The Thought Landfill

I write posts about games I've beaten from beginning to end. I enjoy writing them, I hope you enjoy reading them.

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Game 182: The Talos Principle

You wake up among what appear to be ancient Roman ruins, you notice that your body is clearly robotic, and you hear a voice from the sky claiming to be God and telling you to complete puzzles in order to prove your worth as his child and ascend to paradise. Thus begins Croteam’s philosophy-based Portal-esque puzzle game.

You quickly find that you are inside of a simulation of some sort and you find a computer program that slowly reveals itself to be AI and begins discussing philosophy with you. The Talos Principle is not content, however, with simply talking about philosophy to you, it wants your answer. Once it has your answer it pokes holes in it and makes you question everything. Once  you change your answer to be more inclusive or exclusive to more accurately portray your worldview it does it again. It’s a really interesting experience that I’m surprised more games haven’t tried but it basically runs you through a Philososphy 101 gauntlet to defend your own beliefs as you struggle to figure out your place in this game world.

From scraps of text files and audio logs found around you start piecing together the story about humanity working together desperately to preserve itself as some great unspecified calamity appears to be about to wipe out everyone on earth. The pace at which you gain more information on what happened is perfect for keeping you engaged and made this game one of those that you play 8 hours straight at a time and forget to eat. It’s an incredibly engaging story wrapped by very engaging puzzles that drove me to 100% completion which is something I’ve rarely done even in the vast assortment of games I’ve beaten. There’s always just a few more scraps of knowledge hanging out around every corner driving you to do more.

One of my favorite things about this game is that you learn early on that this is not a game that simply wants you to go with the flow. This is a game that wants you to break its rules as much as possible and has countless rewards for you doing so. It doesn’t look like it at first and the voice of Elohim who seems to have the only sense of serious direction encourages you to comply but in true form with this game’s themes it wants you to question everything. The first time you realize you can sneak items out of some of the puzzle areas, the game opens up in a whole new way. Many of these moments are required in order to get 100%, but many more still simply lead to bizarre and delightful easter eggs that I would be cruel to spoil.

This game is an absolute delight and is surprisingly emotional. It’s clever, it’s engaging, and it certainly left me very hopeful after the truly climactic final area. Play The Talos Principle. You will not be disappointed.

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Game 181: Call of Juarez: Gunslinger

I have honestly never been a fan of the western movie genre. I like the idea of the wild frontier and a lot of the tropes that come along with it, but for some reason Hollywood just never presented it to me in a way that clicks with what I enjoy about the setting. Luckily the gaming industry has me covered with a Red Dead Redemption being one of my favorite games of all time and now Call of Juarez: Gunslinger, a quick game allowing me to step into the shoes of the biggest badass that ever walked the frontier.

The entirety of Gunslinger is narrated Bastion style as you play through stories of famous bounty hunter Silas Greaves as he’s telling them to a small audience at a saloon. The game toys a bit with themes of unreliable narration and myth-making and while I could keep stealing more things from Errant Signal’s video on this game, I’ll just link it here and recommend it for anyone more interested in it. The story and gameplay work together fantastically and really serve as a way to give you a quick drive by of all the old west tropes you could possible ask for from train heists to bank robberies and especially gunslinging showdowns which involve a very intense minigame to take down the final boss of each area. It’s much better than it sounds and works very nicely to make you feel like a true badass of the West. The bosses stand as highlights of old west folklore and include Butch Cassidy and Jesse James further emphasizing the unreliable narration that is brought into question, but having the upside of letting you duel with Butch Cassidy and Jesse James.

The gunplay feels very satisfying and a lot of the levels feel very much like those old west shooting ranges that you see at carnivals with popup targets but that might be because I mostly used long ranged weapons instead of the shotgun which seemed underpowered given how much reloading it needed.

The bullet time mechanics are a blast, you can shoot your dynamite in the air to rain explosives on your enemies, and you get the chance to do an awesome bullet dodge to avoid killing blows at times. This game is just super tightly put together and by the time it’s out of ideas and getting stale it wraps up nicely and let’s you go on your way. It’s only 6 hours, but it’s exactly as long as it needs to be and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

To steal a joke from a Steam review, go play McCree Simulator and have some damn fun with it.

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Game 180: Dark Souls 2: Scholar of the First Sin

Disclaimer: I’ve only played through this game once, not like, 8, like I have for Dark Souls 1. Also, I never played the original release of this game, only the Scholar of the First Sin edition which has enemy placement changes, all the DLC, and I think other minor tweaks here and there.

The short version is that this isn’t as good as Dark Souls 1, but it’s still very good and you should go play it.

I had heard a lot of things coming into Dark Souls 2 from excitement to disdain and also being asked why I didn’t just pick up Dark Souls 3 (because I’m waiting for all the DLC is the answer to that) so I had no idea exactly what to expect. What I found was a game that tried to improve on the mechanics of the first and try some new things, but ultimately lacked the cohesiveness and creativity of the first game and even fell flat mechanically in a few ways. That said, there’s still plenty here to love and the lore is still as rich as ever even though in the grand scheme of Dark Souls lore the events here feel more like a historical footnote.

In Dark Souls 2, you find out very quickly that the game really loves pitting you against hordes of enemies at once which makes for an interesting challenge to focus on. It’s rare that you can aggro exactly one enemy meaning that you want relatively fast weapons with large hitboxes to handle the hordes. That functionally eliminates the usefulness of wielding colossal high-damaging weapons like I did in the first game. The slow swing speed of my beloved Zweihander would have killed me more than anything else here. Interestingly enough, your move speed while locked on to an enemy is much lower meaning that you can’t really kite the hordes that are walking toward you while still being ready to block them. In addition to that, the early game shields are really bad at their job and many enemies have chains of hits that if the first one hits your shield, you can do nothing but block the rest which in combination with the bad shields and the fact that the shield break animation in this game leaves you much more vulnerable means that if you block the first hit because you’re too slow to walk around it, you’re probably dead. Now at that point, the best thing you can do in standard Dark Souls fashion is dodge roll around the attacks, but herein lies another problem. There’s an entirely new stat called Agility that governs how many invincibility frames your dodges have and if you start with a class with low Agility then you don’t really even have that as an option either. All of these factors combine to make an early game that is a lot harder than the late game when you have the perfect weapons, decent shields, and a good dodge roll again. There’s one particular moment in the Lost Bastille where entering a door aggros about 8 enemies at once that really drives these mechanical issues home.

This game also encourages a lot more player interaction than Dark Souls 1 making it much easier for you to co-op with friends and NPCs as well given how many there are. There are also many more NPC invasions which occur regardless of your status as human and function as mini bosses that showcase different playstyles that a player can have which I like as a design mechanic, but screw those guys in Black Gulch man. I’ve got enough to worry about there!

The areas in this game retain a lot of the creativity from Dark Souls 1 from the aforementioned Black Gulch which is an evil pit of poison and despair that just oozes with evil to Heide’s Tower of Flame which consists of some incredibly beautiful vistas along the ocean-side ruins to Aldia’s Keep which might be my favorite location visually, truly leading you to understand who Aldia is and what twisted creations he has made within seconds of stepping foot inside. That said, there’s also some areas that feel a bit paint by numbers like the Dwarven caves (I know they’re technically called Gyrm) and the lava castle, but even those areas tend to fit nicely into the lore and despite how many places are just forested areas, they all manage to have their own unique flavor of well-designed “oh god, this place sucks! Get me out of here!” I’m looking at you Shaded Woods.

While the areas themselves are pretty varied, the bosses unfortunately do not have nearly as much creativity despite the staggering number of them. Most of the bosses are just humanoid knights of some sort which all have something to make the battle interesting, but it’s not enough to make you forget just how much visual design is lacking a bit of the spark from Dark Souls 1. That said, some of the bosses do definitely evoke that same “what on earth is THAT” reaction like the Demon of Song and The Rotten. There are a lot more bosses this time around that focus on fighting multiple foes at once (including one that I find particularly clever where there is a massive swarm of weak enemies and only one of them is the boss that you need to kill to stop them) which seems befitting the increased focus on horde combat and co-op that comes in this sequel.

The DLCs this time around are most definitely the highlights of the game as a whole. While a lot of other people have talked in depth about how Dark Souls 2 doesn’t use vertical space as well as Dark Souls 1, what it really comes down to is the fact that the level design just doesn’t seem as tight or interesting overall which the DLC addresses handily with much more DS1-styled areas in The Crown of the Sunken King and Crown of the Iron King. The level design is phenomenal with one of my favorite area gimmicks being ghostly suits of armor chasing you down that are invincible until you kill their armor shells elsewhere in the area which is filled with puzzles and traps. It’s all very intense and just clicks in a way that the main game just doesn’t quite reach.

My favorite place by far though is The Crown of the Ivory King where you get to explore a sprawling city caught in an eternal winter. The areas are very cleverly put together and take a very different approach to level design which I’ve heard is similar to Bloodborne in many ways (PC port when FromSoft?) After a once-through of the city everything becomes thawed out opening up new areas, changing the old areas, and allowing you to collect new items and even allies for the final fight of the DLC which can be fought any time once the city is thawed but is very difficult without picking up more assistants from exploring. Additionally the DLC has one area that is a wide open snowy field which is very odd for a Souls game and you have to deal with the occasional blizzard obscuring your vision as you fight wacky lightning horses. It’s great! The whole game is a blast, but all the above combined with just how jaw-dropping the final fight is makes for an incredibly memorable experience in this DLC.

There’s more stuff I could talk about in terms of the drastic shift in spells and miracles with a gigantic boost in variety and more of a focus on casting speed, but considering I haven’t actually run a build for any sort of casting I will probably have to address that in an addendum at a future date. Beyond that I thought a lot of the major mechanical changes were just fine. Starting with only one estus flask that upgrades over time and focusing more on healing consumables as well as having your max health decrease a bit with each death until you use an effigy both contribute very nicely to the game’s sense of hopelessness. The game still gives you plenty to work with and by the end of the game I had 99 effigies, but it always just felt more devastating to die than in Dark Souls 1.

Dark Souls 2 is a good game and I’ve only scratched the surface of the incredibly engaging world and gameplay that it presents. If you liked any of the other FromSoft games, this one is 100% worth your time, I promise, just try not to break your controller before your dodge roll gets decent.

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Game 179: Darksiders

This game was released back in 2010 and must have been the last kind of triple-A game to get away with this particular style of no-fun-allowed angst in its story while still being a bright, colorful, and visually creative game. It’s not great, but given the multitude of ways it rips off other games, the very ways in which it fails to be good are quite interesting.

To give you an idea of where Darksiders gets its... influences, it’s got Devil May Cry-styled combat; dungeons, items, and a horse like Zelda; flying sections styled after Panzer Dragoon; and oddly enough a portal gun for some puzzles in the last dungeon. 

The first thing I want to address is the difficulty curve and health upgrades because this game starts off as a decent challenge but then because of the difficulties of balancing it becomes a cakewalk later on only spiking again for a miniboss you have to fight three times over. The health upgrades in this game give you an entirely new health bar when completed meaning that your first real upgrade doubles your health and each one thereafter still continues to give a colossal boost percent-wise to your total health so while you need to be fairly careful if you intend to survive before upgrades, once you get a few under your belt it breaks the difficulty for all but the most challenging of battles (which disappointingly are not the main bosses). Why can’t the difficulty scale better with your health bars? Well, they stole Zelda’s system of heart pieces being scattered around the world which means you can’t have a guaranteed ballpark for the player’s health at any given time. It’s a problem that could have been solved in a myriad of ways from making the health bonuses much smaller to removing heart pieces and just making health increases mandatory at certain points of the game, or even by just scaling enemy damage up more harshly to encourage more exploration for the collectibles but instead we end up with the broken system as it is.

Speaking of broken systems, the combat falls flat in basically every regard. The extra weapons you get besides your starting sword feel mostly useless since upgrades for the base sword let you do basically anything they can do and since they level up with use, it’s hard to justify using anything but the starting sword throughout the entire game. Also, I don’t know why they would give you both the boomerang and the pistol when the boomerang actually can stunlock enemies and deal with large hordes at once and also do more damage. It feels like they never sat down and thought about the purpose of each weapon in the larger context of the game making for some rather useless-feeling items. They also let you use only two of the main weapons at once without pausing to switch despite there only being three total. The fact that you can even use two at once is ripped right from DMC3 where it is used to encourage stylish combos but here such combos grant no such reward, not even a satisfying combo counter. The lack of a combo system also fails to encourage a variety of play meaning that there is no reason to not use the high-damaging delay combo for the starter sword for the whole game, occasionally punctuated with a stinger to get enemies off of you. On a strict surface level, the combat is easy to get into and is definitely functional and pretty cool looking, it’s just a shame that the systems conspire to remove any meaningful depth from the combat. I kept trying to pull of massive combos which was not terribly difficult, but the lack of any sort of systemic acknowledgement made it just feel hollow.

Finally, I want to address the portal gun that it throws in at the final dungeon. For Darksiders’ portal gun they didn’t have the systems in place to make it a direct copy from Portal, but instead you can only use it on a minute selection of stained-glass walls and there is no physics engine in place to preserve any sense of momentum. You just catapult out the other side regardless of your entry speed. This leads to the portal gun mostly being used to move you uneventfully from one side of the room to another and to solve trivial light beam reflection puzzles. There was one interesting puzzle with some platforms that raised and lowered based on the weight they were carrying, but other than that it felt more token than anything.

The mechanics are so slapdash in this game, but it’s still functional enough that I can recommend it to aspiring game designers as a lesson on how not to design. Hell, I could gripe about the story too if it made any sense whatsoever. You never even see the other three horsemen of the apocalypse which seems like a massive oversight and the only time where any characters seem to have any fun is when you get in a competition with a blacksmith to see who can kill more angels (they’re evil though, so it’s okay).

This game is certainly something even if that something isn’t good. If that something sounds worth it to you, you’ll probably at least learn something playing through it all.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 178: Guacamelee

The most Mexican experience I’ve ever had in gaming comes from a game studio located in Toronto. If you ever wanted a game that nestles itself comfortably in well-respected Mexican culture from luchadors to Dia De Los Muertos where you can also wear a chicken suit and fight a mariachi skeleton... I’d say you can’t do much better than Guacamelee, but then again I’m not sure you can even find another game with those requirements anyways.

The basis of Guacamelee is that it’s an optionally cooperative metroidvania where you play as a luchador and instead of standard metroidvania powerups you learn new wrestling moves as you try to save the world and, of course, El Presidente’s daughter from a mariachi skeleton more evil than El Diablo himself.

If any of this sounds interesting to you, go pick this game up now! If you’re reading this post when it comes out it’s currently on sale on Steam for $5!

The game is lighthearted, well written, has fantastic-feeling combat with a satisfying combo system, a delightful soundtrack that has clever variations for living and dead variants of each area, a charming art style, lots of fun collectibles encouraging exploration of its creative landscapes, and has lots of optional platforming puzzles where you get to use your abilities like a good metroidvania should. Plus, the game knows when it has run out of ideas and doesn’t drag on forever. Unfortunately that last bit means that it’s only about 5 hours, but if you’re a completionist there are a bunch of trinkets that are very well hidden throughout the game world for you to get after beating the game. I didn’t even realize that those trinkets existed until I got one after the final boss and I’m pretty sure most if not all probably require the last major upgrade to get which unfortunately means that you can’t pick them up as you progress through the game as normal and instead have to go back once you beat the game which you don’t have a ton of incentive to do otherwise.

There’s only one serious complaint besides those trinkets that I have and that’s the mid-boss checkpoints. For really long boss battles mid-boss checkpoints are a wonderful thing, but in this game it seems far too liberal with them. You may have a rough time getting through the first phase but get through to the second phase with only one hit left only to die and restart at the second phase with full health trivializing the rest of the battle. I think overall it needs to let the player really learn the attack patterns for the bosses and work through them more so the entire battle feels more rewarding to beat. All of the bosses are very well designed and learning their patterns and having decent reflexes will let you avoid all the damage that they throw at you, so I think that the checkpoints are an unnecessary addition.

Overall though, I promise you that Guacamelee is a truly enjoyable experience in fantastic game design. If you ever felt the need to piledrive a chupacabra then it will make your dreams come true.

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Game 177: Far Cry 3: Blood Dragon

A cheap, fast, fun, self-indulgent romp, this entry of the Far Cry series is a reskin of the base Far Cry 3 game crammed full of all the ridiculous 80s action movie cliches, neon glow, and synthesizer music you can handle. With the aesthetics resting somewhere between Hotline Miami and Kung Fury it’s hard for this game to take itself seriously so it’s a good thing it doesn’t try. The titular blood dragons are dinosaurs that shoot lasers, you’re a cybernetic loose-cannon cop who doesn’t play by the rules, and there is an impressive amount of other absurd facets to the shoestring plot that I would hate to spoil but are equally as fun.

This game was basically designed as a victory lap for the Far Cry 3 team to unwind after putting out the more serious base game and you can tell the developers just had an absolute blast. That said, because of the nature of the game it doesn’t have as much polish as a proper triple-A title tends to have which is fine generally, but the polish of the base engine makes the jagged edges stick out more. For example, there were times when the filter of dark neon purple that sits over the entire game vanished for a split second and it looked exactly like the base game which means my immersion was clearly RUINED. The cut scenes are mostly pixel art which, while fitting for the time period being aped, tend to not work as nicely as a full blown visual cut scenes would have (except maybe for the training montage). The story missions tend to be a linear series of rooms where you take out the baddies in standard Far Cry 3 fair which is fun, but ultimately loses a lot of the flow of the original game. And finally the ending was super fun and memorable, but then the final boss was just killed in a cut scene probably because they ran out of budget to make a proper absurd final boss.

There’s an interesting thing about the tutorial and the game’s writing that I want to talk about. The tutorial is almost entirely text-based and all dumped at you at the beginning of the game with very few chances to actually apply what you learn before dumping you into combat. That’s not as bad as it sounds, but it’s not ideal and were this any other game it would definitely be a terrible approach. The way the developers get away with this not being a completely abysmal choice is a bit interesting and it mostly hinges on the game being able to somewhat reliably expect the player to have played the base Far Cry 3 game first. The controls are almost exactly the same with only a few minor quirks here and there in the mechanics actually making a difference so it’s not a huge leap to go from the base game to this one. The other main way they make this work is through the writing. Your character is being forced to go through the tutorial as well and is getting annoyed at it at approximately the same rate as you which helps put you and the main character in the same spot of wanting to give a middle finger to the authorities who put you through this. That said, ultimately if you do something annoying to the player, pointing out it’s annoying and laughing doesn’t really fix the base problem of it being annoying in the first place.

Beyond that, there’s not much to say that isn’t just a retread of Far Cry 3. The combat is fun, most missions have that Arkham Asylum-style stealth combat for clearing areas which is super satisfying, and the weapon and scenery variety encourage a wide range of play styles to maximize the mechanics you have available.

If you want a short game with a lot of doofy 80s trope-filled fun then this is probably some of the most fun you can get.

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Game 176: Shovel Knight

The very concept of Shovel Knight is to make an old-school NES game with a modern perspective in design. Yacht Club Games succeeded in delivering on an experience evoking Mega Man, classic Castlevania, and even a bit of Dark Souls interestingly enough with all the jagged edges of the lives system and completely unfair difficulty ironed out for a gameplay experience that is simple, challenging, and best of all incredibly fun.

The control scheme of this game is designed with incredible simplicity for modern games. All you need is jump, shoot, special, and pause so you can select what your special ability is Mega Man style. If you have an extra button or two on your controller then you can use those to cycle your special abilities without pausing which can be very useful given the vast arsenal you pick up over the course of the game. Each weapon of this arsenal is well-designed to serve a different purpose and when you pick one up you are given a good chance to experiment with it with either a small obstacle course where you need to use your newfound ability to get back to the main level or in a nearby bonus level on the map.

Beyond the special abilities, of which most are useful but some are less so (I’m looking at you rolling gear platform), the main controls of this game are very tightly put together and with the simple set of mechanics the developers are able to make fantastically fun levels to traverse even if there is an ice level with ice physics. The most “out there” mechanic that the game presents you with from the outset is the fact that Shovel Knight can do a plunging shovel attack similar to Link’s swordplant. It starts as a simple way to destroy blocks beneath you but is then put to use in the levels as a means of attacking enemies from safe vantage points, bouncing on temporarily created hovering pads, and even hopping across bubbles.

With the simple set of tight controls, the things that really shine in Shovel Knight are the level and boss design, both of which borrow heavily from the Mega Man series with mechanics and enemies explained very well through environmental design and play and bosses that tend to incorporate the very arena they fight in as part of their battle. That said, the game also borrows the spikes from Mega Man being instakill which becomes an absolute bear during the Polar Knight fight. The wide array of bosses extends outside the main levels with many wandering the world map for you to fight at your leisure and I can hardly think of a reason why you wouldn’t fight them right away because they make for such entertaining fights.

How does a game rooted so much in old school gaming handle death from a modern perspective? This is a big obstacle that I’m sure the developers wanted to tackle early and they tackled it in a way that I absolutely adore. When you die you drop a large percentage of the money you were carrying that you can then pick up again in floating money bags when you get back to your point of death. This presents you with the Dark Souls challenge of pushing yourself to just go a little further every life until you beat the level. That said, sometimes your money bags just end up in places that you can’t grab and it can be frustrating. At best it’s a bit more complicated to pick it up than traversing the area normally and can force you into mastery of the area more thoroughly. At worst your money is over a pit that you would need to kill yourself to get in the first place.

Additionally there’s the checkpoint system. There are checkpoints throughout the level that you can break. When you break them they give you money but they don’t function as checkpoints any more. The tougher it is to beat the level without the given checkpoint the more money it gives you. This is a fantastic risk-reward system that can make second and third playthrough even more of an enjoyable challenge and can even allow players to dynamically set their own difficulty level in their standard playthroughs.

Now since the release of this game there has since been a DLC pack where you get to play through the story of Plague Knight, one of the main bosses. This lets you play through the game again with an entirely new set of mechanics including bomb mixtures for optimizing combat and area traversal, a static base health that can be upgraded on a per-life basis by consumable health vials, and charge jumps that catapult you through the air. The DLC is incredibly fun but given much of the level design is the same, it doesn’t feel nearly as tightly designed for the mechanics.

The DLC also has a more interesting story. Shovel Knight’s story is a very standard rescue-the-princess kind of tale while Plague Knight’s is about intrigue, backstabbing your allies, being oblivious to the love of another, and planning to take over the world like the mad scientist you are. There’s a lot more creativity put into the areas outside of levels and some serious writing chops start to shine through as these very dynamic characters interact in very fun ways.

If any of this sounds interesting to you I really can’t recommend this game enough. I had an absolute blast with this game and considering it’s out for every platform shy of the TI-84 there’s little excuse not to pick it up.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 175: Undertale

I want to start this like basically every Undertale discussion online by saying that this game really is best experienced blind. Just go play it! It’s real cheap and most definitely worth your time and plus it will make it so the internet will stop yelling at you to just play it already. If you really want to read at least some of what I have to say but don’t want to be completely spoiled I’ll give another warning before I get into the really spoiler-y bits below.

Undertale is a beautifully hilarious, intriguing, and emotional experience that I am so very glad is a part of gaming history now. One of the reasons I haven’t been posting so much lately is because I’ve been trying to figure out what to even say about this game that hasn’t been beaten to death everywhere else online.

Undertale is a game where you can choose to befriend all the bosses and they all become great friends who you get to hang out with and enjoy the company of. The writing is solid and makes for some truly amazing and memorable moments that make it hard to hear about friends playing through killing these bosses whom you’ve gone on dates with, raced snails with, and had dance offs with. This is also one of the few games that has ever made me truly laugh out loud from its writing which punchy and absolutely absurd.

Undertale is a game where the soundtrack is nothing short of incredible with boss themes that you’ll listen to on loop on YouTube for hours and the masterpiece Dogsong. In all seriousness though, Ghost Battle is probably my favorite, but so many of the songs on this soundtrack will pull your heartstrings like an Olympic tug-of-war team (that actually used to be a thing, look it up).

Undertale is a game where the creator realized that menus are only so exciting and made the combat into mini bullet-hell segments where you dodge increasingly creative attacks and even at one point dodging damage around the menu itself.

MORE SPOILERS FOLLOW

Undertale is a game that breaks the fourth wall; shatters it into little tiny pieces. Undertale is a game that will take you off-guard with a crazy space plant Omega Tom Hanks... thing. It will take you off guard with how much potential for cruelty it grants you and how it punishes you with emotions only and that is more than enough. I’ve beaten a No Mercy run and I felt like a hollow husk of the person I was at the end.

Undertale is a game where you will feel sympathy for even the most cruel of enemies in the world except probably Jerry. Most importantly and sadly rarely seen in modern gaming is that Undertale is a game that will make you feel. It will make you feel so much showing the true artistic strength of a man that almost nobody knew existed just a few years ago.

Undertale is a game with pixel art that will probably make you cry. It will make you scared. It will make you confused at points. But ultimately Undertale is a game that if you stick it out will make you so incredibly happy.

Go play Undertale.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 174: Castle Crashers

“Oh man, this is just like that one thing from Castle Crashers!” “I actually never got around to playing that game...” “Check your steam inventory. I just fixed that and we’re playing right now!”

This is how my buddy got me to play Castle Crashers which is basically a modernized version of that one sidescrolling beat-em-up that was reskinned 30 times back in the arcades of the 90s.

Alright, that brief description is a bit unfair. While the game at its core is basically That One Beat-Em-Up, there are a lot of great modern touches that make this game a unique and memorable experience. For one, you don’t have a stack of quarters that is swiftly vanishing like a bad one-night stand preventing you from playing too much. That also means that you’re given a lot more time and freedom to get sick of potentially repetitive gameplay so the formula is shaken up a bit with each character having a level-up bit between stages that let you customize your character to make your style of play better and stronger. There is also a magic system that lets you cast spells, again unique for each character and as you level up you can unlock more spell each one carefully serving a different purpose for the sake of having some gameplay strategy.

This game is definitely best played with friends but the creativity of bits like the corn boss where as you beat him up he drops healing popcorn or the river level where you’re fighting while log surfing downstream or even getting to wield a lightsaber later in the game definitely make it an enjoyable enough game experienced alone. But if you don’t play with friends you don’t get the fun lighthearted deathmatch at the end of each level where you fight for the princess that you just rescued.

This game is not incredibly deep, but you can get it for real cheap these days and you can definitely spend your money worse. If you just want to dick around with some friends it is definitely a great experience for that and gets my wholehearted recommendation and who knows, you may be pleasantly surprised by some of the game’s better setups.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 173: Life is Strange

This game is flawed. This game is beautiful. This game made me mouth-open full bore sob. This game is powerful. If you want to feel things, it’s hard to get much better in gaming than this.

This game is very heavily focused on the story and character choices which I don’t feel comfortable spoiling for anyone out there, but I can tell you it involves time travel and that’s what brings up this game’s unique mechanical feature. Max, the main character who you control has the ability to rewind time which in this dialogue-heavy adventure game means that if you don’t like how a dialogue choice turned out, you can undo it and try again. This solves one of the biggest problems that people consistently have with dialogue trees, the fact that you’re never 100% sure what your character will say and how they will say it. This ability even applies to most of the major choices the game presents as pivotal story points so you can see at least the short-term consequences of all your actions are and decide between which you think is best for your playthrough.

The game also does theming with photography very well as Max and many of the other characters are in a photography class and love the artistry of it. It makes for a solid aesthetical choice, along with the modern indie soundtrack that will make the game feel dated in a decade but feels perfectly used here nevertheless.

As for what the game stumbles on a bit, the lip syncing for the first couple of episodes is abysmal sometimes matching the quality of dialogue that sometimes smacks a bit too hard of /r/fellowkids. The puzzles are also a bit lackluster and somewhat reminiscent of adventure game logic at times, but they do a good job of breaking up the pace enough that it’s hard to get too rustled by them. As the episodes go on though, you definitely feel the love and devotion and self-improvement put into this game by the developers who really wanted to share this great story that they had in the best way that they could.

Seriously, this game is great, but now I want to talk about the ending, so if you haven’t played it yet, spoilers follow and I strongly recommend playing the game first.

When I started playing this game it was when Episode 4 was just around the corner. I had a friend who had told me it was amazing and that I needed to play. Once she had thoroughly convinced me I bought the full season pass in a steam sale and blazed through the available episodes and we excitedly played through episode 4 when it came out as well. As I was going through episode 3 I told her “I think this game is building up to one final decision and it’s probably going to be between being with Chloe or saving the town. I don’t care though, I’m saving Chloe.”

I was set on that choice and sure enough I called it. The second half of episode 5 basically had both Max (and myself really) go through our relationship with Chloe and those around us and I realized by the time I got to the decision that the game had changed my mind. I’m still not entirely sure what made me change my mind. Maybe it was the severity of the stakes, maybe it was that I realized that it really was the best choice and this is what the story led up to completing Max’s character arc and in many ways my own.

When I realized I had to make the choice to kill Chloe I started crying and then the final scene ran and the crying turned from a stream to a waterfall and it just hit me way harder than I had even come close to expecting. Upon completion I sent my friend a message telling her how much sobbing I had just done and she said she cried but it wasn’t that bad and that she had picked the other ending. She went back and saved the town this time and within minutes of that choice she was freaking out in all caps and sobbing heavily as well.

I hadn’t cried like that in years. This game is powerful, it’s genuine, and it’s incredibly human and I am so glad it exists. A lot of other people have gone through similar emotional experiences and for the hard work and dedication that has brought so many tears to so many eyes I applaud your work Dontnod. I look forward to seeing what else you put out.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 172: Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door

I was told by so many good friends of mine that I *had* to play this game and that it was a fantastic experience. One of those friends of mine even speedruns this game (shoutouts to twitch.tv/the_octopope). Sure enough, they were right. All those characters at the bottom of the picture are just bursting with personality and are so very well written with the exception of Mario himself who, while he never really speaks, still has more personality than any of his other game incarnations.

I never played the first Paper Mario game, but I imagine the board meetings must be a blast since the creativity behind this game is top notch. 

“Hey Paper Mario Designer A, how about we have one chapter where Mario has to fight in arena matches while uncovering a conspiracy behind the event management?”

“Sounds great Paper Mario Designer B, we can put that in somewhere around the time we get to play as Bowser in a loving and goofy homage to the old Mario games”

“Let’s not forget that bit where we launch Mario out of a cannon to the moon!”

“Or the paper airplane power that will allow him to glide across gaps!”

“Can we somehow wrap that in with the phantom who tries to curse you but doesn’t seem to understand the meaning of cursing?”

“Sounds good to me! Maybe we can put that on the ghost pirate island...”

The sound design is great, the writing is fantastic, the use of the popup book visuals is impressive and saturated with the creativity that the team has shown in the writing, and the way this game evolves turn based combat makes for a truly modern take on the genre. Each attack you make adds an optional timing element to deal extra damage or increase your star gauge for super powered attacks. Each attack done to you has a windows of time to react to block some damage and a tighter window to block all the damage and reflect a little bit. It’s a simple idea that is well explored in this game and has even been duplicated in other games like South Park: The Stick of Truth. It really makes the turn-based system feel much more lively.

Additionally, the combat adds a nice bit of flavor to the gameplay by having it all take place on a stage with an audience that can increase or decrease in size based on your performance and is the basis for how quickly you increase that star power gauge mentioned earlier.

One minor thing that I really liked about this game is the fact that all the numbers are very reasonable. Having 80 health is a lot in this game. Most attacks do 1 or 2 damage and this allows for some interesting gameplay designs choices. It makes it so that the basic defense reaction command only blocking one damage consistently throughout the game works nicely on the difficulty curve. As damage from enemies increases, the pressure to go for the tighter counter commands increases as the return from the basic block command diminishes. It also makes defense values for everyone much simpler to understand instead of attack and defense values being obscured by formulas where you just need to guess that your numbers should be higher without a proper understanding of how much better a breastplate with 79 defense vs your chainmail with 70 defense actually is. Really, it just makes everything feel more manageable.

I don’t want to spoil some of the better bits of storytelling, but every time you think you know what’s going on, the game throws something new and unexpected at you. Expecting another dungeon crawl? Turns out that train you’re taking to the macguffin *is* the chapter and you’re now going mystery solving. Expecting Luigi to be frightened or ineffectual? Turns out he’s going on adventures arguably better than yours of questionable veracity.

This game is excellent and I’m super glad I played it. Friends, you were right, and now I pass on their recommendation to you.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 171: Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal

And thus completes my adventure through the original Ratchet and Clank trilogy. Bringing in a lot of the innovations expected from a sequel that were conspicuously missing from the last game, this third installment is fantastic!

This game adds more powerups, even more guns while keeping the old ones making for a truly staggering number available, a level up system for weapons where they get extra powers at max level, and some really cool vehicle sections that are more sandbox-y than the ones in previous installments which I feel works a bit better. In general this game diverts from the standard obstacle courses of the previous games more frequently in favor of sandbox-y segments, but while they make for good combat areas, there is rarely anything to explore beyond hunting enemies. I do wish that they put more effort into these areas and added maybe more hidden screws or something to reward exploration more consistently there.

That said, what Ratchet and Clank does best is not sandboxes but the mostly linear obstacle courses chock full of creativity and challenge and this game fully delivers on its promise. The enemy variety is solid, the controls are tight with each weapon serving a different purpose quite well from the shock cannon used for general wave clear, the shurikens for heavy single target damage, the miniturrets for crowd control, and the lava gun for breaking the arena fights, and the platforming really steps it up a notch in this one with cool mini planet platforming challenges.

Beyond that, the game really knows how to throw you into new scenarios with different gameplay to keep things fresh from the aforementioned vehicle sections and mini planet challenges to the sections where Clank grows 10 stories tall and punches things to the 2D video game within a video game where you play as Captain Qwark.

The level of polish in this game is a mirror shine and despite the fact that I haven’t mentioned the writing yet it’s still the top-notch humor and character development that this series has made me accustomed to and the villain Doctor Nefarious is likely the best of the series so far, but the continued buffoonery of Captain Qwark makes his previous villainy all the more endearing.

Go play this game. I don’t care who you are, you are very likely to enjoy it and if you don’t I will personally send you a card of apology. I’m not joking.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 170: Katamari Damacy

I’ve played many of the games in this series prior, but it was only recently that I beat one from start to finish. Katamari Damacy is an absurd game with completely unique gameplay, a super lighthearted soundtrack, and graphics so low poly it could probably run on some toasters.

The presentation is what makes this game. You start off the game with a tiny ball that you roll around sticking tiny objects such as thumbtacks and erasers to and by the end of it you’re mercilessly decimating entire continents in your endless quest to correct your father’s mistake of accidentally destroying all the stars in the sky. If this were portrayed differently, this could be almost a horror game from the perspective of the monster but because of the bright colorful aesthetics, catchy soundtrack, and the King of the Cosmos providing ridiculous banter over everything you can’t help but play this game with either a goofy grin on the whole time or in complete dead seriousness about how many more geese you can stick to your giant ball before time runs out.

The gameplay here is simple: roll around and stick things to your ball so you can get bigger and therefore stick bigger things to your ball. It provides a lot of very satisfying moments when you come back to the area you started in and pick up the whole house where you began the level. There are a few levels which mix things up where you have to stick as many X to your ball as possible, or get as big as you can before picking up one of X. The latter type of mission can get a bit frustrating at times though as what they categorize as X is often vague at best. Example: your mission is to get as big as possible before picking up a cow. The instant you pick up one cow the level ends. By “cow” the game also includes milk cartons, statues of cows, people holding signs with cows on them, etc. Sometimes you don’t realize what you’ve hit that falls under the “cow” category right away, but when it’s clear in-game, the idea makes for a fun level.

This is the sort of game that could have only come out in the PS2 era of gameplay. You couldn’t get away with these kind of shenanigans with modern gaming budgets outside of a Kickstarter campaign but this generation of gaming was one of the best for these risky games as the consoles were limiting developers much less in what they could accomplish yet budgets were still comparatively low to get triple A games out the door. It was a great creative game for its time and it’s still a great creative game now.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 169: Saints Row IV

This game is a love letter to the very idea of fun itself. In what other game can you fly around dressed as Mechagodzilla firing explosions at aliens while listening to a soundtrack of iconic songs where probably half the budget went for licensing? The absurdity alone isn’t what makes this game as great as it is though. It’s certainly what it’s themed around very strongly and further emphasized by the DLC packs involving track variants for the Dubstep Gun (which is exactly what it sounds like) and the opportunity to meet Santa and save Christmas in the most earnest love of the tropes and cliches I’ve ever seen.

For more analysis on the actual themes of the game I strongly recommend Errant Signal’s video. While I absolutely love what this game has put forth on that subject there’s a few different things that I want to focus on.

Balancing the difficulty in a game where the player is given crazy unstoppable superpowers is a herculean task and to give it in a game where the controls feel this tight is nothing short of astonishing, but often times the developers seem to have gotten lazy with making particular areas more challenging by simply taking away the super powers that they’ve trained you so well to use. These parts always bothered me in hindsight but while playing them they didn’t bother me quite as much as they tended to be some of the best balanced areas in the game in terms of challenge. This also might be partially because I got the All-the-DLC Edition so I had this crazy overpowered chain explosion ability that rendered most fights a few steps above trivial. In short, while I shouldn’t complain too much since it was still super cool and fun, I feel developers should be more careful about balancing the DLC weapons. If you want to avoid it, disable the Elements of Destruction DLC.

Another thing about the powers is that they are such a major focus of the game since they are now not only what let you fight crazy hordes of aliens but also what let you move around the city in a very Prototype fashion. The crazy fast running, gliding, and super jumping make the sandbox an absolute blast to simply get around and with tons of collectibles with lots of upgrade cash-ins it’s constantly rewarding. Additionally, the new movement let the developers put in a bunch of specific challenges such as the alien spires that are essentially vertical obstacle courses in the vein of Ubisoft and even though they are clearly poking fun at Ubisoft with them, they really are a blast to navigate as they are designed very well for your abilities. Then again, I’ve always been a sucker for the radio tower bits in Far Cry 3 so I’m basically the target audience there.

The game also has a large focus on developing the characters that have joined your crew over the course of the franchise aping a Mass Effect hub where you can chat with them and also have copious amounts of casual sex with them (even the robot) but what’s more effective is the major character-focused missions where you get to go into the computer simulations of each character’s worst nightmare. These missions allow for some fun trips down memory lane for longtime fans as well as some solid character development even if it may be a bit reductionist when looking back at Shaundi’s character arc since Saints Row 2.

In the process of celebrating the very idea of fun, Saints Row IV by far succeeds at becoming the very fun it loves. It’s not perfect but it lets you shoot black holes at people and has solid writing leading up to a truly excellent ending so it’s hard to complain too much.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 168: Devil May Cry 4

No, not the Special Edition. I haven’t played that yet, but I’ll probably pick it up when it inevitably goes on sale.

This game is disappointing in a way most games aren’t. The mechanics of this game are top-notch, the visuals are fantastic, and overall it captures so much of the fun of DMC3 and gives it tons more mechanical depth despite the vast amount of depth it already had. That said, it feels like the game doesn’t push you over the course of it short 8 hour play time (half of it retreading the same levels with Dante instead of Nero) to really make use of all the mechanics put in place. What is there is very well designed, but it’s just not enough. It left me not just hungry, but starving for more. I want more levels. I want more enemies. I want more bosses. Sadly these are things this game does not provide, nor unfortunately does the special edition seem to do so.

If you want a serious in-depth breakdown of the mechanics I can’t recommend anything short of The Gaming Brit. Seriously, go check out his video on it by clicking here! For a quick summary, Nero makes for an interesting character mechanically with a lot of depth but not too much as to not scare off newcomers to the franchise. When Dante comes in halfway through though, this all goes out the window as Dante is more insanely complex than probably any other hack and slash character ever.

What the game does well though is encouraging the use of all the different options and depth that each character has. There’s a wide variety of enemies and tons of ways to go about dealing with them all while trying to keep your stylish meter high to get the massive scores. The controls all feel simply incredibly satisfying and when you feel in control of what you’re doing you can make the combat look like a super impressive dance of death. The challenge is getting to that level of comfort with the mechanics in the first place.

Because this game is so much about mastering the mechanics, it that makes it all the more unsatisfying that there simply isn’t enough gameplay to really do so. Luckily what is there is super satisfying from Nero’s counter grab and airgrab shenanigans to Dante’s crazy weapons like the briefcase-gun-thing Pandora. 

Speaking of that crazy weapon, there really is a lot of creativity shown in this game overall despite the occasional mediocre puzzles and platforming. The bosses are a blast from the giant frog monster with glowing women bait to the giant plant snake thing and they all have their own battle patterns pushing you to remember all of your combat options to take them down. The weapons in the game range from a normal sword to a sword with a revving engine to an exploding hovering spike generator to a stretchy claw to, again, Pandora which is a gun of such variety and craziness that it puts any other gun I’ve seen in a game to shame.

All in all, would recommend to anyone interested in a game with excellent mechanics or anyone wanting to see why deadlines that are too restrictive can wreck a project. Here’s hoping we get another good adventure with Dante soon.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 167: Star Wars: The Force Unleashed

Let it be known that this is probably the only game I’ve ever played that was also released on the N-Gage. Seriously, I forgot the N-Gage existed.

This is a game I didn’t expect to be great but I expected it to be at least fun and cathartic as I zipped around and blew up countless vehicles, force lightninged hordes of stormtroopers, and overall caused unimaginable havoc with the most overpowered Star Wars character this side of Kyle Katarn. What I got was a game that desperately tries to be God of War but falls apart with all of the worst developer mistakes that can be made for hack and slash gameplay. I remember when this game came out a ton of my friends were saying it was awesome but looking back it looks like it wasn’t terribly well received by game critics (then again, scores might just not have been so inflated back in the era of the N-Gage).

Starkiller (the main character) starts off very powerful from the beginning of the game and you do get some nice moments here and there where you get to feel like a god among men as you clear out an entire room of stormtroopers by force tossing them all into a corner of the room and destroying AT-STs by slicing them in half. Once you get past this though, the frustrations set in. The AT-ST destruction cinematics are replayed so many times, the enemies become resistant to your force powers and get unblockable and nearly undodgeable attacks, your combos that you get rarely feel distinct and useful, and overall the game just becomes less and less fair to the player as it tries to balance out against the odds already stacked so heavily in the player’s favor.

There was one gameplay moment in particular that stuck out for me so much and left me with an incredibly bad taste in my mouth and it’s the scene depicted in the picture I chose for the top. You are tasked with downing a Star Destroyer. You do this by using the force really hard (like, so hard guys); so hard it takes all of Starkiller’s concentration and he can’t use any abilities while grabbing it. During this segment there are infinitely-spawning tie fighters. If you stop pulling on the ship, it returns to its old position. If you get hit by a tie fighter you stop pulling the ship. You need to kill the tie fighters fast enough that the ship hasn’t returned to it’s full, upright position by the time you start pulling on it again. The tie fighters drop health recovery.

In this situation there are no stakes. This situation is nothing but a time sink. The fastest way to kill these tie fighters is through your force lightning but since you can’t lock on you just need to jump and force lightning at the air hoping the lock on system will kick in and kill a ship for you. Then you need to do this about six more times without missing in order to not have the ship undo all the progress you had made on it. This one moment that was meant to feel truly epic, probably the peak moment in this game, is ruined by some awful design choices in how to translate it into gameplay.

This neatly lets me segue into the fact that the story of this game is heavily emphasized and is unfortunately terrible. The characters are bland. So bland that I can only remember the Jedi who lost his sight, the characters from the movies (boy howdy are there a ton of those) and the love interest who has almost as little chemistry with the protagonist as Adam Malkovich had with Samus. I would harp more on this, but the fact that this story takes place before episode IV should really tell you all you need to know.

If you ever wanted a game that has bosses with basically undodgeable attacks, overly-long quick time event finishing moves for about 10% of the enemies, and the most contrived reason ever to have a Darth Maul boss fight then this game is for you. This game made me very mad from a game design perspective and I probably only finished it because of how short it was. That said, afterwards I craved a hack and slash with good gameplay so I played DMC4 which I’ll get to in my next post.

[thethoughtlandfill]

Game 166: Transistor

DON’T WORRY IT’S NOT A SPOILER

Seriously, the first few seconds of the game have you pulling that giant USB-meets-HAL looking thing out of that dude.

Transistor is the second game by Supergiant Games, the makers of indie hit Bastion and boy howdy, did they step up their game. This game somehow looks better, sounds better, has a much more involved story, has tons more polish, and substantially more complicated gameplay. This game is so polished that it has an entire button devoted to letting the main character hum along to the absolutely stunning background music. And let me mention again just how amazingly good that soundtrack is.

The world’s design is super intense with vibrant blues and whites with shocks of red in a style that I’m tempted to describe as future-punk. Knowing more about the world than what it looks like, however, can prove to be a challenge. Supergiant Games has found a different way to integrate gameplay and story than I have seen before and I think I like it but it really does make you work to understand what’s truly going on. The gameplay involves somewhat turn-based combat using powers that you collect over the course of the game. Each of these powers can be used as a main utility, can modify another main utility, or can be used to grant passive abilities. I mainly used this setup to create cluster-stuns, but by using each power in each way you unlock more information about an important person in the city and their history. This encourages creativity and exploration with what works in combat that simultaneously helps you build the lore.

Some of the fun combinations that I ended up having were dashing while leaving behind a dummy clone, shooting fast long-ranged blasts that then explode out into cluster bombs, and even having weakening blasts that damage over time and drain life at the same time. The powers are all somewhat balanced, but some leave a bit to be desired. The mind control power is mostly useless for example, and Jaunt() is way too good to not have in your inventory all the time. Additionally, the fast stun combination makes fights with single enemies trivial, but since that rarely happens it doesn’t break the game too much.

The soothing voice of Logan Cunningham narrates this game again which is amazing as expected, but makes me wonder if Supergiant Games is designing themselves into a corner. He voices the giant USB that Red, our heroine, wields and since she’s mute it makes him the sole voice outside of some other major characters. This time, however, he is not narrating the past, but rather plays an active character in the present showing us that Mr. Cunningham’s voice work expands beyond simple narration. The voice acting he gives is truly moving at some points, and given how well paced the game is, the character arcs really do hit home even if you’re not scrounging for details to understand the plot.

If you want a super pretty game that has super solid and consistent aesthetics that really shows how a development team has grown over the years that is also a blast to play, you can do much worse than Transistor. And if you want to pretend like you know what’s going on in the game to impress your friends at dinner parties, George Weidman does a pretty nice story breakdown here.