Superhot

SUPERHOT, SUPERHOT, SUPETHOP, etc.

The thing that made Portal so successful, you'd think, was it's wonderful excellence in terms of memetic suggestion.You can say a lot of things about Super Hot, but there's a temptation to say what the game instructs you to say instead of actually reviewing what the game actually is. You'd be surprised, once you're "in on the joke".

Me, I don't know, I don't think I really felt much for the joke.

Regardless: Superhot's description almost always starts with a lie. The line is, I believe, a shooter that moves when you move. This isn't precisely true, though it isn't precisely untrue either. Instead, Superhot is a very simple shooter with a single enemy type and a weird meta story I won't get into that moves faster as you move faster, but is always moving just a little.

The end result could actually be described as a FPS-puzzle game, though that 'just a little' thing and certain other components degrade that puzzle element as well. So you end up with a shooter that is puzzling, both in gameplay and description.

Superhot, etc

A slice of Indie: Morphblade

I really liked Gunpoint. My understanding, from reading the news around Gunpoint, was the next game by its developer was Heat Signature, which is this amazing sounding game about ... Actually go google it, but basically it's about being a little tiny space pod that slowly captures larger and larger ships, then battles with those ships, can lose those ships and so forth. I haven't read too much about it since it's like reading about Axiom Verge 2 or Double Dragon Neon 2: They will probably happen, but it is very far away from now in time and I don't want to think about being in my forties.

Regardless, apparently the developer of Gunpoint put out another game, on the third. I learned this when I was browsing through news of the Humble Bundle Monthly, which means not only did the game come out without me knowing but also entered a position of me owning it without knowing I was owning it beforehand. Which is pretty nice.

Holiday Card: Hade

At some point I stopped being able to do more card grinding games and moved onto actually playing games again. But Hade, Hade was the last of them. And Hade was a pretty good game to end on.

There isn't a great deal I can say about Hade, much of it is visually obvious. Hade is a single screen at a time puzzle game about bouncing 1 or more balls around a map to collect "hints". This might have common ground with other puzzle games, but I must admit I don't really have a lot of puzzle experience. Every couple of levels, Hade spins up the difficulty, and then settles back down as it introduces new mechanics. I got through maybe a quarter of the game and saw a good 10~ or so different mechanics in action, which would then generally build up to combining them together before adding something new and building back up once again.

The mechanics range simple directional changes, to pad that change direction depending on how you approach, to barriers, to one shot versions of all of this and extensions on the nature of several of these. There's a lot of variety. A couple of the levels do feel rather similar to earlier ones, but usually it feels like you're re-doing the earlier map with a more complex set of mechanics at your disposal.

Visually Hade is extremely simple. The audio cues are good, and the music track is a somber, gentle affair sort of going on the background. There's not a ton to say here, it's a simple puzzle game. I would recommend a 144hz VA panel for it, though. You really want those inky blacks. Yeah, buy a $300 monitor to play a $3 game.

What Hade does well, and what kept me playing far longer than any recent puzzle game I can bring to mind, is the fact Hade does not waste time. You open the game, navigate two menus to a puzzle, and then you're playing the puzzle. If you screw up, you reset with a click, you start with a click, everything is smooth and brisk. It's totally laser focused on puzzle action without any baggage dragging you down around it. I really found myself appreciating that, but ultimately, I started to dread the 'upswing' in the difficulty curve. You'd get a new mechanic and slam through three puzzles, then it started to get hard again. There's a great ah-ha moment, but it started to take me longer and longer.

Ultimately, I'm just not that big on puzzle games. Would I recommend Hade to people who like puzzle games? I want to say yes, but I might be wrong in that. I liked it, though.

Holiday Card: Pirate Pop Plus

There are various points in the nostalgia triggering spectrum that is gaming where gaming was, in a word, pretty ugly. Truly retro pixel art, that is, atari style is pretty hideous. Early 3D is pretty grim - I don't mean the sprite based faux-3d of Duke Nukem or Doom, but the shortly after those titles. But one of the true stand-outs for ugliness is the original gameboy.

I played many hours on the original Gameboy, so the four "color" LCD stylings of Pirate Pop Plus look fine to me. The faceplate, seen in the screenshots, adds to the effect and reminds me of playing Gameboy Color emulators (or whichever, the one Metroid Fusion was on) which is pretty pleasant. But I would totally understand if you took one look at these screenshots, turned three hundred sixty degrees and bubble-walked right out of the room.

Anyway, PPP is a rehash of a decade(s) old arcade game, Pang or Buster Bros or honestly who knows which? I can remember playing this game years back in the arcade, but I could never remember the name. Essentially, in this case, a pirate appears on screen and produces a bubble. When you hit the bubble with your harpoon, it pops in two or three smaller bubbles. Repeated down one size and once you've obliterated the bubble or take too long he's back again with another bubble. And repeat til you lose. PPP distinguishes itself with a world-flipping mechanic, in which the pirate appears at random and picks up, down, left or right to be the new down. Often he'll pick the direction you're already facing, but then you can shoot him in the ass.

PPP also has a currency system, in which gold coins drop and can be traded into a vendor for new characters, new music and then a lot of silly stuff that doesn't do overly much but is sort of fun. The cosmetic side is cute, but requires a lot of grinding that likely goes beyond how much fun you'll get out of the game. I had a good two hours with it, and I'd probably play it more, but I have so many games to work my way through you know how it is.

The gameplay on the most part is quite enjoyable. When the gravity gets flipped, you have a weird bonus round where you can 'land' on bubbles to pop them very quickly. If this happens at the right time, you can rack up quite a few bonus points, but it's also the most dangerous point. When you first touch the ground, you bounce, and you can't fire while you're in the air. The end result is a period of extreme vulnerability, which isn't much fun and is basically the main point I die at. The other thing is your spear can ONLY ever pop one bubble, which frankly isn't well thought out on the developer's part. You can end up in the later levels with piles of bubbles all clumped together and chain spearing just won't get through them all. Not sure why it doesn't linger for a split-second to pop multiple.

You can also run into an issue where you fire a spear as the pirate appears, and drive it into his rump while expecting to hit something else. End result is much the same.

In conclusion, I'd say PPP is good if the graphical style tickles your fancy. It's a fun little game with a little grind on the side to make it a bit more interesting. I do wish it had more power ups, or perhaps more interesting power ups as most of them are pretty dull. Definitely a lot better than, oh, quite a few titles I fired up while grinding cards only to find them utterly unplayable.

Witch cards will drop: Ittle Dew

If you look at my Steam game playing history in terms of hours spent, I tend to gravitate toward somewhat less action-y, somewhat more think-y games but rarely all that think-y. I'm not a puzzle guy, not really, I lack patience. I always have. I do like turn based 4x games; the reason I haven't reviewed many (or any, I'd have to check) ends up with the feeling they eat time like no other. It's kinda hard to write about a game you should probably put a good hundred hours into to get a real feel for what it's like.

I do like puzzles in some games, though. I remember the sci-fi grounded puzzles in Dead Space really fondly. Clearing jams in the artificial gravity unit or life support wings were cool, generally unique ideas. But puzzle games themselves are generally the same thing repeated over and over. Push a block. Push a block. Now, push a block.

Generally, I think the biggest issue is one of general pacing - puzzle games tend to be sluggish and mistake the deliberate pace of the puzzle gameplay with something the game should have at all points in the production. It often feels like half the challenge is not getting bored out by having to slowly shove blocks around a room while your character moves at the speed of a waterborne slug.

Ittle Dew is a block pushing puzzle game. It was done by, previous to, the same individual(s) who put out Card City Nights, which was a pretty fun single player card game. It has the same tongue in cheek sense of humor and shares the same basic art style, albeit in a somewhat different setting than whatever you want to say CCN was in.

Inaccurately named: Gunpoint

I'm not a historian and I don't know when it happened, but at some point advertising took over the naming of things. Probably in the sixties, but probably like the 60s BC. A flashy name was worth more than actually, I don't know, describing the contents of the project. Thusly we have Gunpoint, a game in which I was shot about a hundred times but never held at Gunpoint, and only shot a singular person throughout the entire campaign. The developer straight up admits he came up with the name and built a game that got away from the name.

Your character is holding a gun on the box so... Actually I guess it's kind of a reverse spoiler or something... Well, whatever. Gunpoint is a puzzle game, a genre rarely recognized for its thrilling action-o-matic scenes. Actually it might be better described as a Noir detective ninja puzzle game, or maybe a spy thriller puzzle game. You're described as a spy, but you look more like a noir era detective. It's a spy game, basically, in that fantasy realm of spy games that I don't think we get that many of any more.

Well, there isn't a box. If there was a box, then he'd be holding a gun on the box. Or the tin, if you bought the hypothetical nonexistent collector's edition.

It's also a pixel art game. If you've been reading my reviews for a while, you probably realize I'm a little enamored with pixel art games. Good pixel art, mind you, which can be minimalist like Risk of Rain or incredibly detailed like Sonic Mania. There's lots of bad pixel art, lots and lots, people just taking the easy way out and making something "retro".

I wouldn't describe Gunpoint as retro. In fact, the juxtaposition of elements and ideas in Gunpoint are such that it really ends up defining itself by stringing together those elements into something that feels familiar but also unique.

Two pack review: Puzzles Galaxies and Save Halloween: City of Witches

So much like the last time I did a two pack, this is two smaller indie games I didn't get that much play out of. On the plus side, they're both puzzle games, so at least it feels like we have a theme this week.

You can actually get the gist of Puzzle Galaxies basically from looking at the screenshots - which look nice - in that it is a "match four on a platform" game. You highlight two platforms at a time and transfer crystals until a platform is homogeneous, and then it locks off. After you get all the platforms done, the little space station launches and that's the entire game. This is pretty good for being a relaxing, simple brain puzzle you can play at a little to mellow out. It certainly looks fine, and as bundle fare goes, it's fine.

Except it has enemies who pick up and steal crystals to swap them around. This is such an odd decision, since you often end up in the last 25% of a board waiting for the enemies to drop their crystals. There is nothing lamer in a game than sitting there waiting on a timed board for the game to move on, but here you go and there it is. I wouldn't really recommend puzzle galaxies, as it is very simple and yet doesn't really do well with being a simple relaxation game for that. Also, it only has four music tracks, which get repetitive quite quickly.

I would, oddly enough, recommend Save Halloween. I know for a fact I got this game from a groupees greenlight bundle, where I honestly remember seeing it and expecting like a trash HOG or VN or something. But those basically always have cards, so like, why wouldn't you pick it up in a $1.50 bundle you're going to make fat stacks of card bux on?

Instead, Save Halloween is actually a very campy themed match 3 game with a ridiculous amount of variety. The board shapes change with pieces flopping on on the dialogue, the piece icons change, you get lots of power ups and upgrades you gradually unlock by adding things "to your house" which is of course a spooky Halloween looking mansion. It also has various roadblocks to slow your progress, like parts of the board being blocked off til you break barriers or spiders that spread til you destroy them. Oh, also you get activated abilities, though I didn't get far enough to unlock all of them. The game at its core is very simple, but with timed mode off it is extremely relaxing and plays quite smoothly. Most boards are completed by meeting certain criteria, and the game even has vaguely boss battles. I say vaguely because they're not especially vicious, but they do add to the variety.

The art assets especially are just so ridiculous, and the early steps of the game are voiced - and then replaced with text only and suddenly all the grammar in the game breaks. It's not a "good" game, but it is weirdly delightful and I think I'll buy a copy for my mom on sale day just to see her laugh at it since she's a big halloween fan. I wouldn't recommend it if you want something really stunning out of your five bucks, but it's certainly a solid enough match-3 if you're looking for one to goof around with.

I can't really explain the deal with the voice acting dropping off five levels in and being replaced by euro-broken english. It's just very strange. You only paid the woman to voice like, all of four or five lines? And only paid for the translation on like 17 clips?

Still, it honestly just adds to the silly camp humor.

Two pack review: an Imp? A Fiend! & Astaral Breakers

I run into this issue from time to time where a game just doesn't have enough meaningful content to discuss in a broad, long review. Having hit on two of these games in a row, and having posted nothing in months, I guess I'll lump these two together.

 An Imp? A Fiend is about the easiest game type in the universe to review. It is a torture platformer, more in line with Super Meat Boy than something like There Was a Caveman, which I enjoyed a heck of a lot more than either of the former. This is a platformer with rotating saw blades, double jump, wall jump and a lot of the usual suspects. Pixel artwork, boilerplate soundtrack, etc.

The game is... Bad sort of in relative terms. There's nothing really distinguishing here, except that your imp is pretty good in a fight, but the game is just a bit of a chore without much pay off. Screens are filled with enemies, which is lame, but the real bummer is when you get to the first town and basically no one says anything. Just screen after screen to waddle through, with NPCs that shouldn't be in the game and extra busywork. For the one town you acquire the key, but you have to thaw the key out, only nothing really implies this... So you just wander around til you find that exact spot and yeah it's pretty not great.

I got about thirty minutes of amusement here. The controls are good, and I like how your little imp doesn't exactly feel like a slouch, but eventually you start smashing your face into screens filled with spikes and saws, and it's just not that exciting. That's all there is to the game, but it's not really quite as quick or nuanced as better versions of the genre. It feels like it could use a bit more polish and a lot more consideration of game flow.

Astral Breakers is a tetris vein puzzle game of ... Oddly limited means. I was fiddling around with the new Genesis Hub thing where I have a copy of Columns, and the game is very reminiscent more of Columns somehow than pure Tetris ... But even then not all that much.

Basically you drop 1 singular colored block at a time, which is unusual. The blocks are completely nonreactive and won't disappear by themselves. At seemingly random points, the game gives you the breaker power up, which you can enable with a keystroke. The power up is added to whatever color you currently have, and it 'breaks' all connected blocks of that color. You can aim the powered up blocks at blocks of another color, they won't break, and this - in theory - sets up the combo system.


As far as I can tell, the game is about that. You can set up combos by having 'breaker' blocks set up to fall on their matching color, but I honestly found this just about never happened, because you're always competing against an opponent and whenever they do a break random crap spews on your screen.

Oh, and the game has an adoreable little intro video with a little star. D'awww.

Frankly, this game is probably a good introduction to puzzle games since it feels very under your control, but it's not a Tetris, not a columns and definitely not a Bejeweled. Maybe if you wanna give a kid a non-violent but simple game, it would work there, but for me there's just not enough to recommend it.


Anyway, I generally wouldn't recommend either of these games. An Imp? is a decent torture platformer, but I'm a poor judge of the genre since I hate these kinds of games. Astral Breakers is just too simple for its own good. It just doesn't grab you, even though it is a quality presentation.

The shadow of potential: Contrast

Contrast is humorously unique to me, for a couple of silly reasons. For one, the visual style and core concepts are just subjectively very appealing. For two, I swore off buying non-bundled games last year and Contrast didn't go on a deep enough sale until day 1 of that very same year. So I didn't buy it then, and actually, I can't remember how I bought it this year, and for three that sense of "not especially memorable" manages to permeate everything about the experience of the game.

Contrast apparently didn't do well on a financial and possibly critical level, and it isn't that hard to see why. Superbunnyhop reviewed it back in the day, but he also had an interview with one of the developers, who sounded rather ... Negative about the game's short-term sales. It might have done better in the long term, that proverbial spiky tail of the fictional dinosaur, but I kinda doubt it.

I'm kinda down on this game, if you haven't noticed.

It's about robots: Primordia

So, I'd be the first to admit I couldn't tell you the difference between a puzzle game, a HOG or an adventure game or any of the myriad divisions. I mean some games are puzzle games, but there are also games which have puzzles in them? They are puzzling but not puzzled out? I would also be the first to tell you that I delight in robots - robots are very important to me. And Primordia is about robots.

Or it is sort of.

Primordia is a well-written adventure (!?!) game centered on a robot with a wacky pun spewing sidekick that has to solve the essential problem of power, since another robot showed up, shot him and took his "power core" that provides power to his ship. And oddly that song does fit the theme of the game, somehow. The game's story slowly comes together, and I don't really want to spoil elements, but I found it sort of an interesting take on post-apocalypse sort of things since the robots don't really recognize it as such. Or much of anything as such, but since they're robots, you go yeah ok this makes sense.

There isn't a lot to say about Primordia, given the gameplay is very simply and very soothing. The characters, pardoning the one, are very interesting and unlike Morningstar they're not intentionally pushed to be annoying. I wish I could have screenshotted more of the sidekick's puns, but unfortunately the game won't allow you to use the steam overlay screenshot tool OR the raptr screenshot tool (how that is even possible is beyond me) but will allow you to screenshot using the printscreen key.

Which makes no sense! Unfortunately that also advances the dialogue, so I'd see something funny and then the game would eat it. Sigh.

Card to Kill: Block Legend DX

I end up with a lot of games from groupees bundles, as I've mentioned earlier. The current system tends to poop out 1-2 games every two weeks, which tends to give me a lot of games to process into cards. Block Legend DX was sort of interesting to me because I immediately felt regret I'd added it to my Steam account when I could have given it to someone else.

After playing it for ten minutes, that emotion faded.

Block Legend DX is oddly enough a match two game, in a somewhat similar vein to Puzzle Quest. Unlike Puzzle Quest, the tiles you match can not be manipulated and only activate when clicked on, as well as offering their unique effect when triggered. You can match up melee attacks, spells, healing, blocking, so on and so forth. There is some bonus for chaining the same tile repeatedly, and they do more if you match up more than the initial two. You shape your character with leveling, so different classes and different leveling paths will result in a different evaluation as to which blocks to trigger.

You can also heal, which is slow, but more you're supposed to put up your 'shield' to block. The block bar is much shallower than your health pool, but much faster to refill, so combat sort of forms an odd rhythm of refilling your bar and then returning to whichever other element you're triggering. Out of combat, the blocks remain, which gives you a chance to reshape the "terrain" of your field and refill your various stats.

The game is all done up in cute, ye olde Final Fantasy style sprites or whichever sprites you associate with these. The game is definitely pleasant to look at, as it is very simple but very colorful and lively. A lot of it actually sort of wasted, since while you're staring at the tiles and trying to figure out your next six moves, your little character is dancing around, waving his or her weapon and frolicking while the enemy does as well.

The music is brutal. The tracks are about 23 seconds long and sound like Gameboy tracks. Not GBA. Original gameboy. The game also likes to play very, very loudly when you first start it up, which was unpleasant. It's weird how it looks so nice - I mean it's retro pixel style, but it's colorful and well done - but sounds so awful. It's all abstractions anyway, but there's a lot of effort put into the art, even if I think it's a mobile port.
 
The core system is actually pretty good, and each game takes about 10-20 minutes to play before ending. The first couple times you play the game, it's pretty sweet, then the bitter reality of the game starts to set in.

You march forward in a straight line, encountering random enemies along the way to the boss. There will be two, and exactly two, towns on each stage. 90% of the time, the town is useless, as it is either impossible to have the gold necessary to do anything, or you've already spent the gold on something else. Or you don't need an item, so it's still useless. You would think the developers would, I don't know, put something useful in the initial towns. I mean this seriously, you just can't have as much gold as it wants you to have early on, because they lazily have all towns scaled to the same costs throughout the game. So there's basically no point to it being there, and no one bothered to fix that because...? I don't know.

The problem really comes in as a matter of difficulty and just pointlessness. Random enemies are basically hapless, even if they were threatening, you can heal up between encounters. They become somewhat relevant on the third or I assume later boards, but they're still basically 30 seconds of who cares in between 30 seconds of who cares. So after it kicks in it doesn't matter, you just march forward to the boss, and the boss is dramatically more difficult. You need to hit a rhythm of block block heal attack attack in between boss swipes, which can be very difficult to do, or not difficult at all. If you chain enough damage combos you can flatten most of the early bosses, and if the game is receptive you can just set it up so you do.

This is a block matching game, after all, and while you can shape the initial field you get when you encounter the boss, you can't really play too many moves ahead while trying to play keep ahead on the block block matching. Most of the time, I found I died to a boss with it below 50% health, but I ran out of block blocks and just died. Or couldn't heal. Or it three shot me. Or it didn't give me any way to actually do damage to the boss.

On top of that, whenever the boss makes a move, you can't input any moves. Between the slow progression of tiles falling into place and the jilting inability to make a move every couple seconds, bosses are dramatically more difficult while not really intense in the right way. And you ONLY die on bosses, so the rest of the game is a huge waste of time. Lastly, and bizarrely, when you complete a quest it flashes a big old quest complete across the entire screen. It can and often will do this midbattle, which just adds to disjointed nature of the boss fights. Since the boss fights aren't very good, and they're the entire focus of the game, the game ends up ... Not very good.

So, basically, you spend about ten minutes or longer getting to the second or third stage boss, then you hope that RNG doesn't screw you or it splatters you in short order while you're essentially defenseless. On top of all of that, the game punishes you further for RNG if you run out of moves. Yes, when you're playing zenmode Bejeweled 3 it is possible to line up moves to make certain you don't deplete, but here you're trying to go block block heal attack attack, and the game is vomitting unnecessary blocks at you.

The item system is kinda shitty too. You can buy items in towns (assuming by some miracle you have enough gold, which is rare) or you can get them from matching the 'item' blocks. Yes, there's an entire set of blocks that eventually give you loot, which fills up a bar on the left hand side. Once it fills, you get an item, though I'm not entirely certain how it works entirely. You're supposed to use items on bosses, but you generally ends up in such a hectic rush that the whole process feels even more disjointed and shitty, assuming you found anything useful at all, which most of time you didn't.

Fundamentally, while I enjoyed my first hour with Block Legend DX, I wouldn't bother playing a second hour. It's just too rng driven, and the roguelike nature of the game means you're back to level 1 killing farting fairies again if the game spawns too many of the not-useful-in-combat blocks. I'm sure I could play better, but the issue here is that you barely get any practice playing the "real" game. It's minute after minute of grinding nonsense, then finally real combat that can be over before it began with a few bad falls. The core of the game isn't too bad, but there's too many block types, you can't swap blocks around and it just feels so random in a really bad way. Also the game's flow is terrible, and you're basically given no time to do anything.

Card to Kill: Final Dusk

I end up with a lot of card spewing games from Groupees that I would never normally play. As I write this, Steam enhanced reports of remaining card drops my account has $47 CDN sitting there. While some of that is bugged and some of that will be taken by Valve, you can get an idea of just how many Card games I end up with.

Mechanically Final Dusk is a puzzle game where the vampire girl runs along a set path, and then there are a variety of objects to interact with. The vampire girl has brain problems, likely from listening to the music on loop, and has to be guided, prodded and protected with all your bat energy otherwise she turns to stone and a pointless sad game over screen appears. I feel like this is a pretty normal puzzle game, sort of akin to a more interactive physics puzzle, but somehow it doesn't quite have the pleasing feeling a puzzle game does.

From the second level on, the game presents you the option of using your ... Bat-ness? ... to cover objects. This is about 3 minutes into the game, and I already hit a snag. The controls indicate you press 'Q' to use your bat powers to cover a light source, but the game doesn't explain how this actually vis-a-vis works.

It is always a good sign when the wordy, irritating blob of tutorial text doesn't actually cover how to properly use a skill. Also I noticed running it in windowed mode it had that moronic "windowed but locked" set up, where your cursor can't escape the window. That is optional, mind you, but I'm not really sure why it should ever be turned on. As far as I can tell after a good twenty minutes of limping through levels, you press 'Q' and then slide your mouse over the object you want to cover... Once I figured that out, I could get the mechanic to work most of the time, but not always. It never felt quite consistent.

If there's one thing you don't want out of a puzzle game, it is even the slightly margin of error introduced in the control scheme. Certainly it is ultimately user error, but I'm not even sure why it is possible to make such an error.

Art asset wise, Final Dusk has the weird smell of clip-art ... But other than that is actually quite crisp, clean looking and maybe a little weird if you don't like ... I dunno what we're supposed to call the princess here. They clearly portray her as a bratty teenager, so we'll say she's 16 and pretend? Ok? Anyway her sprites are good, the bat sprites are good, and cutscene art is pretty nice looking. I guess I can forgive it, since she's sexualized in sort of the "for teenage girls" ways, and I sort of imagine this game is aimed at teenage girls so maybe there you go?

Or you know, waifu hunters.

The music is awful. Like really, really awful. There was one track that just bored a hole in my skull until I turned it off, maybe there were other tracks later on but I didn't hear them because I feared permanent brain damage. I then put on the tracks for Sol Survivor, which are really good and make for excellent ambiance while doing puzzle games that don't otherwise have good sound tracks. Like this one.

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I got to a level early on where I realized you're supposed to, in the planning stages, winch furniture up an elevator. Like you move the dresser over to the elevator and then you - yes, I'm serious - crank it up "by hand" to the next floor. During the planning phase. I don't know what happened, I blacked out for a moment and when I came to the game was uninstalled from my computer. It is a mystery!

Anyway I like the basic ideas behind Final Dusk's gameplay, and the art is actually nice, but the control issue is just so freaking irritating that it makes the game frankly impossible to enjoy on any level. Between fighting with the controls and the tedium of slowly setting up the levels to run the track, and the game deriding you for "setting a checkpoint" when all it does is redo all the nauseating busywork because the controls flaked out on me, I just kinda fell asleep in my chair. I really don't want to repeat the two minutes dragging furniture around. If I wanted that type of gameplay, I'd stop putting off cleaning my basement.

I do feel like maybe I'm not the target audience. Maybe this game is for twelve year old girls, not me, and that's fine, but I still kinda actively hated my time with it.

I completely forgot to post this one back when I finished the game. I always feel bad posting negative reviews. Then I tried playing it again. God, the music, urgh.

Whoops forgot to play games month: Remember Me

Yeah, kinda forgot to do much in the way of proper gaming for the month of august. I did play a great deal of MMDOC and some Beatbuddy, but neither are really worth talking about. Beatbuddy, as an ultra short review, is very pretty and relaxing but ultimately just rather dull. I'd hit puzzles where the solution was "swim very fast" and just stare at the screen in confusion. Because I was bored. Remember Me, however, is an interesting enough bit to actually get into.

I have to admit I was really excited, or at least mildly excited, about this game when I first saw images of it. The concept work is really interesting stuff, the memory ideas seemed neat as well, though it does have this sort of weirdly sanitized drug culture feeling to it. I was also really shocked at the general sentiment in the media that the main character was considered in someway unmarketable. Really? Nilin is like the best looking new protagonist design I've seen in years. Supposedly the issue is she's female, and men don't want to look at a girl when playing a third person game.

I dunno, this is just not something I'm wired to understand.

Remember Me, as to the game itself, is a touch weird to get into. The game is the strangest mix of high concept and generic video game. An hour in and it is still spewing random tutorials at you or vaguely explaining boring stuff like 'hit guy with special power up to break up the monotony!' and you're like 'zzzzz'. Nilin's gorgeous model aside, the game is pretty boilerplate. Inversely, the world of neo-Paris is fantastic, a really unique near future bit of sci-fi with lots of craziness and world building, all centered around what legitimately feels like a hopelessly defanged portrayal of drug culture.

On the other hand, neo anything feels like a dated 80s reference. Who calls anything Neo anything after the Matrix? I'm sure there's a guy in his late teens or mid-twenties who is like 'Neo-Paris? Keanu Reeves Paris? Whoa, what?'

Back to forming plats and stuff: Rogue Legacy

So a couple of weeks back I finished up my write up on Guacamelee! and I felt kinda bad about it. The game was really charming, and much of the time I really enjoyed it, but it had multiple elements that just made me grind my teeth or get bored. Part of it I wrote off as simply a matter of platformers. I've played a couple here and there over the last few years, with few of them feeling as good as Sonic Classics or New Super Mario on the DS. Was that world? Whatever. Anyway, I did the only sensible thing about uninstalling a platformer I got fed up with - I went through my list of pending card games and immediately installed another platformer.

Rogue Legacy is a delightfully inspired fusion of ARPG, roguelike (or the genre that fundamentally spawned ARPGs anyway) and platformer with beautiful properly retro graphics that settles on basically dying, and passing to your offspring a horrible quest to be maimed horribly in the hopes of eventually, one day, taking down that damn nasty castle. The game really reminds me of Act Raiser, actually, on the visual level. It's a little bit weird since it reminds me of both parts of Act Raiser at once but hey that's cool.

So given I've been frustrated and irritated with platformers since like, 2010 or something, you'd imagine I installed this game, played it for ten minutes then uninstalled after I brutally died three times in very short order, right?

Actually maybe it reminds me of Soulblazer. Maybe it reminds me of 16-bit era games in a general way. In a good way. But not of Super Castlevania, which I played back in 2011 and found did not age quite as well as I'd hoped. Can I go with 'it reminds me of Quintet? Does anyone ever remember who that is?

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Clickr

I actually played Clickr well past the point of getting my cards, but somehow it just sounds like a pun name suits a silly little game. Clickr was on my wishlist, on Steam, for a long time before a friend bought it for me for Christmas after I bought them a game a day for a week or something. Steam sales are good for buying but they're really good for gifting!

Clickr is a very simple to learn puzzle game that relies on little more than three button presses. First and foremost is 'the clickng' which allows you to remove most pieces from the playing board with a click of the mouse. Your goal in doing so is to produce four squares of the same color, which join up to become a clickable big square that generates points. The game also allows you to rotate the board, with gravity always obeying whatever down currently is. There is little more on the basic level than this, you can also get 'turn squares' which increase points, chain combos and some game modes have 'block' and 'star' pieces which behave slightly differently. There's a fair amount of depth in the core gameplay even if the basics are very, very simple.

Presentation wise Clickr appears to me to be rather, well, Asian in origin with very cute graphics and an adorable sound track filled with happy noises. Apparently the studio behind the game is from South Korea, which wasn't my first guess, but I won't post my first guess since it kinda shows how poor I am as a white canadian man at telling different cultures apart. I digress; the game is smooth looking, the interface is good and like I said it is filled to the brim with large amounts of cute. My only real complaint with the art style and presentation lies with the skin feature. The game allows you to reskin it to your pleasure, but there's only three skins, which it could have used more!

In terms of content there really isn't a "basic" Clickr game. You open with puzzle mode, which is actually far more cerebral than it appears at first blush. I didn't really notice until stage 21 (which, if you buy the game, you'll probably notice as well) as to what is going on. After that you get battle mode and push mode, which are sort of "vs" game modes against the AI. Battle mode requires paying attention to the other player far more than push mode, with rewards for timing your stars and minetraps against the AI's wave of forces. It's a good extension to the main game, and fun in its way. Lastly there's a puzzle mode that centres more around turning than clicking, which is referred to as IQ mode. IQ mode feels like a more nuanced shifting block puzzle.

Each of the main modes will have a handful of additional tweaked modes based on them, such as a battle mode where you don't get stars but get tons of stones to make mines with instead. Most of these game modes are slightly different, but don't really offer a big enough change up to really make you enjoy a mode you've grown tired of.

Regardless, if there is one complaint about Clickr it ties back to why I had the game on my wishlist in the first place. I don't really go in for puzzle or match games. I really liked Bejeweled 3, but I only played it for a week or two before getting tired of it. You know who does like Bejeweled 3 a ton? My mother. So I've been looking for other puzzle games to put on her computer, and Clickr unfortunately does not fit the bill. There really aren't many casual modes for this game and the relaxing content dries up after the first hour. Past that, it isn't a casual game, and after a while success required something like 2 clicks per second. I'm not really fretting, it was never for me and I did have fun with it, but it's not casual enough to gift to my mother.

There's nothing really wrong with clickr, other than being a bit too hard, but if you're looking for another match puzzle game to fiddle with, it's a well made title with some cutesie graphics and a silly sound track. The presentation is good and the game, while simple, is pretty good.

Ya know you want to do more than stare: 2013 in review

As with last year, this is a set of mini reviews summarizing my recollections of games I played over the course of 2013. Unlike last year, I'm going to be really frank about something: I don't necessarily recall, with perfect accuracy, how I felt about the games while I was playing. This is more or less a summary of how I feel about them a week, a month or almost a full year afterwards. This is after digestion, these are the lasting impressions.

I divide this into four categories, which work in the following somewhat conflicting ways. Category A is the games I think, regardless of your tastes, you should give a serious look at and try because I really enjoyed them. Category B, inversely, are game I think you should try only if you like the genre they're in, but otherwise I felt pretty highly about them. Category C are games I liked or sort of like, but I'm not really recommending unless you're already inclined towards them, or I had problems with getting them running. Category D lastly are games I just stopped playing and/or can't really see personally ever telling anyone to play.

You may notice this review system is entirely subjective. While I do my best to be impartial about things that aren't objective in nature, the truth of the matter is, you're going to have to look at my reviews and decide if you agree with me or don't. If you do, then my opinion is worthwhile, but if you don't maybe you like the games I don't like, and vice versa. As an aside, where I put my experiences does not interrelate with where you put yours. If you really liked a game and I didn't, it doesn't matter, it just means we disagree and you can probably look at the review to figure out why. I get hung up on stuff that doesn't matter to most people, but I do tend to talk about why.

To me, that's the idea, to talk about flaws and facets, and then maybe other people can figure out from my subjective opinions how they'd mesh with their subjective opinions. Because ultimately we're not all that objective, except I will say I'm a fanboy of absolutely goddamn nothing and that's my thing.

Also these reviews are not, as with last year, of games entirely from MY 2013. Many of them are older, but some are more recent, but I feel like hey - how often do you get to read a review of complete games years later, or compared to modern titles? The point here is to discuss if this $5 title is still worth your money four years after its release, and how shit ages, and if we have time how many donkeys power uPlay.
 

The Secret of Success is Card Work: Gravi

Puzzle, or more specifically torture platformers are not "for me". I take some solace in the fact that they're not really for most people, though there is a very vocal minority who clamour about them and I guess buy them. So I'm willing to admit, Gravi isn't for me but in spite of that it's actually still pretty neat. I don't mean that in the sense of They Bleed Pixels, though I guess mechanically it was pretty cool too. I mean Gravi is a neat take on a puzzle platformer that uses different mechanics as opposed to adding different mechanics on top of the base.

Gravi, which is also the main character, can not jump. Instead he can project matter onto surfaces, and that matter (depending on the size of the projectile) will attract him. There are two different projectile settings, either shooting a fifth of his load at a time, or all of it at once, which changes the range of the attraction as well as shrinking Gravi. Sometimes you want to be smaller, and sometimes abruptly becoming too big will kill you as well.

In other words Gravi isn't based on pixel perfect jumping, it's based on looser physics based trick shots and has an odd feeling to it that almost feels like playing pool, but with jumping puzzles? It's hard to articulate the exact strange feeling of the game, and while the difficulty isn't exactly level it fits in with the strangeness. It's mechanically different and while physics based puzzles have been a thing for a long time it's just its own sort of weird I guess. Also, Gravi doesn't adhere strictly to being a puzzle platformer - Sometimes a set of hazards are to be overcome with slapdashing forward, or precise timing, or a mix of all three, which creates a looser feeling in my mind that helps keep the "torture" platformer feeling from setting in. It's not always that you're failing the jump by two pixels, it's sometimes that you haven't figured out what you want to do and sometimes you need to let go, jam the directional stick forward and just blind luck your way through.

However, while I was hoping to get through a decent chunk of the game before just writing it off, Gravi is ultimately just another torture platformer, albeit it does have its own sense of flow and style that makes it a bit more interesting for a while. I eventually brick walled and received an achievement for dying too many times, which just prompted me to close, then uninstall, the game. Torture platformers have an element where you can tell the level development just went through a process of adding spikes or other hazards hap-hazardously and willy nilly to "increase the challenge". The problem is, honestly, you play torture platformers to overcome the difficult moments. No one is going to feel a sense of accomplishment over not twitching 2 pixels too far to the left and dying at a point the developer just randomly slapped some spikes onto "because um spikes go in torture platformers hurk". It's just brain dead design.

The game is pretty charming for a while, and as you can tell, I got a good hour of chillout gaming from it before it just spike walled me off from the rest of the content. While I know I'm not the target audience, having realized somewhere between They Bleed Pixels and Giana Sisters that PC platformers aren't for me, I'm actually not sure how good this game is as a torture platformer. The controls are weird and loose, and while the music is fantastic the graphics are a bit unnecessarily drab, which doesn't make for a great presentation. It is physics based, and while that's neat in places, Gravi is kinda hard to control at times which may turn off fans of the genre. Without that I'm somewhat at a loss as to who this game is aimed at.

I also had a lot of issues with Gravi's hit box, which feels oddly shaped, and several of the pinpoint movement sections seemed to kill him out of hand. I also couldn't tell if shrinking reduced his hitbox. The screenshot on the right is where I gave up on the game, and while I experimented with using the size changing and different mass shots to try to squeeze past, I couldn't determine if I was messing up the precision jump or if I needed to be smaller. Because I died most often to the incidental shit around it, I couldn't nail it down and just ended up getting sick of the sloppy controls then deleting the game. I don't think this is how puzzle platformers are supposed to work and like I said, it just feels like brain dead design.

I don't mind dying a hundred times to a challenging part. I'm not going to enjoy it, but I don't mind it conceptually. I do mind dying 80 times to incidental garbage for no reason to get 20 decent attempts on the jump. So, like I said, I'm not sure who wants to play this and I'm not sure a game that could have been a sweet chill out title didn't lean back a little on the stupider pinpoint precision jumping puzzles.

I got Gravi through a groupees greenlight bundle. The soundtrack is really good.