DrBloodmoney's Super Scientific Ranking of Games!

[CelestialRequiem]

On 1/10/2023 at 7:20 AM, DrBloodmoney said:

Dead Space Ignition

 

Summary: 

A fairly near idea as a tie-in to Dead Space 2 - a motion-comic choose your own adventure, mixed with puzzle game blend, serving both as a teaser, and potential tie-in / unlock for the (at the time, unreleased) bigger game - Dead Space Ignition was a novel concept... however, that novelty was about the only thing really noteworthy about it.

 

The motion-comic art is fairly uninspired - and actually, quite amateurish in places - and the three mini-games not particularly fun. A reverse-tower-defence game is the arguable highlight, but is rendered overly simplistic due to lack of real balancing, and can be generally beaten through sheer attrition, and the more "puzzle" mini-game - a laser reflection game is pretty basic. That one, while having some scope for fun - and a few good puzzles that do tickle the puzzle-itch. There is also a sort of Tron-style line-racing game, that is simply boring to play.

 

The actual motion comic story is perfectly serviceable, but to be honest, in a universe like Dead Space's, (which has shown, with Dead Space Extraction, that it can easily support a really good spin-off,) "serviceable" is damning by faint praise.

 

A cool concept, but makes for a very forgettable game - and while some knee-jerk excuse might be made, given the simplistic nature of the product, it is worth remembering that Metropolis: Lux Obscura took the very same concept - a motion comic choose your own adventure game, coupled it with just a single mini-game (in it's case, a good match-3 puzzler,) and made for a much better, nicer looking, more replayable, less frustrating, and much, much more interesting and enjoyable end product.

 

 

The Ranking:

Odd, not-quite-all-there eldritch space horror walking sim Moons of Madness is a pretty dull affair, but it certainly has more going for it than this version of eldritch-adjacent horror...

...but I do think that while Dead Space Ignition is pretty dull overall, it still has more here to keep the player interested than lacklustre puzzle-box game Access Denied.

 

Thus, it finds its spot.

 

I couldn't even commit to doing Dead Space 3 -- so this spin-off that seems to be somehow even worse than a main entry (at least, that's how it seems -- I have a very poor view on Dead Space 3) -- I don't think I would be able to amuse this title. Appreciate being spared.

 

Speaking of which... unless I misunderstand your checklist -- I'm able to nominate Dead Space 2 to be S-ranked, no? Not saying I would do that to you (but maybe I will, if you grant me that dangerous agency), but I recently did it and was shocked to see you didn't!

Edited January 11, 2023 by CelestialRequiem

[DrBloodmoney]

1 minute ago, CelestialRequiem said:

Speaking of which... unless I misunderstand your checklist -- I'm able to nominate Dead Space 2 to be S-ranked, no? Not saying I would do that to you (but maybe I will, if you grant me that dangerous agency), but I recently did it and was shocked to see you didn't!

Nominations are for reviews of S-Ranked games, so Dead Space 2 doesn’t qualify, I’m afraid - I don’t have the S-Rank, so won’t review it.

 

Sorry!

[CelestialRequiem]

5 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Nominations are for reviews of S-Ranked games, so Dead Space 2 doesn’t qualify, I’m afraid - I don’t have the S-Rank, so won’t review it.

 

Sorry!

Quite all right. May have misread/misunderstood your opening post (been a few months since I read it, and hadn't partaken in it prior, as you're no doubt aware). I apologize about that.

 

...I'm happy to not even see Dead Space 3 present. ?

[DrBloodmoney]

5 minutes ago, CelestialRequiem said:

Quite all right. May have misread/misunderstood your opening post (been a few months since I read it, and hadn't partaken in it prior, as you're no doubt aware). I apologize about that.

 

...I'm happy to not even see Dead Space 3 present.

 

yeah… I did hear tell about DS3, and think I just gave it the swerve!

 

[Copanele]

On 1/10/2023 at 5:20 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

 

XBlaze Code: Embryo

 

Sorry, but I will never NOT laugh at the fact that you played (even if by mistake) a Blazblue related game ??? just thinking about your face seeing Es  ,her pudding obsession and her "pudding" composition makes me start laughing again.

Then I remember that I have to play this crappy visual novel (for a different event) and I stop laughing. Still funny tho  

On 1/10/2023 at 5:20 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

This review and ranking is based entirely on what the game is like to play for someone unfamiliar with the overall story:

 

There is a very bland, rather un-characterised protagonist, (a man,) trying to solve the mystery of what a disaster a decade ago has to do with super-humans now causing havoc. As he meanders through the story, he encounters a bunch of other characters - pretty much exclusively hentai-level girls of indeterminately youthful demeanour, indescribably ample proportions and unfathomably skimpy attire - does a lot of amine wide-eye gesticulation... and solves the mystery in some way. 

Or something.

Or whatever.

Eh you pretty much nailed the Blazblue story  in the main games you have an actually interesting protagonist with a "cool biker" attitude (to put it lightly) who has to deal with epic monsters, weirdly obsessed brothers, tons of girls of any (cup) sizes and shapes, and mumbo jumbo words.

And also gameplay is a fighting game. Which beats...whatever this game is.

No really, the Blazblue games are actually very good.

On 1/10/2023 at 5:20 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Maybe this all makes perfect sense to the BlazBlue fan... but for an outsider, I've never had a game put me off a franchise harder than this one. Even Fear Effect Sedna made me curious to see the earlier games. This one made me never want to bother.

Yeah no, I love Blazblue but the prospect of going through X-Blaze makes me groan. Imma turbo it, as the Gods of Fighting games and Anime intended, because this game feels like the equivalent of "Fever Dream 18+ DLC" or something compared to the main series.
And yes the diehard fans love the visual novel, still gonna skip it  

 

 

Now...that I laughed a bit (hah), I actually have a request...for a game that we talked about before, of course if you still remember it - 3D DOT HEROES.

Whenever that will be, please add it in a "Priority" list, I heard legends about this game  

 

[DrBloodmoney]

8 minutes ago, Copanele said:

Now...that I laughed a bit (hah), I actually have a request...for a game that we talked about before, of course if you still remember it - 3D DOT HEROES.

Whenever that will be, please add it in a "Priority" list, I heard legends about this game  

 

Good shout - I'll add it to the Priority list ?

 

...just know though - it may take a while, as I've at least two batches of catch-up to go, and there are a few rather embarrassingly long awaited Priority Assignments still outstanding!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Beths and Science-Jerrys, as promised (and in some no cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

Heavenly Bodies

 

Summary: 

A co-op-first, objective-based QWOP-lite puzzle game from 2pt Interactive, Heavenly Bodies sees two couch-co-op players take the roles of two nameless astronauts on a space station. 
With their only communication to Earth being by way of diagrammatical instructions, on how to conduct various experiments, repairs, or maintenance to keep the space station running and further their scientific research, each level sees these two lonely players have to interpret the minimalist instructions sent to them via their communications panel, then enact them - dealing at all times with the perils, difficulties and often curiously amusing foibles caused by the lack of gravity. 

 

The actual tasks being conducted in each level may seem simplistic - operating a compression and crusher, for example, then sprinkling the crushed materials in planter pots, then watering them, or retrieving several parts of a satellite from crates, and assembling it - the absence of gravity, the odd control scheme, and the 2D plane make these seemingly simple tasks into puzzles all by themselves. While turning a wrench, for example, on Earth would be no big deal, doing so in a zero gravity environment, where the player must find a way to "lock themselves" to avoid simply spinning around along with the wrench, makes for goofy fun, puzzle solving... and occasional digital gymnastics as the player tires to hold all the required buttons in the right sequence!

 

I say the game is "co-op-first" for a reason. While Heavenly Bodies can be played entirely in single player, it is not a game that really should be. Like it's 2D, Space-based, psychedelic cousin Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, Heavenly Bodies allows for single player play, but co-op cooperation is baked indelibly into the fabric of the design doc upon which it is crafted, and as such, solo play not only feels a lesser, less interesting, less fun experience, it actually feels somewhat antithetical to overall design of the game.

 

Each of the discrete levels - with bespoke environments and challenges, all conveyed through pictorial instruction manuals, the interpretation of which is al light puzzle in and of itself - is clearly designed with tandem play in mind, and moreover, almost every one of the most interesting and exciting parts of the campaign that I played, were parts that simply could not have occurred in solo play.

 

The gameplay is QWOP-style, with movements of each player characters arms tied to each analogue stick, "grip" for each hand tied to the shoulder buttons... and (as my sister and I did not realise until quite late in the game, and after becoming wedged in more awkward doorways than we could count,) additional shoulder buttons to bend knees - used to squeeze through tight spaces, or, in the case of good players, to "kick off" from a surface, to quickly float to another.

 

There are 3 levels of "difficulty", though the method of implementing these is a little unusual. Rather than making the tasks to be completed more or less complicated, the method of control of the player character is what changes... and I do actually recommend playing primarily in the "hardest" mode. 
(This is not game-flex, I assure you - there's a good reason! Two actually. Bear with me.)

 

In "Easy" mode (called "assisted") simply reaching out in a direction will "float" the character in that direction. So extending an arm left, will rotate them, or "kicking" legs alternately, will effectively allow them to "swim" through space.

 

In "Normal" mode, these same assistances exist, but have a slightly less effective momentum to them.

 

In "Hard" mode, however - called "Newtonian" - broadly realistic physics is used - a player cannot create motion where none exists, and must work to the Newton's Third Law - that each action will have an equal and opposite reaction. (thanks Applied Mechanics class!)

While this mode can be the more frustrating to begin with, my partner and I found, over time, it actually became the easiest mode to play in, simply because it is the only one where movement is truly "predictable". In the "easier" modes, if floating from one area to another, simply reaching out to grab something, will cause the game to try to "rotate" the player in that direction, potentially skewing the trajectory. In Newtonian, however, the trajectory remains true, and the player can therefore grab things, or impact objects, without fouling their path.

 

Not only that - the game actually becomes far more exciting and interesting as a co-op prospect in Newtonian mode - because the ability to simply "swim" back to safety is removed.

In Newtonian, simply losing ones grip, and floating out of reach of any hand-hold (even at glacially slow speed,) can be a death sentence for a player. This might sounds frustrating - however, it does make for some much more interesting scenarios.

For example, after loosing my grip when completing a space-walk, I assumed all was lost, however, as I slowly drifted from the station, I realised I still had a spanner attached to my suit from a previous objective. Waiting until the perfect moment, and throwing it directly away from the station, the force was JUST enough to send me drifting slowly back towards it.

In another case, when I became detached, it sparked a frantic scramble, as my co-op partner attached a line to her suit, jumped into the void, caught me, and we both pulled ourselves back to safety!

 

These moments - the victories, or the nearly-there-but-not quite moments were the absolute highlight of the game, and the clearest showcase for the gameplay the developer was intending - and they feel great. Playing in other modes (or, indeed, in single-player,) would likely remove a lot of this, and tend to make the game feel lesser - more a simple case of completing the tasks, being frustrated by the deliberately awkward controls, then seeing some credits.

It's also worth noting - I won't spoil anything here - but the very final moments of the game are a really fantastic emotional part. The lack of gravity that the entire game has been predicated on is used to really clever, winning effect, and the catharsis the moment causes - particularly in two-player - is on a level that rivals the (similar) moment in the movie Gravity!

The visual style is an interesting, quite unusual blend of "hard-science" realistic, (albeit on a simplified, 2D plane,) and artistic, almost sketch-book hand-drawn style in the space environments. 
Planets in the background, for example, have a "cut-out" paper-craft feel, with textures created using visible sketch-lines, and of course the actual characters are somewhat comical in their movements.

The overall effect is one that could feel dissonant, but actually, the cross-pollination of the more artistic, free-flow environments and the mechanical, technological foregrounds - coupled, of course, with the eerie, atmospheric and minimalist score -  makes for a really satisfying and evocative overall tone and tenor. The somewhat ridiculous movement of the player characters, and the awkward, often hilarious foibles they encounter in trying to do the simplest of tasks are funny, but the game never really feels "full comedy", because the tone still manages to convey the isolation, the gravity, the danger and the loneliness of space.
The silly movements and fumbling of the characters as they, for example, slowly edge their way along an antennae array, quickly becomes dire, and almost sad, when one loses their grip, and begins floating - just out of reach of their companion, and just beyond help - suddenly doomed to death in the void of space!

 

Audio is excellent - the score is a great one - creepy, minimalist and haunting - perfect for the combined danger, majesty and suffocating isolation of being alone (or alone together) in space. Sound effects are fine - the game is deliberately, almost hauntingly quiet a lot of the time, so the clinks and clanks of machinery being worked, or of the player characters shuffling and bouncing around the station are quite evocative... and the deafening silence of losing grip, and drifting into the void is oddly haunting and perfectly complimented by the careful lack of over-egging via the audio!

Overall, Heavenly Bodies is a fantastic little game - but one that really needs to be played a specific way: In co-op, and in Newtonian - to really shine. 
While I am generally the last person in the world to lean into the turgid, "play on hard for the real experience", type flexing, in this specific case, I do think that by not doing so, the game itself, and the ensuing experience is genuinely lessened.  

 

If you have a co-op partner, some patience, and the ability to think logically and enjoy some silliness mixed with some lonesome ennui, Heavenly Bodies is a perfect game to cater to you! 

 

 

The Ranking:

For ranking, the most obviously applicable comparison point for me is Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime. That is a game also primarily co-op focussed (and I played both games with the same co-op partner.) While I like Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime, I do think on balance, both I and my sister marginally preferred Heavenly Bodies' odd brand of co-op QWOPing.

Both games look good, but Heavenly Bodies sounds better, and the moment to moment gameplay on Heavenly Bodies is a little more varied, and while Lovers has its high points, the "will one person save the other" moments in Heavenly Bodies are a question Lovers couldn't really answer with its gameplay.

It's a relatively close one between them though, so I was looking at the game above, but close to Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime for guidance. There's not much that is directly comparable, but in terms of smaller scope games with surprising depth, and oddly well crafter tones, I think the inflection point came between Islanders, and Donut County.

 

I think I had a slightly better time with Heavenly Bodies than with the fun-but-fleeting Donut County (co-op helping here, I suspect!) but I do think the oddly satisfying, pleasingly calm and gorgeous looking Islanders still manages to hold it's spot.

 

As such, Heavenly Bodies finds its, right below it!

 

 

 

 

 

The Entropy Centre

 

Summary: 

A 3D narrative Puzzle game and debut for Stubby Games, The Entropy Centre is a game with Portal - and specifically Portal 2 - firmly highlighted and bolded in its list of influences.

 

The player takes the role of Aria - an employee of the eponymous Entropy Centre. It is a facility on the moon, using scientific harnessing of the chaos and predictability of puzzle-solving to generate energy, which is used to "rewind" Earth in time after world-ending calamities, with a view to sending information of these calamities back to Earth-based scientists and world leaders, to then allow them to avert them,

Waking in her room to discover herself alone, and the facility in a state of disrepair and ruin - with a broken, scorched Earth visible in the distance, Aria, with the help of Astra - a chirpy, overeager AI contained within her signature time-rewinding tool, who's input is conveyed via vocal track and a series of emoji-style facial indications on it's LED screen - sets about to discover what has happened, repair the facility, and rewind Earth back to pre-destruction. 

When I began playing the game, I was immediately struck by how close its parallels were to its most obvious point of inspiration -  Portal 2.

The 3D puzzles are absolutely of the Portal style - block and gate puzzle design, using a single technical mechanic and an ever increasing level of complexity for the player to logic their way through using that basic premise (time-rewinding of object paths, in this case,) - but more than that, so many of the narrative and and tertiary elements seems Portal-like too. The "single person trapped in a decaying, abandoned facility", the stark, concrete and utilitarian design, the seemingly infinitely wealthy, and somewhat sinister "corporation experiment gone awry" element, the sentient AI guidance, the almost religious zeal the machines have for puzzling - everything seems like a Portal-wannabe... 
... and that is a potential avenue for disappointment. Portal 2 is an extremely tough act to follow.

However, what becomes apparent after several of the 15 chapters of the game progress, is that not only are the developers clearly aware of how closely their opening hours mimic Portal 2, but that this is both deliberate, and smart. That initial Portal-like nature is not simply copy-cat in nature, it is weaponised, and used as something of a bait-and-switch. 

 

To be clear - The Entropy Centre is a Portal-like in terms of gameplay, but in many design and narrative ways, it actually becomes one of the most effective and best Portal-likes, by only seeming slavishly devoted to its inspiration, at the outset. As it progresses it deviates from that source material in smart ways, and using the player-expectation that the initial comparison invites, as a springboard to counter-programme its own narrative in smart ways.

 

The corporation here, for example, is not actually evil or wicked - that notion is dispensed with pretty quickly. In fact, it is a genuinely benevolent thing, and the calamity that struck it is not a result of hubris or science run amok. It is simply a sad conclusion befalling a genuinely benevolent scientific endevour. 
It feels malevolent at the outset, because the players mind is immediately (and deliberately) reminded of Portal - they are placed in "Portal-mode", and so expect any corporation to follow the Aperture Science model.

In fact, the narrative elements are not treated like the potential Portal-retreading "not all is as it seems" mystery that the game, at first, appears to be aiming at... but in fact, as a genuinely clever exploration of a fun sci-fi premise, in a way that feels oddly fresh in videogames, simply because it isn't as cynical as we are pre-programmed to think it will be.

The first few chapters certainly lean into the notion that there will be some grand mystery and some hidden malevolence to uncover... but the game quickly dispenses with this, in favour of much more interesting and much less well trodden territory - simply commenting on the sad nature of inevitability of systemic breakdown - of the entropy effect - of the nature of hope, and delving into some of the more interesting conceptual elements that the game's wild premise invokes.

It becomes, instead, a curiously poignant, uplifting yet sad, hopeful yet wistful little tale of the unlikely friendship between a human and an AI, fighting valiantly, yet hopelessly, against an inevitable fate.

Gameplay-wise, The Entropy Centre leans heavily on Portal - there's common elements like lasers, springboards, boxes and floor switches making up the bulk of the puzzle rooms - however, like most good puzzle games, the central conceit is what gives the game its signature. In Portal it was the portal gun - in The Entropy Centre it is the time-rewind gun.

 

The time-rewind gun allows any objects to be moved, then "rewound" from a distance, along the path they initially took, up to 38 second into their past. The means, as a very simplistic example, if a corridor has three doors, each of which requires a floor panel to be operated with a box, the player can place the box on each door in reverse order of requirement, then "rewind" it remotely, from one to the next, allowing them to pass.

It's a simple premise but ,like all good puzzle games, the key to it working is exactly that. It is simple to understand, but the nuance and the determining factor between good puzzles and bad, is the many ways in which this mechanic is required to be used cleverly depending on the situation. Here, that variety is very good. Each of the 15 chapters has between 3 and 6 puzzle rooms, and despite the core mechanic never changing, very rarely does any single puzzle element feel like a repeat - and the smooth curve of compounding difficulty and extension of lateral thinking feels pitch perfect.

The game is not fiendish in its difficulty, but dances along that difficult line between "too easy" and "I need a guide" very effectively - the player feels smart when they complete a puzzle, but not frustrated when they get stuck for a while, as the solutions are always well worked out, and sensible once solved.

 

The game does fudge its premise a little in places, but these feel generally for the better, and work to either keep the puzzles working well, or to keep the player's challenge in the solving of the solutions, rather than the enacting of them. One box type, for example, doesn't rewind in placement, but rather, rewinds between "collapsed" and "intact" - making for some clever puzzles - and while this does slightly fudge the fictional premise, there is at least pip service paid to justifying it... and it is forgivable, in the sense that the puzzle expansion allowed for by this is used effectively.

Also, while movable objects can be rewound up to 38 seconds into their past, this is 38 seconds of movement, not of basic time. As such, the player is never required to rush, desperately trying to enact a solution they have worked out within the 38 second window - in reality, they have as much time as they need to think about the solution... they simply only have 38 seconds of object movement to work with.

The specific, designed puzzle rooms are intercut, on occasion, by some more "action" section between - either where collapsing sections of the facility must be traversed at speed, with the rewinding mechanic used to repair or freeze in place collapsing elements to facilitate Aria and Astra's escape (usually from the rogue repair-bots, who are menacingly running amok in the centre - or where these bots must be directly fought, by rewinding their own plasma attacks back into them.)

These sections can be exciting, and even fun, but this is the closest the game gets to frustrating. Aria's tools for combat are not strong, and since being hit twice in quick frequency simply results in a restart, some of these sections can get a little irritating at times. When the collapsing facility sections work, they really do work - as a narrative and gameplay palate cleansers between the more cerebral, slower-paced puzzle rooms - but the mechanics are clearly designed more for slow, careful puzzle-solving than fast-paced action, and it does show.

There are a bunch of collectibles to find - specifically emails and records on the few remaining working desktop computers. These are well worth finding, and the player would likely want to find them all anyways, even devoid of trophies, as they contain some of the most interesting conceptual elements of the game's narrative. Most are fairly easy to stumble across - I found around 55 of the 70-odd in a blind playthrough - but a few are hidden in some clever spots within puzzle rooms, requiring secondary or esoteric use of the puzzle solution elements to access.

 

In terms of visuals, this is the area where The Entropy Centre most sticks to it's Portal 2 influences - the facility is certainly in the Aperture Science mould - all white concrete and geometric, brutalist design, overgrown with vegetation and crumbling into decay - but it does look good. As the player progresses through the facility, seeing more and more of the "working life" of its inhabitants, the visual story-telling remains strong, and for a smaller indie game, the graphical prowess is pretty impressive. 

There is a minor gripe - there is a slight "white outline shimmer" that can happen (no doubt as a result of minor pop-in on a white background) that can occasionally catch the eye when turning the field of view - though this tends to become ignorable (and was likely exhascerbated in my case, simply due to having recently played several games where "white glowing outline" is used as an indication of intractability in objects!)

 

The whole look of the game is certainly functional - for example, object being "rewound" show an orange or blue (Portal influence!) tracking line, giving an indication of where they previously were, to aid the player - but functionality is not in place of genuinely interesting environmental design. The facility is not wildly original in design aesthetic, but is it certainly interesting enough to keep the player wanting to explore it fully, seeing different areas is always welcome, and the game keeps up its end of the bargain on that front.

Audio is good - the narrative is told primarily via the interactions between Aria and Astra, and both voice actors do a great job. While Astra is (deliberately) somewhat grating in its unwavering chirpiness early on, and not every joke lands perfectly, many of them do, and actually, the curious friendship and relationship between the two principle characters becomes genuinely endearing as the game progresses.

Foley and sound effects are nice too - not stand out, but certainly functional, and in the action sequences, become quite a necessity, as collapsing structures are often first indicated by the crunching, groaning sounds of them ripping their foundations and snapping.

Overall, The Entropy Centre is certainly a Portal-like, and qualitatively, it is no Portal 2, however, of the many Portal-likes I have sampled, it is certainly in the top end of the pile, and arguably the best - aside from the king itself. The narrative is engaging, the puzzles are very smart, without feeling fiendish, and the dialogue, while not on the level of Portal 2, does outdo most other Portal-likes on console.

Fans of Portal and Portal 2 have quite a lot of games at their disposal to try and recapture that magic, and most are decent, if not "pretty good", but very few really hint at giving that same feeling, and overall level of polish. The Entropy Centre doesn't get there - but it's potentially the closest any Portal-like I've played has come.

 

 

The Ranking:

As is fairly obvious from the review, The Entropy Centre is not on the level of Portal 2, of course, but is in the upper end of 3D puzzle games that are currently ranked. As such, I looked at the current front-runners on there, and the two that jumped out were Quantum Conundrum, and Superliminal. 

Both are great games, (Superliminal would arguably rank higher if it were longer) but the higher of the two is Quantum Conundrum, and I think The Entropy Centre is the better game of those two. Its puzzles are simpler overall, but the difficulty curve is better, and the narrative is quite considerably better.

That moved it up above Quantum Conundrum, and I started looking at games somewhere in the middle between Portal 2 and it. There's not much in the way that is puzzle-focussed - but there is Observation, and while I liked The Entropy Centre a lot, I don't think it quite manages to outdo Observation, which while a smaller game, is wildly original and cool. The Entropy Centre is smart and fun, but doesn't have that level of originality or signature style.

 

Looking a little further down then, and simply asking "would I replay this, before replaying The Entropy Centre?" the point where I think it fits is right below cool, gorgeous, interesting little sci-fi tale Stray, but above Sam Barlow's curious, winning FMV game, Telling Lies.

 

 

 

 

 

System of Souls

 

Summary: 

A first-person 3D puzzle platform game from Chaotic Lab, System of Souls combines some of the basic elements of a "Portal-like" 3D cerebral puzzler, but mixes in some significant portion of 3D platforming and timing-based action, as the player traverses a super-clean, robotic environment of semi-augmented reality in a robot host, solving puzzles as a facsimile for recovering and repairing memories. The goal? To solve the mystery of how the player consciousness died in "real life", what the strange facility he finds himself in is, who all the robot hosts he meets along the way are, and what calamity resulted in this odd post-life world he inhabits.

Gameplay is System of Soul's strongest suit, so let's begin there. 
Puzzle-wise, it is a relative success - though it does tend to undercut the (genuinely smart) puzzle design, with its mechanical elements used to solve them. 

The actual design of the puzzles are good. There is no "hook" to System of Souls, per-se - where Portal has it's ubiquitous PortalGun, and The Entropy Centre has it's time-rewind hook, System of Souls simply makes use of its environmental elements, jump pads, boxes, switches, lasers etc, to craft it's puzzles - but there is pretty good variety wrung out of these elements throughout its 5-6 hour run time.

 

If System of Souls does have a signature element that makes it stand out from other Portal-likes, though, it is not so much in a narrative or gameplay specific, but rather, in a gameplay style. System of Souls, unlike most 3D puzzlers, leans quite a lot more than most on platforming and action elements in its solutions - and this is where the gameplay does break down a little.

 

I will freely admit, that I tend to prefer my puzzle games pure "cerebral" in nature - I find the best puzzle games work because once a solution is found, actually enacting it is simple - and if a solution requires significantly tricky mechanical or acrobatic gymnastic to implement, or very strict timing windows etc, then that is an indication that the solution is not the correct one, and a more clever solution is available. However, this is a personal preference, and the fact that it is not the case with System of Souls is not necessarily an objective negative.

What is an objective negative, however, is the way in which the action elements of System of Souls are implemented - as they have a tendency to invoke frustration. There are multiple puzzles that require long strings of actions to be undertaken, where any failure at any point will require a full restart, or at a minimum, walking back to the start and redoing the whole sequence - and because some of these require quite exacting platforming, or quite strict time-sensitive manoeuvring (for example, over/under laser-grids etc.) there is clear potential for frustration, if the same tricky section is failed multiple times, requiring the same long-but-not-difficult sequence to be repeated every time. 

 

The platforming and gravity-model of the game is consistent, but quite "floaty" and sometimes difficult to accurately gauge. 3D platforming in 1st person view is tricky at the best of times, given that the player doesn't have the full view of the character's body - but in System of Souls this can be particularly irksome, as often these tricky sections of platforming must be performed while carrying an object (usually a block) - which floats and rotates in front of the character's vision, taking up over 50% of the screen, obscuring their view of the environment they must traverse... and most frustratingly, which can easily be dropped, if the object is accidentally pushed by any environmental element.
This results - relatively often - in doing long section of platforming involving critical timing, to move a box from one precarious platform to another... only to either fall into water and restart, or - worse - to succeed in the traversal, but have the block "slapped" out of the player's grip, by an adjacent wall, and watch it drop into said water at the last jump. 

These elements are not complete deal-breakers - as said, the game's puzzles are smart, and fun to solve - but it does tend towards one of my most irksome annoyances in puzzle games: knowing what the solution is, but simply getting stymied and frustrated by mechanical elements when implementing that solution.

Narratively, System of Souls is a curiosity, but something of a disappointment, all told. The actual narrative conceit - an "uploaded consciousness" trying to solve the mystery of their own murder, by reconstructing their own memories - is a good one, and the basic premise of the world is sound, but unfortunately, the implementation leaves a lot to be desired. 

 

Occasional "break" levels - in actual "break rooms" - happen periodically, where the player can talk to various other uploaded consciousnesses inhabiting robot bodies, each of whom tends to one of a few "archetypes" giving their views on the ecological disaster and hubris that led the the requirement for the mass uploading. These are purely in text form, with no vocals, are quite long, (often 30 or 40 button-presses each to read the entirety,) and are not terribly engaging. It's hard to tell if this is primarily an issue of translation, or of writing (both are, I think, an issue,) but the result tends to leave the player cold, and don't invite a lot of emotive connection.

 

The actual solving of the players mystery murder happens in portions, at the end of discrete chapters, and these are not much more engaging really. Some limited visual stills are used - which is fine, the game is, after all, a smaller budget indie - however, the writing is not very engaging here either, and that's something that is not a result of budget.

The gameplay culminates in a finale that uses some fairly clever combined puzzle and action elements, and is quite unique as puzzle games go, and for that System of Souls deserves credit, but the narrative culmination shortly thereafter is fairly underwhelming (in both it's possible ending paths,) and so tends to leave the player with the memory of the puzzles, and not much more.

Visually, System of Souls does look nice. It's a very clean, very stark and minimalist puzzle environment - unlike something like Portal 2, or The Entropy Centre, System of Soul's environment is not subject to any decay, and everything looks pristine - but there is some nice flourishes. Reflective surfaces and lighting look cool - and I will say, while it causes significant mechanical and gameplay frustrations at times, as it affects the players ability to accurately "place" a box in a specific position, the way held objects "float and spin" does look pretty neat and cool.

 

The design of the robots and the non-puzzle environments are fine, but not particularly interesting beyond that, and not terribly original. Unlike The Entropy Centre, (or even some other Portal-like games, like The Spectrum Retreat,) the environments do not really engage the player with much "environmental story-telling" - rarely is there enough uniqueness or interest to really further the narrative through design.

 

Audio is fine, where it is present - the lack of any voice work does hamper the narrative a bit, and keep it at a distance - that's not always a massive detriment (Norco, for example, to be reviewed soon, has no voice work, and is one of the most engaging narratives I've ever played,) but here, there isn't the level of writing to counter that detachment.

Overall, System of Souls is a perfectly serviceable 3D puzzler, and one that has some pretty good puzzles throughout its length, but those are sometimes undercut by it's mechanics, and the narrative it is undercut pretty critically by the shortcomings in its writing.

It's not a game I would tell people to avoid - indeed, for the puzzle game fan, who has already played and beaten some of the better examples of Portal-likes, there is some good meat here for the solving - but as a narrative game, it falls short, and so it is hard to recommend to the non-puzzle-enthusiast.

 

 

The Ranking:

System of Souls ended up being oddly quick to rank - I think the puzzles in general are probably a cut above Q.U.B.E Director's Cut, and the visuals are nicer, but that's in a vacuum. Once the mechanical issues are factored in, I think Q.U.B.E Director's Cut holds its place, as while its puzzles may be slightly less interesting overall, it doesn't hamper them with mechanical control problems.

 

A few spots below, however, is Cuboid, and while that game is fun, most of the elements that negatively affect System of Souls in terms of narrative do not apply, as Cuboid has no narrative at all. While there are some issues with System of Soul's mechanics, I still think, even accounting for them, the overall fun to be had does just rank above the fun-but-fairly-invariable Cuboid.

As such, System of Souls finds its spot.

 

 

 

 

 

Treasures of the Aegean

 

Summary: 

A 2D, parkour-adjacent, fast-paced platformer/puzzle time-loop game from Undercoders, Treasures of the Aegean is exactly the kind of well-polished, well-constructed, thoughtfully made indie gem one hopes for every time they take a punt on, and boot up a relatively obscure, under-played title!

 

Taking the role of Marie Taylor, a Lara Croft-like explorer and the "action" side of a two-man treasure-hunting team, the player heads to Santorini, to investigate an ancient Minoan civilisation. When an earthquake erupts, driving a long forgotten piece of land up to the surface of the aegean sea, they head into the reclaimed land, searching for clues at to the fate of the civilisation that seemed to simply vanish from history several thousand years prior.
What they find, is a huge swathe of the forgotten culture's ruins, complete with loads of treasures to find, secrets to unlock and ancient puzzles to solve... but within 15 minutes of arriving via helicopter, the ground begins to erupt, and the volcano blows - taking not only Marie and her partner, but a sizeable chunk of the planet with it!

 

Suddenly Marie finds herself back in time, the evening before, ready to explore the volcano again... and must continue doing so, on repeat, until she discovers a way to avert disaster, learn the secrets of the Minoans, and escape the time-loop.

Gameplay wise, Treasures of the Aegean is pretty fantastic. The entire volcanic island is free to be explored from the outset, complete with all its puzzles, and moving around it is fast, satisfying and extremely fun. Marie moves quite fluidly - Treasures of the Aegean is not a precision, pixel-perfect platformer, but rather, a fast, seat-of-your-pants adventure - and the speed with which a player can run, slide, leap and swing around the various cavers and ruins in the island is impressive, smooth and fluid.

On initial runs, the player likely has no real idea what to do first - or indeed, what might be the overall flow or objective of the game -  but as they progress, this makes itself known pretty quickly. 

There is a single-screen, pictorial "tableau" that the player can reference - and which shows at the end of each run - representing their progress across all runs. This starts as blank, but slowly fills out with each piece of information discovered by the player, and with each little puzzle element they solve. At first, individual pieces of information may seen sporadic and unrelated, but as more and more free-form exploration is undertaken, and more info discovered, it becomes clear that this is not only serving as a record of discovered information, but as clues - both as to what still needs to be solved, and how to solve it. 

If two of three items relating to a particular puzzle are found, these will be contained in the same section of the tableau, and therefore gives hints, not only how many there are out there, but which area and mechanisms they affect, and what part that plays in the overall puzzle of the island. 

Some collectibles are related to these puzzles, and some are simply collectibles - however, "simply collectibles" is not really apt in the case of Treasures of the Aegean, as even these have a genuine, gameplay-critical reason to be hunted. With each collectible found, an hourglass on the tableau is filled, and Marie will have more time on the island in future runs, to explore, to puzzle solve, and eventually, to complete the full suite of puzzles required to change the ultimate fate of her, the island and the world!

What makes the game feel so satisfying is the realisation - which comes after some few runs - that the entire island is a single, unified puzzle, which could really be solved in any run - if only the player knew exactly how. The result is, that every small victory - every little tertiary puzzle, every collectible, every new area explored - feels like another step towards unlocking a grand mystery... one that is staring the player in the face the whole time.

Once this fact becomes apparent, there is immense satisfaction in every run - filling out little bits more on the map, discovering little new secrets, adding to the tableau, collecting treasures to increase the time in future runs - it really never feels like a single run is ever a waste... and even if one somehow is, the actual gameplay mechanics of simply moving around the environment are so damned fun, that it wouldn't really feel that way anyhow!

Each time Marie lands on the island in a new loop, she begins at a different place on the map, and while the island is vast, exploring is a pleasure, not a chore, primarily because of two things: it feels great to move around with the excellent movement model, and every place to go has multiple paths to get there. There is a map (a good one, filling out in an interesting way as Marie explores, where places discovers in the present loop are sketched in grey, which them become proper, colour additions in the next, allowing the player to keep track of not only where they've been overall, but where the've been specifically in the current loop,) however, despite the labyrinthine nature of the island, and the size of it, it never feels like constantly consulting the map is a requirements, because the paths are so open. A quick consult to gauge rough location is generally enough to allow her to sprint, leap, swing and jump her way in the rough direction, without fear of running into dead ends. 

Visually, Treasures of the Aegean is tip top. The art-style is one pretty unusual in videogames - certainly, I cannot recall having seen it done before. It is comic-book style, (which is not unique,) but specifically European comic book style, (which, as far as I am aware, is.) The visuals are straight out of Hergé's Tintin, or Uderzo & Goscinny's Asterix and Obelix books - a bright, colourful, broadly drawn, yet finely detailed and slightly exaggerated sketchbook style, and looks fantastic.

The comic book stylings are not simply dressing for the platforming either - cut-scenes are presented as stills from comic books as well, text is stylistically identical to the lettering in European comics, even the timer clock looks like a "settings" yellow box in a comic. Everything, down to the expressions on the faces of characters pretty much perfectly mimic those in any Tintin book, complete with a slight overlay texture used to mimic the printing press ink-dots of comic pages. 

The flat-plane 2D environments look lifted directly from one of Tintin's adventures, and the style is both aesthetically pleasing, and beneficial to the gameplay - the simply, bright colours allow all objects and environments to "pop" and be traversable and intelligible even when moving at breakneck pace - as the player will have to - either due to running from danger, or to solve the islands mysteries in time, before the cataclysm happens!

Audio is good - there is no voice acting, but sound effects are good, and the music is actually really excellent. It's evocative and mysterious, yet swashbuckling and fun - a perfect fit for the Indiana Jones style adventure, and really lends the game a lot of help in maintaining its dangerous-yet-fun romping tone effectively.

The narrative is relatively simple, but works well, with enough detail to remain interesting, but not so much navel-gazing that the lack of voice work becomes an issue, and the game clearly knows it's biggest strength is in its action and parkour. Sections between runs are short, but memorable due to the art and character info. 

There are a few short sections that cut in after certain numbers of loops, wherein some incidents from Marie or her partner's past are learned (and in some cases, played,) most notably ones where they interact with some of the game's nemesis characters - the usual treasure-hunting filmic staple of course... another, less historically minded or altruistic team of explorers hell bend on discovering the same secrets for different reasons!

These sections are probably the least fun straight sections of gameplay - they are the only ones where Marie's path is set, and where failure results in repetition (in the main game, falling from too great a height, or being shot results only in a loss of loop time, not death,) but these sections are mercifully short, and not really particularly irksome anyways. Really, the worst thing that can be said about them, is that the player likely wants to get back to the island, for some more exploring!
 

Overall, Treasures of the Aegean is a fantastic little game. It's not long - completion of the entire game is unlikely to take a player longer than a day or two, and a full, 100% run would follow shortly thereafter, but it really cannot be overstated how welcome the level of polish and finesse to be found here is. 

The game is exceptionally well constructed, never wastes anything, and is predicated on a movement model and mechanical design that genuinely rivals - and often exceeds - the sense of speed and fun found in much higher budget, much bigger games. The puzzles are good, the level design is impressive, and the visuals - and indeed, the whole presentation - are a joy to see.

 

 

The Ranking:

Another oddly fast ranking this one - The game that immediately came to mind, given the treasure hunting elements, and the fast-paced, smooth motion of Treasures of the Aegean, was Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light. 

 

Both are fantastic, smaller-scope games - relatively evenly matched, I think. Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light does have the co-op elements, and a little more variety to the gameplay, however, Treasures of the Aegean wins on visuals by a long way, and the time-loop elements, the pristine, smart gameplay loop. Treasures of the Aegean also beats out Lara Croft on the narrative, and so I think on balance, it has to rank higher.

Having said that, as good as Treasures of the Aegean is, I can't see it beating out the game directly above Lara Croft - the bigger, nostalgia-imbued, narratively fun and intensely enjoyable Psychonauts...(nostalgia talking perhaps, but that's not the only factor!)...

 

... and so Treasures of the Aegean finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

Faraday Protocol

 

Summary: 

A 3D alien-technology-themed puzzle game from Red Koi Box, Faraday Protocol sees the player take the role of an alien archeologist on a remote planet, who has discovered several ziggurats of unknown origin.
Entering one, and finding a piece of alien technology - a Bia-Tool - they discover they are able to manipulate the flow of energy within different alien artefacts, which can be used to traverse the many layers of "testing chamber" in the ziggurat, all the while learning the origin, ands interacting with the sentient AI guardian of the facility - the rather GladOS inspired and curiously cold and malevolent - IRIS. 

Faraday Protocol is a curious game to be reviewing in the same batch as System of Souls, because while they do both have some good and some bad elements, they are almost the polar opposite of one another in terms of qualitative elements. While System of Souls has strong puzzle design, but undermines it with some mechanical eccentricities that don't always work, and has a narrative that is deeply explored, yet underwhelming in nature... Faraday Protocol is the opposite.
It has no issued with it's mechanics, but has a decidedly dull and uninspired puzzle design, and while its narrative is genuinely fascinating, it almost criminally under-utilities it, only very lightly exploring the genuinely interesting concepts it is predicated on.

Narrative-wise, it is difficult to really delve into without spoilers, however, I will say this - the actual concept for what the ziggurats are, what IRIS is, who the player is, and what the history that lead to the state of the game are genuinely smart and clever. However, the game really doesn't give any of the information away during the bulk of the gameplay. Instead, the ending of the game is home to a massive info-dump conversation, during which all this fascinating lore is dispensed: clinically, concisely, and without much in the way of nuance, exploration, or time to resonate. 
The result is, a lore that could, in all seriousness, have supported an entire, lengthly trilogy of games... is blurted out in a five minute exchange as the game is ending.

 

It's disappointing in the extreme - and a little unforgivable, given that for the majority of the game, the player is not only completely at a loss as to what the narrative is, and so devoid of information that the game tends to feel like nothing but puzzle-after-puzzle. Without narrative at all during the bulk of the game, they are likely unaware there even is this massive backstory to appreciate. They are only finally given it... just in time for it not to matter.

 

Gameplay-wise, Faraday Protocol is genuinely disappointing. The hook of the puzzle design is the transfer of energy - the player finds specific "totems" of different colour types, which operate different mechanical elements - and some will be charged, and some not. By "sucking up" the energy from charged ones, and transferring it to uncharged ones, they can manipulate the environment, and traverse the puzzles.

It's fine as a mechanic - not original, but one that is broad, and has scope for lots of good puzzle design - and at the game's outset, if feels like the game is going in that direction. After a few quick, easy puzzles, the game begins to get quite tricky, and simply determining what each totem does is fun and satisfying... 
...but then a strange thing happens. 

Around the half-way mark in the game, the variety and compounding elements of the puzzles just seem to.. stop. 

 

There is a particular type of puzzle prevalent in games - commonly known as the "lights out" puzzle. You know this puzzle. Trust me. Virtually any gamer will be familiar with it, whether they are a puzzle game fan or not, as it makes its way into many games. Essentially, the player has an array of "lights", and turning one off, turns other surrounding ones off. Each one affects different numbers of others, and the goal is to either turn "all on" or "all off".

In the early parts of Faraday Protocol, these puzzles feature occasionally in the puzzle rooms... which is fine. They are a perfectly good staple puzzle type. However, around the half-way point, it really feels like the game runs out of ideas, and virtually every puzzle from that point on becomes essentially a variation on that same type. 

It is a strange, disappointing thing, as the puzzles seemed, prior to that, to have a steady rate of new elements, but for whatever reason, this become the dominant (indeed, almost only) element to the second half of the game, and while there's nothing wrong with that kind of puzzle when used sparingly, it is arguably one of the least interesting puzzle types generally - and not a strong one to lean on for so much of the game.

In terms of visuals, Faraday Protocol is, unfortunately pretty weak. The main issue isn't anything technical or graphics related - graphics are fine for a lower-budget 3D indie, and there are no real technically hiccups here - but rather, in terms of art-design. 

The style is clearly taking significant inspiration from ancient Egyptian mythology (not for any particular narrative reason, as far as I could tell, but purely stylistically,) and while this does have the laudably and beneficial advantage of making Faraday Protocol stand out a little in the crowded marketplace of 3D trial-based puzzle games, it's not a particularly pleasant style to work within.

It is very dark, with black obsidian the standards background, and the overuse of gold as the accent colour tends not to lend the air of magnificence (as was the undoubted intent,) but rather to make the whole ziggurat feel like some odd cross between the Luxor hotel, and Trump Tower. 

 

It's clear the game wanted to distinguish itself from the 3D Portal-like pack - a sub-genre that can feel artistically derivative, given how many are some variant of "sterile, white / light grey, and mechanical" - and in that regard, it is a good thing, but the specific artistic palate of Faraday Protocol isn't a great alternative.
The heavy black is not just an artistic, preferential negative for me - it is also somewhat antithetical to the game function - dark black and gold are not colours easy on the eyes for long stretches, and in a puzzle game, where pouring over an environment looking for little details and changes is a staple of the genre, it becomes a burden. 
There is, as it turns out, a real, very clear and technical reason why so many 3D puzzle games share a broad colour-palate... and Faraday Protocol makes the best case for the ubiquity of it, by not using it.

Audio is pretty standard - the environment sounds are suitably alien and strange, and sound effect do help in the solving of puzzles - particularly when the rooms are large or labyrinthine, and knowing exactly what each mechanism has done is not obvious. Voice acting is okay, but not great - the protagonist, who is of alien species, speaks in what we recognise as a heavy Russian or eastern European accent, which is odd - but then, who is to say what an alien would sound like - and IRIS's voice is suitably sinister, but never reaches a tenth of the personality of her inspiration - GladOS.

Overall, Faraday Protocol is a bit of a whiff - it's a puzzle game that starts fairly strong, but seems to get bogged down on a single puzzle variant, and never really iterates past a certain point, the difficult and relatively ugly visuals don't do it any favours, and the lack of good narrative doesn't help to propel the player forward once the puzzles drop the ball. 

The narrative premise does turn out to be interesting, but its wildly misused, and only becomes apparent long after the game has run out of gameplay steam, resulting in a disappointing "could have been" feeling to the whole affair.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

We're pretty low on the ranking with this one unfortunately. 

 

Ranking well below most other 3D puzzlers on the list, not quite in the "abject mess" territory, but deep into the "Very small games, or big games that are deeply flawed" area.

 

I do think Faraday Protocol, despite flaws, has more to it than Supermassive's unfortunate red-headed step-child Hidden Agenda, who's flaws are more pronounced and game-defining... but I struggle to place Faraday Protocol higher than the fun-but-fleeting Artifex Mundi joint Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart.

 

As such, it finds its spot.

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

No Priorities this time - and probably none next time, as I'm playing holidays catch-up, but hopefully I'll be back on the horse proper after the next batch!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

LA Cops stays as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

Edited January 16, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next 5 (not, this time,) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

Toem
Twelve Minutes
Metrico+
Norco

Queen's Quest 3: The End of Dawn

 

 

Playing catch-up from the Festive Break, (and adding a quick one on the end, in order to finally catch up after the holiday game-glut!) so still no Priority Rankings here, BUT...

...I promise I will be doing some of the 4 outstanding Priority Rankings as will fit next batch as possible! I know some folks have been waiting a while, and I can only apologise!

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, fend off all new adversaries?

 

Is gaming butt-plug LA Cops going to pop out and be replaced as 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Niles' and Science-Daphnes, as promised (and in some no cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

Toem

 

Summary: 

 

A short, funny, charming little photo-adventure game from Something We Made, Toem takes a cute, black and white, sketchbook aesthetic, adds some whimsical and goofy characters, and weaves a little big adventure as a young man on the cusp of adulthood in his sleepy, idyllic, paper-craft world, is given a camera by his mother, and sent on his coming-of-age journey: to travel to the top of a local mountain, and witness "the phenomenon" that waits atop it.

Taking the role of that young man, the player travels from one small biome to another - each a stop along the bus route to the mountain - helping locals, photographing wildlife, making friends, and earning enough "social credit" to earn a bus-pass stamp, allowing access to the next location.

In terms of gameplay, Toem is relatively slight, and not particularly challenging, however, this is not to its detriment. The game plays essentially as a mission based exploration /adventure game. 
Many of the denizens of the world will have a small mission or task they can be helped with - and these can always be accomplished by either taking, or showing them, specific photographs. Sometimes these are plainly obvious - "show me a picture with my whole Hotel in frame" is fairly self-explanatory, and the trick is simply finding your way to a spot where that is possible - while some might be a little more adventure-game-adjacent, and require a bit of lateral thinking - for example, photographing "5-living creatures in one shot" can take some figuring out to find a good spot - but they never really require much more.
In addition, a "photo compendium" that can be filled out, requiring pictures of every type of flora, fauna and a variety of biome specific landmarks means the player is always rewarded and encouraged to take photos of everything they see as they journey.

While the lack of challenge might at first seem like it would make the game lack substance - particularly given that the run time of the Toem, from start to finish, clocks in at only around 3-4 hours - it never really feels that way - and that is primarily due to care taken in its crafting. The world itself, while minimalist in art-style, is charming and whimsical as hell, genuinely varied from biome to biome, and while small in terms of floor plan and real estate, is remarkably densely populated in terms of things to do. Each biome contains between 10 and 20 areas, and each will be home to multiple quest-givers, a plethora of things to photograph, and unique things to see or do. 

 

As well as the individual, "one-and-done" missions, there are a smattering of longer-form, biome-spanning missions given in the initial area, which serve as further additions to the games sizeable task list, tying the whole game together more neatly. While all this "tasks-upon-tasks" compounding, in tandem with the lack of objective challenge, should, by rights, result in the game feeling like a simple filling out of a checklist, the real joy in Toem is in its tone and light nature, and in the exploring. 
NPC characters are simple caricatures, but their dialogue is well written - charming, and often genuinely funny - and simply travelling the world, meeting all these little characters, and seeing the binds they have got themselves in is the real fun of the game. The fact that the player can then help them out, or complete a task for them is almost immaterial as a gameplay challenge device - it simply serves as a fun way to see more of their strange little world, and meet more of them.

Also, despite the fact that there is really only a single method for "solving" each and every mission in the game - by using the camera to take photos - the game does manage to squeeze a good variety of wrinkles on top of that. Whether it's competing in games of hide-and-seek, where pointing the camera at the contestants identifies where they are, or revealing ghosts who only show up in the view-finder, or even using the camera's view-finder as a makeshift FPS view to throw water-balloons - the game's core principle and core credentials as a photo-taking simulator are maintained, but never adhered to so fully as to be at the expense of variety or fun.

There are a couple of minor grumbles with the game - a few of the solutions to the missions can tend to be a little too prescriptive (for example, I know for certain I managed to create situations where a photograph clearly showed what should be valid solution to a photo-challenge, but wasn't the one the game had in mind,) though this isn't a huge problem, and not one exclusive to Toem.
The biggest issue, actually, can be genuinely irksome issue later in the game, though: the camera's memory bank. For some reason, the camera provided to the player is only capably of storing a finite number of pictures, and once it fills up, there can follow a rather cumbersome, busy-work task of deleting some to make room. Because this likely happens towards the end of the game, but while there are still some tasks outstanding, it can be a little troublesome to go through, deleting photos, but trying to avoid accidentally deleting one the player might still need to show to someone - particularly for some of the broader, more game-spanning missions.
It's not a massive problem, but it does seem an unnecessary one - the photos are still, small, black-and-white images. there is no real reason for the game to limit them in number, on a console with 500GB to spare! This decision does, as a result, feel a little arbitrary.

The visual style of Toem is, as said, fairly simple in terms of detailing, but that is not to say it looks anything less than great. The paper-craft looking black and white world in crisply drawn and inviting, and looks really nice - both in rotating isometric (as it is while exploring,) and in first-person (as the game switches to when taking photos.) 
The actual style is somewhere close to the whimsical, construction-paper aesthetic of Deathspank (without the colours, of course,) but that doesn't really do it justice in 2022. Toem's visuals are a cut above that style, removing any of the raggedy edges, and dissonance of compounding elements, and feels cohesive, delicate and smooth - and rather than simply using that art-style, it leans into it for it's comedic beats in a way Deathspank was never fully able to. Deathspank was a comedy game, and worked, but those comedic moments came almost exclusively from the writing and dialogue. Toem is able to make use of visual gags too - and it's cartoonish, Phinias and Ferb style characters work well in this context.

 

The breezy, bouncy tone of the game is aided further by the audio - there is no voice work in Toem, but the score is light and airy, and very pleasant. While not a core I would listen to independently, I was often reminded of the score to another "breezy, light-adventure vacation" game - The Touryst. The score of each biome is used to convey the distinct settings, but there is a general high-quality and thematic through-line to the protagonist's journey, that while upbeat and unsupposing, does manage to imbue the finale moment with some awe and gravitas, to accompany the final leg of the journey up the mountain, and the majesty of "the phenomenon." 
Without spoilers, I will say, the curious non-specificity with which the NPC characters refer to "the phenomenon" works within the game, and what it actually is works in an oddly poignant way, within the mild, light tone of the game.

 

Overall, Toem is a great little game. It's not a difficult one by a long stretch - indeed, one could hardly find a less challenging way to pass an afternoon on a console - however, it is a loving crafted, often funny, and permanently delightful little experience. It packs in a ton in its limited scope and run-time, varies across its whole experience, and looks and sounds really lovely.

 

It won't keep a player long, but for what time it does ask for, it makes very good use.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

 

There isn't a huge amount directly comparable to Toem - there is Chicory, which immediately came to mind, due to the adventure-game adjacent style, the whimsical writing and the black-and-white world - but while Toem is good game, I don't really think it is in contention with Chicory. Chicory has serious underpinnings to it's whimsical dialogue that Toem doesn't, and there is a lot more meat to the gameplay of Chicory.

In fact, Toem came down to a simple "which games feel more or less awesome?" and actually, the spot for it presented itself pretty quickly: and that is between bizarro comedy adventure game Jazzpunk, and decent, if never outstanding 3D action shooter Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy. 

 

While Toem doesn't quite outdo the silly, genuinely funny hijinks of Jazzpunk, I do think that, pound-for-pound, I would probably replay a few hours of Toem before replaying the same amount of Guardians, and so it finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

Twelve Minutes

 

Summary: 

 

A small, tightly contained Adventure mystery time-loop game developed by Luís António and published by Annapurna Interactive, Twelve Minutes sees the player take the role of a husband, who, upon returning home after a seemingly normal day, spends a short time with his wife in their modest, 3-room apartment... before a violent police officer knocks at the door. Accusing the mans wife of the murder of her father, the police officer proceeds to kill one of both of the characters...
... upon which time, a 12 minute time loop resets, and man finds himself returning to the apartment once again. 
It's up to the player to - through changing the events of the loop, avert the incident, discover the reasons for the events taking place, (as well as the time-loop itself,) and escape the purgatorial repetition.

Time-loop games have been in vogue of late. Between Outer Wilds, The Forgotten City, Returnal, Deathloop, The Sexy Brutale etc, the concept has been tackled in a variety of ways. Within that broad thematic genre, Twelve Minutes is something of an anomaly, however, as it seems to suffer from some real design drawbacks, that are wholly different from the ones other time-loop games either do, or deftly avoid.

The loop in Twelve Minutes is - rather obviously - 12 minutes at most. That is the maximum time available in a loop, assuming the principle character is not either killed or knocked unconscious, thus prematurely resetting the clockwork world. In the majority of time-loop games where real-time is used, the timer actually provides the biggest obstacle to progression, and is, in effect, the real nemesis to the player. Time itself become the antagonist, far more than any characters contained within the game.

 

In Twelve Minutes, however, because of the extremely small available area, and limited interactions available, the 12 minute overall timer is not really an issue. Instead, it is individual little timers within the game that provide the biggest hurdles. Whether the player can, for example, figure out how to incapacitate both his wife, and the cop prior to any attack, and thus discover some clues as to the nature of the mystery is less confined by the 12 minutes, and more by whether he will be able to remove all drinking glasses prior to his wife looking for a glass of water, so he can then offer her one laced with sleeping pills, or whether he can hide in a closet quickly enough that she will be unaware he has even come home.

The game is predicated on many little micro time-critical elements, and it is as much about finessing these little parts and stringing them together to meet an objective, than it is about anything else.

Speaking of "objectives" though - this raises the real issue with the game. Twelve Minutes is a game that is original, clever, and unusual... but it is one that feels fatally flawed in terms of enjoyment. 
Why?
Because it is a game at odds with itself. It is predicated on contradictory gameplay mechanics, in a way that cannot possibly result in anything but frustration. 

It is a game where interacting with objects, picking dialogue choices, and using items on other items is the key to success. As such, fundamentally, it is an Adventure game. Adventure games are an old, well-established genre - and players are well trained in how to play them. Clicking on everything, checking everything, and interacting with everything to see what effects can be set in motion. Experimentation - freeform experimentation - is a key part.

The time-loop elements of Twelve Minutes feeds into this notion well - seemingly at first, at least. Because the world "resets" each loop, the player can experiment, and figure out what things do what, and then compound these, to see what aspects can lead where. It fosters a sense of loose experimentation, and a gives the indication of a free-form, sand-box style of play. 

However, because the game also wants to have a very specific, very tailored narrative through-line - aping something like a filmic narrative structure - it does a rather silly thing... it actively sets traps whereby the player can (and almost assuredly will) end up "stuck" and unable to progress across multiple different iterations of events and multiple different "tracks" of narrative.

Essentially, the game is structured in such a way, that only by doing specific tailored sets of loops, in the prescribed order, can each subsequent one be seen through to its natural conclusion. The narrative requires the player to do things in a very specific order, but makes very little attempt to actually guide them or let them know, not only what that order is... but that there is an order at all.

These concepts - the strict narrative, but free-from time-loop gameplay are simply polar opposite, and not compatible.
If the player who likes to experiment (me, and I dare say most players,) stumbles into, for example multiple pieces of information, by having partially completed what the game considers to be "Loops 5 and 6", before completing what the game considers to be "Loop 3," they are likely to become hopelessly stuck and lost. Not only are they unaware that there even is a prescribed order to the loops, but they will not necessarily know why the actions they are taking do not lead to a conclusion, are given no indication of that, and are unlikely to naturally go back to complete the fundamental steps of "Loop 3"... because they are already ahead of the game narratively, and looking for bigger answers than the ones that previous loop clearly is aiming towards.

 

It is one thing to have a game that appears free-form, but simply gates and guides its players not via "walls" but via "punishment" - that can be done well, (for example, in the FROM Souls games, where the player is free to take multiple paths, but is encouraged through a specific progression via more or less challenging enemies.) However, in an Adventure game, where enemies are not a factor, that "punishment guidance" is absent. In fact, the perceived lack of "punishment" is the real problem in Twelve Minutes - the player is given no indication as to why they cannot progress, but neither are they explicitly "punished" in game for getting off the invisible, un-signposted "correct path".. aside from simply being unable to fathom why they cannot progress.

There is an accusation levelled at some time-loop games, (I have made it myself,) that they can feel over-prescriptive. Deathloop, for example, or The Forgotten City - it has been mused that the mysteries of these games would be made more involving if the game did not essentially guide the player, via filling out overall "time maps" or detailing "progression notes" - essentially showing the player their progress within different narrative tracts. 
There may be some validity to this notion (indeed, Deathloop is, arguably, a little too prescriptive at times,) however, Twelve Minutes is an absolutely sterling example of the need for such player-aiding systems. It has none, yet it's strict narrative through-line makes it the most in need of one. As such, the potential for frustration - for players to simply reach "dead-end" points, and have no notion of where they got off track, or how to course-correct, is virtually 100%.

To be clear, Twelve Minutes' issues are unlikely to be solved with a simple guidance system - indeed, the fundamental concepts of the game are a little too contradictory for that to be the "be-all-and-end-all" solution - however, some combination of a slackening of the rigid narrative, allowing the savvy player to progress past missed steps providing they are able, and the addition of some kind of "mind-map" element to show the fundamental concept behind specific loops, or even simply to indicate the requirement for a "layered" progression would go a long, long way. 

All that said, its a shame that the gameplay throws up such frustrating, and such fundamental issues with narrative progression, because the actual narrative - if played out in the correct order - is pretty good. There are layers to the mystery of what is going on that are smart and fun - including several "oh shit" moments where the fundamentals of the game are re-contextualised, (one of which is actually an "oh shit... ewww, gross!" moment,) and they mostly work. They would, of course, work far better if the player just happens to stumble into the correct, desired linear path... but unfortunately, the odds against this are staggering. They do work, but I suspect most people will see them as a result of having to consult a guide at least a few times.

The actually "final ending" is smartly drawn, if a little over-the-top. Its not overly forced, and does allow the game to slot well into the "identity crisis, cerebral thriller" type filmic sub-genre - a genre that tends to ask the viewer to accept some leaps as standard - but I do think it works as a capper to the whole mystery pretty well.

Visuals are pretty good - graphically Twelve Minutes is no powerhouse, it is decidedly indie, and small scope - but the visual style is very interesting. The whole game is shown top-down from centre-ceiling, so all 4 walls are visible (think A Link to the Past Dungeons, but more realistic,) and that viewpoint gives an odd, quite narratively appropriate "fly-on-the-wall" feeling. It feels like the characters are rats stuck in a maze, being experimented on by the player - which, in a sense, they very much are!

Audio is one of the highlights - the voice cast are named actors, (James McAvoy and Daisy Ridley provide the protagonist and his "wife". and worlds-greatest-wierdo Willem Dafoe provides the cop,) and they all do good work. The actual visual design of the characters are pretty simplistic, and because of the top-down view, there is little characterisation to be seen visually, but the voices to a good job of "humanising" them, and drawing the narrative out.
Music is pretty good - suitably subtle and eerie - and while not stand-out, does fit the tone well.

Overall, Twelve Minutes is a real shame - it has many building blocks of a really cool, interesting game, but it couples two wildly contradictory elements in a way that very few games could ever combine well, and leans far too rigidly and staunchly into both - failing to take any steps to marry them together for the player.

 

I rarely use my own failure or requirement to resort to a guide as a negative in a review, (Lord knows, I am by no means a great gamer, and what happens to me is not necessarily going to be universal,) however, in the case of Twelve Minutes, the problems are so egregious, that I think the odds of a player happening to stumble through in the right order is minuscule. I'd wager my issues with the game will be damned near universal, in this specific case. 

If a game is as rigid in structure as Twelve Minutes is, yet fails to offer guidance - to the extent that guide use becomes a virtual necessity, that is a real problem - and a particularly harmful one in a game predicated on discovery and unravelling of a mystery.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Twelve Minutes isn't a bad game - in fact, it's a genuinely interesting one, with some strong elements - but it is fatally flawed as a product, and the ranking has to reflect that. 
As such, I started thinking about indie games that had some very good elements, and some genuinely bad ones, and the game that immediately came to mind was Superbrothers JETT: The Far Shore. 

JETT is, qualitatively, a game of two halves, much like Twelve Minutes, however, I do think the highs of JETT far outweigh the highs of Twelve Minutes, and while it has some major issues, they are not quite as fundamental as Twelve Minutes' ones. As such, JETT has to outrank it.

Working down from JETT, the first adventure-adjacent game to catch my eye was the short, awkward post-romance One Night Stand. That game is not a time-loop game, but because it is so short, and so predicated on repeat play, in some sense, it functions exactly like one.
One Night Stand is the better game though. Its much smaller in scope and length, and has less artistic flourishes or meat to it, but what is there works for its fleeting duration - far more so than Twelve Minutes does.

That makes it win in the fight, but I won't completely discount the parts of Twelve Minutes that are cool and well done, or the much larger nature of Twelve Minutes, so it's a marginal win. 

The game right below couldn't be less similar to either of those games - Castlevania: Lords of Shadow - but that is a much larger scoped game, which manages to be less interesting overall, and one that really fails to capitalise on it's extreme higher budget, and thinking about it, I really don't imagine I would - given the choice between the two - play LOS again, before replaying Twelve Minutes...

...and so Twelve Minutes has to find its spot there!

 

 

 

 

 

Metrico+

 

Summary: 

 

An "Analytics and Metrics" themed puzzle platform game from Digital Dreams, Metrico+ is the enhanced, updated version (for PS4) of the original Vita game Metrico, in which an unnamed, simply-drawn protagonist character traverses a bizarre, Microsoft Excel- inspired world of bar-chart, pie-charts, stat graphs and mathematical visualisations, each of which reacts in different ways to the different metrics of the players input.

Essentially, Metrico+ is a series of individual puzzle "rooms" in which the ability to traverse from left to right is gated by obstacles. That is, of course, the broad definition of all puzzle platformers, however, what sets Metrico+ apart, is the manner in which these obstacles act. Each puzzle is different, but in all cases, the movement or action of these obstacles is tied to metrics of the player action. 
In one instance, for example, a "bar chart" might raise up based on how many times the player jumps. In another, a slide-chart might extend, or retract, based on player position. A platform might raise as the player moves left, or lower as they move right, or even more esoteric elements might be involved - an object might raise in increments, based on how many times the player has "shot" a rolling pie-chart, or even how many times they have fallen off a platform.

 

With each new puzzle, the player will not only need to experiment in order to see what actions have what specific consequences, but once established, they must then determine which combination of these action will allow them to progress through the whole puzzle - without blocking themselves.
For example, A puzzle might seem initially simply - say, appear to require jumping across a few simply platforms - however, the player may well find that a bar chart at the exit is slowly closing in discrete increments, based on the number of player jumps made. As such, they must then puzzle their way through what seemed initially simple in a much more curious way - figure out the metrics required to make a solid platform, that can be traversed in fewer jumps than will close the exit before they get there.

The actual puzzles are generally very good, and quite well implemented, with a pretty laudable variety on show, given what would appear to be a rather thematically invariable design concept. 
The game features 6 discreet "worlds" each introducing a new method of input around which the world is broadly themed, and the progression of complexity is well honed, and a smooth curve. If the player knows the solutions, each of these worlds is very quick to traverse, (indeed, a series of the games most devilish trophies require each world to be completed in a speed-run time, which vary between 3 and 7 minutes,) however, the nature of the game as essentially a 3-factor puzzle, (first figure out the metrics involved, then establish the solution via trial-and-error, then enact it correctly,)  means the first time through the game can take quite a bit of time.

There is also a series of collectibles added to many of the puzzles, requiring the player to establish a complete set of defined metrics, in order to make a "full pie-chart" appear, that adds a secondary element to them - as well as the obvious finessing and tightening of the solutions, and the establishment of smarter, more streamlined solutions required to meet the (extremely strict, and supremely unforgiving!) speed run parameters.

Visually, the game is simple, but the theme of "metrics and analytics" is well adhered to, smooth, and curiously aesthetically pleasing. The character (selected as male or female at the outset,) is simply a silhouette, and the world made entirely of geometric shapes, but some flourishes in the camera movement between puzzles, and in the end-of-world animations make that visual style really shine. 
The mathematical theme of the game actually serves a duel purpose too - it allows the game to be quite unique looking, as well as affording the developer the freedom to actually put genuinely helpful indications and what would usually be "behind-the-scenes" percentage values and indicators on the screen. These help the player to understand the nuance of what is happening, and the specific requirements for each metric, but also seamlessly blend into the overall aesthetic, and in most cases, actively enhance it. 
Conceptually, the game's visual design is such that it creates a situation where the art designers do not need to disguise the gameplay designers elements. They have total freedom to "show the working", because doing so only enhances the artistic design of the game.

Audio is fairly nondescript - the music is ambient background, and there is no voice work (or narrative to speak of to apply it to,) but sound effects are well done, and appropriately "mathematical" in nature - they sound right out of a soundboard of key-stroke indicators for a business learning tool. 

Narrative is essentially non-existent here - Metrico+ is a "pure puzzler" at heart - and while there is a very broad, lose conceptual metaphor at play, shown entirely as visual design, as the character progresses through the game, it is pretty minimal. Realistically, it allows for some slight visual stylings, but not much more - though the game doesn't feel wanting for the lack of narrative.

Actually, the ending sections are retained from the previous Vita version, and as such have one of the more strange elements of the game. Each world ends with a choice of two doors - the choice between which is immaterial to the progression of the game - but which - in its original, Vita incarnation - incorporated an odd, online "how many people chose each door" mechanic. 
It was not a gameplay critical thing, even then, and really just served as another "metric" to add to the theme... but since that online element does not exist on the PS4 version, the retention of the "two-door" endings is slightly bizarre here - as the only purpose it serves, is to mildly confuse the player as to why there are two apparent paths at all!

Overall, Metrico+ is a pretty neat puzzle game, with a cool, fairly unique look, and interesting core theme and set of mechanics, and a pretty good upgrade of the original Vita game, accessible to a much wider audience. 

It's not a game that will challenge the player too much in the initial playthrough, however, the puzzles are smart and satisfying to solve - and there is certainly scope to offer much more, if the player decides to go for the full platinum, as a wealth of fun, smart collectibles, and a set of extremely tricky speed-runs will add considerable additional gameplay to the mix!

 

 

The Ranking:

 

There's quite a few puzzle games on the ranking now (of course, given my proclivities!) and so fine ranking of puzzle games is made a bit easier now.

In terms of games within that genre, I do thing both The Spectrum Retreat, and Hue rank above Metrico+.  Metrico+ has some clever puzzles, but both those games boast that too, plus they have narrative hooks, are longer and more varied, and are a little more engaging as a result. 

Further down though, I thing Q.U.B.E Directors Cut, while longer and with more narrative, doesn't have quite the puzzle strength or variety to beat out Metrico+ - and it's look is not as interesting, so Metrico+ lands above it.

Up a bit then, I think Metrico+ does have what it takes to beat interesting but simple and short Type:Rider, however, despite the flaws in terms of UI, I think the game right above it - Through the Darkest of Times - carried enough interesting facets and original content - and some very interesting history - that it has to rank above the gameplay-good, but narratively limited Metrico+.

As such, Metrico+ finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

Norco

 

Summary: 

 

There is a particular brand of "heightened reality" fiction. Arguably, even 30-odd years later, Twin Peaks remains probably the most notable example of it, though an argument could be made for Wes Anderson's filmic output, Terry Gilliam's work, Charlie Kaufmann's writing and certainly David Lynch's wider filmic output. 

 

It's a peculiarly difficult genre needle to thread - and a particularly dangerous one to attempt, given that when not done right, it can easily become insufferable - but essentially it is the broad genre equivalent of "eclectic". Essentially, it is a genre where many, many different bizarre, strange, oddball and unusual elements are woven together - multiple elements, each of which in any other fiction would be "the one oddball character" or the "one really strange situation", each of which should, by rights, threaten to over-tip the entire narrative - but due to a combination of an intricate balancing act, an incredibly solid and well grounded core foundation, (and the creator's ability to discern the "unusual-and-fascinating" from the "strange-for-the-sake-of-it",) they all congeal not into a mishmash of nonsense (as they, perhaps, should do, when really considered,) but instead, balance together, and work in tandem just perfectly. The peculiarity of all the elements remains, but the ways in which such peculiar elements would normally topple any other narrative by their oddness are somehow nullified by one another in a delicate balancing act. 
It's rarely done well, but when it is, it allows all the desirable traits of peculiarity to remain in each element - the awe, the originality and the inspiring or fascinating qualities, but all the negative ones are eschewed - the off-puttingness, the distancing of the viewer from the material, and the scoffing. 
Rather than an abject mess, the art in question instead is coalesced into a coherent, fascinating and textured world into which the viewer can only sink into and marvel... because it is unlike anything else.

If one were to, for example, list out all the odd characters, strange situations and, (in theory,) ridiculous elements that make up Twin Peaks, the show would sound, to the un-initiated lay-person, like a complete mess. watching the show, however, despite the continual rotoscope of bizarre and unusual elements, the bought-in viewer never really bumps on any particular one, because the whole show is crafted together so well. It just... works. The continual kaleidoscope of the unusual makes not for confusion, pushing away the viewer... but for fascination, drawing them further in.

When that "heightened reality" fiction works, it is virtually impossible to articulate exactly why it works, (or, conversely, why other art, with seemingly all the same aspects, but lacking the magic, doesn't)... 
...it just does.

This "heightened reality fiction" is exactly the difficult genre Geography for Robots aimed at when they decided to make their first game - Norco. 
And in the first swing, they absolutely nailed it.

The narrative of Norco is, on paper, quite bizarre. 
I will not delve into spoilers in this review, but the world Norco takes place in is a sort of alternate-present reality of the (real) Norco area of Louisiana. 

Like the real Norco, it is an area dominated by the presence of an enormous oil refinery. 
Like the real Norco, it is a relatively impoverished place, and one where the love-hate relationship with the refinery is very real. (The real Norco refinery, while supporting the entire area economy, has been the scene of not one, but two major, explosions, both resulting in civilian loss of life, and both resulting in blanketing the area with toxic gasses.)  
Unlike the real Norco, however, this one exists in a world where bipedal robots are commonplace, human download of memories is a thriving industry, mysterious data-gathering apps are running rampant, the oil bosses are obsessed with aliens that may or may not exist in the swamps, cults of former Walmart employees worship an alt-right YouTube personality within an abandoned mall, men who live in drainage ditches are convinced you are a direct descendant of Jesus Christ... and one where he may or may not be right.

It's a world of seedy private detectives who wear clown make-up... just 'cause. 
Of mercenary hustlers who only listen to Christmas music. 
Of street puppet shows, and Pig Men in swamps, and possibly psychic teddy bears, and rampant AI learning machines that can turn the very roots and tendrils of the bayou tupelo trees into a giant, living brain. Maybe.

Now - I'm perfectly aware that what I am doing right now is exactly the thing I said one shouldn't do with Twin Peaks - I'm listing many of the oddest qualities to the uninitiated, and, on paper, they probably seem like a complete mishmash of ideas. 
I realise that. It's for a good reason.
It's specifically to lend gravitas to my words, when I say the following:

 

I think Norco may potentially be the best written videogame I have ever played. 

 

It just... works.

 

For all the bizarre elements that make up the weird, double-pronged narrative of Norco - whether during the sections where the player takes the role of Kay, the elder of two siblings, returning to Norco after a long absence to deal with the death of her mother, or the sections where you play several weeks earlier, as her mother, the game is plotted, paced, textured and dialogued to an ABSURDLY high level. There was simply not one moment of playing the game, where I was not both fascinated, fully bought-in, and chomping at the bit to explore more of this world.

It is a bizarre tale, filled with strange and unusual elements, yet nothing every feels strange, because everything is strange... and because as strange as everything is, the solid foundation of stellar, literate and borderline poetic writing, and the fundamental realism of the world created by all this strangeness is so strong. No matter how oddball or quirky or peculiar some elements might seem, within the fiction, it not only all makes sense, but it all feels real. 
Loading up the game, you are stepping into a world - and while it might not exactly resemble the one in which you purchased the game, it feels completely coherent and completely plausible within its own boundaries. The extreme quality of the writing, the music, the visuals and the thematic web is has a strength and such a grounded, solid tapestry that every new strange element that is introduced sheds its ridiculousness, and retains only its fascination. Exploring Norco feels amazing, not because the elements feel weird, but because the world feels weird, and the elements feel real within it.

On that writing: there are a lot of games that use flowery, literate writing, heaped with metaphor and simile, and seem to try to ape genuine literature. Sometimes it works to some degree, but a lot of these tend to diminish by over-egging. They are trying to seem explicitly literate - and they can often be good enough - but what tends to shine through is the trying. They often feel like games doing an approximation of great writing.

Norco feels a cut above most, because while the writing is tantamount to a literary work, it is so by being so, not by trying to be so. 
The sense of place, and of tone is absolutely set from the very outset, simply by the quality of the writing. It's not overly flowery, and not overly wordy, but has the brevity and specificity of a serious novel. The ways in which situations, places, people and things are described are with such careful use of language and such specific analogy and description, is such that the player can practically smell, touch and taste the fabric of this Norco - and of the greater alternate America in which this version of it resides.

It is a game without any vocals, yet with the simple, text-based scroll on the right had side of the screen, the personalities, traits, mood and tenor of each character positively drips from every word. There is no acting involved, but more than any other voiceless game I have played, I could still hear the characters. I could hear the accents. I could hear the tone. I could hear the timbre and the gravitas, the cracks of their voices and the sombreness, the madness and the hysteria and the fear and the sadness - the voices were there, albeit in my head... and that is something only novels can usually do.

Visually, Norco is, of course, not a graphical powerhouse. It is pixel-art, and simplistic in nature, given that it is a largely static-screen Adventure game. However, that is not to say the visuals are anything short of fantastic. 
It would be naive to posit that Norco, as the debut game from a small indie studio, chose its pixel-art visual style purely for artistic reasons - of course the budget of the game necessitated such, and the idea that a studio of that size and scope would ever have had the option of rendering Norco in full 3D is flimsy at best. However, Geography for Robots have clearly crafted the best possible game using the tools available to them, and have been keenly aware of the strengths and weaknesses of those tools from the very outset. Rather than be limited by those drawbacks, they simply lean into the strengths of them - and the result is a game that not only feels confident, accomplished and perfectly at home within the medium in which it is presented, but is one that I can honestly say could not possibly work better than it does with any other art-style. 

Norco's single screen locations may be pixel art, but they are incredibly detailed, convey the setting, tone and the bleak, unyielding nature of the place - the poverty, the dilapidation, the pollution... and of course, the omnipresence of the oil refinery, forebodingly and menacingly looming overhead in every frame, like the tower of Barad-dûr.
Characters may only have a few images to their names, but each packs so much personality and life into those pixels that make them up, that even weeks after finishing the game, I recall far more distinct characters from Norco than I do from virtually any other game I have played in the past year or two.

There is stylish use of "picture-within-picture" elements to accent different conversations, and these look cool as hell, while also serving their necessary functions, and the framing and shot-composition of areas is never less than perfect.

Audio is brilliant also. There is, as said, no voice work (and to be honest, the inclusion of it is not missed, due to the writing standards,) but what there is, is one of the best soundtracks I have heard in quite some time. It is a dark Jazz-inspired fusion of Vangelis' Bladerunner-esque style and Aphex Twin-style down-beat ambient tonal (provided primarily by Gewgawly I,) on top of which is added several tracks by Louisiana sludge metal band Thou to round out the score. 
It is both excellent to listen to divorced from the game, (and has been on constant rotation in my car since playing the game!) and works perfectly within it, adding to the bleak tone, and working in symbiosis  with the visuals and writing to set the mood of the place, the plot and the game.

Gameplay in Norco is, as said, Adventure game in nature - and to be honest, is relatively minimalistic. The point-and-click nature is relatively basic - there is no roving on-screen character, all screens are from the first-person viewpoint of the character being controlled, and clicking on objects simply reveals the characters thoughts about them, rather than moving an avatar to them. 

The actual gameplay difficulty is pretty slight. Norco is not a "difficult" game, and simply interacting with everything will see the player complete the game with relative ease, and since doing so is the method by which this fascinating world is explored, the player will likely be doing so anyway. 
Indeed, the game includes several "player-assistance" systems - NPC companions can be consulted at any point for a check-in, (a "what should I do now?" conversation,) and an interesting "mind-map" style personal set of memories fills in as Kay explores, which can be consulted for clues as to what o investigate. Truth be told, I never felt like consulting either of these was a requirement - I never felt lost in the plot - but since each of these conversations and mind-map consultations resulted in more writing, and more fleshing out of the world, I still availed myself of every single one!

There are some unusual sections of gameplay - essentially tiny mini-games, involving timing button pushes or sequencing pattern memorisation. These are fine - they do little but add some flavour and variety to the input, and are not exactly winners stand-alone... but it's pretty much immaterial. The game is about the story and the writing, and that is where Norco shines so brightly, that the minimal use of some  mini-games barely warrants comment.

Overall, Norco is a genuinely brilliant game. An Adventure game from a first-time studio, that threatens to not only be one of the best adventure games every made, but is a serious contender for one of the best written videogames of all time. 

It is a world uniquely and singularly fascinating to explore, with a tone, a tenor and a "realness" that should be impossible based on just how many seemingly ludicrous elements are in play, yet not a single one of them feels out of place, because Norco itself is such a strange, wild, downtrodden, eclectic place. 

An absolute triumph from start to finish, and a game that any self-respecting videogame fan needs to experience!

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Norco is a hell of a game, and while the actual "interactable" gameplay might be slight, that is inherent to the genre, and not a detriment here. Adventure games are a genre that live and die by their narratives, and narratively I think Norco is outstanding.

The blisteringly good writing, sense of place and tone - these are elements that under normal circumstances might be trumped by longevity or critical gameplay, but when they are operating at the level that they are in something like Norco, and combined with visuals and music that compliment and escalate them to the degree in which they do here, that is something that can directly compete with - and even surpass games that have far more nuance and "interactive" gameplay.

Looking in the area to which I think Norco roughly belongs - the upper stratosphere of the current list, one other game sticks out, as being there primarily for tone and feeling, rather than specific gameplay elements - This War of Mine.

This War of Mine is a sublimely crafted work of art - one I adore - but I genuinely thing the writing in Norco, and the overall package of sight and sound does eclipse it - just.

 

The game directly above This War of Mine, however, is Transistor. While I don't think the writing, sense of place or tone in Transistor is quite at the level of Norco, all of those elements are certainly present in Transistor - to a wildly high degree also. 

Transistor does beat Norco on music, I think (just), and it's visual style is awesome too - though I'd argue Norco takes that round...
...but the one thing that has to be accepted, is that while both games compete very closely on all the strongest factors of Norco - and Norco wins many of them... Transistor does still have a lot more gameplay and variability to it.
I'm hesitant to use that as a deciding factor for many of the great games below it, as I think the strengths of Norco's writing, music and sense of place are just so strong - but Transistor is the first game on Norco's climb towards the top that genuinely competes on all other aspects, and has the gameplay to back it up.
 

As such, Transistor retains its place, but Norco finds its spot just below - becoming the new 18th best game on the ranking!

 

 

 

 

 

Queen's Quest 3: End of Dawn

 

Summary: 

 

Much like its predecessor, Queen's Quest 2: Stories of Forgotten Past, Queen's Quest 3: The End of Dawn suffers a little for the glut of Artifex Mundi games that use "High Fantasy" as their style. The Eventide, Grim Legends and Lost Grimoires franchises all exist somewhat within the same High Fantasy genre but each also has a distinct spin beyond that. They are "High Fantasy plus X", whereas Queen's Quest, as a franchise, is the baseline "just High Fantasy".
As such, in order to stand out, a Queen's Quest game has to be a little more noteworthy in terms of quality, as it doesn't really have the distinction to stand out from the crowd. 

 

Queen's Quest 2: Stories of Forgotten Past was a little wanting in these areas - it was a fairly middling AM entry generally, and without any hooks, it simply became "another one." Queen's Quest 3: The End of Dawn does suffer from some of the same drawbacks, but happily, it is actually a particularly good example of the AM cannon in the other ways.

The art-style is, as said, simply High Fantasy, but in this case, there is a good variety to the locations, and some nice, bright art to go with them, and while it is a little lacking in distinct personality, it still serves as one of the better examples of the High Fantasy art they can do.

the puzzle set in Queen's Quest 3: The End of Dawn is good - there is a lot of puzzles, and quite a variety to them, including a few unique (or at least, less often used,) types. The hidden object sections are decent - the nice bright art does make these a little easier, but they work well enough, and actually, the "puzzle-to-hidden object" ratio is a little more skewed in favour of puzzles than the norm in this one.

The narrative is pretty simple - AM narratives usually are, but as AM narratives go, it is a decent, if not great one.

There is, unfortunately, a boss battle in this one (one of the areas I never welcome in AM games, as they never really work as well as simply having a good puzzle at the end,) but it is mercifully simple, and works fine enough - though a more substantial puzzle would have been more to my personal tastes. 

 

No bonus chapter in this one, but the actual main game is a decent length, and it doesn't really feel wanting for the lack of one.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

A good entry in the AM canon - outstripping its predecessor by a good distance, based on the stronger puzzle selection and art.

 

Doesn't do enough to compete with the top end of the AM games (an area dominated by the Enigmatis series,) and doesn't quite do enough to outdo Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart, but it is far closer to that game than to Lost Grimoires: Stolen Kingdom, and looking at the games in between, I think the most fitting place for Queen's Quest 3: The End of Dawn is right below Nightmares from the Deep: The Cursed Heart...
...and so it shall go!

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

No Priorities this time, as I'm playing holidays catch-up, but I'll be back on the horse proper after this batch!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

LA Cops stays as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

[YaManSmevz]

On 1/16/2023 at 1:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

Once again, I have fallen behind on my favorite journal of modern science. For shame!

 

On 1/16/2023 at 1:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Heavenly Bodies

 

I really need to peep out this and Lovers!

 

Heavenly Bodies definitely sounds interesting. I've always had a weird fear of outer space (even still as an adult nearing middle age, it still freaks me out if I think about it for too long!) and this seems like a perfect way to play on that. An amalgam of freaky and cutesy, I could be into that!

 

Also I will heed the advice and not make the same mistake I made with Overcooked - find a partner and enjoy it as it was intended!

 

On 1/16/2023 at 1:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

The Entropy Centre

 

I hate to reduce such a fantastic write-up, but you really could've just said "Portal 2" and mic dropped that shit. I remember you talking about this before, the comparison paired with your enthusiasm drew my interest right away. I'm about the Aperture Science-but-not-really vibes here, especially since it appears that Stubby really did their homework!

 

Also I need to play Observation, it's sitting in the hard drive just waiting to be called up.

 

On 1/16/2023 at 1:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Treasures of the Aegean

 

It's a surprising rarity to see you write about a game I already own, though am yet to play. Copa is responsible for the purchase, and you have provided a friendly but firm "move this up the list bro, trust."

 

Honestly a 2D adventure with puzzles, good music, and an intriguing look would do me some good. Also, the game's image is great - I love the dude in black pointing so dramatically, and those guys in blue look so clueless. I can't help getting a Shredder with Bebop and Rocksteady feel?

 

On 1/24/2023 at 9:31 AM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Toem

 

This one looks so charming!

 

I made a point to download it right away, so this will likely be my first PS5 game, whenever that time comes. I've seen it around, with the kind review here and there, but this is the first time I feel I really understand what it's going for. And it sounds dope!

 

You also gave me a gentle reminder that I want to check out Chicory - though that's in the class of games where I really feel like it'll be worth it to wait for the PS5 version! A class that grows larger by the day?‍?

 

Quote

 

Twelve Minutes

 

Yaayyy!!!

 

I confess to having a hint of concern that you'd be like "THIS WAS A MASTERPIECE" and I'd find myself thinking "fuck, am I dumb? Did I just not get it??"

 

Complete agreement on all counts. I found it so frustrating because there's a great deal of good here! I love the set-up, the voice acting, and so many of the little creative flourishes. Even some of the missables were a great idea, the paintings for instance, but the whole story feeling like a missable unto itself was a bit much. To get so many interesting pieces of this puzzle just to be slapped with a dead end for not being fascinated with the right piece first and having to start over gets old fast.

 

Also, for the most part I greatly enjoyed the story, but (one thing in particular) towards the end felt like they wrote themselves into a corner, or were just trying to top each other in the writing room, maybe both. The mystery of it all had me in the palm of its hand til that came up to seriously challenge my suspension of disbelief!

 

Really glad you played this one. For all its flaws it was still deserving of scientific analysis!

 

Quote

 

Norco

 

 

Bloodmoney!

 

Whenever I relent (or indeed make it to 2024 with a fatter wallet), this will assuredly be in that shopping spree! There's just too many great things here - Wes Anderson and David Lynch, Louisiana with bipedal robots, genuine oddity, writing that knocked you on your ass, a Vangelis Twin sludge soundtrack that can hang with Transistor's - who wouldn't want in on this?

 

Great work as always homie?

[Copanele]

I really didn't have time to reply here. Goddamn...uh...gaming  

On 1/16/2023 at 11:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

 

Treasures of the Aegean

Not gonna lie, I was abit nervous about this game. I loved playing it so I hyped it ...maybe abit too much, was afraid you wouldn't like it. Glad it wasn't the case  

The biggest shocker for me is that I enjoyed a platformer - the bane of my existence in videogames. Yet somehow this one was incredibly catchy and satisfying. You actually mentioned it best here:

On 1/16/2023 at 11:17 PM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

The game is exceptionally well constructed, never wastes anything, and is predicated on a movement model and mechanical design that genuinely rivals - and often exceeds - the sense of speed and fun found in much higher budget, much bigger games. The puzzles are good, the level design is impressive, and the visuals - and indeed, the whole presentation - are a joy to see.

 

This game DOESN'T WASTE YOUR TIME! Everything you do has a purpose or leads towards a puzzle or a collectible. Also the first game where collectibles are essential to your gameplay - can't say I ever saw this kind of mechanic anywhere else.

Swear, if I encountered a physical copy of this game I'd buy it in a heartbeat  the devs should definitely do more of these types of games!

 

To my shame...I can't say I know any of the other games that you played. Other than Norco, I'll check it out, please don't hunt us down ?

(I should also fire up Voice of Cards Forsaken Maiden - don't forget to review that!)

[DrBloodmoney]

 

16 hours ago, YaManSmevz said:

 

Once again, I have fallen behind on my favorite journal of modern science. For shame!

 

 

I really need to peep out this and Lovers!

 

Heavenly Bodies definitely sounds interesting. I've always had a weird fear of outer space (even still as an adult nearing middle age, it still freaks me out if I think about it for too long!) and this seems like a perfect way to play on that. An amalgam of freaky and cutesy, I could be into that!

 

Also I will heed the advice and not make the same mistake I made with Overcooked - find a partner and enjoy it as it was intended!

 

Oooft - Overcooked solo? That sounds like a thing!

 

For sure, both Lovers and Heavenly Bodies you really need that two hander. They CAN be played solo - they have the facility... but TBH, I'd say it's all a bit...

 

 

 

Quote

 

I hate to reduce such a fantastic write-up, but you really could've just said "Portal 2" and mic dropped that shit. I remember you talking about this before, the comparison paired with your enthusiasm drew my interest right away. I'm about the Aperture Science-but-not-really vibes here, especially since it appears that Stubby really did their homework!

 

Also I need to play Observation, it's sitting in the hard drive just waiting to be called up.

 

Damn - I forgot you hadn't done Observation!

 

Yeah, no excuse on that one - it's like a 4 hour game - but man, do they pack some ideas into those 4 hours!

 

Entropy Centre is definitely one you should keep an eye on though - like I said, it's no Portal 2 (nothing is, really,) but it's its own thing, and genuinely really good. One thing I'll say though, while Portal 2 absolutely grabs you from minute 1, with Entropy, it took me a few chapters to really get in a groove with it... so stick with it if you do!

 

 

Quote

 

It's a surprising rarity to see you write about a game I already own, though am yet to play. Copa is responsible for the purchase, and you have provided a friendly but firm "move this up the list bro, trust."

 

Honestly a 2D adventure with puzzles, good music, and an intriguing look would do me some good. Also, the game's image is great - I love the dude in black pointing so dramatically, and those guys in blue look so clueless. I can't help getting a Shredder with Bebop and Rocksteady feel

 

Lol - those guys are laughably clueless and useless in the game too - I love it!

 

 

Quote

 

This one looks so charming!

 

I made a point to download it right away, so this will likely be my first PS5 game, whenever that time comes. I've seen it around, with the kind review here and there, but this is the first time I feel I really understand what it's going for. And it sounds dope!

 

You also gave me a gentle reminder that I want to check out Chicory - though that's in the class of games where I really feel like it'll be worth it to wait for the PS5 version! A class that grows larger by the day‍

 

Oooooooh - yeah. Of those two, Chicory is the one - that game is dope AF. Toem is good, don't get me wrong, and the much quicker game to plat (5-6 hours vs. 20-30) and since it was PS+, basically free - but for sure don't sleep on Chicory!

 

 

Quote

 

Yaayyy!!!

 

I confess to having a hint of concern that you'd be like "THIS WAS A MASTERPIECE" and I'd find myself thinking "fuck, am I dumb? Did I just not get it??"

 

Complete agreement on all counts. I found it so frustrating because there's a great deal of good here! I love the set-up, the voice acting, and so many of the little creative flourishes. Even some of the missables were a great idea, the paintings for instance, but the whole story feeling like a missable unto itself was a bit much. To get so many interesting pieces of this puzzle just to be slapped with a dead end for not being fascinated with the right piece first and having to start over gets old fast.

 

Also, for the most part I greatly enjoyed the story, but (one thing in particular) towards the end felt like they wrote themselves into a corner, or were just trying to top each other in the writing room, maybe both. The mystery of it all had me in the palm of its hand til that came up to seriously challenge my suspension of disbelief!

 

Really glad you played this one. For all its flaws it was still deserving of scientific analysis!

 

 

Yeah - I had heard a lot of negativity, but you playing it and at least having some good stuff to say kept it in the wishlist, and TBH, I'm glad I played it - it just made so many silly, self-defeating mistakes in implementation!

Still though, plenty of interesting stuff in there - and I suspect that some lessons might be learned for another game down the road!

 

 

 

Quote

 

 

Bloodmoney!

 

Whenever I relent (or indeed make it to 2024 with a fatter wallet), this will assuredly be in that shopping spree! There's just too many great things here - Wes Anderson and David Lynch, Louisiana with bipedal robots, genuine oddity, writing that knocked you on your ass, a Vangelis Twin sludge soundtrack that can hang with Transistor's - who wouldn't want in on this?

 

Great work as always homie

 

I know, I know - I talk a good game about a lot of games, and my enthusiasm tends to be a fire-hose, rather than a laser-target....

 

...but for real now, no fooling.... Norco is one of those games.

I shall not rest until everyone in our little cartel has played it, because it is just so damned cool.

SO DAMNED COOL!

 

 

 

13 hours ago, Copanele said:

I really didn't have time to reply here. Goddamn...uh...gaming  

Not gonna lie, I was abit nervous about this game. I loved playing it so I hyped it ...maybe abit too much, was afraid you wouldn't like it. Glad it wasn't the case  

The biggest shocker for me is that I enjoyed a platformer - the bane of my existence in videogames. Yet somehow this one was incredibly catchy and satisfying. You actually mentioned it best here:

This game DOESN'T WASTE YOUR TIME! Everything you do has a purpose or leads towards a puzzle or a collectible. Also the first game where collectibles are essential to your gameplay - can't say I ever saw this kind of mechanic anywhere else.

Swear, if I encountered a physical copy of this game I'd buy it in a heartbeat  the devs should definitely do more of these types of games!

 

Yeah man - props to you - this is one I never would have noticed, most likely, but the fact that it was a platformer (of all genres!) that you were recommending had my interest piqued for sure!

 

Also, I gotta say - platforming and controls aside - the whole "the whole game is one big puzzle, and no run is ever wasted" thing...

...if that was something you dug...

...that open up a whole avenue of games I can recommend... OUTER WILDS!

 

ahem.

sorry.

OUTER WILDS!

 

sorry!

I really don't know what keeps happenOUTERWILDS!

 

...ing.

 

 

Quote

To my shame...I can't say I know any of the other games that you played. Other than Norco, I'll check it out, please don't hunt us down 

(I should also fire up Voice of Cards Forsaken Maiden - don't forget to review that!)

 

 

How dare you publicly point out that my record-keeping was suspect, and in my haste to get to the Norco review, I straight up skipped over VoC: The Forsaken Maiden! ?

 

No excuse, beyond my failure to add it to the Science Spreadsheet - I'll get a review in next batch. TBH, it's not even going to be a hugely onerous one, as most of the core aspects are fundamentally the same as the original game - but I do think it's the superior game of the two!

 

Edited January 27, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (somewhat) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

Legacy

 

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
Red Dead Redemption
Superhot: Mind Control Delete

 

New

 

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden
Tetris Effect
 

 

 

 

Subject(s) in RED marked for PRIORITY ASSIGNEMENT

[Care of @Zvetiki, @det_gittes & @grayhammmer ]

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman 3, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet LA Cops ever going to lose the title of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[Platinum_Vice]

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Legacy

 

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy
Red Dead Redemption
Superhot: Mind Control Delete

 

New

 

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden
Tetris Effect

 

Hype for this line-up be like

 

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hello Science-Gavins and Science-Staceys, as promised (and in some cases requested), here are the latest results of our great scientific endeavour!

 

 

 

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

 

Summary: 

 

A collection of the first three games in the Ace Attorney series of mystery/detective visual novels from Shu Takumi and published by Capcom, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy sees the player take the role of rookie defence attorney Phoenix Wright, as he and his assistant Maya investigate the scenes of crimes, and defend their clients in court.

Splitting their time between court, and investigating the scenes of the crimes, Phoenix must establish the facts about what went on, argue the case successfully in front of various judges, and pit his wits against various prosecutors... including his brilliant but often antagonistic prosecutor counterpart, Miles Edgeworth.

In terms of gameplay, the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games are curious beasts.

They are, as said, primarily visual novels, but this is hybridised with some Adventure Game mechanics. The actual interaction is primarily in conversation tree-style dialogue choices - both in court, and out of it - however, the investigations do afford significantly more freedom, and take on a much more Adventure Game flavour, as the player will often be free to move around different screens of the area, investigate clues, and discuss these with Maya or the episode-specific NPCs.
The interlacing of these elements is fairly limited in reality (the series was primarily, particularly in its early incarnations, aimed at a hand-held audience of GameBoy and DS users, and worked to suit those limited-input formats well,) however, the mix and the pacing is well done enough that while 90% of the games are really Visual Novels, they have the feel of being much more interactive, and of the player having much more agency in the narrative, than they actually do.

There is a lot of reading in the games - realistically, that is most of what the player does - but the genre, and the consistent high quality and variety of the cases - mean that even simply reading the facts of each case has an "interactive" feel to it. The player is actively trying to solve a mystery, and so the reading becomes more "active" as they search for clues, than simply "passive."

If there is a negative to the gameplay, it's that sometimes - particularly in 2023, when some other mystery games have found more clever ways around these issues - some of the actual solving of the case can get bogged down by mechanics - and by translation. There are a few instances where the specific wording of a question felt too ambiguous - where the specific piece of evidence to be presented, for example, feels a little unclear. That can be irksome, if the player is sure they do know what happened in the case, but is simply being stymied by the wording of the questions...
...but it's hard to see that as an outright negative, as it almost exclusively happens in court sections. It could be argued that that very same problem - knowing what is right, but being unsure how to "sell" it to the judge, is actually exactly the experience of being a defence attorney, and so it perfectly at home here!
The fact remains though, in each case, there is one specific answer to each question that is "correct" - and sometimes, either the writing, or the translation, leaves a little bit of specificity to be desired.

In general though, I really think its admirable how much the writers of these game manage to wring out of their characters. They never tip the balance over too far, and allowing the characters to continue on after the case relatively unscathed, but neither do they simply treat each case as purely stand-alone. The characters might move on to the next case, but the events of the previous one remain in their memories - and in some of the best cases, actually factor into the storytelling of future ones. It's not a series with "player-choice" necessarily - cases are static, and the primary "choice" is a pass/fail as to whether the player manages to figure out the mystery before they are told it, and if they succeed in court, but because the games are written well, they have the feel of more agency than they actually have.

As a series Phoenix Wright has, in my opinion, never quite got the credit it deserves for its overall tenor and tone. It is oddly distinct within videogames, for what it is, and for what it is not.

 

It is a series dealing with law and criminal courts - some elements that could be a little dry if done poorly - but does it in a comedic, upbeat and fun way... yet still manages to maintain a pretty consistent hit-rate in terms of good mysteries. Those cases and episodes are not entirely uniform - they ebb and flow in terms of the quality of the mystery - but at their worst they are simply okay, and at their best, can have multiple twists and turns, and really hook the player with their Agatha Christie-style mysteries.  

It also manages to maintain ongoing character dynamics, and long-form story arcs that weave throughout the individual "one-and-done" cases - and these work very well. Because the characters - both friends and antagonists - are all distinct, have particular personalities, eccentricities and foibles, and there is consistency of through-line across episodes, across games, and even across the series, the result is a series of games that operate like some of the better mystery TV shows. Playing a few games in the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney can feel like watching a full season of something like Johnathon Creek or Monk or Veronica Mars - each individual episode has its hooks, but there is a "buffer" layer of enjoyment baked into each, even before the mystery is known, because fundamentally, the characters are fun to be around.

It is a series that is rooted in anime trappings, (indeed, such was the success of the game series, at times credited with popularising the concept of the Visual Novel in the west, that it was even spun off as an anime series at one point,) yet despite the abundance of anime tropes, never dips into "weeb" or "fan-service" territory. While being genuinely clever and rich enough in the details of the mysteries to engage adult players, it remains staunchly acceptable for the younger audience too. That is a remarkably difficult thing to pull off - indeed, even mystery TV shows can have trouble maintaining that balance - and it's very much to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney series that it can maintain that level of cross-generational appeal across such a long stretch of games.

Speaking of those visuals, I really think they shine in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy. The series has always had a strong look - characters are bold, distinct and endearing for the most part, and there is a high-quality art-design to the games, meaning that characters with relatively limited poses and screenshots are given a lot of life. Phoenix himself, Maya, her sister, the lovable-if-eternally-baffled Detective Gumshoe, the antagonist-with-a-moral-compass Miles, or any of the rotating gallery of suspects, witnesses, judges and NPCs are always strongly drawn and filled with personality.
The transfer to HD visuals for this console release of the trilogy looks great - the art has all been polished up and rendered in high definition, and the result is a game that while essentially comprised of stills, has the feel and quality of a good Saturday Morning cartoon.
Cut-scenes look nice, and there is a ton of style and flourished added to bring further life to the proceedings - not least, the franchises staple signature: the 60's Batman-esque "OBJECTION!" splash screen.

Audio is one area where the games are let a little bit down - there are good stings accenting the proceedings, and the jaunty, jazzy background music is fine - but it's certainly the one area where the limited scope of the original releases for handheld systems makes itself abundantly clear. There is no voice acting, (which is to be expected,) but the dialogue is constantly accompanies by a blep-blep-blep-blep morse-code style ticker-tape sound. This was never of particular note on the handheld consoles, (truth be told, I'd imagine the majority of players were playing without sound, as Phoenix Wright was always the perfect game for a train journey, or to pass time in a waiting room,) but on a big-boy console, where the sound is generally on as standard, that does get grating.
It changes pitch a little, depending on the "speaker" whom it accompanies... but honestly, it's annoying at any pitch!

Overall, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is a great collection of three great games. Those games are older now (the oldest dating from 2001,) and were originally pitched to a smaller, less capable system, and they have not been "fully modernised" - but that is generally to their benefit. The tone is as strong as it was upon original release, the characters as fun and goofy and endearing as ever, and in high-definition, the art gets to shine in a way it never could. 

 

No player is likely to mistake these for "modern" high-budget games - the evidence of the limited scope is clearly evident, particularly in the audio (or lack of it,) - but taken from the stand point of viewing the games in the context of what they are, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is easily the best way to experience what is a heck of an opening salvo from a really great, really fun, impressively memorable and genuinely well written franchise. 

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

I think the strongest arrow in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy's quiver is its mystery writing and the characters, and so the games I looked for for comparison were in that camp - mystery games, that are primarily narrative focussed.

On the list, there are a few that stood out, but the ones that seemed most appropriate were threefold: David Cage's Heavy Rain, Backbone, and No Code's Stories Untold. 

I think, despite the much monger run time and strong art, Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy does have to rank lower than the highest of those: Stories Untold. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy is smart and clever and fun, but Stories Untold is certainly more interesting in 2023, and the visuals, while obviously more modern, are also simply more interesting, and more unique. The narrative is shorter, but more unusual.

However, I do think that Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy has to rank above the other two. Backbone is the higher ranked, and while Backbone has a lot of cool elements, and is certainly a more wild and unusual journey, the sheer wealth of cases in Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy, and the general high standard of writing is such that the compound effect simply outmatches what Backbone does.

 

That leaves a small handful of games in between to prove a spot - none of which are really comparable, but simply on quality and fun - and particularly on writing - I think the most appropriate spot feels like it is just above The Solitaire Conspiracy, but just below Yoku's Island Express.

And so it goes!

 

 

 

 

 

Red Dead Redemption

 

Summary: 

 

I recall vividly conversations that happened with consistency and fervour around gaming forums or between gamers, beginning around 2001, shortly after the release of the - at the time, mind-blowing - Grand theft Auto III from Rockstar. They escalated in 2002 with the release of GTA: Vice City, and reached a particularly notable fever-pitch in 2004, with the release of GTA: San Andreas.
They varied in approach, and in answers, but essentially they were always themed around the same musings:
"Wouldn't it be cool to have a GTA set in BLANK?"

 

Such was the star of Rockstar at the time - a marker of unimpeachable quality, and unparalleled videogame advancement, as yet unmarred by missteps, or even reasonable peer developers offering qualitatively comparable alternatives - that essentially, the idea of ANY 3D, open world, free-form, sandbox game that wasn't an RPG, simply meant "GTA".
It wasn't so much the crime aspect. GTA was a crime simulator, but because that simply happened to be the genre with which Rockstar proved, (with GTA III,) then confirmed, (with Vice City,) that such a massive, free-form, loosely-mission structured, yet sandbox-style world could be accomplished, one was simply being conflated with the other. GTA meant crime, yes, but more fundamentally, it just meant open-world-non-RPG...
...and so the question really being asked in those conversations wasn't so much "what setting could house a good crime sim?", but rather "what world do you want to fuck around in?"

The answers, of course, varied... and in many cases, they were, in time, answered in some fashion - not always by Rockstar themselves, but often by others, as they caught up. 
"A prohibition era" GTA was answered by Mafia. 
A "WWII themed GTA" by The Saboteur. 
Yakuza established itself as the one other genuine strain of true genus, covering the Japanese locations and flavour. 
Rockstar themselves did "GTA in school" with Bully, and games like Crackdown, Infamous and Prototype covered "superhero GTA". 
Other games like Saints Row, Watch Dogs, Sleeping Dogs, The Getaway, True Crime and their ilk would go on to take up other cities, and tonal variations on the Rockstar theme, and Ubisofts Assassin's Creed games took on a form of "ancient historical GTA."

(Yes, it is, of course, reductive to consider these games "GTA in X" - I am aware - however, I do think it is wilfully ignorant to pretend that the ground for these games was not paved, or at least shaped, by GTA.)

 

None really attempted the genre Red Dead would land in, however. Until, that is, in 2010, when the notion of a more "natural environment" aspect of the GTA formula - having been proven with the vast swathes of "between-city" areas in GTA: San Andreas - was finally applied whole-cloth...
...to the sequel to a dormant, purchased IP, in that most under-catered of genres in gaming: The Western.

And what a world that was to fuck around in!

To describe Red Dead Redemption as the "sequel to Red Dead Revolver" - the decent, if scope-limited level-based 3rd Person shooter from Angel Studios (who were purchased by Rockstar towards the end of its development) - or as "Old West GTA", is reductive. 
Red Dead Revolver was a solid, if not hugely remarkable game, notable primarily for its setting (the Old West was even less well used as a game setting back then,) and its scope and scale gave absolutely no hints as to the direction the "franchise" would go next. 

 

Also, though, to describe Read Dead Redemption as being any "version" or "skew" of GTA is something of a misnomer also. While Red Dead does retain some loose structure from GTA, really, it is its own beast.

GTA itself had, of course, already undergone several marked deviations from its "core" original format - firstly with GTA: San Andreas, deviating from the pure "crime in a city" format by having such a vast, country landscape alongside it's usual staples, and again in GTAVI, the formula was altered, where the "silly sandbox" aspects of the were quite significantly downplayed, as the narrative elements became more serious, the protagonist's journey more a focus, and it started to become antithetical to the design, for the player to simply cause chaos for chaos' sake.

 

Truth be told, GTA had stopped being a "silly sandbox crime" game already, and had become something more substantial. That silly fun was still there for the choosing, but it wasn't a selling point anymore. 
What remained was the lavish and giant worlds, the focus on an absurd amount of detail and things to do, a well told fiction, and the use of the games' US setting to make comment, (often very broad, on-the-nose, satirical comment, but comment nonetheless,) on US society.

It is from this version of GTA that Red Dead Redemption is best viewed - not as a version necessarily, but as a separate strain sprung from the same genus.

Taking the role of John Marston, a reformed former outlaw who has settled with a family, the player is thrust into the role of bounty-hunter by a cruel and scheming lawman. Marston's wife and son are held hostage by the law, on the promise they will be released, upon Marston's successful bringing of three members of his former outlaw gang to justice. 
Thus begins a long, winding, mission-based narrative thread, that sees him ride from township to township throughout the old west, (and Mexico,) pledging, swapping and undercutting allegiances to different factions, gangs and people as he pursues his old compadres. 

The narrative threads of Red Dead Redemption are, all told, pretty good. The game clocks in around the 25 hour mark for a "pure narrative" "critical-path" playthrough, and while the game does suffer from the usual GTA staples, (there is always a few "faction storylines" that go on a little long, and feel flabby in the middle, (in this case, generally around Mexico,) the actual plotting moves at a fairly steady pace. 
Of course, like its GTA cousins, the actual narrative can feel over-long, though this is more a result of the free-form nature of the game itself. There is always so much to do in a Rockstar sand-box-style game - so many side quests, optional objectives, emergent gameplay moments, and simply things to do and see - that the player will often get distracted from that critical path for dozens of hours at a time. That isn't necessarily a detriment to the game, however - and certainly not an issue exclusive to Rockstar.

Virtually every open-world game has similar issues, and in fact, Red Dead actually suffers far less for that genre nuance than most - for two reasons.

 

Firstly, the overall quality. 

Like most Rockstar games, the level of detail and the fun of side missions is rarely significantly lower than on the critical path. Side content is worth doing, so the player does it - and unlike some games (Far Cry is a recent example I recall,) the blend of critical missions, side missions, emergent content etc. is very fluid. The player rarely feels like they are "ticking off boxes" on a list of tasks - the blend is such that is feels more like simply being in a world, and discovering things to do, and tasks to be done somewhat organically. 

Secondly, the tone and the stylistic genre.
Red Dead Redemption is a western - and as such, the more staid, slower pace of the narrative actually fits far more appropriately than it does in something like GTA. Westerns are a cinematic genre that operate at a slower clip than crime dramas. There is more time spent in simple artistic appreciation of landscape, or silence, of the machinations of getting from A to B... and this really helps to hide some of Rockstars issues that can be more obvious in the likes of GTA. It doesn't alleviate them, but it does at least soften their impact.

Rockstar have a, (well founded, but distinct,) arrogance to their game designs. They know how good their games are, and they want you to know that too - and that manifests, often, in an artistic fetishisation, and borderline masturbatory approach to things like character animations. 
Rockstar put the effort into making a really nice animation for doing something (say, opening a car door, and getting into a car, in GTA,) and they are going to make you appreciate it... by having it take a long time, and not allowing the player to skip it. In a GTA game, these kind of unskippable, "you will look at this!" elements can be irritating, and feel antithetical to the pace of the game, but in Red Dead Redemption, the equivalent ones do not... because the game is a Western. It is slow-paced by genre, and so fits Rockstars sensibilities better.

 

This is not to say that Rockstar's arrogant forcing of pace is a good thing, of course. While the pace of Read Dead feels fitting, I'd still hesitate to say that forcing the player to slow down and "appreciate" the level of detail in an animal skinning animation, or a painstakingly detailed horse animation is anything but cavalier with the players time - particularly in a game as long as Red Dead can be...
...but I also cannot deny that while these elements are arguably more egregious on paper than they are in GTA games, the effect is lessened overall.

That actually brings up some other areas in which Red Dead Redemption's Western setting plays into Rockstar's hand better than GTA - the filmic and cinematic tropes, and the sometimes juvenile or too-on-the-nose satire.

Rockstars head honchos are, of course, cinephiles at heart. Each game they make is steeped in film references, and in taking elements from popular cinema in their design. GTA generally is steeped in mafia movies, Vice City drew from Miami Vice and many 80s "glitz and drugs" films, San Andreas was Boyz n tha Hood, Menace II Society and the rise of 90s gang cinema... even Bully drew from every Porky's, Revenge of the Nerds or Animal House type school and college sophomoric comedy.

 

Red Dead Redemption, being a Western, leans into that filmic genre too - but because the Western as a film genre has multiple strains - the Leone Spaghetti Westerns, the traditional John Wayne Westerns, the John Huston-style sweeping grandeur Westerns, and the more Unforgiven-style revisionist Westerns - all distinct, but sharing a common backdrop - it allows Red Dead Redemption's gameplay and narrative to ebb and flow dynamically between different styles, without ever feeling dissonant.

A gun-fight can be right out of exploitation, fast-paced For a Few Dollars More-style cinema, then the ride home can be a sweeping epic ride across country, a-la The Searchers, and it never feels quite as incongruous as it can in GTA, when the tone suddenly switches from a Beat Takeshi-style sombre crime moment, to a Fast and Furious-style over-the-top car chase.

It might seem like the Western setting should mean one of the tent-pole elements of Rockstar - the commenting on modern US society - would be lost. However, what it effectively does, is force, by genre, that thing that Rockstar lack generally - oversight and editing. 

Rockstar's issues with GTA are that - often - it feels like there is no one ever saying "tone it down." They come up with a joke, and it feels like they immediately do the most obvious, most crass, most on-the-nose version of it, without any room for nuance.

With Red Dead Redemption, they HAVE to tone it down tohugh, due to the genre... but the blood is still pumping to that satire organ. Instead of making the obvious "look at this thing... and we added a pun!" joke, the satire is forced to be more subtle - in looking at the building block of what would become the America that the Hauser brothers so like to skewer, they can comment on how things like racism, sexism, hypocrisy and corruption are baked into that society - and always have been - but are forced to do it in a more mature, less "on-the-nose" way.

Gameplay is pretty excellent throughout. As said, the narrative is good - engaging, cinematic and a good yarn - but the real meat of Red Dead Redemption is in how well the game succeeds at simply putting the player in a world. Getting on a horse, and riding out into the plains, or across the desert, or into the fledgling city, or up the mountains has a feeling of grand scope (lent by the landscape,) and because Marston feels generally pretty good to control (lessons have been learned since the awkward controls of GTAIV,) a player can easily loose an entire evening simply exploring the land, and seeing what happens - missions be damned.

There is a multiplayer here too - one that built quite significantly on the rudimentary offerings of GTAIV's MP. Red Dead Redemption is, arguably, the earliest genesis for what would become Rockstar's eternal cash-cow, when fully realised in GTAV - the "open-ended", do anything world multiplayer, that somewhat marries the concepts of single-player mission-based sandbox, with basic MMO design.

It allows players to all enter the same instanced world, and simply "be". They can chose to meet, to fight, to take on missions... but there is no forcing that issue. Essentially, it takes the same broad idea of the single-player format - be in the world, and pick your own adventure - and applies it to a MP setting. While that doesn't always work, it was novel - and clearly, once honed into the money-machine that is GTAV Online, it was an idea with significant legs!

Visually, Red Dead Redemption is a 2010 game, but its genuinely remarkable how good it looked then, and how well it holds up. It has, of course, been surpassed multiple times now in terms of scope and fidelity (not just by its own sequel, but, since the Open-World game is often the "showpiece" genre for AAA developers nowadays, by many other offerings like Horizon, Far Cry, Modern Assassin's Creed etc,) but it remains impressive - even today - how well the game captures the brutal majesty and the unforgiving beauty of the wide open swathes of land that make up its world. 
The landscape encompasses virtually every "biome" type that old-west cinema can be set in - Dakota-like mountains, Montana plains, valleys, Mexican sands and villages, early City dwellings etc. and blends them seamlessly together, so a journey across the game's landscapes feels as epic as it should, and morphs from one to the other without visible seams. 

 

Character models are arguably the area where Red Dead Redemption has been most eclipsed by time - certainly the character models and animations would feel rough by 2023 standards - however, for the time and place, they are well ahead, and so by comparison to other games of the era, Red Dead Redemption still stands relatively proud. 

Audio is pretty great across the board. Because Red Dead Redemption is not a contemporary setting, on of the staple factors of GTA is unable to feature - the Radio Stations - however, what Red Dead Redemption does instead, is lean far more into silence, than frenetic noise. 
In GTA, there is almost never an "un-scored" moment - each mission is completed in a maelstrom of different city sounds, radios music and general buzz - as city life generally is.

The old west, however, is quiet. Riding out across a plain does not need frenetic music, what it needs are quiet moments, with the lonely sounds of the landscape, the horse-hoofs on dusty ground, and the screech of a distant eagle. Red Dead Redemption does great work with these elements - the nature sounds and the ambient noise all work well, and lend verisimilitude to the experience. 
Occasional music is used - one particularly good moment, the first ride to Mexico is actually scored with a full song - but these moments are used sparingly, and smartly - like the score in a western movie would be.

 

Vocal work is good - it's not on the level of a Last of Us, or a "pure" narrative game, but there is a lot of characters, a lot of dialogue, and it varies in quality (often with the writing,) but rarely does any of it stick out as genuinely poor. At worst it is acceptable, and for the most part, it works well for the broad character archetypes being worked with. 

 

The Audio highlight here though, for sure, is foley. As a defacto bounty hunter and tracker, Marston uses his ears as much as his eyes when navigating the land, and the player follows suit. There is a real quality to the sound design in the game. Gunfire has a "crack-pop" that is punchy and visceral, horses whinny and bray, animals call, grass and trees rustle, hooves pound - these are the sounds of the old west, and they are the sounds the game nails.

 

Red Dead Redemption is a monster of a game - its huge, sweeping, grand... and it has been talked about at length for over a decade. I could continue to go on and on about it, but really, this would become unwieldy!

Overall, the salient point is that Red Dead Redemption represents without a doubt the best incarnation of the Old West to feature in a videogame up to that point (and likely since, with the exception of its own sequel,) and probably the best incarnation of Rockstar's gameplay formula, period. 

The setting and genre is not only interesting, and one less well trodden by games in general, but virtually every one of the notable restrictions that genre and setting place on Rockstar, work to its benefit. They force them to reign in their usual negatives, accentuate the positives, and go some way to justify the more negative Rockstar tropes and eccentricities in a way contemporary games like GTA cannot.

 

The result is a game that feels exceptional on many, many levels... and feels underwhelming in very few.

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

We're very high on the list with this one. While Red Dead Redemption does still have some of the negative elements that Rockstar games always tend to, those are disguised and alleviated far more here than with most of their other games, resulting in a really great game, that is giant, sweeping, epic... and most importantly, fun.

Red Dead Redemption is one of those games that ranks highly because of a confluence of factors, rather than one specific shining one.
There is variety to the gameplay, and to the approach to missions, and that competes with some of the best games ranked highly for those reasons, though it must be noted that, regardless of approach, that variability is not on the level of something like an Immersive Sim, however. 
There is a good story here too, though it doesn't quite compete with the narratives of some of the top games on the list.

Truth be told, most elements are like that in this ranking - Red Dead Redemption is not the pinnacle of any specific element, but is a very high quality example of such a broad range of them, that the net effect propels it upwards.

Near the top of the list, the games are often very different in terms of qualitative elements, and direct comparisons become much more difficult, and much more a measure of "general awesomeness" - and so direct one-to-one fights become less meaningful, but simply by sitting and genuinely pondering which games deserve to outrank Red Dead Redemption, and which don't, I feel like a very specific statement became clear...

...and that is that while Red Dead Redemption should outrank some games I've loved like Bloodborne, Little Big Planet 2, and even the original Hitman(2016) in the aggregate...
...and despite some serious back and forth, I think does have to outclass even Dishonoured...

...I cannot say that the game outmatched the Shadow of the Colossus Remake. 

While Red Dead Redemption is a great, fun, sweeping game, it never really got me emotionally - and the epic grandeur of it still never eclipsed the equivalent feeling of Shadow of the Colossus, once the Remake removed all the negatives, and accentuated all the positives of that game.

As such, Red Dead Redemption finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

Superhot: Mind Control Delete

 

 

Summary: 

 

Beginning life as a DLC mode in development for Superhot - the 2017, ultra-stylish, virtual-reality themes bullet-time-violence simulator from SUPERHOT Team - Superhot: Mind Control Delete was fleshed out and released in 2020 as a stand-alone product, splitting the difference between DLC and sequel by being offered for free to purchasers of the original game, but with paid accessibility to those new to the strange world.

Essentially, Superhot: Mind Control Delete follows the same pattern that many games did, (and do,) in the current vogue - spurred by the meteoric rise of the rogue-like genre in gaming culture - it applies a rogue-like elements (or in the case of this game, a rogue-lite element,) to the pre-existing gameplay, allowing a game with essentially the same technical and mechanical elements to take on a whole new lease of life as a repeatable, randomised, run-based version.

Stepping once again into the strange, mysterious, somewhat sinister world of the underground virtual hacking scene, the player this time has one goal in mind: More.

 

Narrative is less a focus - the original Superhot had a fairly effective narrative element that made itself known around the edges, and became quite interesting as the player progressed, constructing a compelling, (if still vague,) mystery as to what the nature of the game being played was. It was relatively slight, but evocative, and for as minimal as it was, it was a story narrative. 

Mind Control Delete, however, has little in the way of a "through-line" narrative arc, and instead, serves more as meta commentary on the nature of games themselves - in general, and specifically, when it comes to rogue-likes (and, no doubt, the developer's feelings on the response to the original game, which certainly saw a lot of ardent fans clamouring and begging them for... more.)
"More" is the theme of the game - that's what the button the player pushes to play another level says, and the concept of "More" is used by the game as a punchline, a question, an answer... and a thesis statement!

While the game is certainly bigger and more fleshed out than the average DLC pack for an existing game, it has, it must be said, the general feel of DLC - more than of sequel. stand-alone DLCs are an unusual beast generally, and the "form factor" of them is not terribly well established. They can fall anywhere between slightly limited, but still fully-fledged sequel, (The Far Cry "interim" games, like Primal and New Dawn, for example, or Dishonoured: Death of the Outsider,) they can feel significantly smaller, (The Last of Us Left Behind, for example, or Assassin's Creed Freedom Cry, while released as bolt-on DLC, were available separately,).... but generally fall somewhere in-between. (InFamous: First Light, for example.) 

It's not an easy thing to quantify exactly, as the "substantiality" of these stand-alone DLCs has as much to do with the relative length and substantiality of the base game to which they owe allegiance - but if push came to shove, the camp Superhot: Mind Control Delete would most appropriately fall in would be around the Infamous: First Light area.
There is certainly plenty here to keep the player occupied - likely for around the same amount of time as Superhot did - however, there is a feeling of re-treading that naturally comes from the inherited elements, and while gameplay and mechanics are altered and freshened by the introduction of the rogue-like elements, the game does feel still fully beholden to it's progenitor, and not necessarily pushing the franchise forwards.

Having said that -that gameplay, and those mechanics were, in the original Superhot, fantastic. The game had a fresh and original look, and amazing feel, and was a blisteringly original and smart core combat-puzzle game. The only real complaint that could be levelled at it, was that there wasn't quite enough of it - and so making some small mechanical and format changes, adding new levels - and crucially, having those levels include an element of randomness and repeatability - is more than welcome.

 

That randomisation in Superhot: Mind Control Delete does work... though it does introduce potential issues, which the core game is slightly altered to accommodate. The level-build randomisation works, essentially, like snap-map did in older FPS multiplayer custom modes. The levels are not entirely random - there are discrete sections and elements, which the game bolts together in different ways, and combines to make new levels, but certainly, the player playing for any extended period of time will see repeated rooms / hallways / balconies etc. What will change also though, is enemy placement, and while the randomising in Superhot: Mind Control Delete is not revelatory, or the most varied seen in games by a long stretch, the modest ways in which levels change is enough to extend the possibilities and the player engagement a fair bit.

This randomising has positive and negative aspects to how it affects the core gameplay. As said, the variety is welcome, and alleviates the issues the original game had, in that once a level was "solved" there was little gameplay left beyond simply finessing it. The individual levels, however, were specifically tailored, and so it was always clear that the level presented could be solved.

In Mind Control Delete, however, because some aspects of each level and enemy placement are chopped and changed, while offering more variety and a longer repeatable challenge, that tailoring IS less nuanced. Sometimes, enemies will be positioned such that they have the drop on the player prior to them even seeing them - an issue that the original game didn't ever struggle with, as each level was bespoke and specifically designed.

 

This is alleviated somewhat by changing up the "fail-states" of levels. where in the original Superhot, a single hit or shot to the player resulted in death, here, the player has a set number of hearts - and only dies once they are all gone. 

As such, the actual objective of Mind Control Delete feels substantially different to that of Superhot. Rather than pursuing the "perfect" single run, the gameplay and combat puzzle-solving is more about minimising danger, and developing the flexibility to adapt and change tactics on-the-fly. It is no longer about perfecting a single challenge with no mistakes, but rather, about developing skilful use of the mechanics to deal with as many varying situations as possible, while minimising them.

The rogue-like elements manifest elsewhere too - some powers that are gained over time, such as the ability to make all thrown objects explode, or to increase ammo available in all guns, etc, add a little additional variability, as well as a broader, more "cross-level" feeling of "levelling up." These work well in the rogue-like context - in a way they likely couldn't have in the original game.

Visually, the game is, absolutely, and 100% its father's son. It looks identical to the original Superhot - both in the action, and in the interstitial "around the edges" sections. that is not a bad thing - Superhot looked cool as hell, and the combination of stark black and white levels, and crystalline red enemies still looks cool - and remains pretty unique. The "CRTs and ascii Fonts" look of the hacking sections  still look dope, and the whole game still drips with the style the first one did. Nothing much new is done with it, but it still works.

 

Audio is one area that feels lacking though. There is good foley - the gunshots and the shattering of the enemies still sounds cool as hell -  but the gameplay is oddly, almost painfully quiet for the most part. In the majority of levels, the background is either wholly silent, or underpinned with a very quiet, sombre drone. This feels, (and likely is,) a stylistic choice, and might not feel odd in some cases... but since a couple of levels - in particular, the "disco" levels - do introduce a pounding, really fun soundtrack, and because it works so well as an accompaniment to the action, it tends to make the rest of the game feel lacking for the absence of it.

I'll note, Superhot had some of the same elements - it used silent ambiance in action also - but for some reason, it stands out more as a negative in Superhot: Mind Control Delete. Perhaps due to the more fast-paced, quick-fire, "not perfect, but do your best" nature of the revised rogue-like gameplay... the game feels looser and more action-heavy, and as such, the score feels like it should have adjusted along with the gameplay.

Overall, Superhot: Mind Control Delete is not a revelatory thing - it's not pushing the franchise forward really - either aesthetically, mechanically, or auditorially, and it arguably spins it's wheels in terms of narrative content - but it does offer a new, interesting spin on what is the undeniably fun gameplay of the original Superhot. 

 

It's not changed dramatically, (it would be highly unlikely that anyone who did not enjoy the original Superhot would find more to enjoy in Superhot: Mind Control Delete,) but it does offer an interesting enough new slant on that gameplay to anyone who did - giving more and more variable levels for players to blast their way through...
...and given that it was free to most of those players, that can hardly be anything but a win!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

As said, Superhot is the game that Superhot: Mind Control Delete is absolutely the DLC for, and while I do like the way Superhot: Mind Control Delete alleviates and addresses the (few) issues Superhot had, the fact remains, Superhot remains the superior game. It has the narrative, the more tailored levels... and it's the game that was revolutionary. Superhot: Mind Control Delete is a nice add to it, but it isn't doing much beyond adding to it.

As such, Superhot provides the ceiling.

Working down from there then, and keeping in mind that while Superhot: Mind Control Delete is not revelatory, it does retain many of not most of the positive elements that propelled the original game so high in the ranking, it comes down to really considering how awesome Superhot: Mind Control Delete is in a vacuum, sans the originality and ballsy panache of that audacious first game.

There's not much similar for direct comparison, but on pure "awesome feel", I think the game I'm comfortable with Superhot: Mind Control Delete beating out is the interesting, but in places flawed, The Sexy Brutale... but for all that it has some issues, I'm not quite comfortable with Weird West ranking lower than Superhot: Mind Control Delete. 
Weird West doesn't work in all aspects as well as it could, but it does really shine in some, and is original in a way that a derivative "variation on a theme" like Superhot: Mind Control Delete cannot be.

As such, Superhot: Mind Control Delete finds its spot! 

 

 

 

 

Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden

 

Summary: 

 

The second in the table-top themed, card-based light JRPG series from Alim, under the direction and pen of Yoko Taro, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden released in 2022 - a mere year after its predecessor, Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars.

In a new story, unrelated to the previous Voice of Cards entry, the player takes the role of Barren, a young fisherman on Omega Isle - one island within a loose archipelago, whose fate appears to be sealed and the isle doomed to wither, due to the lack of the establishment of a "maiden."  Each island in this world has one of the "maidens", who, along with their protector and stalwart hand, protect the islands via mystic magic - and the sword - eventually sacrificing themselves at an altar to ensure the isle's future.
After finding a young mute girl, Laty, and befriending her, it becomes clear that she is, in fact, the intended maiden of the Omega Isle, but has not been able to assume her mantle. Together, the two set about to visit the other maidens of the other isles, to request (or take,) relics from them, to allow Laty to fulfil her destiny, and save Omega Isle.

As one might expect for a sequel coming so hot on the heels of its predecessor, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden is very similar in many technical and stylistic elements to the game that came before it. Both games share an aesthetic, style, tenor and pace, and in fact, rather than feeling necessarily like demonstrable "original and sequel", the "table-top gamified" trappings of the series, make them feel rather more like two distinct campaigns within the same overall rule-book.

As this is the case, this review, more than most sequel reviews, will really be designed to address Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden as it directly relates, compares, and contracts with its predecessor, rather than purely as a stand-alone product. I'm not going to delve to specifically into the overall trappings of the Voice of Cards series here, as that has already been covered in the review of Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars.

Taking Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars as a baseline then, while Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden does retain virtually all technical and mechanical elements whole-cloth - even extending to retaining the same "game Parlour mini-game", a lot of tertiary NPC cards, and a significant number of the environment Cards - it does have some significant differences, worth exploring... 
...and happily, virtually every one of these changes is for the betterment of the game!

Firstly, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden, while paced similarly to Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, is quite significantly both longer, and more challenging. While neither game is particularly testing, the difficulty of Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars was notable, in just how lacking it was. Aside from a single optional mini-boss, there was virtually no possibility of failing an encounter in the game. 
While Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden is still not a particularly challenging experience all told, the curve of the game feels far more attuned this time, with spikes at bosses, and far more note required to be taken by the player of things like specific status effects and counters, combinations of moves, specific play order etc. In fact, while Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars saved its most challenging encounter for an optional event, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden does reserve its most difficult fight for the final campaign boss, and that particular encounter (or set of encounters, in fact,) ask the player to have a much more solid and comprehensive understanding of the nuances of the combat in the game than any element of its predecessor did. 

Secondly, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden, as the second game in a now established franchise, is no longer setting up the peculiarities ad eccentricities of the unusual stylistic trappings - and as such, is more free to toy with them. It uses that format to do more interesting variations on its gameplay, and while some of these are simply artistic flourishes - having rainy marshlands show visible, 4th-wall-breaking raindrops on the table-top itself, for example - some are legitimate gameplay design changes. For example, introducing "stealth" sections, which manifest as pathing "board-game-style" turn based puzzles, in which the character piece must make moves through a hallways, keeping a set patterned path of enemy cards in mind, and avoid trapping themselves, in a sort of "slow, turn-based version of Ladybug or Snake.
Not every one of the format-bending elements is a winner (the stealth sections, can feel a little grating when used too often,) but the overall effect on the game - breaking up the standard format to allow for more variety - works, and is a good addition, allowing Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden to sustain over the longer duration.

The third major change, is in the format of the game itself, with regards to characters and parties. While the original Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars followed a very basic, JRPG structure of slowly adding party members, and eventually allowing the player to select which to actively use, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden flips this around. Rather than a vast party of characters, there are really only 2 (or, 2 and a half,) primary characters who are "permanent".
Essentially, the game uses Barren and Laty as the only real "story playable" characters, and has a narrative-based rotating third and fourth slot, filled by which ever combination of maiden and protector befit the current plot. During some brief sections, where Barren and Laty are not accompanied by another maiden, their traveling companion, the (suitably Japano-weird) spirit guardian Lac, will sub in as their third. 

 

This rotating zoetrope of characters allows the game to both focus the scope of characters in terms of the busy-work elements (buying equipment, equipping, managing skills etc,) while also feeling larger overall, (there are actually significantly more characters to fight with in Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden than its predecessor.) It also neatly steps around the usual JRPG issue, of having a large party, but the player simply falling into a routine and using the same characters all the time - the companions are set by the narrative, to the player must learn to use all combinations effectively at different times. 

All of this works pretty well, and combines with one of the other changes in Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden - the different Narrator, and significantly better musical score.

The change in narrator is not really a plus or minus - both the narrator of Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden, and Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars do good work, and one does not feel demonstrably better or worse than the other - but the mere fact there is a change is something of a benefit to the franchise. 
It adds to the notion that each game within the series is a "campaign" within an established rule-set. This one is a different flavour, and that feels correct, as it is coming from a different Dungeon Master.

The score also - while both games have their music composed by noted Japanese composer (and long-term Yoko Taro collaborator,) Keiichi Okabe, I thought the music in Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars was a little bland by that standard, and a little milquetoast, overall. 
By comparison, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden feels a cut above - it's more vibrant, more varied, and more interesting, and stands out - particularly during rousing boss fights and key moments in the plot.

 

Overall, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden is a good addition to the franchise, and arguably a much better indication of Voice of Cards as a franchise, than its predecessor. The actual narrative might be a little weaker, truth be told (it is, it must be said, a little less funny, and a little more self-serious,) but there is more than enough additions to step it above Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars generally, and enough elements that play with and have fun with the original stylings and tone, to confirm that the franchise has legs to support continued sequels.

A good building upon an already solid, and quite original premise, and makes for a winning, charming, odd little game - and the best of the two so far!

 

 

The Ranking:

 

As said, I think that while the narrative is a smidge weaker in The Forsaken Maiden, generally, the changes are all for the better, and that established The Isle Dragon Roars as the natural floor.

The same oddness that made that original game difficult to compare one-to-one with other games still applies here for the games above, but in a simple "would I play The Forsaken Maiden before replaying this one?" it did actually do quite a bit better.

There were a few games in the list where the answer was tenuous, but the first one to really give a hard "No" was the interesting, weird amalgam of mystery Walking Sim and 3D Puzzler The Spectrum Retreat.

As such, Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

Tetris Effect

 

Summary: 

 

Ever since its debut on the Gameboy, Tetris has been one of the defacto "power-games" in videogames. Ask any non-gamer of a certain age to start naming videogames, they will likely get to Pac Man, Mario, Pong... maybe Sonic(?)... before the mention Tetris... but Tetris is highly unlikely to be further from the top of the list than fifth or sixth. It's one of those games that, by being so singularly one thing, and having such a strong, specific identity, is practically synonymous with the genre to which it belongs. Virtually all fast-paced, falling puzzle games could be considered, "Tetris-likes". They are easily described in terms of their proximity to, and deviation from, Tetris, and are judged against Tetris as the defacto barometer of quality.

It's a game that has had over 100 releases and variations since its inception. The simple nature of the game - a 10x20 grind, seven distinct block on rotation, and an increasing or decreasing speed of drop - is so fundamental a core, that it allows for a huge amount of malleability in its application. There are version of the "pure" game, like Tetris Ultimate and Tetris Arcade, there are multiplayer variants like Tetris 99 and Tetris Battle and Tetris Friends, there are unusual variants like Tetris Cascade and Tetris Elements... there are even mash-ups with other games, like Puyo Puyo Tetris or Pokemon Tetris... and everything in between.

The fundamentals of the game are evergreen - clearly. A game does not stand the test of time in the way Tetris has if that is not the case, and very few games can boast the sheer swathe of skill levels to which it appeals. Virtually anyone on the planet could tell you the basic rules of Tetris, yet the skill ceiling is near infinite - as demonstrated by the existence of the Tetris World Championships, which continue to be played each year.

I am a fan of arcade puzzlers - I always have been - and chief among those puzzlers, (and without a doubt, at the centre of, and acting as the catalyst for that greater appreciation,) is Tetris. I've played a decent number of Tetris variations, and pound for pound, I believe that Tetris Effect is potentially the best release the game has seen.

Essentially, Tetris Effect operates as three different things, with three different pillars to its offering.

Firstly, and primarily, as Tetris's answer to what is arguably its only true rival for the arcade puzzler crown (on Sony consoles, at least,) Lumines. 

 

Lumines is a game with Tetris-style gameplay baked into it's DNA. A lot of games can boast the same, but what really set Lumines apart, and allowed it to stand tall, and step out of the long shadow of Tetris, was that is didn't simply provide a "spin" on the Tetris model - it also offered something Tetris really didn't: its combination of sight and sound. 

Lumines took the slightly simpler gameplay it boasted, but combined it with a psychedelic, rotating playlist particle effects, colour palettes, and soundscapes of electronica, setting that aspect right up front, and turning the gameplay of the game into more than just a challenge of increasing difficulty. It turned it into an experience, first and foremost. Rather than simply increasing the difficulty consistently, for a uniform, set challenge, it allowed the speed and the difficulty of the game to ebb and flow to the BPM of the music, and turned what could be a simple game into something that felt more akin to listening to an album, with an accompanying visualiser. The playing of the game was simply the icing on the cake.

Tetris Effect's flagship "Journey Mode" essentially does the same thing. 

It takes the basic Tetris gameplay, but rather than simply increase the challenge as the player progresses, and work on a basic "how long can you go?" mentality, it sets up discrete levels within that challenge - ebbing and flowing in difficulty - and importantly, changing significantly in terms of the sights and sounds, while maintaining the core game. 
In one instance, the player will be playing with blocks made of water, looking at the playfield as it streaks across an oceanic surface, dolphins jumping and swimming in time to the ambient soundtrack. The next, the background will melt into a nighttime city-scape, and the music drift into a jazz-inspired medley, only playing piano keys when the player rotates or spins the tetrominos. 
In one, the pieces might be wooden cogs, clicking and clacking as the fit together to the beat of wooden instruments, then the next might be a swell of electronica and the screen bursts in particle effects like an exploding star.
These operate seamlessly, blending into one another, and are governed by a finite number of clears.
 
Like Lumines did before it, it works. While I'd argue the actual soundtrack is not quite as consistent as it is in Lumines - there are certainly more discrete tracks I would listen to divorced from the game in most variants of Lumines than there are in Tetris Effect - the visuals are actually even more impressive than anything Lumines has done in my experience...
...and this element is doubled-down on further, by one curious addition: Tetris Effect can use VR.

 

While not in any way a requirement, using the VR headset with Tetris Effect is something that should be experienced by anyone with the facility, as the effect is pretty mind-blowing. Rather than taking up the edge of the screen, the various effects, the thumps from the blocks slamming down, the particle effects etc. seem to happen all around the player - and in combination with the music, it makes for a truly awesome kaleidoscopic experience.

It is one thing for the flat-screen to suddenly brighten upon clearing a set of lines, suddenly showing a background of hot air balloons, for example. That is cool, but just an interesting little background thing. In VR though? When that moment doesn't simple change a screen wallpaper, and instead, an explosion of light suddenly sees the player floating hundreds of feet in the air, with colourful hot air balloons all around them, some so close they feel they could reach out and touch them, the effect is mesmerising.

When - at one stage - the screen changes from a mechanical looking interior, to a view of space, and a space-station in the background, that seems simply a nice artistic shot. It's only in VR though, that the player sees they are actually fully contained within a spaceship loading dock - one they can see rendered in full 360 degrees around them... and then witness the hatch blow, and find themselves floating in space... and be able to look down, and see the Earth hundreds of miles below.

Mechanics-wise, there are some specific gameplay other eccentricities added to Journey Mode too, separating it from other Tetris versions - the most notable being "Zone". 
Zone is a slowly compounding meter, built up by clearing lines, that can then be activated for a short period. When "in the zone" the drop of pieces freezes, and lines cleared are "shifted" to the bottom of the stack, without being instantly removed. This allows the player several seconds of uninterrupted time to build up huge numbers of "stacked" clears, (or fix  problems in their stack)... then score massive, normally impossible multi-clears when the timer restarts, and all the complete lines clear at once. 

It's a cool mechanic, and one which - like all good aspects of Tetris - feels simple, but the use of it, and the ability to harness it for increased score, is open to a wide variety of skills and tricks. Like all good Tetris - it takes seconds to understand, but a long time to master.

 

The second major pillar of Tetris Effect, is that it serves as a completionists archive of Tetris' most popular variants and game modes.

Quite separate form the main "Journey Mode", are what Tetris Effect calls "Effect Modes". 
These are the more standard variants of Tetris. Some specific challenge modes that have graced most serious Tetris games in the past: the speed focussed "Sprint" Mode, or the Speed-and-Points-based "Ultra" mode etc. 
Some that are specific skill-based ones, such as "Combo", testing combo retention, "Target" testing quick-build, specific line completion, "All Clear" testing finesse and piece placement theory, etc.
There are also some more esoteric modes, such as "Mystery"... wherein random bizarre effects happen at high frequency, such as flipping the entire playfield around, shifting placed blocks, or random, giant pieces falling.

This area of the game is certainly the less innovative area of Tetris Effect. I'm not sure if every mode represented in Effect Mode is from previous versions of Tetris, but for sure the majority are. What is original though, is the sheer number of modes encompassed in a single release. It removes the previous conversations of "I like this release, but I wish it had the mode from X..." because there are just so many, and such variety.
That each is also coupled with Tetris Effect's crisp, clean, snappy feel, and different curated versions of its visuals and sounds, tie even these more traditional modes into the broad "kaleidoscope" that is the overall package in a nice way.  

 

The third pillar - catered for now, with the sweeping "Tetris Connected" update the game saw several years ago - is that Tetris Effect also serves as a hub point for many of the most popular Multiplayer Tetris modes.

 

Much like Effect Mode does with single player Tetris, Connected Mode does not necessarily introduce brand new variants to multiplayer Tetris, but it does represent possibly the best, and most complete combination of them - and does it in one of the best feeling, and certainly most visually and auditorially pleasing version of the core game.

I will admit, despite my long love of Tetris, I am not particularly well versed in Multiplayer Tetris variants, however, as Connected Mode has grown, I have sampled each, and have played more than my share of some, and am consistently surprised both by the variety available in terms of game types... and the very consistent availability of opponents!

It's unusual to see a multiplayer game continue to house such a steady stream of players, day-in and day-out after such a long time, but the fact that it does is a testament to the quality of Tetris Effect in the overall pantheon of Tetris releases. Despite there being a significant number of alternative (and often free,) places to play MP Tetris, Tetris Effect still attracts players of all skills on the regular.

In general in these reviews, I will specifically cite the audio and visuals in their own little sections, but with Tetris Effect, it feels largely immaterial, as the sights and sounds of the game are such intrinsic parts of what makes it stand out, that I have essentially covered it already. 
Tetris is a game that always changes, and never changes - its core is simultaneously good enough to stand alone, and stand the test of time, yet simple enough to allow for infinite variation, without losing itself - but Tetris Effect is the first version I am aware of, where the unique hook is so visually and audibly stunning.

Fundamentally, Tetris is Tetris, and lives and dies by the quality of the input model, the smoothness and the amount of variants on show, and here, every one of those defining factors is pretty much perfect.

There are little elements added as broad, cross-variant elements - such as an XP gain, showing "levels" of the player, or a catalogue of hundreds of avatars to unlock based on different mini, cross-game challenges. These serve no in-game function really, but do serve to complete the package, give the player a feeling that as they practice and get better, they are always progressing.

There's leaderboards for each individual game type, but in addition, weekly "rituals" (events) happen each weekend, wherein different Effect Mode variants are highlighted, and getting scores in these results in increased XP gain, new or unique avatars, and a specific, "ritual leaderboard" being entered, as players across the world compete and work together to reach a weekend goal.

 
It's the little aspects like that that make Tetris Effect feel so complete. Simply presenting the modes available here, without those flourishes, and having them play with the slickness and robustness that Tetris Effect brings to the core game would undoubtedly make for an excellent game already...
...but what these elements do is tie what is often a very solo-focussed journey to meet the (often brutal) requirements for the coveted "SS" rank in all modes feel less like the player is in a lonely battle against an uncaring Tetris God, and more like they are part of a community.

A group of like-minded weirdos, battling the Gods of Tetris...  all alone, but all together!

Overall, Tetris Effect is, in my opinion, the very best version of Tetris to be released in a very long time.

Possibly ever.

It contains virtually every variant any self-respecting Tetris fan could want, plays as well as - if not better than - the best Tetris releases out there... and looks and sounds so far superior to any of them that it isn't even up for debate.

 

It has the variation, the broad, comprehensiveness, and the suite of options to cater to any skill level, and there is more than enough to see a player from novice through to master, without ever changing game.

Tetris Effect, in a very real sense, the Tetris release...
...and since Tetris is fundamentally fucking awesome...
...that makes it pretty awesome indeed!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Something that has come up in previous rankings, is the idea that for very old games, or re-released and new versions of very old games, while the core game may be amazing, the actual presentation or package of it is what lets it down. The other Tetris on the list for example - EA's unimaginatively titled "Tetris" - is Tetris, and therefore a fundamentally awesome game...
....but in a modern context, the presentation was pretty dull, the modes on offer not particularly great, and overall, the release hurt the game.

With Tetris Effect though, we have a case where the fundamental game is timeless and a classic, AND the presentation is everything one could want - modern, original, sleek and plays like a dream.... AND it also has a suite of modes and variants and options to justify the release as a comprehensive one-stop-shop for all things Tetris.

That results in a situation where a game that is so good, so approachable and so fun that it has stood the test of time for 40 years... with only additive elements, and nothing to detract from it.

We are in the upper echelon of the ranking, by simple default.

 

Now, I don't want to simply say "none of these other games will be getting played in 40 years.... therefore Tetris is No.1!", as that would be silly - Tetris is, in my opinion, the UR-Arcade Puzzler - the king of that genre - but that genre itself has limitations. Many of the top games on the ranking do things Tetris can't. Narrative, Emotion, Story etc: these things matter in a macro sense. They don't matter to Tetris, but they matter to an all-inclusive list, and it would be silly to argue otherwise.

Let's not mess about though - Lumines: Remastered is already pretty high-ranking... and Tetris Effect blows Lumines: Remastered out of the water. It's bigger, more lavish, more varied... and Tetris is fundamentally a better game than Lumines.

I'm not going to belabour this - going through every single game, and why I think Tetris beats or doesn't beat it - and the usual go-to argument of "would I replay this over that?" doesn't really work with a game like Tetris, as it is designed for quick-blasts. I do regularly replay Tetris. 
After S-Ranking it, with a total of 320 hours on the game clock, I celebrated by...
...playing some more Tetris!

Essentially, I simply thought about what the core game of Tetris is in 2023, what a marvellous package and interesting set of visuals does to that, and simply looked at the list, asking the actual, base, original question upon which this whole Scientific endeavour is based:
"Is it more awesome than this game?", and worked down.

The first game where the answer was "Yes" was... despite the rampant awesomeness of that game...
..Transistor.

As such, Tetris Effect finds it's (very high, and well deserved) spot! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

Thanks to @Zvetiki , @det_gittes & @grayhammmer for putting in requests!

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

LA Cops stays as the worst-of-the-worst, with the title of 'Least Awesome Game'

 

 

What games will be coming along next time to challenge for the top spot... or the bottom rung?

That's up to randomness, me.... and YOU!

 

Remember:

 

SPECIAL NOTE

 

If there are any specific games anyone wants to see get ranked sooner rather than later - drop a message, and I'll mark them for 'Priority Ranking'! 

 

The only stipulation is that they must be on my profile, at 100% (S-Rank)....

 and aren't already on the Rankings! 

 

 

 

Catch y'all later my Scientific Brothers and Sisters! 

[Slava]

1 hour ago, DrBloodmoney said:

...and this element is doubled-down on further, by one curious addition: Tetris Effect can use VR.

 

While not in any way a requirement, using the VR headset with Tetris Effect is something that should be experienced by anyone with the facility, as the effect is pretty mind-blowing. Rather than taking up the edge of the screen, the various effects, the thumps from the blocks slamming down, the particle effects etc. seem to happen all around the player - and in combination with the music, it makes for a truly awesome kaleidoscopic experience.

It is one thing for the flat-screen to suddenly brighten upon clearing a set of lines, suddenly showing a background of hot air balloons, for example. That is cool, but just an interesting little background thing. In VR though? When that moment doesn't simple change a screen wallpaper, and instead, an explosion of light suddenly sees the player floating hundreds of feet in the air, with colourful hot air balloons all around them, some so close they feel they could reach out and touch them, the effect is mesmerising.

When - at one stage - the screen changes from a mechanical looking interior, to a view of space, and a space-station in the background, that seems simply a nice artistic shot. It's only in VR though, that the player sees they are actually fully contained within a spaceship loading dock - one they can see rendered in full 360 degrees around them... and then witness the hatch blow, and find themselves floating in space... and be able to look down, and see the Earth hundreds of miles below.

 

Yeah, I've been hearing how good Tetris is in VR from people that played it. Besides the artistic effects, the VR is said to be a preferred way to play for the performance reasons - the framerate is higher and the input lag is apparently much lower. There was even some video where a pro player compared the two modes and was doing better in VR. I'm just fascinated by this game and its existence.

 

[DrBloodmoney]

2 minutes ago, Slava said:

 

Yeah, I've been hearing how good Tetris is in VR from people that played it. Besides the artistic effects, the VR is said to be a preferred way to play for the performance reasons - the framerate is higher and the input lag is apparently much lower. There was even some video where a pro player compared the two modes and was doing better in VR. I'm just fascinated by this game and its existence.

 

 

Interesting - must admit, I played most of the "serious" games on the PS5, so without the VR option available, but since platting it, I have switched it back to my PS4, so I can use the VR more often - I can't say I actually do any better in VR, (in fact, I generally do much worse)... but I think that might be more to do with constantly getting distracted looking around at all the awesome shit around me ?

[Slava]

11 minutes ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

Interesting - must admit, I played most of the "serious" games on the PS5, so without the VR option available, but since platting it, I have switched it back to my PS4, so I can use the VR more often - I can't say I actually do any better in VR, (in fact, I generally do much worse)... but I think that might be more to do with constantly getting distracted looking around at all the awesome shit around me 

 

Sorry, I meant a preferred way for this game in particular. That video was about Tetris Effect, and a Tetris pro was the one playing, so maybe the result doesn't extrapolate well to other games and genres ?. It was also pre-PS5 days.

[grayhammmer]

2 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

and again in GTAVI

Oh wow, GTA 6 already came out?!

But seriously, this was a really good write-up, especially for Tetris Effect. As for my next request, I will ask for an analysis of Puyo Puyo Tetris because you can never have enough Tetris.

[DrBloodmoney]

41 minutes ago, grayhammmer said:

Oh wow, GTA 6 already came out?!

But seriously, this was a really good write-up, especially for Tetris Effect. As for my next request, I will ask for an analysis of Puyo Puyo Tetris because you can never have enough Tetris.

 

D'oh!

 

Man, that typo was bound to happen at some point! 

 

Anyways, moving on...  Puyo Puyo Tetris added to the priority list, with your name ?

[YaManSmevz]

13 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

You've settled into quite a nice little groove, sir! Cranking these out, I love it?

 

13 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney Trilogy

 

This is one of those games that never particularly appealed to me, but I keep seeing it being played and enjoyed to the point where I'm clearly missing out on something.

 

To YouTube!

 

13 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Red Dead Redemption

 

Fantastic work!

 

Obviously I agree with everything here, but there's two things in particular that I'm really glad you pointed out: the lack of attempted satire and more muted tone resulting in far sharper writing and better jokes (Let's call NASDAQ "BAWSAC" CUZ IT SOUNDS LIKE BALLSACK AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA) and the outstanding foley work. I remember riding my horse in a marsh, and the sound of its hooves hitting the wet surface was just so accurate, I genuinely stopped what I was doing just to pay attention to that.

 

I'm also really happy to see it placed so highly! Go Red Dead!

 

13 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Tetris Effect

 

I am still so impressed that you knocked this one out, the breakneck speeds required made my eyes bleed. So congrats again on that!

 

I love Tetris, and I always forget that I love it til I'm playing it or a knock off, maybe I should just buy it and accept that I may never master it. Oh, and VR Tetris sounds fucking amazing!!

[DrBloodmoney]

3 hours ago, YaManSmevz said:

 

You've settled into quite a nice little groove, sir! Cranking these out, I love it

 

 

This is one of those games that never particularly appealed to me, but I keep seeing it being played and enjoyed to the point where I'm clearly missing out on something.

 

To YouTube!

 

Cheers m'dude!

 

Yeah, I wonder with Phoenix Wright - part of me thinks it would be right up your alley - given our shared love of mysteries like The Forgotten City - but that game is an odd one in relation to the Ace Attorney games - on the one hand, I do think it's the same basic itch... but on the other hand, the ways in which The Forgotten City really is adaptable and fits around the path the player takes really does show up how rigid those older games were...

 

...still though - worth seeing at least one of them, to get a sense of how it goes - they are charming as hell!

 

 

 

3 hours ago, YaManSmevz said:

 

Fantastic work!

 

Obviously I agree with everything here, but there's two things in particular that I'm really glad you pointed out: the lack of attempted satire and more muted tone resulting in far sharper writing and better jokes (Let's call NASDAQ "BAWSAC" CUZ IT SOUNDS LIKE BALLSACK AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA) and the outstanding foley work. I remember riding my horse in a marsh, and the sound of its hooves hitting the wet surface was just so accurate, I genuinely stopped what I was doing just to pay attention to that.

 

I'm also really happy to see it placed so highly! Go Red Dead!

 

Ha-  I was bracing to get yelled at for not ranking it higher actually - I know Red Dead is one of those games a lot of folks cite as one of the GOATs - and it's definitely a beast of a game... I just think Rockstar's self-love is a little to strong to be completely nullified by any game... this one and Bully probably get the closest though!

 

 

3 hours ago, YaManSmevz said:

 

I am still so impressed that you knocked this one out, the breakneck speeds required made my eyes bleed. So congrats again on that!

 

I love Tetris, and I always forget that I love it til I'm playing it or a knock off, maybe I should just buy it and accept that I may never master it. Oh, and VR Tetris sounds fucking amazing!!

 

Thanks man - it was a rough one for sure... though it can't be denied that if a game takes that long to do, and kicks my ass so much, and I'm still playing it after finishing... 

...that's gotta be a game with some magic!

 

[Heather342]

@DrBloodmoney great write up for Ace Attorney ?. I would definitely recommend you check out The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, it has the same charm as the original trilogy and a really intriguing mystery throughout all the cases, but being designed for current consoles the animations are a lot smoother. Plus of course, Herlock Sholmes absolutely steals the show ?

[DrBloodmoney]

11 minutes ago, Heather342 said:

@DrBloodmoney great write up for Ace Attorney . I would definitely recommend you check out The Great Ace Attorney Chronicles, it has the same charm as the original trilogy and a really intriguing mystery throughout all the cases, but being designed for current consoles the animations are a lot smoother. Plus of course, Herlock Sholmes absolutely steals the show

 

Cheers Heather - I might just do that actually - writing about the original games has reminded me how much I enjoyed that series!

Edited February 2, 2023 by DrBloodmoney

[HelixNebula_x]

@DrBloodmoney a great bunch of write ups as usual my man!

 

Happy to see Phoenix Wright place decently on the list. Playing it on PS4 was my first experience with the series and I thoroughly enjoyed a lot of the same aspects as yourself. Brilliant characters, and the overarching plot was just enough mystery to keep you on your toes as you worked through the cases.

 

Always glad to see Red Dead doing well as well. A much better series that GTA in my opinion, and I played the shit out of this one on the Xbox. Me and my mates used to spend literal weekends just playing online and grinding out Tesoro Azul to level up? I couldn't see Red Dead 2 on your profile, but I think you'll love that if/when you get to it based on this review.

 

Just a quick one, is TLoU Part 2 not eligible for a ranking because of the title update? I know you only tend to rate S Ranks and I can see you have the plat but not the extra trophies. If this is eligible, I would love to see your write up for it!

 

Keep up the good work!