonic Lost World syndrome ie. they only came up with enough bosses for half the game, then reused near-identical fights in the back half, which is a let-down. The clay-style graphics look great, and occasionally they even lean in to the malleability of the medium, but don't really factor into gameplay; they could have done more with this but it remains mostly as simply an aesthetic choice and a part of the story, such as it is. The addition of unlockable challenge rooms also doesn't make it feel less anaemic as a full-priced retail release for a home console. I like that the Kirby series can get experimental like this, but Rainbow Paintbrush didn't quite go far enough.
[Review] Dangeresque: The Roomisode Triungulate (PC)
Looks like I'm going to have to jump...!
Playing Telltale's Wallace & Gromit brought back memories of their prior game Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People, which reminded me that I should follow in the footsteps of my friends on the Telling the Tale podcast and catch up with this little adventure game made by the Homestar Runner creators themselves, the brothers Chaps (and some other collaborators). Originally a bite-size pastiche made in Flash in 2008 and jokingly pitched as a response/follow-up to Telltale's game, this 2023 expanded release adds two more "roomisodes" (plus a fourth in an update a year later), making for a pretty substantial retro homage chock full of classic Strong Bad humour.
Dangeresque, the private eye/crooked cop played by Strong Bad in his DIY action movies, has been saddled with some paperwork by "the Chief". He has to fabricate some evidence to "solve" an old case or get sent straight to jail himself. Then, he has to defuse a bomb in his car on a seedy street corner with the dubious help of his sidekick Renaldo. Finally, his archnemesis Perducci forces him to foil a series of assassination attempts in his restaurant via elaborate traps. The bonus episode X has Dangeresque Too (aka Homestar) stuck in a hotel's lift while being hunted by vaguely defined bad guys, so he has to concoct a disguise in three parts (a threesguise) to sneak past them.
The Dangeresque videos are among my very favourite Sbemails, and Dangeresque 3: The Criminal Projective was likewise a highlight of SBCG4AP. Naturally, they have all the usual nonsense and malapropisms of any Homestar Runner project, with an added layer of over-the-top 80s cop movie parody. The Triungulate is no different, and the adventure game format offers many opportunities for goofy quips and gags as you click around the self-contained screens.
The format is mimicking old graphic adventures, with an on-screen score counter and separate verbs. Dangeresque can Look, Talk, and Get/Use any interactable object or character, the three functions serving mostly as an avenue for additional jokes. You can save at any point and there are death/failure states, but after a brief cutscene they immediately return you to where you were before with a simple "or did I?" papering over the narrative gap. With the scenarios mostly being contained to a single location, the gameplay is quite friendly and although some item interactions are a little obtuse I was never stuck for very long. Finding hidden interactions and easter eggs gets you additional score, Steam achievements, and of course more dialogue; these are hinted at if you return to an episode after clearing it.
The roomisodes are breezy point and click snacks, but finding the extra stuff can extend the experience a bit. There's also a little bonus scene with Dangeresque Too visiting the first room, and the unlockable arcade minigame Rig Rug which features in episode 2. Of course, familiarity with the source material will let you spot more callbacks and references but I feel like the game might be good for Homestar Runner outsiders, especially if they're familiar with the kinds of games the Triungulate is modelling itself on. All up, a damn fine little episodic adventure.
I'm not done with clay-effect games, and next on my list was Telltale's 2009 four-episode point-and-click adventure. Before the Walking Dead's huge success led to pivoting the company into the kind of choice-based narrative-focused adventures pioneered with their Jurassic Park game, Telltale was reviving the old-school adventure game, including classic LucasArts series Sam and Max and Monkey Island. Between those two, they put out an excellent Strong Bad season and followed it with this series based on Aardman's nostalgic British stop-motion short films.
Prior to this, W&G had had a handful of games and comics expanding on the world of the shorts, and it was just a few years after their first feature film, Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Grand Adventures doesn't exactly build on these, instead featuring an entirely new supporting cast who haven't been seen before or since. They still have the right kind of small-town Northern English charm, though, and make for great support to the low-stakes hijinx; the script too fits this setting impressively well for an American game. This game also acts as the debut for Ben Whitehead as Wallace, taking over from Peter Sallis whose retirement was imminent, and he does a great job in the role. Overall the casting is excellent, although I wish the character of South Asian descent, Mr. Paneer, was played by an appropriate actor; this is still eight years before The Simpsons' Apu controversy, but surely it's never too early to not have white people doing impressions of other races.
Each episode has some mild peril resulting either from some sinister charlatan, or Wallace's good-natured but buffoonish blundering (or both), and makes good use of his wacky contraptions within the vague mid-century parochial English setting. Episodes are themselves broken into chapters which helps keep puzzles and locations contained, finishing with a more action-y setpiece that ups the stakes. Control often swaps between the man and his dog between segments; as an adventure game protagonist Wallace has plenty of befuddled quips and comments, but Gromit is as silent as ever. When the other townsfolk are around they pick up the slack to remark on what he's doing (or trying to do), but occasionally he'll be isolated and although he has some nice subtle expressions that are well observed from his prior appearances, it hurts his effectiveness as a protagonist in this kind of game; not to mention the hint system, which is supposed to kick in if you bumble around too long.
To briefly touch on the plot of each episode, they generally start with Wallace launching a new scheme. The first has him factory-farming bees to deliver their honey, which backfires when he has to rush a huge order and science-magically creates giant bees. In the second, he converts his house into a simulation seaside resort, but everyone's holiday is interrupted by a kind of murder mystery situation. The third has him creating experimental ice cream while an outside instigator cons the town into donating to his travelling fair to ostensibly rebuild a dog shelter; the antagonist figure here makes for a strong story and the carnival for a fun setting. The final episode centres around a romantic misunderstanding between Wallace (now running a private detection firm) and his neighbour that somehow segues into a golf tournament. Each scenario makes creative use of the limited cast and locations of Wallace's house and the main street of the town, and by the end I was quite fond of this little world.
It helps that the game feels so authentic; there's been an effort to approximate the claymation style, with subtle marks on the characters' textures, a limited set of mouth positions, and I thought the eyes in particular matched the Aardman look very well. The two protagonists' walk cycles also capture their eccentricity spot-on, and clearly a lot of care has gone in to give them fitting mannerisms and animations. Jared Emerson-Johnson's soundtrack too hits the mark at establishing the right tone.
From what little I've played of Telltale's point-and-click games, they seem to do well with puzzle design, with good signposting and establishing connections that will be called back to. I did need to consult outside hints just a few times, and I wish I'd figured out the "cycle inventory items" hotkey earlier than the final segment of the final episode, but generally the puzzling experience was pleasant and satisfying. There were plenty of surprisingly delightful sequences along the way, like constructing insults for Mrs. Gabberley to yell at her uncouth husband in a squabble, or cheering her up by obliviously remarking on unrelated items (this [and her Northern patois] is why she was my Weekly Guy, to borrow the parlance of the Telling the Tale podcast).
As part of the history of Telltale adventures, this may be a footnote compared to their LucasArts revivals and of course their later narrative games, but among licensed Aardman games it stands tall, and even compares favourably to W&G stories in other mediums. Certainly as a humble point-and-click it's full of charm and cleverness, and you can't deny Wallace, the bemused savant, equal parts gormless and winsome, at once hero and villain to his community and the long-suffering Gromit. What a dynamic.
Still on my "games with art style gimmicks" kick, here's a little indie effort from late last year, from the Spanish studio that brought us Gigantosaurus: The Game, WildSphere. Although this isn't listed on their website for some reason. It doesn't even have a MobyGames page! You'll have to trust me that it exists.
Caveman games were all the rage in the 90s, but they've petered out since. So it's nice to have this throwback. Except what it's actually throwing back to is 100% Super Mario Galaxy (despite the opening cutscene referencing Banjo-Kazooie, that doesn’t seem to really be a design influence). Anyway, in a vaguely defined "cartoon prehistoric" world, a village of Stone Age folk are kidnapped by some kind of wizard, and it's up to Crosak and his buddy Ena to rescue them across surreal floating planetoids. Ena looks kind of like Crosak, except with lipstick and big eyelashes because she's a girl. She features prominently in the key art, but only appears if you activate the drop-in co-op mode. You can't just choose to play as her, which was my first gripe with the game.
Crosak has some fun moves: he can jog, spin attack, a midair attack functions like a double jump, there's a roll to cover more distance, plus crawling and stomping. There's potential here but the moves don't chain in to each other, so it feels stiff. Combat also feels off: even basic enemies take multiple hits to defeat, and sometimes your hit just oddly misses them or you take damage simultaneously. The boss fights are especially dull and janky, but they do reward you by unlocking timed powerups in levels which can open new paths.
The game consists of six main levels, each with ten villagers to rescue, who take the place of Mario's power stars. Borrowing my least favourite convention from the 3D Mario games, getting one immediately kicks you out of the level. So I ended up covering the same ground—often a fair bit of open space included—multiple times to get villagers in the same areas or past where a previous one was. Planetoids are connected by swooping grind rails that you snap to and can't get off, and it's easy to forget which one takes you where and just go in circles. I would try to pan the camera around to get my bearings, but the game employs an aggressive eye-straining blurring effect to simulate tilt-shifting in aid of the claymation-style aesthetic.
So I have qualms with the level design. It signposts cutoffs (rails or doorways) that will take you to a minigame, but with no distinguishing features you just have to remember which ones you've done. The minigames themselves are various flavours of over-long autoscrollers, bland 2D sections, or a tedious ball-rolling one that when it got reused later I simply noped out of, since you only need about half the total villagers to get to the end of the game.
Apart from the Mario Galaxy planet gimmick (which isn't even used in a very interesting way), the main hook of Crosak is the clay-like visuals. They have a pleasing look to them, with some use of low framerate, textures that slightly shift, and visible fingerprints that give some of the intended charm. Sadly the rest of the art direction falls flat; there's just not much going on in the levels, with boring choices for world themes until the final level finally injects a bit more surrealism.
It's nice to see more 3D platformers in the indie space, but there's plenty of better ones than Crosak. I give it some points for ambition and for aping Super Mario Galaxy, although inviting that comparison will inevitably end badly for the low-budget alternative. The art style helps it stand out but it's kind of the best thing going for it, and even then it fumbles other aspects of the visual design. For better or worse it's also quite short, with my "any%" playthrough over in a few hours. It's not broken, it didn't make me angry, it just falls short in a lot of areas. Oh well.
A novel twist on the classic Snake. Not only does the food try to take a bite out of you, but you can also jump over your body! Apples that latch onto your snakey form (it starts very long, to make jumping more immediately valuable) start travelling up and if they reach your head, you lose. But you can also eat them off of yourself if your jump lands on the part of you that they're attached to. It's a little tricky to explain but intuitive and very fun to play around with. As you play, you unlock new modes that make your snake faster and faster, making for some frantic arcade action. It's designed as a pick up and play title that you can return to at any time, and it's great for those quick bursts.
Sasquatchers
Made by Telltale veterans, this miniature turn-based tactics game namedrops Advance Wars, and has you use that framework to hunt cryptids, not for violence (although they won’t hesitate to harm you) but to capture footage and photos of them to earn money from online views. Your crew of documentarians have different skills and specialisations for lighting up terrain, manipulating monsters, and maximising likes on your pictures. Snapping shots or video moves you from the grid to a first person view rotated with the crank, to get the best angles on the beasties. It’s very clever and although brief has a good handful of different creatures whose behaviours and special attacks you must contend with.
Forrest Byrnes: Up in Smoke
A tongue in cheek spinoff of sorts from Campo Santo’s Firewatch, this fast paced arcadey platformer isn’t exactly an auto scroller, but an advancing wall of fire behind you means you can’t dawdle. Your ranger character has to survive the hazards of the forest while rescuing kid scouts and nabbing collectibles. With the help of his trusty shovel he can bounce like Scrooge McDuck, dig up goodies, and knock down rocks and trees on his way to the rescue helicopter at the end of each randomly generated stage. The crank is used to pull kids out of wells and in menus, where you can look at posters unlocked by finding jiggies that reveal a cartoonish sinister side to Byrnes. The action is solid and the pixel art impeccable.
Battleship Godios
A horizontal shmup with two interesting gimmicks: you have a limited number of bouncing bullets which must be re-collected before you fire them off again, and you can spin the crank to reverse time. Using your limited resources within cramped spaces, you have to gradually break the parts of enemy battleships to rebound your projectiles inside them and finish them off. Self-described as “a game with a high level of difficulty and trial & error gameplay that makes retrying inevitable”; I think it would work better (for me at least), without the life system where dying (which happens easily from collisions with other ships) takes away lives even if you reverse time, and you have to start over from the beginning of the game. It could have kept the difficulty and the novel mechanics without being as punishing as this. As it is, not my cup of tea.
b360
One of Panic’s own games for their system, this is a novel take on your classic brick breaking paddle game, but using the Playdate’s crank to spin the paddle in a circle while you bounce a ball to hit blocks in the centre. There’s a campaign of 100 levels with occasional sci-fi interstitials. Each set of 10 will generally introduce a new gimmick or riff on a theme, although sometimes the theme is “be ridiculously precise with your shot” which I found frustrating. Each of the four screen borders has a wall to block one bounce which helps but it still gets tough. Thankfully if you lose all your lives you can start at the same level you were on. So I had moments of struggle but I still saw it all the way through and had a decent time.
Ratcheteer
A mini Zelda-like adventure, in fact I'd say a pitch-perfect homage to Link's Awakening, while leaning more into puzzles than combat. The sci-fi setting is interesting, with your character maintaining the cryogenic facilities for a humanity who is awaiting the end of a long winter caused by a comet impact. But tensions with the surface-dwellers and a mysterious race of aliens spark a little adventure, where you gather mechanical gizmos and explore the caverns and frozen wastelands to bring peace to a blighted world. The Playdate doesn't have many buttons, which can make swapping between your equipment a little fiddly, especially since you so often need a lantern in the dark spaces. But there's some nice use of the crank: charging your lantern, a spin attack, a drill tool, etc. The world map and dungeons are very compact and cleverly put together with new items opening shortcuts, which makes for satisfying progression. This is a little more substantial than many games in Season One, with my journey nearing four hours, so it's a good closer; maybe even the highlight of the collection! Lovely stuff.
Surely the best Sunsoft mascot-based nonogram game on the Sega Saturn.
A nice nonogram is always a good time for me. So after playing some Hebereke games I set my sights on this Japan-exclusive spinoff from Sunsoft's genre-spanning mascot series. I've seen it mentioned but now that I know the characters, the time was right. Apparently Oekaki Logic was a nonogram magazine, and so the puzzle designers there presumably provided the grids for inclusion in this and other games bearing the name on the Super Famicom, Wii, etc. There's actually three O-chan no Oekaki Logic instalments, and the first game has ports on various platforms. I picked the Saturn port because of all of them, I think it's the only one with a story mode.
This port (and presumably the PSX port) take advantage of the CD format by including voice acting, although it doesn't come up much, O-chan just shouts at you in some of the menus. She also hangs out on the side of the screen while you solve puzzles. It's nice for her to have a starring role over and above Hebe and the rest of the gang. The story even has Hebe go missing, and it follows O-chan's quest across some island to find him, encountering various old friends and enemies (including a green doppelganger) along the way. Then it ends with the "it was all a dream" cop-out. Ho hum.
The structure of story mode is very simple. You move to the next square on the map screen, and run into another of the cute blobby characters that populate the Hebereke world. There's a short dialogue scene, spelled out only in hiragana so it's difficult to parse, especially with how fast it scrolls by. Then you solve a set of ten puzzles. Some of the characters join you, becoming available to call on once per puzzle as a hint function, revealing squares in different patterns (O-chan's freeze breath reveals one row and column, for example, while Jennifer's bombs do a random spread of individual squares, and Sukezaemon uniquely removes mistake penalties). I only found this necessary or convenient twice near the end of the game. Beyond the Ufouria four [minus Hebe], you also get joined by Pen-chan the penguin cosplayer, Bobodori the bird, and even Utsujin the alien who is the main antagonist of Ufouria 2.
Sometimes your opponent is a silent Popoon (read blob) with a smaller puzzle set who grants temporary access to a slot machine; I never won this so I don't know what it rewards you with. I can't even guess! I also didn't note down how many puzzle sets make up the whole campaign; maybe ten? So there's a fair number to solve, especially when you add the total from the normal mode… although I only played the story for this coverage, so maybe the puzzles are reused? You can't view the solutions in any of the modes, so it's hard to say.
I'm uncomfortable with so much uncertainty, so I'll tell you what I am sure of, and that's the nitty gritty of the puzzle mechanics. Puzzles range from 5x5 to a whopping 30x30 which I've never seen before. The Saturn resolution can barely accommodate the grid at this size, and there's even a zoom button to get closer to the squares. When you get to 25x25 and above, the clues can't all be displayed at the same time, so the borders scroll depending on your cursor position. This is a bit jarring, and can make it hard to follow at a glance when the clues don't line up visually with rows and columns that aren't actively selected. I think there's a reason nonogram games usually don't go this big, because these compromises aren't the most elegant.
The puzzling is also light on features, although to be fair this game was releasing in 1995, the same year as Jupiter's first Picross games, which also feel primitive by today's standards. There's no screen wrap, and holding cross while moving the cursor can overwrite marked spaces, even though marks get corrected in story mode (make three mistakes and you have to start the puzzle over, much like Jupiter's NuPa). Most egregiously, clue numbers aren't checked either automatically or manually. In the early Picross games you could mark them yourself, but here they stay the same, which demands more concentration from the player, especially on the later giant grids. I will say the solutions look nice and are often recognisable; they get coloured in after you solve them, and a handful depict the Hebereke characters but otherwise are the usual assortment of objects and scenes I’ve come to expect from nonogram games.
I enjoyed that the story mode doesn't have any time limits. In fact, normal mode doesn't either, it just keeps track of your best solve time. This mode works like Jupiter’s “free mode”, not checking for mistakes. The puzzles here are split up by difficulty. There’s also random mode which just throws a random puzzle at you without any ado. A versus mode lets you face off with another player in some way (couldn’t test that). To round out the package, an edit mode lets you design your own puzzles and save them either to the system RAM or a cartridge; this is pretty forward-thinking for such an early nonogram game, so I have to give it props.
The story mode is a fun novelty that frames the puzzle solving around the theme of these silly characters interacting. The puzzle design itself is also good. Otherwise, this particular puzzler feels a bit creaky. The combination of awkward display of large puzzles and lack of conveniences make this hard to go back to. I think its worst sin though is not letting you see thumbnails of the solutions you spent so long discovering. Filling up menus with little pixel art creations is one of the joys of these games, a visual reward for your logic skills. In this specific way, this game’s implementation is technically inferior to the books and magazines that spawned it!!
Sunsoft's cult classic NES game Hebereke turned out to be well worth playing, but the reason I played it is so that I could check out this modern legasequel and compare it to Good-Feel's craft-based Yoshi games. Basically, a lower budget holds it back a bit in the looks department but it gets by on its charm. And if anyone calls this a remake, I will shake my head sadly at them. Wait, Sunsoft describes it as such on the game's Steam page? *shakes head sadly*
It's been 33 years since the original Hebereke, and Hebe the penguin or whatever is still hanging out in the strange world of Ufouria (the localised release retains this PAL title, and the game even has brief cameos from Bop-Louie and Freeon-Leon!). Utsujin, an alien guy who was a boss in the first game, returns from space with a new plan to spread his gooey creations the Bumyons all over, and it's up to Hebe and friends to stop him with the aid of their trusty Popoons (the ball things with faces that you can throw around), because it turns out the two are antithetical for some reason.
In their efforts to stem the invasion and reclaim rocket parts to strike back at Utsujin's flying saucer base, they will traverse the various biomes of their little world via randomly generated levels. Yes, rather than a Metroid-like (which are more popular than ever), this sequel adopts some light roguelike qualities for its structure. Each level is made up of a few chunks that get assigned each time you venture out from Hebe's treehouse. There's not too many, so you will end up playing sections repeatedly, especially for the earlier levels that you need to pass through to get to later ones that are connected on the map (you do unlock fast-travel options later to skip around though). They also try to keep replays fresh with side-missions and button prompts for your teammates to find you bonus items.
Hebe and friends still have to stomp in mid-air to defeat enemies, but with more button mappings it's convenient to do, and you can unlock a super-butt bounce that is both financially rewarding and satisfying to pull off thanks to a bit of visual hitstun. You can now pull a Popoon out of nowhere at any time rather than them spawning from defeated enemies, but they're less useful as they only stun basic enemies; their main purpose is to destroy the sticky Bumyon blobs that act as hazards or that shield bosses. Characters also still have unlockable attacks, but you must spend health to activate them, and they're not even very useful to make up for it. I only ever used Jennifer's bombs because they're the only ones that also open paths and collectibles in stages.
As in the original, Hebe's three friends have to be fought so they join your team, but swapping between them is easy via the shoulder buttons, complete with a cute high-five animation as they tag in. They all have mobility differences that help in the various levels, but this time they all have the same basic speed and jump height so it doesn’t feel like a handicap to choose one. After your crew is complete, progression is driven via the vending machine in the hub, which stocks more items as you collect cans to recycle (these are unique collectibles that are found in levels), and you need to collect many coins [or buttons, or whatever they are] to buy everything. These will unlock new abilities for your crew, enable helpful items in the levels, let you into bonus rooms, etc. Sometimes grinding is required, or to put it another way replaying levels to find secret areas and cans also gets you money, so it depends on your mindset.
The environments each level takes place in are loosely inspired by the NES game, although they were fairly standard and barebones there so the crafty glowup is appreciated. Everything is made to look handcrafted, specifically mostly feltwork, which looks great especially on the adorable main cast of playable characters. The enemies and bosses are more or less taken directly from the original game in all their wackiness, but have been given a claymation makeover. You don’t quite get the level of detail and variety that the Kirby and Yoshi games have, but I’m just glad that other developers are trying things like this; even with a lower budget it does really stand out!
In addition to the in-game visuals, the menus and UI make use of round bead textures. The original game’s sprites also appear as dialogue portraits rendered via beads, which is a cute touch. This game has a fair amount of dialogue, fleshing out the quirky characters a little, whether it’s explaining new abilities or just chatting in the hub zone. It's not deep but adds to the overall charm.
I was pleasantly surprised by Hebereke 2. Rather than hewing too close to the original it tries something different with the structure, and it's an interesting experiment. In terms of the enemy roster and locations I was hoping for something a bit more adventurous, or some deep pulls from across the rest of the series… although there is a nod to the cast's appearance in Barcode Battler, which was fun. It's a low-key, fun little adventure with an interesting art style. Just don't try to get all the achievements, it's a hell of a grind to collect 50,000 money.
Sunsoft was once an electronics manufacturer with a decently successful mid-size stake in the video games industry. While they're still around today, their game business has dropped off… at least, until an attempt at a resurgence starting a few years ago, with revivals/sequels for some of their cult classics like Trip World, Gimmick, and Hebereke. The latter utilises an art style featuring hand-crafted materials much like Good-Feel's Yoshi games, which is why I'm now visiting the original Hebereke so I can then play the sequel.
Anyway, Hebereke has a complicated history that can be seen on TCRF, with a lot of content cuts and a planned North American release. It did come out in Europe and Australia though, under the name Ufouria the Saga, with two of the main characters redesigned and all with new names. A recent rerelease with the subtitle "Enjoy Edition" includes some standard emulator features, achievements, and a speedrun mode, but fumbles the inclusion of the localised version, as it only lets you see images of the clumsily translated cutscenes. So I opted for a fan translation patch of the Famicom release, which has a better translation and retains the characters of the Japanese version. After all, they went on to star in many more games (puzzle, isometric racing, nonograms, etc.) and Hebe was even Sunsoft's mascot for a time, unlike Bop-Louie and Freeon-Leon who were never seen again.
Hebe is a penguin-like creature who fell in a weird hole or something, ending up in an unfamiliar land. He has to gather companions (or in the original localisation, find his amnesiac friends) in order to get back home, while contending with the hostile creatures of this land. Well, some of them act hostile but they're all quite goofy, with various flavours of blobs, cats, odd-looking birds, or even disembodied lips & tongues, etc.
The game is quick to establish a quirky tone, as you climb a rope that is revealed to be a string of drool hanging from a blobby face. One boss fight has you destroy the armour of a large cat, who you then have to attack while they sit motionless, crying. Other enemies include birds that poop on you, mice with flying propeller hats, clowns, smiley faces, and various kids wearing animal onesies.
After a boss fight, one of the latter joins your crew, that being O-chan the haughty kitty cosplayer. Despite being a penguin, Hebe is lousy at swimming and slips on ice, and somehow she is much better at these things. Later Sukezaemon/Shades the cool but old-fashioned ghost can help you jump longer distances, and Jennifer/Gil the gruff and manly fish/lizard thing has superior underwater mobility. You can swap between controlling these characters at any time, even in midair, by opening the select menu. Hebe stays relevant as he has the best run speed and vertical jumps, and even gets the ability to wall climb later.
What you soon realise about Hebereke is that it's in fact a Metroid-like, albeit a cutesy and stripped-back one that plays like a platformer; a more famous example perhaps is Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, or the later Adventure Island 4. The game world is open and features many paths and areas that you have to come back to later, some requiring you to unlock another character or a new ability like Jennifer's bombs. You find the door to the final boss relatively early, but to get in you need to find three keys at the far corners of the world. You get a map pretty early and later unlocks will mark keys and other items on it, and getting around isn't too arduous. The original plan for the game was a bit larger but as it is, it's quite a compact experience.
I recommend reading the manual first, as it took me an embarrassingly long time to realise that pressing down during a jump puts you in a stomping stance, similar to Capcom's Ducktales. This is the only way to defeat enemies initially, and they either drop a small health refill (like Metroid, you can find expansions to your health meter) or a ball projectile with a face. Picking up and throwing things is a big mechanic in the game, although enemies defeated this way won't drop health. It's not quite as developed as it is in Gimmick which builds the whole game around the projectile, but it adds some depth. Each character also has an unlockable charge attack of varying usefulness; Jennifer and O-chan's have exploration utility but all require a charge time that's a little too long to really feel good to use. They do all have that bit of weirdness about them though that adds to the game's character: Hebe chucks his head as a projectile, for example, and Sukezaemon shoots out his eyeballs which home in on enemies.
Hebereke is a great example of the "search action, but cute" subgenre. The quirky, cartoony tone is so charming and the game world is just the right scale. Add in decently tight controls and some clever mechanics and you've got a fairly solid late-era NES/Famicom game. It's generally not too challenging, although some later platforming sections and boss fights make savestates and rewinds extremely handy, whether you're doing it in your own emulator or via the Enjoy Edition. Some of the large sprites are also impressive although they're clearly taxing the aging hardware beyond its limits. So now that I've played this little cult classic, I'm interested to see what Sunsoft do to revive it 33 years later!
Do you know who the author of the Lufia Club Nintendo comic was? I know Claude Moyse, who translated the actual game, was the editor of the magazine as well.
He was, yes. Unfortunately my scans of the Lufia Special Edition do not include a credits page. But also I was never sure even when credits are available who actually wrote the comics. For example, Moyse's credit is "Chefredakteur" and various other people are usually credited with "Redaktion" which I believe is "editorial", which seems like the closest thing to writing, but it's not broken down further by feature. My German is also not great and reliant on machine translation. So basically, I have no idea, sorry!
After playing Crafted World I figured it was a good time to finally get this off the shelf and out of my backlog, as one of the few Yoshi titles I hadn't touched. Starting life as a trade show tech demo to show off the features of the upcoming DS, apparently Nintendo were so happy with it that they turned it into a full retail release for the launch window of the console. Well, I say "full"...
As seems to be Nintendo's way on and off over the years, if you already have a story from an earlier game, then why bother writing a new one? So as various other Yoshi games do, this one returns to the fertile ground of the original Yoshi's Island. Not that it spends any time on exposition, you just see that the stork is carrying the baby brothers Mario when they are attacked by Kamek and you're off to the races. Since there are two phases to the game, I guess it depicts a partial interquel set during the YI intro? So that's something. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Touch & Go is at its core an arcade-style experience. If it released later it might have been called a roguelike, but it's really an old-school score-chasing style that they're going for. Your run starts with Baby Mario floating to the ground with a few balloons slowing his descent; if he hits a hazard he loses one, so they act as hit points. As the omniscient stylus-holder, you draw cloud paths on the touchscreen and interact with enemies to keep him safe on his way down… and collect coins, of course. This phase formed the original tech demo, and it plays out basically the same each time, aside from randomisation of the layout. Time Attack mode does change it up though by adding super stars for a faster pace. The sky gameplay makes you not only react quickly but think and plan ahead, and the three hit points are nice to have.
Your performance in the sky affects how you start the ground phase, which is the main event, but the impact isn't huge. For most of the modes scoring ranks up the colour of Yoshi that Mario ends up riding, giving you a greater egg capacity and apparently boosting your run speed (thus assigning a value judgement to their colour, which usually is not done). Yoshi then auto-runs to the right until… well, until he dies, usually, or until he reaches his goal, depending on the mode. Unlike Mario in the sky, your run is completely over if you take even a single hit, which is extremely aggravating and not exactly lore-accurate might I add. Well, OK, I guess if he has no stars at all the Toadies can grab Mario right away. Fine. Dying on the ground also does let you restart without having to redo the sky section, saving your starting conditions. It’s an odd choice especially when the ground section is often much longer than the sky section, and it breaks the arcade-inspired cycle.
On the ground Yoshi runs on the touch screen, so you’re able to interact with them more directly. You can still draw cloud paths to run along or block enemy movement, and create bubbles around things to convert them to coins and move them around, but now you can also make Yoshi jump and throw eggs. In another instance of changing the rules, Yoshi can’t eat your foes, and you have to rely on fruits to replenish your egg supply by varying amounts. Frantically keeping a barrage of baddies away from a fragile Yoshi feels so wrong, and the entirely touch interface for all these actions can get mighty fiddly.
The goal, inasmuch as the game has one, is to top the leaderboard in the two available modes, which unlocks another two. Score Attack limits your maximum distance to 1000 yards (yes, yards, even though I have the Australian cart and we’ve been using the metric system officially since 1970), challenging you to defeat enemies and collect coins as much as you can before reaching the stork. Time Attack instead has you catch up to a group of Toadies carrying Luigi, where cloud paths now speed up your run and some egg precision is required to get under target times for the leaderboard. These are the modes that have some kind of closure in terms of an end goal, but Marathon mode is where I spent most of my time.
In Marathon you just have to survive for as long as you can, moving through different environments that offer their own sets of enemies and challenges. There’s not too many so you’ll probably see them all in a few runs, but it’s nice to feel like you’re on some kind of adventure even if there’s no end to it. Conserving your egg resources is important, as well as timing when you hit a 100 coin milestone, which spawns a superstar that gives Baby Mario a huge speed boost and infinite projectiles while it lasts. I usually got these right when a Yoshi changeover was about to happen, wasting it completely. Going for a top leaderboard spot to unlock the Challenge mode makes for long runs that feel extra punishing when you inevitably fail, so despite this mode offering some much needed variety it was also the source of the most frustration for me.
Challenge mode is another timed mode where you’re fighting and getting points to add more time to your clock. When it ticks down Kamek swoops in and ends your run, although that may happen sooner since this mode floods the screen with spiky enemies. It’s overwhelming but since nothing is locked behind this mode, I treated it as more a novelty than something to be mastered.
Four modes… is that enough? It doesn’t feel like it when you can “clear” them in a few short hours, as I did. Even as a launch game this feels seriously lacking in content; the modes give you different objectives but you’re doing very similar things in each, and you’ll be seeing the same stuff again and again, and I mean the same few level chunks being reused from run to run. There’s no boss fights to break up Marathon mode, no roguelite-style unlocks, modifiers, or metaprogression… and no reason for me to play this any more than necessary. I already wasn’t getting on too well with the imprecision of the touch controls, the autoscrolling pace, the punishing one-hit deaths; so I was happy to put this down having experienced yet another low point in the Yoshi legacy.
After Skywalker Saga, I thought this could be our next spouse co-op game since we had played Yoshi's Woolly World together previously. I've actually owned it for years and lent it to people, but with the next Yoshi game coming out it was time for this to come off the shelf one way or another. Turns out Cathy didn't like it much so it was a Milo solo. Now I have a long history with the Yoshi series; Island came in a bundle with my first game console, the SNES, and I loved its constant variety, finding its secrets, engaging with its complex mechanics. Nintendo's follow-up Yoshi's Story was experimental but I think not altogether successful, but it has still been highly influential going forward. Afterwards they have lent out the franchise to Artoon/Arzest (Universal Gravitation was interesting but odd, YIDS was a cool riff/expansion on YI, and YNI tried the same but fell a bit flat) and Good-Feel (Kirby's Epic Yarn was a fun and breezy Yoshi-like that led to Woolly World which was excellent with fantastic art design, which then led to Crafted World). Is YCW a worthy successor to YWW, and does it live up to the legacy?
As with YWW, the Yoshi clan have been surgically removed from any kind of context. They simply live in a cardboard world on some island, and I guess Kamek and Baby Bowser exist off to the side. The Super Happy Tree from Story has been swapped out with a big colourful rock, and the baddies take it, scattering its gems so the Yoshis have to go get them back. That's really it. This is probably the most story-light game yet unfortunately; Kirby got a justification for the art style and a plot, but here… well, it's a Nintendo game for babies, why bother am I right!?? [irony alert]
I suppose the first thing to mention is the art style. Woolly World went with a complete yarn/fabric-based world, whereas Crafted World sidesteps into a Play School-style [it's an iconic Australian kids show, look it up] crafternoon universe. They've done a great job leaning into environments entirely handmade from repurposed household materials and craft supplies; it's nostalgic and I daresay a great inspiration if you're looking for craft activities for little ones yourself! The backgrounds are littered with fun crafted objects, and one of the ways the game extends replayability is asking you to scavenger hunt specific crafts in levels; I found this a bit tedious personally, but there's plenty of other side challenges and collectibles that kept me busy.
Compared to YWW, the bespoke style is just as inventive and charming, but loses a little something when it comes to characters and objects. Sure, there are cardboard robot NPCs all over the world map, and the bosses are put together in real time in adorable stop motion animation during their intro cutscenes, but most of the Yoshi series staples like Shy Guys and so on, plus the Yoshis and Poochies, and Kamek and Baby Bowser too, are simply on-model 3D rendered with a bit of subtle flocking texture. YWW had yarn balls for eggs, beads and patches as collectibles, but here they're reverted to your basic eggs and coins. On reflection it feels like a disconnect and a bit of a step back, when the previous game truly went all the way with its conceit.
The world map is broken up into worlds which unfold as little dioramas. Each of them is themed but with only 1-3 levels per set before swiftly moving on to the next thing. This seems truncated, but there are 40 levels overall and they're substantial, and it lets them explore a greater variety of themes. In the end I didn't feel shortchanged on content, but I found it odd that they didn't spend a little more time in each environment. I guess if you want more you can just replay the levels for scavenger hunts and such. After a linear sequence in the early game, the mid game opens up, letting you choose which worlds you advance through on the way to the next three gem doohickeys, before closing in again for the endgame series of levels. I liked the freeform structure, the dev team seemingly not bound by rigid numbers and patterns for how the game is laid out.
As for the levels themselves, they're pretty similar to Woolly World's design. Not quite as complex as the original Island perhaps but always fair and with creative use of gimmicks and such. Yoshi's Story experimented with 2.5D mechanics, moving you slightly in the Z-axis for alternate paths, but only very occasionally. Crafted World builds on this heavily, with many sections taking you on prescribed paths directed in or out of the usual 2D plane, although only ever at 90 degrees. I'm not sure how much this adds to the experience; it can get fiddly and feels a bit superfluous. Another way the game breaks the 2D plane is by having you throw eggs at objects in the background or foreground. Aiming already feels bad because it uses the Yoshi's Story method of moving the aiming cursor manually, but you then have to rely on the game snapping your focus to an object on another plane if it decides you're pointing enough at its location. On top of this there's a distractingly-heavy blur effect when aiming, meant to simulate tilt-shifting as a nod to the small scale of the supposedly handmade world. Basically, YCW is taking a big swing with this 2.5D stuff but it's not exactly hitting boundaries as consistently as it would like.
Beating a level unlocks the "flip side", where you run through in the opposite direction, with the "camera" on the other side. This gives you a sort of "behind the scenes" look at the crafted environments, with the original labels and packaging of the boxes and so on that make up the world now visible, as well as unpainted bits and the reveal of how objects and facades are nominally held together. Very cute. These flip side levels have been stripped of collectibles, but instead have you hunting the three Poochy Pups (returning from the Woolly World 3DS port) against a timer. They hide in fun spots, getting up to mischief or frolicking in the background, and when found they act as reusable eggs much like the Huffin Puffins of prior games. It's a very clever way to reuse the levels for a fresh experience.
The two-player co-op mode (local-only, of course) has some concessions for potential asymmetric play. As with KEY and YWW, you can pick up and throw your partner, but new is a kind of team-up manoeuvre where the one Yoshi rides the other. The ridee can no longer throw eggs but has a powered up stomp, while the rider cannot move but gets access to infinite eggs, very helpful for the many targets to be hit throughout the levels (especially the shooting gallery gimmick levels). Mellow Mode returns but with further boosts; not only is platforming aided by a glide that loses no height, but you take less damage and get double eggs from eating enemies. I actually kept it on for the rest of my solo run just to cut down on the backtracking to make more eggs. Although I found it engaging, the game was rarely *challenging* for me as an experienced gamer, at least until the set of three postgame levels that really push you in platforming and precise management of your resources. This isn't a bad thing at all, just know that the game is fairly gentle unless you're going for total completionism.
Sorry, I have to make one more Woolly World comparison. That game had you constantly unlocking new Yoshi designs, with all sorts of fun and creative patterns crocheted into their yarn skins. While Crafted World only has the more-or-less standard roster of eight coloured Yoshis it does retain customisation, of a sort, in the form of "costumes". These are bought from gacha machines (sigh… but each does have a limited supply that can be bought out so there's no duplicates), and they protect you from a few hits, defending your health bar. They take the form of mostly cardboard frames—sometimes with a hat component—that are held by the Yoshis as long as they last. Since they're big and chunky, I found them a bit distracting for gameplay visibility, and the aesthetics are hit and miss.
I think it is worth comparing this heavily to Good-Feel's prior work, considering it is riffing so much on the art style which informs so much of its presentation. Woolly World was a high watermark in terms of post-Island Yoshi games though, and I can't help but feel that this is a step back in many ways. It experiments with mechanics which is laudable, but doesn't stick the landing so this aspect ends up letting it down. And don't get me started on the soundtrack; the loss of Tomoya Tomita is keenly felt. YCW's sound test has a mere 21 tracks, and much of its music is the same composition repeated over and over with different instruments, a simple and patronising ditty poorly used that I feel reflects a lack of care and attention. I never liked the "new" Yoshi voice either (you know, the one they've been using for 29 years now), so aurally the game is unpleasant all around.
It's like the "children's craft" theme, which is a good idea, became too much of an influence on other aspects and it took on a flavour of "talking down to its audience" that you see in certain media for kids that aims too low. It makes me wonder if they don't want people like me playing the game, and then I feel weird about that. Am I too old for this game? Am I not supposed to assess it as a work of art? Should I even be writing this review? A friend once told me that Yoshi's Island was the first game to ever make him cry, not because it was beautiful, but because it was so painfully difficult. Now Yoshi's Crafted World is giving me an existential crisis. Is that what you wanted, Good-Feel and Nintendo? Well, joke's on them, because yes hello I'm autistic and I frickin' love playing video games and thinking about them and writing about them. So that's what I'm gonna keep doing, no matter what. Sorry, got in the weeds a bit there, but the upshot is Crafted World is a cromulent Yoshi game but not as good as Woolly World.
