DrBloodmoney's Super Scientific Ranking of Games!

[DrBloodmoney]

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

Not sure how i haven't read your awards until now Doc... because they are damn amazing, here's some thoughts from them

 

• Still playing Hitman 3 i see doc... i guess the real question is now, will anything ever top it?

 

honestly, it's feeling unlikely at this point! 

 

There are games that do many individual elements better - but I am coming round to the idea now, that while lots of game could beat it out on individual areas, as an all rounder, it's virtually unbeatable at this point, given it is literally the size of 3 games, has more modes than any random 10 or 20 other games can muster cumulatively.... and is all that, while being stultifyingly excellent!

 

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Tetris Effect, This war of mine and Norco added to the wishlist of like 200+ games across all platforms

 

Nice! 

I guarantee no disappointment! (Well, in This War of Mine, some disappointment - but only because crushing, depressing disappointment is kind of the point!)

 

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Alright, how bad was the trails of Saint Lucia DLC?

 

I made it through via the strength of a good friend co-oping, and us clowning on it all the time...

...but serious...

...if you asked me which would I rather do, the Single Player portion of that dlc again, or shit into my hand and bite into it like an apple...

...I'd need to have a long hard think about my answer!

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Surprised to see Endling as a candidate for worst game, seeing as everyone else prasies it

 

Yeah, so I will say - "Worst Game" (and, actually "Most Disappointing Game") this year feel a little overly harsh - simply because 2023 was easily the strongest overall year of the three since I started doing this.

 

Aside from the two winners of those categories, I suspect that if I had played all these games last year, none of the others would have made it into those categories, as most of them have some pretty good elements - they just fall over themselves. 

 

They aren't all TERRIBLE games - but they are technically the worst game I S-Ranked, just because all the others were a strong set!

 

 

I do think Endling gets a little too much praise out there though - partly because it's very, VERY cute looking, it does have it's heart in the right place - and it was free on PS+, so a lot of folks who aren't maybe often playing indies played it, and were surprised at how good indies have gotten GENERALLY. Like, maybe they were expecting a real clusterfuck, and were pleasantly surprised, even if it wasn't an amazing game - that it was still nice looking and functional and full-sized?

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Must get to Control and Alan Wake at some point, i must....

 

Yes.

Just yes!

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Wow... you really are selling Narco to me, love a deep story that keeps me interested

 

I have to - because it is far too good to be as ignored as it is!

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• All of the oddball award precipitants are now on the wishlist, I'll get to them one day.... hopefully
• The messenger, Sea of stars, costume quest, and Sam and Max are now on the wishlist - I think the wishlist is bigger then the backlog now lol
• Fights in tight spaces only has 78 owners, treasures of the Aegean has only 270 owners across 8 stacks!? Up the priority wishlist they go

 

 

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

• Interesting how basically all of the backlog gremlins were basically all on the same level ranking wise 

Now that the old year of 2023 is finshed, let's look at the new year of 2024 and hope that we play some great bangers this year!

 

Finally, some priority requests and some game recommendations (backlog gremlin award here i come!)

 

For the priority reports can we get inFamous: Second Son and Letter Quest on the priority list please? I have second son on the backlog and want to get to it this year and i want to hear your thoughts on it, and Letter Quest looks both interesting and kind of odd and i wonder if i would like it 

 

Added both with your name 👍

 

Will be a while before I get back to Priorities, since I need to clear the new list after Christmas - inFamous will also need inFamous 2 to be done before it probably too - though Letter Quest can go straight up to the top!

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

Finally here are some recommendations i will give that i think you may like (and totally not to give myself a lead on the backlog gremlin award, no totally not  )

I'm surprised how you haven't gotten around to the Spyro series yet, as they are pretty banger games and some of the best remakes around. Would highly recommend

 

Picto Quest is a odd one, it asks the question of what if we did picross but with monsters and story or picross but rpg, how much you will like it will probably depend on how much you like picross puzzles

 

Save Room is the last game i will recommend for now, basically it takes the inventory system for Resident Evil and turns it into a puzzle game, personally i found it to be a quite joyous game.

 

I think I actually have Save Room bought from some sale or other - I'll check, but I have a vague recollection.

 

Picto Quest sounds kinda cool - I do like some picross, but the PS options are limited, so that seems a good shout!

 

Spyro is an odd one, I've actually never touched a Spyro game, and they managed to miss me even when I was going back and checking out some of the mascot platformers from back in the day - partly because Jak II pretty much soured me on them for a while, and partly because - for whatever strange reason - Spyro and Crash Bandicoot have always occupied similar places in my head, and I always hated Crash!

 

I've see a lot of love for them kicking around the forums though, so might be time to give one a go 👍

 

 

3 hours ago, serrated-banner9 said:

 

I have the maybe similar Virginia (not sure if it's similar actually, it just feels like a similar vibe without me having played either) in the backlog. Interested in hearing your thoughts on it.

 

Virginia is actually reviewed and ranked already - in  Batch 42, so have at it!

Edited January 13 by DrBloodmoney

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Dicey Dungeons

 

Summary: 

 

A curious blend of Deck Builder and Gambling Sim wrapped in a light rogue-like model, Dicey Dungeons, from Terry Cavanaugh (the developer behind Super Hexagon and VVVVV,) sees the player take on the role of various contestants in a brightly coloured, strangely up-beat version of a gameshow in a sort of hellish purgatory, where the players are transformed into dice, and forced to do battle through a casino-themed dungeon, pitting wits against a demonic host in a rigged game, for a chance to win their freedom.

 

Taking the basic model of a deck builder rogue-like and flipping it on its head, Dicey Dungeons does a curious thing, in that it simplifies all the elements of a "standard" deck builder that are usually the source of depth and complexity (namely, the variety of cards, the complexity of synergies, and the brutality and length of the dungeons themselves,) and instead, makes the elements that are usually simple (the basic rule set,) much more variable and complex.

 

Essentially, what Dicey Dungeons does, is present a much more "friendly", much more digestible and bite-sized rogue-like Deck Building experience than the average "full-blown" Deck Builder...
...at least, seemingly, at first.

 

When the player begins their first journeys into the game, with the initially available character - The Warrior - they would be forgiven for thinking the game is extremely simplistic. Indeed, playing as The Warrior IS pretty simplistic. His rule-set is quite easy to understand, even for the Deck Building novice - and for anyone even moderately familiar with games like Slay the Spire, Griftlands, Inscryption etc, can feel pretty rudimentary. 

In fact, beating the first "episode" (each run is divided into "episodes", in line with the "gameshow" theme,) is highly unlikely to cause any kind of real challenge. 
When dipping into the second episode with this character, the player will notice several modifications to that basic rule set, and these can add a little complexity and challenge, however, and this is the first inkling the player will get about how Dicey Dungeons really works. It is not a game in the business of making things challenging via tougher enemies, or more difficult battles where more complex or specific decks are required...
...but rather, in modifying the rules themselves, so the player is not so much fighting an ever-increasing challenge against the enemies, but against the game.

 

These modified rule sets, as said, begin to show when taking The Warrior deeper into his episodic tract, but this is only the opening salvo the game has to offer - and it is when some of the other protagonist characters are unlocked and used, that the game fully shows its hand. 
When taking control of The Witch, or The Inventor, or The Thief or The Robot, or The Jester, they realise quickly that not only are the rules subject to modifications that are unique to specific episodes, but in fact the entire rule set - literally, the way in which the player can interact with the game - is different for every character...
...to the extent that they feel like literally different games. 
The way of playing as the Robot, has about as much in common with how to play as the Witch, as Slay the Spire has with Inscryption.

Each rule set is relatively simple, and certainly doesn't contain nearly the depth or challenge that most other full-blown Deck Builders do...
...the mere fact that there are so many variations, means that while none require the dozens of hours a traditional Deck Builder takes to master, each does require the player to re-learn exactly how they are supposed to play the game at a more fundamental level, with each bite-sized run.

Essentially, Dicey Dungeons takes the initial, confusing few hours of any standard Deck Builder - that period where simply getting a grip on the fundamentals is the key - and instead of shifting out of that gear, it keeps modifying itself, to keep the player in that frame of mind in perpetuity.

 

The player can rely on certain consistencies - enemies are common to all protagonists, for example, as are a majority of weapons or "cards" - however, the variety comes not from seeing different obstacles, but rather, by seeing the same obstacles, but having an entirely different toolset at their disposal to deal with them. 
Where one enemy encountered with The Warrior might seem so simple to deal with that they make them question their inclusion...
...that same enemy, using exactly the same attacks, might be incredibly powerful and difficult to face as The Robot, or as The Thief. 

Indeed, aside from the very very fundamental element - that all characters rely on RNG dice-rolls of standard, 6-sided dice, and that the player must craft a "deck" designed to account for this - virtually every element of the game is demonstrably changed by the modifications of an episode's modifiers... and totally changed by the alteration of the fundamental rule set, governed by the protagonist being played.

It's an interesting approach to the Deck Builder - and to games generally - and one I really haven't seen implemented in quite this way before. 
The closest, non-Deck Builder analogue I can think of is Super Mario Brothers 2 - in that that game presents exactly the same levels whether the player chooses to play as Mario, Luigi, Toad or Princess Toadstool, but their approach to the game changes, due to the different abilities each one has. 
That analogy is apt, I think, in conveying what Dicey Dungeons is doing to the non-Deck Builder familiar, however, it does little to accurately convey the extent of it - the magnitude of difference between the rule sets an gameplay styles. Indeed, it makes more sense to imagine a version of Super Mario Brothers 2 where Mario could jump, Luigi could not at all, but had a car, Toad had a submarine and a drill, and Toadstool was in a bi-plane with a grenade launcher!

All of these rule variations and ever-altering gameplay is a bonus, certainly - it allows Dicey Dungeons to really breathe, and to add a lot of variety and replayability to a game that could seem overtly and overly simplistic at the outset...
...but it does have a downside too.

 

The issue with having multiple rule sets, and an ever-changing set of game parameters, is that - naturally - some are better and more fun than others. 
Dicey Dungeons does actually do a relatively good job of balancing its different rules - aside from The Warrior, who is - I believe deliberately - very simple and easy to play as, (most likely to give the player the grounding in the true "fundamentals" that they require at the outset,) each playable character and episode does present their own unique challenges, and none feel outlandishly over or under difficult...
... but that still cannot get around the fact that some are more fun to play than others.

While The Thief and The Jester feel pretty good and quite intuitive once parsed, The Robot and The Witch are pushing a little into the "too complicated for their own good" territory, where, even once the fundamentals are understood, the actual game is pushed a little beyond the "fun to play" point.
The Mechanic goes further though, and feels like the step too far - where his basic rule set begins to feel punitive, and where even good, measured, thoughtful play can still result in runs becoming "bogged down" and resulting in failures that feel less as a result of player ineptitude, than of player misfortune.

 

On the plus side, the bite-sized nature of the game means these negative elements are fleeting...
...but on the down side, so are the good ones. 
The constant flipping of rule sets allows for a situation where the player is never bored, and is generally never stuck playing a variant they don't enjoy for too long... but they are just as often pulled away from a game they feel they are enjoying, and being pushed into a different one, just as they are coming to master it.

Visually, the game, I think, works pretty well. The art style is a sort of flat-plane, paper-cut-out aesthetic in pastel shades, and the designs of the characters, the enemies and the environments are ultra-simplified, but work for the cutesy-circus theme of the game. 
Animations are deliberately rudimentary, but they work - and the sort of "sign-on-a-stick" artistic designs actually look quite nice. There is a sort of "pieced-together-by-talented-kids-in-school" design ethos, and while that might sound like faint praise, I actually think it is perfect for the happy-happy-but-slightly sinister feel of the game.

Audio is relatively simple - there are a few pretty jaunty, fun, quirky tunes that play throughout, though I do think there is a rather unfortunate lack of variety to these, and, given that the game is actually quite a long one if the player is looking to "fully complete" it (requiring around 40 full, completed runs,) these can get grating over long stretches. 
I suspect the game is designed with a "one-run-a-day" kind of mentality, and the audio score reflects that...
...but as trophy-minded folks know, we often play for a lot longer than that in a single gaming session, and I must admit to muting the sound during longer play sesssions, to stick a podcast on instead!

There is not a huge amount of narrative to the game - there is certainly some, with individual episodes seeing the players taunted by the mad host of the gameshow, or being given "aw-shucks, hard-luck" condolences when they reach the end, are given their chance at spinning the wheel for their freedom and (spoiler,) always losing...
...and the game pushes towards a fairly nicely done "working together is the key" theme in its final acts - but for the most part, gameplay is king here, rather than narrative.
What writing there is is relatively fun and funny - not belly laughs, but chuckles or smiles - and it works more often than it doesn't.

Overall, Dicey Dungeons is a strange little beast. It's a simplified Deck Builder that might work as a first-toe-dipped type of experience, allowing players to sample the genre who are otherwise unfamiliar with it...
...however, the nature of the ever-changing rule-set may actually work against that a little.

It offers the thrill of learning a new game over and over again, though it does rather lack the follow-on from that - the period of mastery, where the player begins to feel that they are meeting the game at its level, and working out clever ways to beat it, as the simplified gameplay means that once a player has come to terms with a specific rule set's eccentricities, there isn't a huge amount of scope for delving deeper, or mastering it, before they a whisked away to a new rule set.

 

Fundamentally though, Dicey Dungeons is not there to be an entry point to a genre - it's there to be a fun, silly, bite-sized version of that genre, and as bite-sized deck builders go, I do find it hard to imagine a more interesting version than this one.
 It's silly, fun, easy to pick up and put down, and offers a multitude of hours of clever and fun gameplay, with a constant drip-feed of new rules to learn, and new challenges to tackle.

 

The Ranking:

 

In looking to rank Dicey Dungeons, I started out thinking about Deck Builders, but while that helps somewhat, it doesn't narrow it down enormously. Dicey Dungeons is definitely more awesome overall than Monster Slayers, however, it is not really getting anywhere near the high placement of games like Slay the Spire or Griftlands, and so falls somewhere in the large swathe of games between those two points.

 

While not technically Deck Builders, however, there are a series of ones that inevitably come up when thinking about that genre, even if they aren't technically part of it - the Voice of Cards games.

 

Those are actually RPGs, using Deck Building and dice-and-card themes as aesthetic as much as mechanic, but the mere fact that they spring to mind was helpful...
...as they provide a much narrower floor and ceiling.

I think Dicey Dungeons is fun and challenging and cool looking enough to - as a full package - outmatch the original Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, however, the more refined, more expansive and better written Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden is, I think, a more honed version of that game design, and does manage to outpace Dicey Dungeons in a 1-on-1 fight.

That places Dicey Dungeons somewhere between those two, which makes things simpler.

 

The games in between are all pretty different genres so it comes down to some quick-hit "would I replay this before replaying Dicey Dungeons?"...

...and for everything up to Airoheart, I think the answer is "No"...
...but for Donut County, and the games above it, I think the answer is "Yes"...
...so Dicey Dungeons finds its spot right there!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Kona

 

 

Summary: 

A First Person hybrid Survival Adventure Game and Walking Sim, with a Canadian setting and what might nowadays be loosely described as "Scandic-Noir" vibes (albeit, minus the actual "Scandic"), Kona follows the tale of Carl Faubert - a private investigator hired by a local big-wig to investigate a case of vandalism - who, upon arrival, is involved in a minor car accident. 

Awakening from being knocked out in that accident, he finds the entire region in the grip of a bitter, unseasonal - and seemingly endless - snowstorm, and venturing into a local gas station for help, finds his client murdered. 
From this point, he must make use of his detective skills to investigate what exactly is going on in the region, solve the mystery of how and why his client was killed, the mystery of a local woman killed and a town cover-up, the devastation a local supernatural myth seems to have wrought...
...and survive the bitter cold long enough to do so.

The basic gameplay of Kona is relatively familiar territory to anyone with experience of "investigative" games. 
Carl makes use of his notebook, which fills in with information about various strands of clues and areas of investigation as he explores the region, and navigating is relatively simple, via either First Person walking or driving his truck. 
Some light puzzles are involved with this - fixing generators or gaining access to locked areas such as garages or houses, though these are generally quite simple, and not hugely taxing. 
Where the game adds some complications, however, is in the survival elements. Carl is freezing cold, and being outside and exposed for any length of time is dangerous - and so the entire game must be played with one eye always towards identifying (and stoking) the nearest fire. Campfire locations or home hearths are abundant, but must be stocked with logs and lit before they can help, and therefore a level of inventory management is introduced, as the player never wants to be without the materials required to warm themselves.

The game makes use of a particular element of gaming that has become something of a signature of the Walking Sim genre in the last decade - the "find a thing, and see a flash of the past that relates to it" trope. 
Many games do this - Walking Sims in particular, though many other genre's have begun to make use of it too, as it is quite an effective story-telling technique, and in Kona's case, these do work...
...however, they are often best when employed sparingly, rather than full-throatedly here. 

 

It may simply be a corollary of the fact that I found the "crime" element so much more interesting than the "supernatural" story parts... but there does seem to be a split in how such aspects are used. When the flashback or scene being discovered is related to the more mundane, "crime" elements, it tends to be audio only, and these are very evocative and quite intriguing. When the "flashback" involves the "supernatural" aspects, however, Carl seems to be transported to a literal fugue state, where he is following a trail of deus ex machina-style light points, and literally seeing the scenes play out (albeit, via light-form models of characters,) and these tend to jump the shark a little. They get into the realm of "wait, how is Carl intuiting all this, just from seeing X?" and that means that the narrative starts to get away from the player. 
Rather than feeling like they are discovering something, and doing detective work to put clues together, they tend to feel that they are simply wandering through the game, being told a story that they have little to no agency in actually piecing together.

The actual mystery and narrative in the game is... okay, but not particularly exemplary. 

Partly, this is due to the slightly ill-fitting combination of the "realistic" and mundane crime elements of the story (which are actually pretty interesting,) and the more supernatural elements, (which are not, really.) The biggest issue with the games narrative, is that while Kona sets up quite an interesting and intriguing "crime" investigation, the supernatural elements of the story are playing out alongside that narrative, and in those areas, the game really isn't doing anything that hasn't been done elsewhere... and better. 

It does rather feel like while there are parts of the game that feel narratively and tonally distinct - the specifically Canadian setting and 1970's time period and the "small town crimes" aspects are pretty good - not wholly unique, but certainly less well trodden territory in games - the game feels like it lacks confidence in simply allowing those aspects to form the totality of its story. By introducing the supernatural elements - which over the course of the game, become more and more prominent, eventually wholly subsuming the "small town crimes" aspects - the game abandons its more interesting elements, in favour of much more rote and much less unique tonal aspects.
This hurts the game, because while Kona is a perfectly mechanically serviceable game in terms of Walking Sim and detective drama, the technical limitations of the lower budget game really show their flaws when forced to contend with the more "action" type set pieces that the supernatural narrative elements entail.

The other issue with the narrative, is that while the actual mystery is quite intriguing - at least for the front half of the game - it is rather undercut by some pretty amateurish voice work and writing. 
Kona is a game sponsored by the Canadian government, and it's clear that the game is doing a deliberate job of evoking a specificity of time period and setting in a way that few games do. That isn't a bad thing necessarily - I am actually often a fan of games that do that, and enjoy when a game has a very specific setting that they are conveying, as it can give a game a much more distinct personality, and in the best cases, adds a layer of "educational intrigue" on top of its gameplay, as I get to discover and learn about a place and/or time while playing...
...however, Kona does rather fall in the trap of trying so hard to do so, that a lot of the voice over and Carl's inner monologue feel less like natural thoughts and dialogue, and more like heavy exposition dumps. the game spends more time explaining the world around to the outsider with tid-bits and little factoids, than actually sounding like something the character would think or feel or comment on diegetically.

 

The voice work by the narrator is not always great - it's fine, but not much more than that - and occasional odd pronunciations or intonations do rather betray a lack of care. There are some line reads that clearly should have had a second or third take, but didn't get them. 
That, coupled with the rather repetitive nature of some of the more mechanical dialogue elements can be a little wearying. I lost count of how many times I heard the same reading of the line "It was so cold, already Carl could not feel his toes", (the line that indicates the player needs to start thinking about finding a fire,)...
... and while, of course, repetition like that can be forgiven to some extent, as it is a result of a gameplay mechanic, the mere fact that that line is going to be heard as often as it is, does beg the question "why didn't you make the wording less awkward, or at least, create a couple of different variations of it?"

Mechanically, Kona is perfectly serviceable, if never outstanding.

The game has that particular feel of a lower budget, PC-driven game, where movement can feel a little floaty and a little awkward, particularly on a controller, however, for the most part, this isn't a huge issue in a game where simply walking around and exploring is the primary engagement. 
There are a few sections of the game where "action" happens - primarily in fending off attacks by animals in the wild, and these are extremely amateurish - feeling like simple swinging a wrench or baton wildly in the loose direction of the animal, and seeing it barely connect. These are pretty poor - as is any part where Carl uses a firearm...
...though it should be noted, these are few and far between and actually, it's perfectly possible to play the entire game without ever doing so.

Visually, I think Kona is quite interesting, in the sense that while the visuals are not anywhere close to cutting edge, and often, in fact, look quite dated and low budget - in particular when any human or animal is animated on screen - the most prominent and omnipresent visual elements - the snowstorm effects, and the landscapes - are actually quite well done. 
The feeling of bitter cold and the loneliness of being lost in the blizzard work surprisingly well. There is something quite oppressive, bleak and effective about the howling gales and the snowfall and the crunch of footfalls on snow that work much better than the rest of the game might suggest - it's hard to play Kona without feeling the cold right alongside Carl, and feeling a little hopeless and lost, just as he does!

Audio is alright, but not amazing. As said, the voice work is not particularly great, though I will say that what minimal score the game has is quite eerie and effective, and the game makes use of silence and sound effects - the howl of the wind, the creak of a door, the rustle of trees and the crunch of footfalls - very well. 
It is in these aspects - the parts that simply convey the cold and the loneliness and the harshness of the environment that game shines brightest, and makes the most effective use of its limited budget, to add up to more than the sum of its parts.

Overall though, Kona is a bit of a disappointment, all told. 

It is a game that benefits from having a relatively distinct setting and tone, but has a tendency to be a little too eager to lean into that at times with a lot of awkward exposition, yet at other times, undercut it by morphing its relatively interesting specificity into a rather more rote and generic "supernatural" tale towards the back half. 

That shifts it from being a lower budget but interesting and curious project in a small field, to a rather minor entry in a much larger field...
...and that is a field it can't really compete in effectively.

 

The setting and the tone of the game are pretty good - and the evocative way the bitterly cold environments are rendered is good, as is the feeling of mystery and intrigue at the outset, but some of the awkward controls and traversal, and the irksome inventory management elements begin to bog it down, and the more amateurish elements of the game eventually overpower it. 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

The investigation aspects of Kona, and the more Adventure Game leanings were the main things I was thinking about when ranking it and looking for comparable games, and so the first stop was to find some games I think it easily surpasses.

Looking at narrative type games in that category, on the lower end of the ranking, I do think Kona pretty easily out-does a curious failure like Last Stop...
...and actually does beat out Best Month Ever! - which is also a game with a very specific "time and place" element to its setting, but also suffers for a lack of finesse and mechanical fluidity, to a level beyond how Kona suffers.

We are actually in similar territory here to some of the better Artifex Mundi games - those games tend to rank lower due to small size and scope, and limited artistic or auditory aspects, but they are still solid games for what they are...
...and I definitely think that the current highest ranked Artifex Mundi joint - Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala - is a game that, despite a smaller scope and ambition, is overall a much more successful game than Kona, so Kona has to rank below it.

That got me thinking about Artifex Mundi, and looking at the games between Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala and Best Month Ever!, the prior entry in the Enigmatis series - Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood - is also in there, and I think also beats Kona...
...but the game right below it - also an Artifex Mundi one - Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call - is probably the tipping point.

I think that while the best of Artifex Mundi games are solid enough to beat out the more expansive Kona, as they are more limited in ambition, but have few outright flaws, whereas Kona aims higher, but has more issues...
...but the minimal qualitative difference between Nightmares from the Deep 2: The Siren's Call and Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood is actually the exact point at which Kona feels right.

As such, Kona finds its spot, nestled between those two game!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rise of the Slime

 

 

Summary: 

 

A light rogue-like Deck Building game with a side-scrolling paper-cut-out aesthetic from Bunkovsky Games, Rise of the Slime sees the player take control of the titular blob of slime, who must quest through a series of biomes and areas, battling foes as they make their way towards the King's chamber... to do battle with the king, and take his place upon the throne.

Deck Builders are in vogue at the moment (happily, for me,) and the genre is currently fecund ground for experimentation. 
The genre is currently enjoying a newfound popularity (no doubt in many ways owing to the extraordinary success of games like Slay the Spire and, more recently, Inscryption,) and is currently in that most enjoyable of genre phases - the time when different developers are experimenting by splicing different sub genres into the mix, alongside the genre staples.

 

While Slay the Spire is very much a "standard" Deck Builder. It both sets the baseline for the genre in its current form, and established the loose framework from which all other modern Deck Builders can work - either deviating or adhering to its different aspects. 

It's worth noting, in fact, that in most cases, there seems to be something of a pattern in terms of genre blending and game success - in so much as that while Slay the Spire was the baseline model (the game that was to the modern rogue-like Deck Builder, as Rogue Legacy was to the modern Rogue-Like generally,) it both helped and hurt the genre to some extent...
...because not only was Slay the Spire a new standard, it was also fantastic.

It both raised the profile of the genre, and made it genuinely difficult for other developers to craft a successful "straight" Deck Builder going forward, as without a genre-blend or more unique hook, any Deck Builder has a tendency to be directly compared to Slay the Spire... and that is a tough comparison, because Slay the Spire is so good, that most games - even fairly good ones - will shrink in its shadow.

 

From my limited experience of the genre, certainly the least successful of all the Deck Builders I have played is Monster Slayers - and while it did certainly have issues beyond simple comparative ones, I cannot deny that the problems were magnified, simply because Monster Slayers was playing directly in Slay the Spire's wheelhouse. It was not really blending any other genres - it was aiming to be a "straight" Deck Builder, and as a result, was 100% comparable to Slay the Spire: a fight it had absolutely no hope of coming out of alive!

 

Indeed, each other successful Deck Builder seems to takes that loose model, and riffs on it with elements of other genres. Griftlands mixed in "choose-your-own-adventure" and visual novel elements, Inscryption spliced the genre with horror, throwback RPG and FMV, Fights in Tight Spaces combined the Deck Builder with the a Tactics fighter, Dicey Dungeons played with the basics of the genre, mixed with a gambling and more traditional Board Game structure. 

I say all this, because while Rise of the Slime is doing a little more in the way of adding unique hooks to its Deck Builder experience than Monster Slayers was - it has, for example, the addition of "movement cards" and introduces an element of light tactical "positioning" in its combat, and adds a complicating factor in the form of "pets", (essentially small familiars that follow the player, and act as both combat-buffs, and npc battle companions,)...
 it is still the closest game aside from Monster Slayers that I have played, to stick basically to "Pure Deck Builder".
After playing Slay the Spire, that places it on a pretty rough grading curve.

Rise of the Slime does have aspects that are good. 
Visually, the game is actually really nice. It uses a very clean, smooth, almost iOS-style visual palate and art style, with bright, pleasant backgrounds, some rather cute and endearing character designs, and has some nice, if fairly simple designs on its many cards.
The whole game is presented in a sort of "children's puppet theatre" aesthetic, with the enemies and objects on visible "sticks", as if being moved by unseen puppeteers below the fold of the 2D scenery, and everything has the pleasing, smooth animation of a quality mobile game.

 

Some of the mechanics are quite smart - and actually have more depth than one might initially imagine - certainly there is nuance to the creation and curation of decks as the player progresses, and the selection of buffs, of items, of routes through the game's variable path, and of synergies between cards are all present...
...however, in much the same way that Monster Slayers did, the lack of adequate balancing in Rise of the Slime does tend to simply show just how well honed something like Slay the Spire actually was. 

In Slay the Spire, virtually every deck and combination felt revelatory, and however the player chose to approach the game, it felt like it was a viable path to victory - they just had to finesse it. While some decks were certainly stronger than others, it never felt like any particular path was wildly overpowered. 

 

The same cannot be said for Rise of the Slime, unfortunately. The game feels relatively unbalanced, in a variety of ways. 
Some starter deck "types" are ludicrously over-powered as compared to others, and some feel simply impossible to use effectively beyond a certain point. Every deck type can seem viable - easy even - for the first few encounters, but there is a rather steep and un-sign-posted point around 1/3rd of the way into the game, after which some decks will simply result in annihilation, save for an absolutely perfect combination of luck, good draws, and painstaking smart play...
...while other decks - in particular, a poison-based one - will simply continue to melt through the enemies all the way to the finish line, without the player feeling so much as a scratch!

That lack of balancing may sound like a nitpick to the non Deck Builder player, but anyone who does play these games will, I'm sure, be fully aware - being able to experiment, to build in multiple ways, and to find ones own synergistic deck solutions that can defeat the game on its own terms is the genre. 
More than virtually any other game type - aside from Fighting Games - a Deck Builder must be well balanced in all directions, otherwise it simply stops being fun. 
If only a few realistic paths exist to victory, then the player will simply rely on them as go-to, will craft all decks to slowly morph into some variant of that "good" one... 
...and once they have seen victory with it, the game loses steam very quickly. 

That is, unfortunately, the case here. 

 

It's a shame, because actually, if the game were better balanced, and more work done to make the unique elements of it make a difference (if, for example, pets were a little more varied, or if the tactical "positioning" elements of a fight felt more crucial to success or failure,) I do think there would be something here. 
As great as Slay the Spire was, there were elements in which it was weak - its art style was pretty simple and less than engaging, and its rule set, while tight and crisp and smart, was generic enough that variations could be made with ease by other games, and whole new addictions formed in the genre fans - but the ways in which Rise of the Slime outshines Slay the Spire around the edges don't really matter much, because the fundamentals - the basic rule set and gameplay and balancing - are so lacking comparatively.

 

The fact is, because Rise of the Slime requires less of the player to achieve the platinum or complete when using particular decks, yet feels so punishing and punitive whenever the player steps outside of those particular decks and tactics, it tends to simply reduce its gameplay scope to a case of "experiment and get slaughtered until you stumble into the right deck, then slaughter everything in your path...
...then put the game down."

Aside from the rather lacking gameplay then, and the visuals, which are, as said, quite nice, there is the audio...
...and this is one area that I think warrants particular mention. 
Not because it is good, or particularly bad...
...but because it is fucking weird... in that there is so little of it!

 

The game is oddly - almost bizarrely - quiet. There are sound effects - which are fine, if not particularly memorable or stand-out - but there is basically no musical score whatsoever.

In some ways, I can imagine the reasoning behind this - it is possible that the developers simple assumed most people would play the game - as many do with Deck Builders - while listening to their own music, or a podcast, or something of that ilk - but the decision to simply not have any music is genuinely strange... and one of the only instances I can ever recall of the lack of score being so odd and dissonant, that I genuinely questioned if my download had a fault or glitch. 
I actually looked up a few videos of the game being played, to establish if this was simply a fault at my end - as the silence felt so jarring, particularly in a game as bright and cheery as Rise of the Slime looks.  The game feels tailor made to contain some jaunty, upbeat, eventually-gets-annoying type score, (like Dicey Dungeons, for example, did,)...
...but it doesn't.

In fact, I guess the genuinely peculiar nature of the silence is actually the best argument in favour of a soundtrack like Dicey Dungeons'... in that while that score did eventually become grating after a while, the lack of such a score in Rise of the Slime felt immediately grating, so I suppose that is an endorsement-via-the-back-door of Dicey Dungeon's audio!

 

Overall, Rise of the Slime is a relatively quick game to finish, and not one that is entirely without merit - it is a Deck Builder that mostly keeps in its lane, has a couple of decent new ideas, and looks pretty nice...
...but it is a game that doesn't really manage to either establish its basic rule set as well as it should have, or balance it effectively, nor does it capitalise effectively on its more interesting ideas...
...and so tends to shrink in esteem.

 

The Deck Builder genre is one that can certainly support a lot of games now, and Rise of the Slime is not objectively bad enough to warrant a purely negative "avoid this" warning...
...but it is also a genre that is absolutely ripe with excellent, unusual and clever games these days, and so in that market, it is difficult to find a reason to recommend this one, when so many other, better games could scratch the same itch, to a much greater extent.
 

 

The Ranking:

 

Rise of the Slime turned out to be a very quick one to rank, primarily because of the only directly comparable game I could think of - Monster Slayers.

 

Monster Slayers is the other Deck builder I have played that felt more ineffective than effective - it has some good elements, but the lack of good balancing and the myriad of small issues around the game did hamper it quite distinctly. 

Rise of the Slime is definitely a more fleeting game than Monster Slayers, and arguably less deep, but it also one that has more distinct elements, and a few more good ideas than Monster Slayers had - even if not all of them are as effective as they might be, due to the unbalanced nature of the fundamentals.

 
It does look a lot better than Monster Slayers though, and has a lot more personality, so I do think it outranks Monster Slayers - if only by a small amount.

 

The two games immediately above Monster Slayers are Arcade Archives: Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus, and Bejeweled 2, however. 

 

Arcade Archives: Tetris The Absolute The Grand Master 2 Plus is a good game, but one that feels less good than its predecessor, and one that feels rather unnecessary in an age of Tetris Effect... 
...and in those specific circumstances, I'm comfortable with Rise of the Slime marginally beating it out...
...but I don't think that Rise of the Slime is doing enough to beat out Bejeweled 2.

Bejeweled 2 is a strange one, as it is a great game, though one not really suited to console play - and has problems there - but it is still a good time, and has a longevity that Rise of the Slime lacks, sue to its unbalanced nature.

I think, therefore, that the right spot for Rise of the Slime is between those two game!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cocoon

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2023 released Isometric Puzzle games from Geometric Interactive and directed by Jeppe Carlsen, (previously of Playdead, with whom he created such indie darlings as Limbo and Inside,) Cocoon sees the player take the role of an insectoid creature on a wordless and curious journey through interconnected worlds on some sort of (at the outset,) indefinable quest. 
Each world is contained in a non-Newtonian orb, which can be jumped into and out of, and carried into one another, with the insect able to hop realities and scales at will, via mysterious portal structures.

Much like Inside and Limbo before it, Cocoon's narrative is pretty esoteric, and does not present information about its lore or world in obvious ways. 
There is no text or spoken words, and little indication of the role of the insect, or of the nature of the world at the outset - or, really, explicit explanation throughout. 
However, also like Limbo and Inside, that hardly matters. Cocoon's story-telling is conveyed experientially - with the unusual world and gameplay parameters simply presented for the player to investigate and make of what they can, and relies simply on the level to which those experiences are intriguing, to drive the player to poke and prod at it, and to propel them towards wanting to find out more.

 

And it works.

 

The world the incest inhabits is bizarre and fascinating - a desolate wasteland populated - and seemingly maintained - by amalgam creatures of both an organic and a synthetic nature, and the non-Newtonian principles of its physical environments are a curious and fascinating idea from a lore point of view, as well as a source of some quite unusual and well developed puzzle mechanics.

 

Each world - of which there are 5 - has its own biometric style, and each is contained within a uniquely coloured "marble" - which can be jumped in and out of at set points. 
A world can be jumped into while holding the "marble" of another world, and this can extrapolate outwards - with the player dropping one world into another, then that container world into another world, "stacking them" like Matryoshka within each other. 

 

The possession of each "marble" also grants specific abilities to the player, allowing them to progress or solve puzzles within other worlds as long as they are holding it (or, later, powering it from another source,) and this grants the game its source of puzzle mechanics. 
While early, or simpler puzzles might simply require the player to carry one "marble" into another, to make use of its inherent ability, later, more complicated puzzles might require multiple abilities to be used in a world, or multiple worlds to be accessed within each other, requiring careful consideration both of how the "stack" is combined, where within each world a another world's "marble" is placed.
Later, even more mind-bending conceptual elements, such as containing a world within another world, which is then circled back to be contained in the first world, allowing a sort of "looping" effect, moving from one to the other over and over.

 

This interplay - in particular the nature of developing correctly aligned "stacks" of worlds is both the source of the games best puzzles (and there are a lot of very good ones,)...
... but also, on occasion, its biggest weakness. 

While it allows for some excellent "eureka" moments, where the player suddenly solves a puzzle, realising something they can do to solve a particularly complex traversal...
...it does also mean that there is sometimes a rather large gulf between the time of arriving at that solution, and actually enacting it, due to the nature of the game. 

In the latter half, where the puzzles are more complex, there is a tendency for puzzles, once solved, to take quite a long time of tracking back and forth and placing worlds within worlds in specific spots, simply to set up, and then execute a solution the player has worked out... and these lengthly times in enacting the solution can often be exacerbated by the experimentation they took to get to that point. 

If, for example, the player had an initial idea that turned out to be incorrect, but had spent some time stacking worlds to try and achieve it before proving it incorrect, it may take twice as long to enact the correct one, as they have to somewhat "unravel" the tangle of worlds they had incorrectly created first.

That is not an enormous or game-breaking issue, however, it is one that a lot of puzzle games alleviate by having a "reset puzzle" mechanic baked in. Because Cocoon is working as more of a narrative adventure and "tonally enveloping", non-immersion-breaking type of game, it is understandable that the developer did not implement such a mechanic, however, the negative side of not having such a mechanic is felt on occasion as a result.

The actual puzzles are pretty good - never enormously challenging, but clever and cerebral. Some serious props need to be given to the developer for managing to create a game with as much apparent "world-hopping" freedom as Cocoon, that still manages to largely avoid the player ever feeling truly "lost" too. 

While the nature of the game would suggest that the player should, by rights, be as free as in an open-world game, the actual path through the world of Cocoon is extremely linear. Indeed, upon completion, the ability the player has to select any specific puzzle, and that these are all numbered in order, shows there is only one possible path through the game, gated by careful alignment of abilities and traversal, however, I say this not as a slight, but as a compliment, because that restriction is never really felt in game. 

 

If any reader of this thread recalls my reviews of The Last of Us games - and in particular, of The Last of Us: Part II - they might recall the particular accolades I heaped on that game for its ability to disguise its linear path. That while in game, the player feels like they are free to explore all over the place, but the game manages to - without the use of too many artificial barriers or false walls - still funnel them along their desired linear path. The game is forcing a linear path, but making the player feel like they are the one discovering it, rather than feel they are being pushed down it. 

That's a difficult thing to do - and Cocoon is one of the rare instances where I've seen it done this effectively. The world itself is bizarre and peculiar and unusual, and the methods of traversal feel quite free, but as lost and unguided as the player might sometimes feel, that is entirely by design and for narrative reasons - they will simply find themselves meandering in pretty much the right direction, pretty much every time, regardless!

That leads to probably the most notable thing about Cocoon - which is that feeling of exploring a world that is truly alien - in its environment, its rules, its inhabitants and its purpose. 
While I do think the puzzles themselves are generally good, Cocoon is not a hugely taxing game, nor an incredibly long one, and there is certainly considerable untapped scope for much more complex puzzles using the same mechanics. 

The "worlds within worlds" design could easily, if it was developer's intent, have been used to craft genuinely stultifying, brutally difficult puzzles, and I would argue there is far more scope for such a game to be unique here than with the more traditional "Puzzle Platformer" mechanics of Limbo or Inside...
...but that isn't really what Cocoon is all about. 
It is a game where the desire is for the player to progress, in order to see the world and the esoteric narrative they crafted. 

Yes, some puzzles might stump a player for a short while, but the game rarely ever adds too many red herrings, and the fact that the the game is mechanically simple. Indeed, the fact that Cocoon uses only one button, plus an analogue stick, and all interactable objects have a single use or purpose, means that even the most puzzle-averse of players will eventually solve a puzzle without being stuck for too long - as there is only so many possible ways they could get it wrong, before stumbling upon the right solution.
The developers want the player to see the game through, because while the puzzles themselves are the meat and potatoes, the real "puzzle" of the game, is in discerning exactly what the nature of the world, the insect, his quest, the nature of other entities (each of whom forms a soft "boss" of each world, and is battled in a rather Death's Door style way, using the unique ability inherent to that world,) actually are.

 

Limbo and Inside had this in common also - the puzzles are simpler, but the nature of the story is itself a puzzle the player wants to solve - and in Cocoon's case, I actually think that area is the most successful of the three games. Both Limbo and Inside made masterful use of environmental design, sound design, score and mood and tone to convey a real sense of place and mystery - and Cocoon does that too, but because Cocoon is truly alien and significantly odder, even than those games, in its lore and design, it makes for a really fascinating journey, as the player is presented with new areas and details, and forms their own conclusions and hypotheses about what the nature of this world is.

Visually, Cocoon is excellent. I'm not sure I'd necessarily hold up the graphical and presentational aspects as quite on the level of Limbo or Inside - those games had such striking and such specific atmospheres that it's hard to match - and the fact that they were presented in 2D meant the developer had even more control over that presentation than they do in Cocoon...
....however, the designs of objects, items, creatures and technological or organic forms in Cocoon is a major leap from those previous games. There is a design ethos to the strange creatures and tech that feels akin to the world of HR Geiger - a sort of "beautiful ugliness" and "organic synthesis" with technological elements ebbing and flowing like living organisms that is hypnotic and strange and often quite haunting. 
The bosses and the pieces of odd tech that the player interacts with are almost always surprising and mesmerising to look at - particularly when activated and in motion - and these vary constantly throughout the game. Simple seeing what is to come is a huge part of the drive to play the game, and it never disappoints on that front!

Audio is equally excellent. the score is minimalistic - almost entirely absent at the outset, and builds to simple tones and mood pieces primarily - however, the game is alive with foley work of the highest order. Every sound is synthetic and strange, with insectoid clicking overtones and offset against organic sounding ambient noises of rain or the hiss of silent deserts, and it makes for a very peculiar and intoxicating soundscape. 
The game is able to very easily set the player on edge with a single rustle or screech of mechanical or synthetic noise, and the relative silence is used very effectively and evocatively, with little swells of underscore building as puzzles solutions are approached, or when the player gets closer and closer to the boss of a world.

Overall, Cocoon is an excellent, if relatively fleeting, puzzle game, doing what Jeppe Carlsen does best - creating games that work for both the puzzle enthusiast, and the puzzle-averse. 

It is not an enormously challenging game, but it is one that provides some of the dopamine-hit moments of sudden "eureka" clarity that one expects from a good puzzler...
...but its aims are far more in the presentational elements and the curious and strange narrative ballpark than in the "pure puzzle" genre.

 

It is a game that is gorgeous to look at, exciting and interesting to hear, and fun to play - easy to pick up and curiously simple to grasp, despite some complex conceptual design, but its biggest triumph is in simply presenting a world that feel genuinely unique and alien, and which any player with a modicum of curiosity instantly wants to learn more about, and to explore.

 

It is a relatively linear game, wherein all the puzzles are single-solution, and so is not one that will likely hold the players attention for days and days, or support multiple repeat playthroughs...
...but during their time with it, it beguiles them with intrigue, atmosphere, tone, mystery and uniquely designed and well-crafted otherworldliness, and makes itself very difficult to put down!
 

 

The Ranking:

 

Ranking Puzzle Games has gotten easier now, as there are a good wealth of them on the list already, so for narrowing purposes, some quick-hit "better than / worse than" points can always be found.

 

I think as good as Cocoon is, and as exemplary as it is in some aspects, it's not quite getting to the level of Limbo. That game may have the less cerebral puzzles, and is technically simpler, however the atmosphere it created is more evocative and haunting to me that Cocoon was, and given the choice between replaying one or the other, I would certainly pick Limbo, so it retains it's place, and provides a first ceiling.

 

A recent good puzzle game that was still fresh in my mind was Humanity - that is a quite different type of puzzle, but also a game with an unusual narrative, and an interesting visual and auditory style...
... but I think Cocoon fairly easily beats it out overall, as I was much more fascinated by its world, think it looks better, and found the design much more impressive.

In between those two, is quite a big list, and among the games there, is Quantum Conundrum. That's a tougher match up, because while I think the actual puzzles in Quantum Conundrum are superior, the visual, narrative, artistic and audio elements are all superior in Cocoon...
...and after some consideration , I think Cocoon ends up having to come out on top. I could see myself replaying Cocoon before Quantum Conundrum, so that was the clincher.

 

A little higher up is a game rather more directly providing a parallel, given the shorter game length, visual distinctiveness and narrative and tonal atmosphere - The Swapper. 
That is another game using smart mechanics, easy of mechanical interface, and a cool, sci-fi tone to work, and in that particular case, I think The Swapper ends up being the slightly superior game. Both are fascinating and interesting, and super fun to play, but I think The Swapper is just edging out Cocoon on visuals and tone, so it keeps its spot.

 

I think The Cave - the comedy puzzle / Adventure game from DoubleFine - has some great aspects, but is hindered by some ropey tech at times, and even without that drawback, I think Cocoon's design and visuals and audio do beat it out, as well as the cleverness of its core mechanics, so I'm comfortable seeing Cocoon place above The Cave, if only marginally...

...and in the few games directly above The Cave's case, it comes down to simple gut feel, and while I think Cocoon does outmatch Afterparty, Darksiders and just manages to squeeze past Matterfall, it is stymied by A Plague Tale: Requiem, which is simply too grand, sweeping, great looking and well made for it to best.

 

As such, Cocoon finds its spot!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

 

Summary: 

 

A 2020 released narrative mystery Walking Sim / Light Adventure Game from One-O-One Games, The Suicide of Rachel Foster sees the player take on the role of Nicole Wilson - a young woman who, at the urging of her dead mother via a letter opened after her funeral, returns to the Montana hotel that her parents operated and in which she once lived, with a view to selling it.

The hotel is a source of much anxiety to Nicole, as she and her mother left rather abruptly, after an affair her father had with her young friend - the eponymous Rachel Foster - became public knowledge, resulting in the break up of their marriage, rumour infecting the town, and the apparent suicide of the pregnant Rachel.

 

Nicole's arrival coincides with the onset of a particularly brutal snowstorm, and she is contacted by a FEMA agent - Irving - who is both a comfort, and something of a catalyst for her memories - familiar, as he (and many in the town), are with her family history...
...and being forced to spend several unplanned days in the hotel, turns into both an examination of her own past, an unravelling of a buried mystery, the dredging up of secrets long dormant... and a reckoning with the ghosts that haunt the hotel - figuratively... and possibly literally.

Gameplay-wise, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is best described as a Walking Sim - certainly the major draw of the game is in the exploration of a well rendered and realised space, and the telling of a linear, cinematic narrative via audio cues and context clues, in much the way that most Walking Sims have since the genre was defacto-invented by Dear Esther - however, The Suicide of Rachel Foster does feel closer to the slightly more "gamified" end of that Walking Sim spectrum. 
While the main methods of engagement are simply walking around and exploring, there is some light Adventure Game mechanics, the ability to pick up or interact with objects, and some (very light) puzzle solving elements, which places it much closer to games like Firewatch, Killer Frequency, or even a little towards Ether One or Myst, than to "pure" Walking Sims, where walking around is the only interactable component, such as Dear Esther, Everyone's Gone to the Rapture, Gone Home or What Remains of Edith Finch.

 

In fact, Firewatch is arguably the closest analogy for The Suicide of Rachel Foster of any game I have experienced, and for more than simply the methods of mechanical interface. In fact, the two games have quite a lot in common. 
In Firewatch, the main character is alone in a space, exploring, but has a single person available via audio, of the opposite gender. (In the case of Firewatch, the roles are reversed, with the player playing as the male.) 

Both games deal primarily in reckoning with the past of the main character, and in examining the effects that past has had on their current self. 
Both games use their "lonesome hero and unseen confidante" design to provide a loosely - if never overtly - romantic or flirtatious slant to the dialogue. 
Both games also make use of a mild but intriguing "potentially supernatural" element to the present-day events, as a way to push the narrative forwards, and keep the examinations of the past flowing at a clip, and to provide a driving "current" mystery to be solved. (In fact - while I will not spoil either game overtly here - but both games actually use this "potential supernatural" element in much the same way too - in that the resolution of those elements of the two stories work similarly.)

The narrative is king in a game like The Suicide of Rachel Foster, and so, while I will keep spoilers to a minimum, it must be addressed, as qualitatively, it is of paramount importance...
...and happily, I found the narrative plot to be well structured, well paced, genuinely intriguing, effective, and well written and performed.

The actual concept - a single protagonist stuck in a place by circumstance, and forced to reckon with the past - is not a hugely original one, (in any fictional media, games included,) however, it is a plot device that can work very well - and is particularly well suited to the Walking Sim or Adventure Game genre. The level to which it is effective is really entirely contingent on the writing and the performances by the actors, and both here work to a high level. 

 

The hotel setting in the snow is one that lends the game - without any effort at all - a haunting, ghostly quality...
...no doubt owing primarily to the cultural impact of the Overlook Hotel in The Shining.
Hell, any space designed for lots of people to occupy like a hotel, deserted and explored alone is an eerie setting anyway, even without the snowstorm - but here, the game is quite clever about how it creates its sense on unease...
...in that it doesn't ever overtly do so. There is actually very little in the hotel that stands out as sinister or unusual - it doesn't need to. All it needs to do is simply have a carpet that looks oddly close the distinctive carpet of the Overlook, or have a little in the way of signs of abandonment and decay - some loose wallpaper, or some mould - and the player is already on guard, and expecting a monster around the corner!

The fact that the game never feels the need to add in any obvious jump scares, or musical stings or ghostly screams or wails actually works in favour of the unease...
...as the player, much like Nicole herself, is constantly reminded of spooky things, but never has a particular element they can point to to say "There!" They can tell themselves "it's just my mind playing tricks", rather easily.

 

I'm aware that the above description insinuates that The Suicide of Rachel Foster is some kind of horror game, and (mild spoiler) it very much is not...
...but I do think that a lot of the mystery and the reason why the game is as engaging as it is, is because of the way the game plays with the ideas and trappings of a spookier genre, and puts the player in mind of that spookier genre, without ever really leaning into it. 
There are references to ghostly things - there was even an amateur ghost-hunting group that tried to film in the hotel at one point, as Nicole discovers - but the payoff for these elements is rather more interesting than the standard videogame "It was a ghost all along!" way many games might go. 

In a way, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is actually a very good example of a game written well enough to have its cake, and eat it too - it gets to benefit from all the good elements spooky games often have in their front halves, but retains enough "plausible deniability" to never have to "pay off" those spooky elements in the standard ways - which is where many horror games (particularly horror games of this budgetary level,) can fall flat. 
It gets to use the genre, but as a stepping stone to a more interesting, less obvious pay off down the line.

The plot is, also, one that is unusually mature in games, in the sense that it is tackling a relatively taboo subject, and not in the "obvious" or easy way. 
The whole history that the game explores is based around a relationship that would be, in some places an actual, literal crime, given that Rachel was 16 at the time.
For what it is worth, as far as I can tell, in Montana, it wouldn't have technically been, as 16 is the age of consent...
....but having said that, I live in Scotland, where the age of consent is also 16, but that doesn't change the fact that a father having an affair with one of his daughter's friends - and the considerable age GAP - would still be considered considerably ethically murky, even if not legally so, and would certainly raise eyebrows, and quite few heckles. It's still a taboo, even if it isn't technically an actionable law.

 

Simply using such a catalyst for a story in a game is already a little dicey, but the game treads some taboo areas around it too - in the sense that while Nicole certainly harbours significant (well earned) resentment about that affair and its ramifications...
... it is not really presented - even by her - as having been predatory or seedy. 
If anything, the game treats Rachel and Nicole's father's relationship as a somewhat tragic love story, in a way one might expect of a similar story involving an extramarital affair of people of equivalent ages, and uses the more taboo elements as more of a way of setting up audience perception then undercutting it, than as a direct taboo within its own fiction.

It's a curious thing, because while the game can - and in my case, did - set me a little on edge as far as ethics and morals are concerned, it uses this bristling against common social values as a way of simply heightening the player engagement with the fiction - making them all the more eager to pour over every detail of Nicole's "investigation" and seek clarity, than as a comment on those norms themselves. In that sense, I actually think it works very well. It sets up an obvious path for its narrative, then carefully avoids ever going down it, so the player is constantly wrong-footed, and questioning the evidence presented...
...putting them squarely in the role Nicole herself is in. They become the doubting but curious investigator, who has a pre-conceived notion of events, but is forced to reevaluate with each new piece of history that unfolds - just like Nicole.
What the character has come by via memory, the player comes by via ethical and moral pre-conception.

The writing in the game - in particular the dialogue, is generally very good, and performed well, and quite naturally, by the principle actors. 
I would hesitate to describe it as quite on the level of Firewatch - that game had some of the best vocal exchanges between characters I can recall in this genre, and always felt natural, and I don't think The Suicide of Rachel Foster quite gets there, (there is occasionally clunky exposition, or occasional line reads that don't quite ring true,) but the mere fact that I was constantly reminded of Firewatch in that aspect does speak highly of The Suicide of Rachel Foster.

Sound design in general, and the score are both pretty decent - not outstanding, but they do the job, but make no mistake: the star of the audio show is the dialogue performances.

Visually, the game is very good, particularly for the budgetary level the game falls in. 
It's a lower budget game, and not a graphical powerhouse, but the small scope of the hotel environment still allows a fair amount of nice detail and flourishes to be shown off. 
The hotel does have a distinct character - when walking around, the player can conjure the musty smell of dust and old furniture polish, and can imagine the roaring fire in a now cold hearth, and the environmental detail is enough to keep them exploring for environmental clues and storytelling well. 
That kind of environmental detail is important, particularly in Walking Sims, where exploring for context clues, and simply drinking in the environments is half the joy - and a lot of the gameplay. The narrative tends to play out in audio form - and while there are games in the genre that do have much more impressive visual palates or technical graphics (What Remain's of Edith Finch and Everyone's gone to the Rapture remain my "Gold Standard" among Walking Sims in terms of visuals,) I do think The Suicide of Rachel Foster goes far beyond what it needs to in terms of place and tone setting via the visuals.

Overall, The Suicide of Rachel Foster is a very good entry in the Walking Sim genre - one that somewhat bridges the game between "pure" Walking Sim, and more traditional Light Adventure Games, and while I'm not sure the specific mechanical  trappings of either genre are particularly deeply explored, nor unusually or uniquely handled, they do work, and they serve a plot and narrative which is interesting, well crafted, well acted, and actually manages to stick the landing well.

 

Upon completion, looking back, it is interesting to consider where the characters started, and where they ended up, and how invested the player was in unravelling the mystery, particularly given the small scope setting - and the game should be applauded - both for tackling some difficult subject matter in a somewhat mature manner, and for managing to effectively keep it's narrative interesting all the way through.

 

It's not a game that demands a lot of the player - neither their time, nor their patience - but gives back quite a bit, narratively and tonally, in return, and uses the medium to tell a story that deals in more difficult subject matter than many games would choose to approach...
...and that alone makes it worth playing.
That it all works as well as it does, only further cements that worthiness!

 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

There are a few Waking Sims on the current ranking that are pretty highly placed - Dear Esther, What Remains of Edith Finch and Firewatch - and while Firewatch was a game that I was reminded of in many aspects while playing The Suicide of Rachel Foster, I don't think it really is quite up there in terms of the overall.
Yes, it does look nice and it is well written and acted, but all those games are also, and are generally at a level that The Suicide of Rachel Foster approaches at times, but isn't consistently at.

I found myself looking more naturally a little further down the list, and at more narrative focussed games in that region. Both Telltale's The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us are in that camp - and feel more qualitatively comparable, though I do think that, on balance, both those games manage to do what they aim to do well, and a little more impactfully overall than The Suicide of Rachel Foster.

A bit further down though, are tow games that I think work as a floor and ceiling, to finally narrow things a bit - NoCode's unusual anthology game Stories Untold, and unusual audio-interactivity game Killer Frequency.

 

While I think the chills and spooks of Stories Untold did work a bit more effectively on me than The Suicide of Rachel Foster, and I think that, plus the combination of the unusual story-telling, gameplay variety and atmosphere mean it should retain it's place against The Suicide of Rachel Foster.

 

Killer Frequency though, despite winning me over quite a bit, and having a cool look and some decent writing, is beaten on the writing and engagement front by The Suicide of Rachel Foster, and I think I'd likely replay The Suicide of Rachel Foster before replaying it, so I'm happy seeing The Suicide of Rachel Foster rank higher.

 

I think The Suicide of Rachel Foster is closer in quality to Stories Untold than Killer Frequency, however, so looking at the games just below Stories Untold, and asking "would I replay this before replaying The Suicide of Rachel Foster?"...
... the answer is "yes" for Hitman Go and Yoku's Island Express...
...but probably a "no"  for Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time...

 

...and so The Suicide of Rachel Foster finds its spot!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains 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]

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

 

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

Hi, Doc! Long time reader, inconsistent af commenter😂

 

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Dicey Dungeons

 

Jesus man, thanks to you and the rest of the homies, when I finally do get a PS5 it's gonna get loaded up with games damn near immediately😂

 

At first I found myself thinking "Ehhh I won't wanna play this after Inscryption, but what if I end up hooked on the genre? And more to the point, you sell it really well! Even though the rules sound like they could easily get a bit annoying, I'm a hige sucker for the happy happy slightly sinister vibe.

 

Also the name alone is super cute.

 

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Kona

 

Yo I been seein this one on sale so often, and every time I look it over with that heavy "hhmmmmmmm" before ultimately passing it up. Looks like the hesitation wasn't unfounded, although the appeal is definitely there - to YouTube!!

 

The Canadian connection is funny, it made me picture you playing it and saying aloud "This voice actor is clearly an amateur.. but damn if he doesn't do a mean 'Oh Canada!'"

 

"It was so cold, already Carl could not feel his toes" is funny too, like it's trying to get up there with "What a horrible night to have a curse." It reminds me too of those assessment tests where you have to pick the grammatically incorrect sentence among ones technically correct, but clunky as shit. The notification is so awkwardly written, already I can see not wanting to read it more than once.

 

Do you find that games combining a crime element with the supernatural tend to do one aspect well and the other not so much? I don't have that much experience with that particular combination, but I remember feeling the same with Vanishing of Ethan Carter, where the crime facet interested me more than the supernatural one.

 

Although... I really liked both in Soul Suspect (to say nothing of the actual gameplay, of course..), now that I think of it. What do you think?

 

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Cocoon

 

 

Finally, a game based on Ron Howard's Cocoon!!

 

Oh wait... nevermind.

 

Seriously though, sold on this one. Addicting puzzles and gorgeous visuals is a fantastic combo! Once again, my poor future PS5.... day one, he's gonna get stuffed😔

 

3 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

The Suicide of Rachel Foster

 

A hard AGREE on all the good points this game has to offer, in fact I feel I owe it another playthrough - right before playing it, I became privy to some unpleasant information about an old friend, which drove my "ick" factor WAY up on an aspect I'm really glad you mentioned - the narrative treating the affair as a doomed but beautiful romance, rather than what it really was.

 

As far removed as I am from that personal business now, reading your write-up really reminded me how much I enjoyed all the good - that organic tension, the fun dialogue, the unsettling discoveries as the game unfolds. Great stuff, my dude!

[DrBloodmoney]

15 minutes ago, YaManSmevz said:

Do you find that games combining a crime element with the supernatural tend to do one aspect well and the other not so much? I don't have that much experience with that particular combination, but I remember feeling the same with Vanishing of Ethan Carter, where the crime facet interested me more than the supernatural one.

That’s actually a good question - I think it’s possible to do both combined well… but now that I think about it, I do think the most memorable ones I can think of are generally where the supernatural element turns out to be less of a thing, or a straight up red herring - like another game reviewed in this batch!

 

Like - Norco or Backbone for example do it well - hell, Life is Strange actually does that too - so it’s definitely not impossible to mix “pedestrian crime investigation” with the supernatural and have it work…

 

…and recently that’s exactly what Alan Wake II does, and it’s fucking fabulously well done there!

 

I guess it’s just about striking the balance well 🤔

 

[skotafactor]

I felt like Kona really fell apart in the third act. I also was going for the “no vehicles” trophy on my first playthrough which really made the exploration element of the game a real chore. I also don’t love most walking sims, but I keep playing them convincing myself that I do. 🤷‍♂️

[DrBloodmoney]

9 minutes ago, skotafactor said:

I felt like Kona really fell apart in the third act. I also was going for the “no vehicles” trophy on my first playthrough which really made the exploration element of the game a real chore. I also don’t love most walking sims, but I keep playing them convincing myself that I do. 🤷‍♂️

Man, doing the no vehicles thing in a first playthrough sounds like a nightmare!

 

I wasn’t even aware of that trophy early on, and I was getting pretty lost in my firs time through (especially since I managed to miss one of the early frozen people) - I’d have probably given up if I had done that!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (not at all) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

 

New

 

Chants of Sennaar
Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden
Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh
A Short Hike
Carto

 

 

 

[No Priority Assignments this time - still playing catch-up!]

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman: World of Assassination, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet Htol#niQ: The Firefly Diaries  going to lose its new crown of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[starcrunch061]

I gotta keep up with this thread more. Was LA cops always the penultimate worst experience; did Firefly Diaries overtake ("under"take?) it recently?

[DrBloodmoney]

1 minute ago, starcrunch061 said:

I gotta keep up with this thread more. Was LA cops always the penultimate worst experience; did Firefly Diaries overtake ("under"take?) it recently?

It was finally dethroned by Htlo… 

Hl#lot…

h$list…

…THAT game a few batches ago - by virtue of being derivative, terrible AND terribly controlling hogwash from start to finish!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

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

 

 

Chants of Sennaar

 

Summary: 

 

A unique and intriguing, 2023-released, language-based puzzle game from Rundisc Studio, Chants of Sennaar takes loose inspiration from the Biblical myth of the Tower of Babel, wherein the inhabitants of an tower are rendered unable to communicate with one another by divisions of language.

 

Taking the role of a mysterious stranger who awakens in a sarcophagus near the base of a great and ancient tower, they must traverse upwards through various disparate castes of inhabitants, who's individual cultures occupy different levels of the vast structure. 
It is made clear that these various cultures have - at some point in history - been interlinked and united, but divergent aspirations and communication barriers have rendered them isolationist and wary of - or in some cases, outright hostile towards - one another, and the lack of communication and cultural exchange has hampered all of their pursuits of what original endeavours they had.

 

Speaking none of the cultures languages, the player must decipher each language via context clues, parsing, analysis of cultural and physical markers and the reactions and gestures of the inhabitants they encounter, to gain enough understanding to discern how to proceed up the tower, eventually unraveling the mysteries of what the tower is, who the protagonist is, what historical context resulted in the current state of affairs...
...and ultimately, to act as a rosetta stone, facilitating cultural exchange between the different people and different levels, by translating their messages to one another.

The way Chants of Sennaar is designed to help the player in this endeavour is really smart. 
Each sentence the player "hears" will initially be entirely in glyph form. 
As they hear different glyphs, these will be added to a constantly growing "pool" of heard glyphs, and for each, the player themselves can type in what they think they mean, as an opening salvo.
This "best guess" is fully freeform (indeed, when playing, I consistently put in multiple versions - "battle/war/fight" for example,) and can be re-written and changed at any time...
...but when listening to sentences again, there is an on-screen translation shown, and any glyphs the player has entered a "guess" for, will be filled in in grey, allowing them to see that guess in the context of that sentence, and evaluate it's application.

As they unlock heard glyphs, the player also unlocks pages of a journal, with pictorial drawings indicating concepts, locations, objects etc, and the heard glyphs can be inserted into these journals against the different pictures, as a sort of "confirmation". 

If a correct glyph is placed next to its appropriate picture, the game does not simply indicate "this is right" however...
...instead, an entire page of glyphs - usually somewhere between 3 and 6 glyphs - must be correctly placed, before the game will "lock them in" (cues being taken here from the excellent Return of the Obra Dinn, and using its neat design method of avoiding "brute-force-puzzle-solving".)  Once glyphs are "locked-in", the players "best guess" text is overwritten with the designed, correct definition of the glyph, and from then on, those particular glyphs will be shown in the translation text in bold white.

 

By using this constant analysis, best-guesses, translations and confirmations, and viewing the three "levels" of understanding - white "confirmed" translations, grey "guessed" translations, and glyph "unknown" translations, the player enters a very satisfying and clever loop of hearing sentences, taking best guesses, whittling down and refining translations, confirming in the journal, then seeing those sentences used...
...seeing which parts are confirmed, which are guesses and which are still mysteries, and using the confirmed parts to further narrow their understanding of the language, to build on for more and more glyphs.

It's an incredibly intuitive and satisfying loop - and one that works as well as it does, because fundamentally, it is straddling two different satisfying elements - videogame progression, and actual, academic learning. 
While the goal is, of course, a videogame goal - to learn the language to the point where they can understand what the NPC characters are saying, and to therefor be able to help them, or go where they are saying to go...
...but that is layered on top of the genuine desire to simply learn. To feel mastery of a new thing - in this case, a new language.

What helps the game succeed as well as it does, is that the while each language can be translated from one to the other (indeed, that is the ultimate goal of the narrative,) these languages are not simply a list of random glyphs, each of which has 4 direct corollaries in the other languages on a one-to-one basis.

Instead, each individual language has its own specific look - generally somewhat analogous to a human language. The Devotees language, for example, is similar, in visual style, to Hebrew. The Warrior's is similar to Germanic Runes, The Bards to Devanagari, and The Alchemist to Newtonian Alchemic symbology... 
...but the ways they actually work is not directly lifted.

 

Each has its own eccentricities and basic rules - much as any real language does - and understanding them requires these "rules" to be analysed and understood, beyond simple translation back and forth to English.

While some words can certainly be intuited by a process of simple application - seeing the same glyph used in the same structure in multiple instances, and narrowed down in that way, the most interesting "eureka" moments almost always happen when those clues are sparser, and instead, the player must combine the context clues they have with more academic analysis of the language itself.

 

In the case of The Devotees language for example, (the first one the player encounters,) the player can translate several of the more obvious words simply by looking at their application...
...but understanding some others requires a more studious look at the form the actual glyphs take, and commonalities between them. 

Seeing that "objects" words always include a specific semi-circular shape to the left of the glyph, or that "locations" are always contained within a specific box-like shape is a moment of clarity, as is noting that the "verb" portion of a sentence always has a flat horizontal line at the bottom.

That understanding can then lead the player, through application and reasoning, to decipher the language's basic sentence structure - in that particular case "Subject-Verb-Object" - which then allows them to narrow down the scope of what other, less obvious terms within sentences mean.

 

This parsing can also be combined with literal interpretation of glyph elements. The player might be able to discern the glyph for "Warrior" based on simple context use - seeing multiple Devotees using it in the vicinity of Warriors, and gesturing towards them...
... however, it is only when combining that knowledge with more academic learnings of the language itself, that they will then identify the key portion of that glyph, see which part of it refers to the "war" and which part is the "living thing" modifier...
...and can then extrapolate that knowledge to other glyphs. Come to understand that "warrior" part with the "living thing" modifier removed as meaning simply "war"...
... then extrapolating that, to see the "war" glyph contained within the "location" modifier, and correctly identifying that glyph as meaning "Battlefield".

 

All five of the languages presented in the game have some different versions of this dance between context clues, visual analysis, sentence structure parsing and modifier analysis, and each is worked out really well. No language in the game feels like simply filling in a list of words, and matching them to their other language equivalents - the player has to understand the nuance of each language, and how they actually work to fully comprehend it.

Some languages might have a "plural modifier" at the beginning of an object, others might have it at the end, or some might simply repeat the "object" glyph twice, to indicate plurality.
Some languages have a sentence structure "Subject-Verb-Object", others might form "Object-Subject-Verb".
Some might have a distinct word for "Us" or "We", whereas others will simply pluralise "I" or "Me".
Some are more pictorially obvious - using glyph elements in a more mathematically logical way, whereas others might have more fluid, less "modular" words, and require more context.

All of this makes for a really quite fascinating time - and a brilliantly original puzzle game!

 

While there are certainly some parts of the game that feel analogous to other games I have played - as said, the "grouped solutions" aspect of glyph confirmation is clearly influenced by the (equally excellent) Return of the Obra Dinn...
...and there have certainly been some rudimentary nods towards the kind of language-translation style of puzzle in some other games (notably, the translation of the Al-Bhed language in Final Fantasy X,)...
... but that it is not really operating on anywhere close to the level of complexity and nuance that Chants of Sennaar is.
The way Al-Bhed was translated was simply a 1-to-1 letter-replacement cypher, where each individual letter corresponded to an English Language equivalent, and the words were simply spelled out as their English counterparts would be. Chants of Sennaar goes much further, in actually dealing with the technical rules of language, and feels much more like genuinely parsing a foreign tongue, rather than solving a simple replacement code.

It's pretty remarkable how well the games puzzles are crafted too - in the sense that while the player is never likely to stumble across the solution to traversing an area prior to translating the particular language, once they do, the actual method of traversal is rarely ever nonsensical or complicated. 
The understanding of language is the barrier to progress - and it work just like being immersed in a foreign culture does. In a foreign place, even something as simple as making a purchase, or asking directions is very difficult without any knowledge of the language, but gets progressively easier as more and more of that language is understood, to the point where such tasks are trivial when fluency is achieved. 

 

It's striking how well a complicated endeavour like translation of a language is broken down in Chants of Sennaar, making it feel complex enough that the player feels smart when they succeed, but not so overly complex or difficult that it would make them yearn for a translation tool. 
The game isn't so challenging as to make a player seek out guides - they want to solve it themselves - and they feel elated and smart when they do!

Visually, Chants of Sennaar is a very striking game too.
The game uses a very colourful, bright, almost comic-book aesthetic, using textured patterns in a sort of Pop-Art-meets-fine-pencil style, which when applied to historic looking architecture, and the distinct architectural and cultural aspects of the different tower levels, works fabulously well. 
The game moves in a very fluid, artistic way, with each location and "scene" looking like a genuine work of art - and conveying all the required elements for puzzle solving clearly, while still retaining a distinctiveness of individual cultures, and it's own unique game art style. 

Audio is good - there is no spoken dialogue (of course, as that would break the game!,) and a limited, under-played score, but it is very evocative and interesting - the score following the plot, as there are overarching themes that tie all inhabitants of the tower, yet distinct flourishes and individualised themes for different strands and cultures within it.
The sound effects work well - there is nothing on that particular front that I think stands out as exemplary, but equally, there is nothing that ever feels out of place or dissonant, and the game makes use of some nice audio stings and sounds to convey success or failure in puzzles or in progression, that help the player quite a bit.
 

Narratively, the game is relatively low-key in terms of the overall plot - but that is not to say uninteresting. 
The major focus of the narrative is played out in simply exploring the cultures and their interplay, and intuiting the reasons for the current state of the tower. There are a number of significant, mysterious details that persist throughout, driving the player towards the eventual unfolding of the grander mystery, and these all work well. 

The finale, in which the player actually reaches the upper levels of the tower, and comes to understand the nature of it, and the fate that befell its peoples in times long past are both interesting and well paid off, and while the final area and language do feel a little lacking in detail (as compared to the previous four cultures and languages,) it's hard to consider that too much of a knock against the game, primarily because it is in the final area that the real meat of the game comes from re-exploring, (and interconnecting,) the four previously encountered cultures, with new knowledge the player has gleaned from the fifth. 

 

Overall, Chants of Sennaar is a hell of a game - I consider myself a "puzzle game guy" - it's one of, if not my actual favourite genre, and certainly one of the genres I have played the most - and finding new avenues of puzzle games can often be a difficult thing. 

There are only a few puzzle games I have played in the last few years that I would hold up and say "this is genuinely doing something original and unique" - Viewfinder, Superliminal, Return of the Obra Dinn, The Witness, The Outer Wilds to name some - but Chants of Sennaar absolutely elevates itself into that pantheon.

 

It's a game that takes a task that can often feel like a puzzle in and of itself in real life - the parsing of new languages - and gamifies it the best way possible: In a way that distills the satisfaction and complexity of such an endeavour down to a level that works for a fun game, but doesn't over simplify it to the point where it looses that sense of satisfaction when completed.

 

Add to that, the fact that it looks great, plays really well, sounds good, and that the developers have put in the work to really make the cultures (and most importantly, the languages,) feel like they "go beyond" the game - that they are viable things that might exist in reality, and could be extrapolated out further than what the player is actually seeing...
...and that makes for a hell of a great puzzle game, and a heck of a game generally! 
 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Chants of Sennaar is, if it's not pretty obvious from the above - a very good game - and so looking at the current ranking, the most obvious games to look at for comparison were other great puzzle games, that do original and smart things with their mechanics, look and sound good, and are - as such - pretty highly ranked!

 

The most obvious comparison for an opening salvo, I think, is the game that sprung to mind while playing it, and that is Return of the Obra Dinn. 
While I do think the games have a lot of similarity in puzzle solving style, and in satisfaction of playing, I do think Obra Dinn is probably the winner here though.
Chants of Sennaar visuals are slightly more to my tastes than Obra Dinn's, but that is by a small margin, and Obra Dinn's are more striking and unusual. I also think Obra Dinn wins on audio, since the score did appeal more.
I think the actual puzzle solving from moment-to-moment is perhaps a little stronger in Chants of Sennaar, but the final overall puzzle in Obra Dinn wins over Chants of Sennaar's overall puzzle...
...and so while its close, Obra Dinn still comes out on top.

 

Further down though, is a different kind of puzzle game - Papers, Please.

That game is also a heck of a good game (everything at this level on the ranking is!) and certainly has more in the way of narrative and emotional hooks, and wins on music, but I do like the visuals and the mechanics of Chants of Sennaar more, and I think if I was choosing a game to replay, Chants of Sennaar would win - so it outranks Papers, Please.

 

That leaves a gulf of blisteringly good games, none of which are directly comparable for Chants of Sennaar, to find its spot among - so I have to simple ask... 
..."Is the supremely good puzzle mechanics of Chants of Sennaar, and its excellent overall package more holistically awesome than this other game?"

 

Every game in that range puts up a tough, difficult fight, and this is a very hard range in which to make judgement calls, so I won't go into the nitty gritty of every match up, or we'd be here for days!...
...but in the end, the final spot where I think Chants of Sennaar falls, is just above the great-but-a-little-short Dishonoured: Death of the Outsider, but just below the excellent and original and clever Control.

 

Two games that bear no resemblance to Chants of Sennaar - other than also being excellent - but it feels right looking at the overall placement...
...and so Chants of Sennaar finds its ranking!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden

 

 

Summary: 

The third entry in the Yoko Taro-helmed card-themed light-RPG franchise, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden continued in the mould established by the two previous entries, combining representative card-based narrative adventuring, light deck-building elements, and a high-fantasy, fairytale-esque setting, in a new campaign, with a new dungeon master.

 

The narrative this time sees a young girl, Al'e - a member of a subterranean village of humans whose home is destroyed - rescued by L'gol - a stand-offish young man from the surface village of Steelborough. 
Discovering that her innate ability to control monsters - a trait inherent to subsurface dwellers - is the reason she was sought out by the council of Steelborough, she is recruited to aid in their endeavours, but when the pair discover the council's motives are less than altruistic, she and L'gol set out on their own.

Quickly joined by fellow outcasts Pulche - a scholar of beats - and Trelis - a half-beast circus performer - the group set out to discover the lost history of the world they inhabit, the mysteries of the interconnection between the beasts and the humans, and the experiments that led the world to its current state.

It should be noted that Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is very much designed in the mould of the previous two entries - Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars and Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden. The gameplay is extremely similar in fundamentals, and indeed, it is clear that each entry in the franchise is designed to feel like a new "campaign" crafted within an existing game, very much in the dungeons and dragons model.

 

This design choice is leaned into quite specifically, in the sense that while each game has its own unique (and un-connected) narrative, and some specific eccentricities in terms of combat etc, these are aimed to distinguish each entry only in so far as light modification for that specific campaign. The broad strokes - the fundamental design elements remain common to all games - even to the extent that specific cards, NPCs, enemies etc are often reused across multiple entries.

It's also worth noting that, whatever minor changes are made around the edges with each iteration of the series - those fundamentals are pretty good. 
The visual style, the clever use of cards and dice and direct-to-player Dungeon Master narration, the switching from environmental "table" to "combat "table", the parlour games, the general tone and structure are all well implemented...
...and so the delta between a "good" entry in the series and a "bad" one are on a relative scale. There is a baseline of quality in the franchise, as well as a sense of "if you like one, you will like them all" to some degree.

 

Because each game has a different narrator, narrative and principle characters, but retains all the same fundamentals, basic cards, layout and broad mechanics, it works well in this regard - sitting down to play a new Voice of Cards game feels familiar and comforting, as the player is more put in mind of playing the next "episode" in a familiar TV show, than playing a brand new game. 
There will be some minor new elements to be learned, and a new story to unveil, but for the most part, the player knows exactly what to expect, and what the game will ask of them in a mechanical sense. Because of this though, there is little point in discussing the merits of those fundamental game elements that are common to all games, as these have already been discussed in the reviews of the first two games. 

Instead, the more interesting points, are the areas in which Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is distinct - and how it stacks up against those two previous games.

 

Unfortunately, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is a weaker entry on that relative scale, and is probably the weakest of the three existing entries...
...for several reasons.

 

Firstly, while the narrative is functional as a "road-trip-RPG" - and does actually have some very interesting and surprising elements in the final act - it never quite manages to feel as "complete", as long, or as engaging as either previous game... 
...and it takes a long time for the plot to actually kick in, and give the characters any real goal, beyond simply "let's see what's out there!"

 

The characters themselves are fine - each is given a bit of back story, and each has their own personality, but the issue is that the two principle characters - Al'e and L'gol - are much less defined, and both are the "mysterious stranger" archetype that previous games have dabbled in...
...for a single character.

In both Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars and Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden, one character was the "mysterious stranger with a past"...
...but in both those cases, there was a much more compelling counterpart to that mystery, and a more defined narrative goal, through which that character could grow and be given an arc.

In Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden however, there is a fundamental flaw with the narrative, in that both main characters are "mysterious strangers"...
...so neither is able to serve as the player's "way in" to discovering the other, or making them open up about their past or their feelings. 

That, combined with the fact that the game really has no "long-game driving goal" for at least the first half of the game (and realistically, the first two thirds,) and instead, has the characters simply wandering, aimless for a long portion, means the writers have little way of making these cypher characters seem interesting, and the player has little reason to care.

The driving force of the plot actually revolves primarily around another character - Pulche - a secondary character. He is only added to the roster several hours into the game - and while his plot does eventually turn out to be quite interesting, the balance of the game feel off, as the player is essentially playing a game from the point of view of two characters who are presented as the "heart" of the story, but in reality, should be the side characters.

The other issue with the game, is that while mechanically it does deviate form the "baseline" established by Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, in this case, by adding in a sort of Pokemon-style creature collecting mechanic, whereby the fighting options the player characters can use are assigned via collected "beast cards"...
...this mechanic is not terrible well balanced, or anywhere near as interesting or variable as the "elemental: combat model changes made in Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden were.

 

Assigning abilities based on collected enemy attacks is a good idea on paper, but the reality is that several of these abilities are very powerful, and can be gained very early, so throughout most of the game, the player can simply rely on those, and never change them. They will serve them perfectly well for the entirely of the game, right up to and including the final bosses.

 

Partly that issue is due to improper balancing and difficulty curving, but partly it is because the game is, fundamentally,  very, very easy. 
None of the Voice of Cards games have ever been overtly challenging - that is not their intent - however, the lack of challenge was an issue primarily in Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, and was "corrected" somewhat in Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden. 
While that second game was certainly not a hugely difficult game, it went a long way towards making the game feel more engaging, by requiring a lot more consideration of battle techniques, and good play was a requirement to survive. 

In Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden, that correction seems to have not only been lost, but actively reversed - Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is a less challenging game, even than the already problematically simple Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars. 

 

In Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars, I, personally, died something like 3 or 4 times throughout the campaign. In Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden, I think this stepped up quite a bit - and with some of the boss fights, I dies several times each, until a suitable strategy could be established. 
In Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden, I do not recall ever losing a fight, or ever being forced to run from one - and while challenge is not always a requirement for all game to be good, in an RPG, I contend that that is a problem. 
Part of the fun of an RPG - and indeed, a Card Based Game - is having to devise somewhat tactical and strategic methods to fell tough foes. If no foe ever gives enough challenge to require this kind of strategising, that makes for a lack of engagement...
...and in one like Voice of Cards, where an overwhelming amount of the game is spent in battles, having those battles be unengaging is an issue.

The visuals and audio are on par with the two previous games - the narrator this time is a female voice, giving a slightly different flavour, and that voice work is perfectly good, though given a little bit of a hamper, in the sense that the narrative itself is not as good as previous entries.

Cards still look great - the art design of the Voice of Cards games is always very nice, and clever in the way it uses cards to represent everything - there are the same fun little animations on top of the cards in battle, or the ways different elements of standard RPGs are presented in card form. Unlike Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden though, there feels like there is a lot less unusual or specialised ways in which specific unique elements are added, and given the "card-representation-make-over". 
That previous game added things like stealth sections, or more puzzle-based elements, which while not always successful, did break up the gameplay style, and add some variety. Here, those are largely gone, and the game feels much simpler as a result.

Overall, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is not a significantly bad game - I do think that anyone who is a fan of the previous two games, will likely find a lot of the same good elements in Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden...
...but they will find them in shorter or less engaging ways. 

 

Going from Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars to Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden felt like a series defining itself and expanding - playing with new elements and refining the fundamentals established in the previous game...
...whereas Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden feels like a regression on that front. Particularly so coming off the second game, though to be brutally honest, I suspect it would feel somewhat regressive even as compared to the first. 

 

The step down form Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars is not enormous... but the step down from Voice of Cards: The Forsaken Maiden does feel quite stark, and it's disappointing in that sense - as it feels like a series treading water now, as opposed to one full throatedly moving forwards.

Hopefully, should a 4th Voice of Cards game come along, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden will feel like simply a lesser entry, and not a downward trajectory - but that remains to be seen!

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Both previous Voice of Cards games are already ranked, and as said, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is unfortunately the weakest entry, so that gives a firm "ceiling" to ranking, below Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars.

Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden is not a hugely worse game, or an enormously different game, however, and a lot of the same arguments would apply to it as did the original, so I started looking at the game immediately below Voice of Cards: The Isle Dragon Roars.

 

There are definitely some games there that are good but flawed, or simply don't meet their potential in some ways, while still being fun to play generally - which is pretty much where Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden comes out, but a lot of them, I think, tend to outrank Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden on specifics, and even in spite of their flaws, as they have a bit more meat to them, or some specific high points.

 

However, working down, the first game I came to where I can definitively state "despite some good parts, this game is definitely less awesome overall"...
...is curious, batshit-crazy and stylistically cool, but a little unrefined and rough-around-the-edges To Hell With The Ugly.

 

That game has some good stuff - it's stylish as fuck, unusual and quite original, but it is rough, and a lot of its ideas are better on paper than in-game...
...so I feel comfortable with Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden beating it.

 

The game immediately above it, however - Grow Home - has some issues, but I think is still a better time overall - and it has the advantage of being quite original, in a way a third entry in a series like Voice of Cards can't be.

 

As such, Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden finds its place! 
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh

 

 

Summary: 

A Narrative Adventure / Light-Puzzle / QTE-Action game from Pendulo Studios, (developers of, among a large catalogue, the Yesterday games, and Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo,) Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh sees the long-standing and beloved Hergé-penned character Tintin brought to life in full 3D.

 

Faithfully adapting one of his earliest adventures to the letter, Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh sticks rigidly to the source material - the 4th Tintin comic book, Cigars of the Pharaoh - keeping dialogue, designs and the plot virtually unchanged, but adding significant additional puzzle sections or action set pieces wherever the confines of the original text would allow.

I should be up-front in this review, by pointing out - I am a Tintin fan. 
I read the comics growing up, and actually own a full set of them now as a grown up. In fact, prior to playing the game, I re-read the original book for context, and was genuinely quite surprised in how faithfully the material is brought to life in the game. 

 

The visual design is 3D, of course, and so the 2D exaggerated designs of many of the characters is difficult to translate exactly...
...however, the job Pendulo do in recreating the look and feel of the book - and of the Tintin universe generally - is really quite impressive. 
Aside from Tintin himself - who, as always the most crudely drawn and most "inhuman" looking character in the books, and requires some licence to be taken - virtually every character who appears in the book is not only translated very well to the 3D environment, but is done so in a way that allows not simply the character, but specific comic-pane poses or actions, to be recreated clearly, and to work within the cartoonish 3D. It is very clear that the artists and programmers each had a copy of Cigars of the Pharaoh open on their desks at all times - and Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is easily the most impressively close a 3D game has come to capturing that look and feel. 

 

I will admit - I do still find it somewhat disappointing that a Tintin game has not yet been created to use the kind of 2D comic-style that something like Treasures of the Aegean did. That game was, after all, specifically aping a European comic book aesthetic that owes its novelty as much to Tintin as to anything, as that kind of 2D would allow a literal 1-to-1 accuracy of look and feel. After all, if the two South Park RPGs have taught us anything, it's that aping the visual style of the original source material exactly, is always going to be superior to interpreting said style in 3D, in terms of verisimilitude.
However, if a 3D game is what is on the table, Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is by FAR the clear winner in terms of capturing the magic.

 

Audio in the game is pretty decent - the music is suitably rousing and jaunty, and befits the older-style of adventure tale that Tintin offers. The voice work, while obviously cartoonish and heightened, is fun within that context too - the old-timey speech and vernacular of Tintin is brought to life pretty faithfully, and the actors do a decent job of aping older-style matinee film adventures. 
I don't think any of the voice work is spectacular by any stretch, but it fits the tone, and works.

 

The narrative and dialogue accuracy is quite surprising in Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh.
Tintin books are, of course, quite dated now - in particular ones as early in the run as Cigars of the Pharaoh. The original book was published in 1932, and was only the fourth outing for Tintin, (and the 3rd available, as Hergé himself refused to allow the rather crude and amateurish first outing - Tintin in the Land of the Soviets - to be published writ large until almost 40 years later.)

As such, much of the mannerisms, speech patterns, references and colloquialisms are extremely antiquated nowadays, but it is to Pendulo's credit that they stick to these pretty much all of the time...
...with the only clear deviations in areas that would be genuinely problematic by modern standards. 

 

On that removal of problematic elements - as said, I am a fan of Tintin, and have read them all, but even I freely admit: the books must be read in the context of when they were written. 
While Tintin would likely have been seen as progressive at the time, and there was no intention of racist overtones, there are still some significantly reductive and extremely rough elements to the books - particularly early on - that are a product of the time and place the books were written...
...and editing these out is a virtual necessity in a modern day adaptation.

 

In fact, I don't think it is a coincidence that Pendulo have elected to make Cigars of the Pharaoh their first Tintin outing. 
It is certainly the first genuinely great Tintin book - and the opening salvo of a run of 4 books that could easily be argued to be the strongest continuous set in the whole series...
...but also, The first three books - Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, Tintin in the Congo and Tintin in America - are, in addition to being cruder and less well written, as Hergé was still establishing the character and tone...
... also racially problematic beyond the point where minor editing would suffice. 

 

Starting with Cigars of the Pharaoh makes a lot of sense, assuming Pendulo plan to continue, as it is where the globe-trotting, high-action, detective-solving Indiana Jones-inspiring aspects of the Tintin formula became clear, and the next books - The Blue Lotus, The Broken Ear and The Black Island are where that formula was cemented...
...and all of those are books where any particularly problematic elements are fairly minimal, and can be worked around, without having to change the plot in any significant way.

As said, visually and narratively I think Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is something of a success, particularly for the Tintin fan, who wants to see a game take the books as genuine inspiration.

However...
...unfortunately, that is where the praise for Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh will end.

 

Despite capturing the look and tone of Tintin effectively, it cannot be avoided saying the following:
Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is an absolute mess of a game - on multiple fronts.

 

Firstly, there is the gameplay as designed.

 

Tintin comics split their time between detective-style mystery solving and comedic, high-concept action, and so does this game...
...however, both are very rudimentary, and very rigid. 

The detective and puzzle elements are by far the better parts - some of the Adventure game type mechanics: exploring areas, talking to NPCs and using items are fine for world-building, but the actual puzzles themselves are overtly simple... and never stop telling the player exactly what to do. 
There are a few more mechanical puzzles - shifting statues to align light beams, or solving audio memorisation puzzles etc, and these actually work fine - they are simple, but varied and effective...
...but there are far too few of them in the game, and they are all rather concentrated in a couple of distinct sections.

 

"Action" in the game, on the other hand, is woeful.

There are two elements of this that the game has.

 

Firstly brutally unforgiving, poorly done, old-school insta-fail stealth sections, which are almost breathtaking in their ineptitude. 
Enemy detection all over the place, and virtually no indicator of what to do, where to go, or how to proceed is ever given. Almost every one of these sections has only a single viable path to be taken, and every one requires precision timing like a Swiss watch. In fact, on multiple occasions, I discounted what eventually transpired to be the CORRECT route, simply because the timing window for success was so ludicrously tiny and precise, that it simply felt like it must be wrong...
...only to bang my head against it for an hour, before finally squeaking through by sheer happenstance. 
These sections break often too - enemies will occasionally detect the player from multiple rooms away, or detect something, start to "approach", stop when they don't find the player...
...then get stuck on geometry, and end up positioned in such a way as to make progress impossible.

These sections are not fun in the slightest, and because they instantly fail at the drop of a hat, are actually very difficult, even to figure out why one failed, in order to avoid it the next attempt.

 

Secondly, there are QTE-heavy chase sequences, where the player must tap the correct button to either jump, duck, squeeze or use an in-environment object to proceed. 
These sections are also insta-fail for the most part, and can be somewhat fun to look at, however, because they have multiple paths, only one of which is ever viable, and because they last an absurdly long time - upwards of 4 minutes, and 50-60 QTE prompts at times - they reduce to a tedious process of trial-and-error...
...one made all the worse by the game's technical issues. 
On many occasions (and, in fact, in my case, on the very first one,) some QTE prompts will simply fail to show on screen. Multiple times. 
In fact, several times, I repeated a section dozens of times, and never saw the QTE prompt that was supposed to show. I simply failed over and over for no apparent reason, until I eventually resorted to watching a YouTube video. Seeing the QTE prompt in the video gave me the indication of the button I was meant to be seeing, and low and behold - pressing that button at the right moment in the sequence got me through the section...
..but in a game where hitting QTEs is the main action element, such a bug is unforgivable.

That all makes for a rather rote and disappointing game overall... 
... but that is only one half of the game's problems. 

The other half, is the sheer volume of technical issues.

 

Now - I rarely bring up technical problems in a review - for three reasons. 
Firstly, because they don't often happen to everyone the same way. 
Secondly, because these are usually fixed in patches, and so reviewing based on them gives that review a shelf-life.
Thirdly - and primarily - it's because I am a fairly patient and forgiving gamer. I can excuse the odd issue here and there as the cost of doing business. Games are hard to make, have a lot of moving parts, and some bugs are inevitable. I don't believe incompetence has to exist for some bugs to happen.

 

As such, I only bring up technical bugs and issues if they are incredibly  rampant, and extremely detrimental...
...and I'm genuinely not sure if I have ever played a game - of any stripe, but particularly a relatively high budget, AA game - with as many issues as Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh has.

 

There were the above mentioned problems with enemy pathing and detection, there were geometry glitches, there was getting stuck on the environment. 

There were elements that disappeared (for example, a puzzle-solution-required crate the player could move would simply turn invisible on occasion, requiring me to remember where I left it, and move an invisible box!).

There were environmental elements that were simply not there (a particular view of Tintin looking out of port-hole from outside the ship was lent considerable comic effect, by the fact that the ship itself never loads... just a porthole, and Tintin, floating 20 feet above a blue sea.)

There were numerous hard-crashes in the game, multiple instant deaths when colliding with nothing at all, multiple points where dialogue or subtitles failed to load, or where puzzles were solved but failed to register. 

Hell, there was even the old Bethesda-style falling through the floor, characters responding to one choice when another had been selected, or the Assassin's Creed Unity style "Here's the inside of my head, because I HAVE NO FACE TEXTURE!" boogyman.

 

That's all in addition to trophy glitches, of which virtually every trophy is affected. 
The collectible trophies both popped with only about half the items collected, and virtually every "do this section without failing" trophy required multiple retries - and re-installs - to get to pop.

 

As said, it takes a lot for me to bring up the technical glitches, but here, I virtually have to because not only is there so many that it defies belief that the game released (and, not for nothing, the developer did come out and warn players just prior to launch, that it was a mess, yet released it anyway)...
...but there is also so many, and of so many types, that I find it impossible to imagine the game will ever be patched enough to be fully free of them. 
Pendulo might be able to improve it a bit...
...but I'd be astounded if Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is ever a glitch and bug-free game.

There is simply too much broken here to glue together.

Overall, Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is a severe disappointment - and not simply because of the rampant technical issues. 

Most Tintin games have been disappointing to a Tintin fan in some fashion, but generally, this is because the games fail to accurately capture the tone and feel of the Tintin books. In the case of Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh though, that disappointment is worse, because this game does capture that look and feel...
...but simply fails to capitalise on it, by making a game that isn't much fun to play, is both too easy, and infuriatingly rigid and finicky in it's actions...
...and tops it off, by being completely half-baked in terms of technical finesse.

 

It's easy to dismiss Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh as a "broken mess" - because it demonstrably is...
...but doing so actually lets it off too lightly.

The fact is, even if the game ran perfectly as intended, it would still be a pretty deep disappointment, simply due to the reliance on dull, easy puzzles and adventure game mechanics, over-long QTE sections, and some of the worst, most player-unfriendly insta-fail stealth sections ever crafted. 

 

As a Tintin fan, it is very dismaying to think that this is the closest to an accurate Tintin game we have really had in the modern era, and has so many good things around the edges - the visuals, the translation, the narrative adherence to the original book...
...but it wraps it in a game so bad that it feels unlikely Pendulo - or any studio, for that matter - will get to try their hand at such an adaptation again any time soon.

 

 

The Ranking:

We're looking very low on the ranking here - Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh does have good elements around the edges - the art, the adaptation, some of the music etc - but the game is so poor in design, and so broken in execution, that it really does beggar belief.

 

That put me thinking about some games that look very nice, but have a lot of gameplay and technical problems...
...and the two that jumped to mind were the reasonably inoffensive at first, but dull and often broken Eldritch Space Horror Moons of Madness, and the nice looking but terribly tedious and poorly designed Fear Effect Sedna.

 

While Moons of Madness did severely disappoint, I do have to concede, it is not even nearly as broken as Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh, and also, it is a new idea, not based on an existing IP. As such, the only reason it was able to disappoint, was by being pretty good initially. Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh, on the other hand, disappoints despite pre-existing fandom, and that feels worse.
I also think I would replay Moons of Madness before replaying Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh - and for a fan of Tintin, and a fan of the book, that is a damning thing to say!

 

Fear Effect Sedna, on the other hand, still has to rank lower than Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh. While Fear Effect Sedna is not broken to nearly the same extent, it is - as designed - even more tedious and ill-thought-out than Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh is, and it's narrative is poorly executed in a way Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh's isn't. 
I was (just) willing to put up with Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh's numerous annoyances, to see the game through for the art and story - but Fear Effect Sedna, I had basically given up on the narrative long before the final curtain...
...so I think it still ranks lower.

That leaves a small cadre of broken, dull or seriously troubled games between those two - and it really comes down to asking "are the good elements of Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh enough to squeeze in above this other game?"

 

Working up from Fear Effect Sedna, the answer is "Yes" for Final Horizon, Zombie Driver and Skeleton Rider...
...but I can't actually say the same for Funk of Titans. If forced, I think I would replay that before replaying Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh (at least, in it's current, broken form,)...
...and would just read Cigars of the Pharaoh afterwards!

 

As such, Tintin Reporter: Cigars of the Pharaoh finds its disappointing spot on the list.
 

 

 

 

 

 

A Short Hike

 

 

Summary: 

A simple, 3D, vacation-themed exploration game from one-man-designer Adam Robinson-Yu, A Short Hike sees the player take on the role of Claire - a young bluebird - in Hawk Peak Park, a vacation location for animals, in which her Aunt May works as a ranger.

 

Flustered, and a little worried about something happening at home, (unknown to the player at the outset,) Claire is unable to call for updates due to a lack of cellphone reception in the park... and so to take her mind off it, and to get the reception she needs, she decides to venture out and about, and climb to the summit of Hawk Peak.

 

In terms of narrative, that is pretty much it...
...but that's not really a detriment.
That is all the game really requires.

 The player has a goal - reach the mountain peak in the centre of the park - and doing so requires a clear set of parameters - collect enough collectible feathers, which both increase how high Claire can climb, and how high and long she can fly...
...but the real meat of the game comes form simply exploring the park's areas, interacting with the many charming visitors and inhabitants she encounters, taking part in various mini games or side activities, and slowly working her way up the mountain.

The writing is pretty good - it's primarily simple dialogue, following mini-quests, or some light multi-quest lines - but primarily they serve as a delivery method for the plethora of personalities of the other holiday makers, and they retain a cheery, upbeat style.

In terms of gameplay, essentially A Short Hike works as a simple exploratory game with a focus on mini-games. 
It very much falls into the "relaxation holiday" indie space, slotting neatly in beside games like TOEM and The Touryst, or even Proteus, and sitting adjacent to games like Chicory or even Yoku's Island Express... albeit with less focus on active challenge, and more on simple meditative vibes and good cheer.

 

The game is mechanically simple to control, but quite satisfying, and the ability to fly - and to upgrade this ability by virtually any path they choose - be it playing volleyball, helping out inhabitants, fishing, exploring etc, - makes for a game where simply being in the space IS the game, and provides all the enjoyment, and while the individual experiences are simple and fleeting, there is a good variety of them, and rarely is a new task more than a stone's throw away.

 

The characters Claire encounters are all quite charming and endearing - much like in The Touryst or TOEM, there is't a lot to any of these individual characters, or any lengthly character interaction, but the developer does a lot with a little, giving each character a distinct personality, and in the best cases, coaxing some feeling - or a laugh - from the player.

Im not sure there is quite the longevity or variety in A Short Hike that there is in either The Touryst or TOEM - I don't know the exact count, but I do suspect both those games have more individual mini-games and things to do - but A Short Hike is no slouch, and while those are all short games, A Short Hike is definitely the shortest - clocking in at around 80 minutes to completion of the main goal, and only a few hours more to 100%. 
That means that while there is a bit less to the game overall, it also benefits from never really having a chance to wear out its welcome - and exploring the island - particularly with the flying and gliding mechanics, which are very satisfying to use!

The visuals are something very curious in A Short Hike...
...because despite being very nice - they seem to be subject to one of the most baffling acts of self-sabotage I've ever seen in a game!

To explain - the visuals are, themselves, good. 

The game is, of course, a lower budget indie game, and hardly a technical powerhouse, but there is some nice, low-poly 3D models that do plenty to convey different environmental scenery, make the island feel pleasant and pleasing, and give the individual characters some good, simple, cartoonish personality.

The movements are simple and the animations too - but they work - and actually, the gliding around when flying is surprisingly nice looking - with the wind-streaks on wing-tips a nice little flourish. 
Once the player collects enough feathers to be able to fly high up, and see the island from a distance, a sort of "sepia-tone-sketchbook" stylistic touch occurs on distant elements, that has a sort of anti-aliasing effect, avoiding pop-in, and it looks very nice too.

Indeed, the game is a very pretty one for this level indie game...
...but in order to appreciate it, the player has to turn off an absolutely terrible looking pixelizing post-render overlay, which is - for some reason - turned on, and at maximum, by default.

To be clear, I am certainly not averse to pixel-art games.
In fact, I am an enormous fan of pixel art - in my opinion, a well done pixel-art game can still, in 2024, look as good as - or in many cases, particularly lower budget ones - better than the 3D polygonal equivalent...
...however, that is in cases of actual pixel-art vs polygons.

 

Actual pixel art is often beautiful.
Post render effects pixelating polygonal 3D models, however, are rarely good looking...
...and in many cases - A Short Hike included - are downright nauseating.

 

I don't mean "nauseating" in the hyperbolic, "that looks so bad" sense - I mean in the literal sense. Playing A Short Hike with the pixelating effect on, made me feel quite motion sick and gave me a headache from squinting quite quickly.

Post Pixelation of 3D elements might look like pixel-art when static - but as soon as the elements are in motion, the post-processing is never able to make the pixels move like actual pixels in pixel-art would, and so the effect is quite disconcerting, and just looks... wrong. 
I will admit, I may be more prone to the dizziness or nausea than others - certainly I have more issues with in-motion VR than most - however, I not only think A Short Hike's post-render pixelisation looks bad, and makes a nice looking game demonstrably and significantly uglier - but it is also the most nauseous a game outside of VR has even made me.

 

I have a suspicion that A Short Hike has this overlay on by default, because in static screenshots - such as what the player sees when browsing the PSN Store, it does look very good...
...but the game really should do itself a favour, by making it clearer, right up front, that it can be turned off.
There is a much better looking game underneath it, as I only discovered so when the overlay was making me so nauseous that I went looking in the visual settings as a last resort before being forced to abandon the game!

Audio is good in the game - there's no voice work, but the score is cheery and uplifting, and soothing in a way that the holiday-zen vibes require. Some of the sound effects are quite nice -there's a sort of "throwback" quality to some of them - I was often put in mind of the sound effects of early Nintendo 64 games, and they work in context.

Overall, A Short Hike is certainly a small game, and not one liable to hold any players attention for a hugely long time - but that isn't a bad thing. It is a fun and fleeting game - one that leaves the player wanting more, not less - and one that works very well for the short time it takes. it looks nice (once the player discovers how to see it properly,) sounds good, and has a lot more personality packed into it's writing than one might expect, for a game of this nature.

There are games that do the same thing A Short Hike does a little more successfully, I think - specifically both The Touryst and TOEM - but the "relax and enjoy some nature" side of gaming is one that can accommodate many games, and A Short Hike is a good entry within that spectrum.

 

Will it take any player more than a few gaming sessions - at most - to finish and be done with?
Probably not...
...but it would take a stoney-hearted cynic not to find some joy in the gameplay here, or to find the inhabitants of Hawk Peak Park - and Claire herself - anything but endearing!
 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

In finding a spot for A Short Hike, the first comparison points were the two already ranked games I think do similar types of gameplay and tone a little better - and those are TOEM and The Touryst. The lower ranked of those is The Touryst, and while I enjoyed  A Short Hike, I think The Touryst's gameplay and exploration is a bit more fun, and while A Short Hike wins on audio, The Touryst wins easily on visuals, and on variety of mini-games, so it provides a good ceiling.

 

 A Short Hike does feel short, and look and play well - so I looked at other relaxing games that have the same qualities a little further down the list - and the one that jumped to mind was Hoa.

Hoa is certainly a better looking game - it looks astoundingly good - but I think the actual gameplay is a bit lacking in Hoa - and while both games are short, Hoa is the one that suffers for that. A Short Hike feels like a short-but-complete game, whereas Hoa feels truncated. It feels like there should be more of it, in a way  A Short Hike doesn't... and when viewed holistically, I think  A Short Hike has to outrank it.

Above Hoa is To Hell With the Ugly, which also looks better, but has a lot of issues and gameplay problems  A Short Hike doesn't have, so I think  A Short Hike beats it out, and I also think  A Short Hike achieves what it aims for better than newly ranked Voice of Cards: The Beasts of Burden...
...but when it comes to open-world, free exploration games, where climbing up is the only goal, the next game up is Grow Home.

 

 I think  A Short Hike has trouble there.

Grow Home looks pretty cool - it's aping an early PS1 visual style, which is unusual, and doing it well, and it also has a bit more challenge to it, while still being relaxing and fun. I think  A Short Hike wins on audio and probably on narrative, but the whole package of Grow Home feels a bit more complete and engaging than  A Short Hike can quite muster...
...so I think Grow Home wins that fight by a hair.

 

As such,  A Short Hike finds its spot, right below Grow Home!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Carto

 

 

Summary: 

A 2020 Narrative Puzzle Adventure from small Taiwanese studio Sunhead Games, Carto combines elements of light Adventure Gaming, Geometric and Logic Puzzles, and some charming narrative cuteness, as the player rearranges the world around them, via a magical child and a more magical map. 

 

The player take on the role of Carto - a young, ostensibly mute girl - who, as the outset, is cared for my her Grandmother, a sort of magical cartographer, who is responsible for mapping, and maintaining, the world below her, from her vantage point in an airship.

After the airship is caught in a violent storm, and the magical map - and Carto herself - are thrown overboard, Carto washes up on an unfamiliar shore, and must find and collect the pieces of the map...
...the placement of which affect the actual terrain she is traversing!

By placing a portion of map - spinning it and aligning it on a cartography grid, she can alter the layout of the real world around her - and by doing so, can traverse the land, help the inhabitants of the various land-dwelling cultures she encounters, and ultimately, reunite with her grandmother.

Carto is a puzzle game first and foremost, and so the most salient element of the game is its mechanics - and these are both pretty good... and not quite what one might expect.

Carto isn't a hugely binary or mathematical style of puzzle game, despite what might seem the more obvious or logical step for a game predicated on jigsawing parts together.

The nature of the game would, on paper, suggest a more traversal-based, more spatially-oriented style of puzzle solving - something akin, perhaps, to A Monster's Expedition Through Puzzling Exhibitions - but that is actually about as far from the puzzling style of Carto as it's possible to get.

 

Instead, the geometric elements of the puzzle solving are generally fairly loose, with multiple "correct" answers, and many, many ways of snapping the various map pieces together to solve specific problems. 

That is because, for the most part, the puzzles are not actually "traversal" in nature. There are certainly some that lean this way - generally more so as the game progresses, where the puzzle is primarily about finding a path through a maze-like movable Rubik's-cube of areas, to reach an end goal - and these are often the most challenging of the puzzles on offer...
...but those type of puzzles make up a relatively small proportion of the game.

 

Instead, the main focus of the puzzles tends to be more Adventure Game adjacent, and more narrative in style - with Carto moving map elements in specific ways to help out the various NPCs she encounters. An NPC requiring a specific item, for example, can be solved by placing the map piece showing the area where that character next to the map piece containing that item. 
There are also more esoteric types, where an NPC will refer to a place Carto has not seen, in terms of directional markers she has seen... and placement of those markers in the correct orientations and positions will reveal a new map piece containing the element the NPC referred to.

In fact, there are quite a number of different ways in which the "rearrange the world" mechanic is used to create clever, imaginative, and occasionally challenging puzzles, and it's to Sunhead's credit that they rarely repeat a puzzle type exactly the same way. they keep the game feeling mechanically varied throughout pretty much the entirety of the game.

 

That variety of puzzle type can occasionally be a little confounding - while not overtly complex, there are occasional parts where some light nudging might have gone a long way to explaining what the game is looking for the player to do. There were certainly a few moments of head scratching involved, where I simply didn't know what the game actually wanted me to try to do, and so wasn't quite sure where the narrative and the puzzles were intersecting...
...but as Carto is a relatively contained, smaller experience, this is not a huge issue, as realistically, there is a finite amount of possible ways the player could go in the wrong direction, before stumbling on the right one anyways.

The narrative-slanted puzzles work here, primarily, because the characters, the world, and the writing are all quite endearing and likeable. 
The actual narrative through line is very simple, and the detail into which each of the NPC quests or storylines go is never enormously deep or convoluted, but there is some genuine curiosity and charm built up - and most of that comes from the fact that Carto is continuously moving to new areas and new biomes, and each of these has some new culture and peoples there.

Each one of the cultures Carto visits is unique, and while not delved into in any real depth, has just enough functional completeness to make the player genuinely curious. None of the cultures are a one-to-one to "real world" cultures, but all are inspired by amalgamating some elements of different ones, and injecting a level of fairytale and fantasy flights-of-fancy, and it works very well. 

In some ways, in fact, the 4 or 5 distinct cultures Carto discovers, helps, and is helped by, gives the game an odd correlation to another game - Chants of Sennaar.

While the the two games are markedly different, there is something parallel about them - both involve a protagonist to whom the multiple cultures they encounter are alien, but must learn to understand them, both games have put in work to make these cultures feel distinct and somewhat believable in the context, and both games have "communication issues" with those cultures... though in Carto's case, her not speaking is less of an impediment, as they do at least speak the same language, and most inhabitants can understand Carto's gestures easily enough!

 

The writing is very clearly translated - of course, given that the game is developed in Taiwan - but for a lower budgeted game, there has been an attention to detail in tha translation that is admirable. The translation captures not only the simple words, but the tone and the charm of the game. It also helps a lot that Carto herself, while not speaking, does have a range of terrible sweet and endearing reactions and animations and facial expressions, that both aid the narrative, and provide some genuine laughs where intended.

The visuals are quite unusual in Carto. It uses a sort of paper-cut-out on a 3D plane aesthetic, that is certainly not unique - that idea has been done in a lot of variations, but here, probably best falls somewhere between Don't Starve, and TOEM...
...however, that doesn't really do it justice, as it is all created with a beautiful looking watercolour palate.
 
The character designs are chunky and exaggerated, but in a subdued way, what resembles a stylised painting, or a high quality, artistic children's picture book, rather than a cartoon. 
The environments are lovely to look at - mixing that watercolour aesthetic with patterned textures for different terrains, and the art style translates very well to each environment, and to the more detached elements, such as the "Cartography Grid" view, where the pieces of the world can be rotated, moved and placed.

 

Audio is simple - there is no voice work, and all dialogue is via text, but the score itself is very good - veering cheery and melancholic as the tone requires, but relaxing and calming and meditative primarily - fitting the light puzzling mechanics and the gentle, feel-good tone of the game very well.

Overall, Carto is a neat little game. It's one who's puzzles are a mixed bag - some much better than others - but the variety and lack of repetition of puzzle types tends to gloss over the weaker ones, by making them one of many.
 
There are occasional issues with player guidance - not indicating the scope of a particular puzzle - but these are relatively minor concerns...
...and they are smoothed over quite a bit, by the fact that even when the player isn't quite sure of what they are meant to be doing, the environments are a joy to see, the basic mechanic is fun to use, and the NPCs, their cultures, and Carto herself are all winningly engaging and delightful to be around.

 

It's not a game that will keep any puzzle enthusiast challenged for too long at any point, but the charm of the game will more than make up for it - and for the shortish time it takes to finish the game, and the limited seeming mechanic...
...Carto packs a lot of imagination, a lot of life, a lot of personality, a lot of good art and music, and a lot of fun into a small package!
 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Carto is a game I played very shortly after A Short Hike, and so I had the comparison between the two fresh in my mind while playing. The two games are not overtly similar, but both fall in the "light-puzzling" and the "cozy, feel-good" camps, and so there was a little crossover there!

 

I do think that, while Carto wins handily on visuals, the mix of puzzles in Carto, while admirable, has some lower points, and the overall mix doesn't quite beat out the variety of little mini-games in A Short Hike. While both games are fun, and close in quality, personal enjoyment has to give the marginal edge to A Short Hike...
...so that provides both a ceiling, and a rough estimate of placement, given that it beats Carto, but not by an enormous amount.

A little below A Short Hike is another game, interestingly, about a girl and her Grandmother, which is also a "cozy" type of game, and one using an unusual puzzle mechanic - Lost Words: Beyond the Page.

I think that while Lost Words does win on narrative and writing, Carto takes it on visuals, and fundamentally, I think Carto does more with its puzzle mechanic. Lost Words is a good game, but it can feel a little one-note by the end, whereas Carto kept finding new ways to use it's mechanic. Some, granted, were better than others, but the variety works as a whole.

As such, I think Carto does beat out Lost Words: Beyond the Page.

 

It's a small pool of games between the two, and while I think the neat-but-flawed Apotheon does lose just barely to Carto, I still think the odd, musical, emotional experience of The Longest Road on Earth is something that stuck with me, and does manage to slightly beat Carto to the punch.

 

As such, Carto finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains 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 26 by DrBloodmoney

[visighost]

Thanks for the reviews, Dr.! Very entertaining as always! You've played quite a few games I really enjoyed in the last few entries, happy you did too. Small note on KONA: I don't believe it was "sponsored" by the Canadian Government, it simply received state funding through a grant program, as so many indie games do. Being from Quebec myself, I found it entertaining to see a game set in our neck of the woods, but I have to agree it was pretty heavy-handed at times.

[DrBloodmoney]

13 minutes ago, visighost said:

Thanks for the reviews, Dr.! Very entertaining as always! You've played quite a few games I really enjoyed in the last few entries, happy you did too. Small note on KONA: I don't believe it was "sponsored" by the Canadian Government, it simply received state funding through a grant program, as so many indie games do. Being from Quebec myself, I found it entertaining to see a game set in our neck of the woods, but I have to agree it was pretty heavy-handed at times.

 

Ah - fair - I wasn't sure of the exact relationship, just saw that some funding had been secured from a national agency, as there is a mention in the credits - and the slight over-eagerness to have the character opine on all things historical about the region - sometimes at the expense of realism or urgency! - hammered it home a little more than maybe it should! 😂

Edited January 26 by DrBloodmoney

[JAK-KRIEG]

Holy hell where do you get the time to play so many games? I am inspired to try some of them also nice review on TLOU2 Doctor.

[shadaik]

Make sme curious what - by comparison - you think (or maybe will think) about the PS3 adaptation of Spielberg's Adventures of Tintin movie.

[DrBloodmoney]

31 minutes ago, shadaik said:

Make sme curious what - by comparison - you think (or maybe will think) about the PS3 adaptation of Spielberg's Adventures of Tintin movie.

 

I remember it a little, though I don't recall playing much if any - as I recall, it was kind of like what those Assassin's Creed 2.5D games ended up being on the PS4 - kind of action puzzle platformer with fixed camera?

 

I don't actually hate that movie really - it's kind of objectively a bad adaptation, but my kid liked it a lot, so I did see it quite a few (too many!) times, but the game felt a bit antiquated - kind of a throwback to the earlier consoles, where movies would always get their perfunctory tie-in game

[grayhammmer]

I'm glad you liked Chants of Sennaar as much as you did. Honestly, it was kind of funny to me how all the praise you gave the game only got it to the 74th spot, but that really just means that you've ranked a lot of good games.

[DrBloodmoney]

14 minutes ago, grayhammmer said:

I'm glad you liked Chants of Sennaar as much as you did. Honestly, it was kind of funny to me how all the praise you gave the game only got it to the 74th spot, but that really just means that you've ranked a lot of good games.

Oh, pretty much anything in the top 100-150 is a “highly recommended” by me, so 74 is a pretty dang high placement as far as I’m concerned…

…because there’s games way lower than that that I would still call great!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (not at all) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

 

New

 

Tchia

Inked: A Tale of Love

Jusant

Tinykin

Blacktail

 

 

 

[No Priority Assignments this time - still playing catch-up!]

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman: World of Assassination, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet Htol#niQ: The Firefly Diaries  going to lose its new crown of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!

[DrBloodmoney]

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

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

 

 

Tchia

 

Summary: 

 

A 2023 released Action Exploration game, and the second from Awaceb, developers of Fossil Echo, Tchia sees the player take on the role of the titular Tchia - a twelve-year-old girl on a fictional archipelago, heavily inspired by the developer's home of New Caledonia.

 

After her father is kidnapped by the nefarious Pwi-Dua from the small island Tchia lives on with him, supported by an army of animated golems of cloth and wood, she sets out for the mainland, armed with her magical ability to "soul jump" to inhabit various living creatures and inanimate objects, to rescue him, defeat Pwi-Dua (and the demon whom he serves, unveiled through exploration of both the islands, and their mythos,) and restore harmony to the archipelago.

 

In terms of broad gameplay Tchia is something of a curiosity, in that while it is far more expansive in scope, and rather higher budget in feel, the games it feels closest to in terms of tone, pace and broad gameplay are ones like TOEM, Chicory, The Touryst and A Short Hike. 

All those games share common threads - a gameplay focussed on exploration and discovery, a relatively light tone, where even the perilous narrative elements (if there are any) are treated in a family-friendly way, a focus on mini games, and a derivation of enjoyment coming primarily from the simple satisfaction of being in a beautiful, "holiday-feeling" landscape.

While Tchia certainly pushes a little further into a more traditional, "world-in-peril" type narrative at times, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay remains pretty firmly in that "gaming holiday" camp, with the narrative arc forming only a loose framework to the game, and the majority of it purely working as a large, exploratory playground.

 

This gameplay style, applied to a much broader canvas than it usually is, is both the strength and the weakness of Tchia. 

 

On the one hand, it is inarguably one of the grander, more beautiful and most expansive implementations of that style of gameplay - and when it is at its best, adds a real sense of wonder to the mix, by way of the simple scale...
...but it can also serve to highlight why that type of game is usually reserved for smaller-scoped, shorter games.
In a game as long and large as Tchia, the variety and "bite-sized-mini-game-smorgasbord" effect is harder to maintain, and much more prone to player-exhaustion and "open-world-fatigue".

 

In A Short Hike (probably the most analogous game to Tchia that I have played,) the dotting between various mini-games always feels fresh and fun, primarily because there is a limited scale to the game. There are perhaps 10 or 12 distinct activities, but because they are all contained within a small environment, dotting from one to the other feels like eating a bag of jelly beans. There are a lot of flavours, and each one is fleeting, but they are all sweet, and simple. the player can "graze" without gorging themselves.

In a game the size of Tchia, however, that type of gameplay becomes harder to maintain. The jelly-beans are no longer in a bag... they're in a Scrooge McDuck style massive vault that the player is swimming through.

 The word is so large, that repetition of mini-games and content becomes a virtual necessity, and so any weaker mini-games become more of an issue - because the payer isn't doing it once or twice - they are doing it countless times. 
In some sense, the simple increase in scale switches the tone of the game from feeling like a game in the A Short Hike or The Touryst camp, to something slightly different - to something more akin to a Ubisoft "Map-Game" - a Far Cry or an Assassin's Creed...
...but without the primary focus on a deeper or more consuming narrative element, the game can feel adrift. 
It has all the side content of a big, open-world narrative game, but lacks the primary engine pushing the player through it, because the narrative elements are more akin to that of a much shorter, smaller game.

 

To be clear, there is a main narrative to Tchia - and it is reasonably compelling - but it is spread much, much too thin across the length of the game.
The enormous world (which lacks particularly user-friendly fast-travel options,) - results an a game which feels like it can't quite decide what it wants to be. Its exploratory, non-narrative elements are its strongest parts, but there are so many of them, that it really needs the engine of a primary narrative for pace...
...but that narrative feels too small for the world in which it takes place, meaning it is spread out so much, and dealt with in such a staccato, broken-up way, that the player never really feels like they are being propelled through the game effectively. 

 

Playing naturally, each new "story mission" is generally broken up by such an amount of side content, exploration, distance to travel and sights to see, that the player will often have forgotten what the previous beat actually was, when entering the next one. 
That can be alleviated by simply following the story, and ignoring side content, but the game is not really balanced that way - there is an expectation that the player will be "levelling up" - gaining new abilities via side content as they go - and so it behooves the player to do so in a mechanical sense, while harming the story in a narrative sense.

To be clear - most of the content in Tchia is actually pretty good. There are some fun races, a neat little wood carving mini-game, collectibles, small camps of demons to clear, some light puzzles, a quite smart treasure finding multi-quest line, some good collectible platforming etc...
...but there is just so much of it, that it's virtually impossible not to be a bit burned out with each type of activity before they are actually fully complete. 

 

The lack of reasonable fast-travel is also an issue. There is - in fairness - a fast travel of a sort - uncovering "docks" allows the player to fast travel between these - but this can only be done from one to the other. The player can't simply "warp" to one of these docks from the map screen. 
Because there are so few of these, and because traversing the large environment takes time...
... often, even travelling from a current location, to the nearest dock, to then fast-travel to another dock, to then travel to a desired location is still a lengthly endeavour.
That is not an issue at all during primary story play, but can be very irksome towards the end-game, where the player might be looking to clean up specific tasks scattered all over the map. 

 

The primary gameplay of the main narrative - and of the more "action-oriented" side content - involved Tchia defeating the cloth-and-totem golems is quite loose and cartoonish, but relatively fun...
...though could use a little more in the way of explanation!

To be specific - the way these sections work, is that Tchia must burn the totems - and the piles of cloth from which they spawn - using various found object - bombs, fire torches, etc, or by "soul-jumping" into flaming embers from a bonfire, and shooting herself at the target. 
This can be quite fun , though in some of the larger areas, with many targets, I found it particularly difficult to find enough bonfires or throwable objects to actually complete these - or to find fires in close enough proximity to them, meaning these seemed unusually difficult to complete, and took a particularly long time...
...and it was only much later in the game that I because aware that items like bombs could be stored in Tchia's inventory!
It's possible I missed this piece of information and it was delivered at some point, so I don't hold this point too hard against the game...
... but if it was, it was certainly not repeated, and so I can personally attest to the fact that I could have done with a tool-tip or two to make me aware of this fact!

The gameplay and narrative might be a mixed bag - in both cases, more good than bad, but neither is without issues - however, there is one area in which Tchia really excels, and that is visually. 

 

The game looks great. 
The fictional environment is, of course, designed to resemble a specific, real-world place, and it's clear that the developers love New Caledonia, because boy oh boy, do they make it a gorgeous looking environment in the game!

It's not a photo-real art-style - it's certainly heightened and "cartoonified" to some degree, but it looks fantastic, with gorgeous blue skies, lovely water effect, and some really surprisingly good looking weather effects. Exploring everything from the island cliffs, to the mountains, to the beaches and the farms and the grasslands is an absolute joy, and the highlight of the game experience.

 

Virtually every part of the game is stunning to look at, and more than that - the game conveys the feel of the atmosphere really well. It's difficult to travel around in Tchia and not feel the heat of the jungle, or the lushness of the air, or the sea breeze - a lot of care and attention has gone into making the island as much of a paradise as the developers believe it to be. 

In fact, in many ways, they the visual splendour, and the lushness of the environment it the primary reason why Tchia works, even when its gameplay can be lacking in places - where the narrative or the gameplay isn't quite enough to hold the player interest for some stretches, the fact that simply being in the environments feels as good as it does, and that there is so much to see, stops those issues being too detrimental.

 

The art style works pretty much perfectly for all elements of the environment - with the only slight exception being the one city area. The art style used is perfect for organic elements, but when applied to urban structures, where more geometric buildings are the norm, it does show itself to be a little more rudimentary and basic than most urban environments look nowadays, and looks a little "PS2-era"...
...but that's hardly a massive problem, given that the city area comprises a very small section of the game, and an even smaller percentage of the land mass.

Audio in Tchia is good - and quite distinct. 
Music, and specifically, native islander music - forms a large part of the games stylistic leanings and its character - in fact, playing along with songs throughout the game forms one of the mini-games - and while it's not a style of music I would personally listen to outside of the game itself, it is a unique hook, and a gives the game a distinct sound that sets it apart from most games.

The general score follows suit, sticking to traditional instrumentation and styles, and it works well.

Voice work is good - it's all in French or Drehu, as the native languages of New Caledonia, and subtitled into English, giving a nice feel of authenticity, and while not overly dramatic, does have the feel of authenticity to it... and the fact that 95% of players are probably unfamiliar with the language, does give the game some leeway in terms of acting. Whether the dialects, accents and intonations are "correct" is largely immaterial to the English-speaking player.... it has the feel of authenticity, and that's what counts.

Overall then, Tchia is a mixed bag.
 It's a game that is gorgeous to look at, and has a lot of heart, both in its devotion to showcasing a part of the world not often seen in games, and in delving into a mythos not well trodden - and does those things very well...
...but while its gameplay is fun and well crafted, it is spread a little thin across a world that, while lovely, feels a little too vast for the game it contains, and the game a little too long for the story it tells.

 

It's a game that can feel a little awkwardly crafted, in that it fits into a genre where virtually all other games are much, much shorter and smaller - and while it does an admirable job expanding that genre, the developers zeal to showcase the location they love somewhat overpowers the genre they choose to do it with. 

The result is a good game...
... that one cannot help but feel might be a better game if there was a little less of it.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

When it came to ranking Tchia, there was a real issue, in the sense that I think the games that are directly comparable to it are also generally much smaller, less expansive games. There is a tendency to feel like "Well, Tchia is a much grander game, so it would outrank them"...
...but actually, I think that is only really the case for the one game directly comparable - A Short Hike.

 

A Short Hike and Tchia do actually have a lot in common - I think I made the joke while playing it, that another name could have been "A Long Hike"... 
...and while I enjoyed A Short Hike, I do think the similarity in feel and tone means that the sheer size, visual step up and increased variety of Tchia - couple with the deeper story - means Tchia has to outrank it.

 

However, another of those games that plays in the same loose ballpark as Tchia - in the sense of the "Holiday Mini-Games Smorgasbord" approach to gameplay - is The Touryst.

While Tchia is still a much bigger and more expansive game than The Touryst, the benefits of that become more slight. The Touryst does, I think, pack even more variety into its much smaller scale - and as such, has the variety, and the absence of any kind of "Open World Exhaustion".
I also think that while Tchia would win in a match-up on music, The Touryst manages still to win on visuals...
... and even on narrative. 
The Touryst's narrative is smaller and sillier, but it has some genuine intrigue and a crazy, strange ending, and I think pulled me in more than Tchia ever really did...
...so looking at it holistically, Tchia has to rank lower than it overall. 

 

That provides the "floor" and "ceiling", without around 20ish games between them, without a lot of direct comparison. 

I think Tchia definitely outranks It Takes Two, which has decent gameplay in co-op, but must be played that way, and has nice art and design, but not on Tchia's level...

... but I'd hesitate to put Tchia above recently played Dicey Dungeons, for example, as while they aren't at all similar genre's, and Tchia stomps all over Dicey Dungeons in terms of visuals and music, the fact remains that I think Dicey Dungeons is the more fun and more original game - and the one I would return to given the choice of the two.

That leaves very few games left, none of which are similar at all, so it comes down to "Would I replay this before replaying Tchia?"

The first game, working up from It Takes Two, for which the answer is "Yes"...
...is Untitled Goose Game...
...and so Tchia finds its spot right below that one!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2021-released Light-Narrative Puzzle game from Somnium Games, Inked: A Tale of Love sees the player take on the role of a nameless Samurai in a hand-sketched world, drawn on paper by a "real life" artist.

 

Initially living his idyllic, pen-and-ink-drawn life with the woman he loves, the Samurai's world is torn asunder when The Artist, in playing out his own anger and unhappiness over his own misfortunes, first toys with him, then steals away the woman, imprisoning her.
Setting out to cross the numerous hand-sketched worlds contained in The Artist's sketchpad, and navigate the many obstacles The Artist puts in his path - seemingly as both test, and punishment - the Samurai quests on to rescue his love...
...and to confront the misdeeds of his creator along the way.

As I occasionally do in these reviews, I'm going to upend the usual format, and talk visuals first. 

I do that fairly rarely, but in any case I do, it's generally because said visuals are either the primary focus, the main selling point, or the most exceptional element of the given game. 
In the case of Inked: A Tale of Love, I think all three of those points are true!

 

Inked: A Tale of Love is a fantastic  looking game. 

It not only has one of the more unique art-styles I can recall in a game, but does it to such winning and immaculate effect, that it really does become a selling point o the game all on its own. 

Doing "pen-and-ink sketchbook" as an art-style is not a completely unique idea in gaming - it has been done here and there, to varying levels of success, but it still remains largely under-used as compared to some other more artistic variants. Water-colour painting effects, cartoon-esque cell-shaded effects, paper-cut-out effect, black-on-white stencil effects, and even oil-painted, textured effects are all more often seen than simple pen-and-ink hatching style...
...and I suspect that has a lot to do with how it looks in full 3D. 

The fact is, pen-and-ink sketchbook style doesn't usually look particularly good in full 3D. 

A more cartoonish, black-on-white graphical design can certainly work - one only has to look at games like White Night, or MadWorld to see it working very effectively...
...but when it becomes more "sketchbook" in style, it tends to diminish in 3D very quickly... and end up looking a real mess. 
(Just look at the horrific, vomit-inducing visual style of Drawn to Death, if you don't believe me!)

It is also, however, a style that can't really shine too well in 2D. While sketchbook can work, it tends to look a little bland in 2D, as the lack of real colour means it would tend to fade a little when viewed simply in that way - and most games that have used it in such a manner have done so sparingly, and as an opening salvo to a change - where the sketchbook, colour-limited world is used as a highlight or punctuation, rather than primary art style.

 

The "sketchbook" style has only very specific applications in which it can really shine - where the "geometry drawn on a graph-paper-jotter" can look really effective...
... and that is where the environment is 3D, but the camera is at a static, isometric angle.
Notably, in a 3D puzzle game.
Luckily, Inked: A Tale of Love is exactly that.

 

The visuals are, as such, both unusual, and unusually well done. Every environment is lovingly created, and manages the not inconsiderable feat of being both interactable - at least, to the extent that objects and obstacles can be moved around to specific spots - but where every static screen looks like a work of art. 

Inked: A Tale of Love doesn't simply use this art style, it leans into that art-style in every facet - consistently adding new additions that stick with the theme - water shown as if drawn using a marker pen, using hatching textures for shadows, using new colours of ink to indicate new environments, or showing splashes of fountain-pen ink as flourishes - in a way that consistently builds on the theme, while never feeling out of place for the world as established.

 

Indeed, the only element of the game that seems dissonant is the one that should do - when, on occasion, The Artist's hands are seen, causing changes - and usually trouble - for the ink-sketched Samurai. 
These hands, I should note, don't actually look particularly great -they are fairly low poly and not hugely well rendered. However, it's hard to take that as a negative particularly, given they are shown for all of a few seconds, and so one can hardly expect the developer to spend too much resource animating them to the level of a full 3D game!

 

The art is a real triumph in Inked: A Tale of Love, and is absolutely the best thing in the game, though that's not to say everything else is a negative.

 

The puzzles themselves are generally decent...

...though I would caution: they are never much more than that. 

The fact is, setting their application into such a stylish and beautiful world aside, I'm not sure that I'd say any single puzzle ever feels unique, or hugely interesting. 
They are fine, but the the thing Inked: A Tale of Love does rather lack, from a gaming point on view, is any kind of gameplay element that can live up to the uniqueness of its look. 
While no puzzle is ever downright bad, the lack of any kind of specific gameplay hook, means that they tend to feel simply like elements of "generic" puzzle games - ones that could work - and indeed, generally have worked - in numerous other puzzle games before. 

 

All the best puzzle games have their "signature" - the thing that makes them stand out from other puzzle games. Portal had its portal gun, Viewfinder has its pictures. Superliminal uses perspective, Hue used colour swapping, The Witness used mazes. 
Not every puzzle within these games is unique to that game - indeed, I'd wager there are certain puzzle types that some variant exist of across every one of those games...
...but they apply their own mechanical signature to it, by way of their unique puzzle hook. 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love does have a hook - but it is purely an aesthetic one. 
The only thing really distinguishing it from other puzzle games is the fact that these "generic" puzzle types are done within a particular signature palate...
...but no matter how stylish it is, an aesthetic is not a mechanic.
A stylish look isn't distinctive enough from a cerebral point of view. 

The result is, while Inked: A Tale of Love looks amazing, it it essentially presenting the player with rather well-worn puzzles types, and making them look unique, without actually making them unique. 
An aesthetic can go a good way to papering over that flaw, and in Inked: A Tale of Love's case, it goes further than most...
...but in the end, no aesthetic could disguise mechanical dryness for the entire length of a game. 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love does somewhat alleviate this dryness by simply introducing new variants of puzzles, but each one does tend to feel like simply the next in aline of "generics".
Now we have elevator puzzles...
...now we have the "rolling ball" puzzles...
...now we have the "balanced weights" puzzles...

...but they are always types that we as players have seen before, and usually, they are in addition to a specific "mechanical signature."

The other big issue with Inked: A Tale of Love, is the controls. 

While the puzzles are simple, the actual control of the game can feel a little awkward to implement solutions, even once solved, because of these. 
Actual walking around the environment is fine - in fact, the smoothness of the movement against the sketch-pad backgrounds is admirable, and the Samurai moves cleanly and nicely...
...but when it comes to moving objects, rotating them, placing them, and doing all the elements of the game that are key to the puzzle solving, it is very, very clear that Inked: A Tale of Love was designed primarily for a mouse-and-keyboard, or for a touch-screen.

The controls on a controller feel stiff, fiddly and quite clunky...
...and the method of collecting collectibles - which are hidden in plain sight and must be "clicked" on - by entering a "view mode" and moving a cursor to the location - is clearly an awkward bolted-on addition to make a game not designed for a controller to accommodate one. 

In fact, the most appropriate venue for the game seems to be a hybrid console - a Switch, or perhaps a Steam Deck, where touchscreen and controller can be used - as I suspect mouse and keyboard would have the opposite issue - where collectibles and puzzle solving are easy, but controlling the character himself is more irksome. 

That controller implementation is, I should say, not a total deal-breaker in this particular game - this is not a case like Dokuro or (God forbid) htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries, where the awkward controls are a game-breaking issue due to the requirement for precise timing. 
In Inked: A Tale of Love, timing-required inputs are very rare...
...but it does have the effect of slowing the general pace of the game quite considerably, as every new puzzle tends to take a bit of fiddling and frustration in trying to enact a solution that the player likely established pretty quickly.

Narratively, Inked: A Tale of Love is... okay.
The actual story is fairly simple, and not hugely forefront, but the parallel tales of the Samurai's hardships, and their cause - The Artist, and his hardships, and his misplaced rage and anger - are dealt with reasonably well. Neither character really gets enough story telling to form a real connection to, though it is just about enough to feel some empathy and sympathy, however minimal it might be.

The narrative certainly does telegraph its finale well ahead of time, and the ending and message of the game is fairly predictable and sentimental, but that's not to say it's unworthy. A little sentimentality can work at times - particularly in smaller, artistic games like this one, and while I do think more could have been done with the story, what it is is fine - just a little sparse.

Audio is okay - there is some general narration - partly from The Artist, and partly from a bridging narrator, who speaks about both the Artist and the Samurai - and this is fine. The writing is simple, but largely effective, and the voice work, while not stand out or exemplary, gets the job done.

The actual musical score is extremely minimal - particularly early on - mostly comprising simple ambient notes, but it does build into a more musical game in the latter half, and it's pleasant where needed, and rousing on occasion too.

 

Overall, Inked: A Tale of Love is something of a mix - it's a pretty generic, rather too simple, and occasionally rather fiddly and cumbersome puzzle game...
...but one that tells a sweet, if simple tale, and does it while looking really quite remarkably good.

 

It's hard to recommend a game purely on visuals - but in the case of Inked: A Tale of Love, nothing else is particularly bad, and the visuals are so good, that it makes one of the strongest arguments for such a recommendation.

Is it a pity that the mechanics of the game couldn't live up to the visuals? 
Absolutely. 
A much better puzzle game with these visuals would be something pretty special...
...but as it is, Inked: A Tale of Love isn't a bad game - it's just something of a missed opportunity.

If the game itself could get even half way towards being as mechanically interesting as it is visually interesting, that would a hell of a thing...
...but as it stands, it is a gorgeous, if rather fleeting and occasionally frustrating game, that's tough to dislike, but also tough to really love.
 

 

The Ranking:

 

So ranking Inked: A Tale of Love gave me a very clear game to act as the "floor" - another game I recall having a wildly awesome art-style, which none of the rest of the game, while generally okay, never could live up to - and that was stylish detective-game / survival horror White Night.

Inked: A Tale of Love has the problem of its gameplay feeling less than the promise of its visuals, but I do think the gameplay is far less of a let down than White Night's was, and the game overall is much stronger, so it should definitely rank higher than White Night.

Looking at other visually striking puzzlers though, a ways above White Night is the awesome looking, if a bit janky and unfocussed Apotheon - and that game, while troubled, I do think has to outrank Inked: A Tale of Love. I think Inked: A Tale of Love is the stronger looking game (and that is saying something, because Apotheon is no slouch in that regard!), but while Apotheon has some real problems - particularly with combat - its issues tend to stem from jank, rather than lack of ambition.
The problem with Inked: A Tale of Love is that it just never seems interested in standing out mechanically, and just doesn't seem to have enough ideas for puzzles to make them interesting, whereas Apotheon had ideas, they just suffered for a lack of polish at times.

 

Some of the games in the field above White Night, however, are ones with rather more genuine or fundamental issues than Inked: A Tale of Love, and in a lot of cases, those issues do drag them down further than Inked: A Tale of Love should go...
...and there is a puzzle game in there that caught my eye - Cuboid.

 

Cuboid is an interesting match up, because it's a game where the puzzle type is static - it never changes, and is a pretty well worn type, and visually and auditorially, it does nothing that could compete with Inked: A Tale of Love...
...but I do think the focused "single puzzle type" game maybe works better than the "multiple-puzzle-type" game, if that "multiple puzzle type" game has no real ideas.
I pondered a while, but in the end, I think Inked: A Tale of Love does manage to beat Cuboid - though it's primarily on the visuals, audio and other elements than the gameplay.

It's quite a close call, however, and the game right above Cuboid - Metal: Hellsinger - is a game that while a little same-y, is a pretty unique style, and has some awesome music...
...and while I think the visuals of Inked: A Tale of Love beat it, that's probably the only element that does, so I think Inked: A Tale of Love has to rank below it.

 

As such, Inked: A Tale of Love finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jusant

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2023-released Puzzle / Exploration game from Don'tNod - developers of such games as Life is Strange, Twin Mirror and Remember Me - Jusant sees a nameless wanderer, accompanied by a strange, gelatinous blue pet called a Ballast, setting out to climb a peculiar organic structure - a seemingly impossibly high pillar of rock, standing curiously in the middle of a vast, sandy desert.

 

At the outset, it is clear that the column - now deserted - was once surrounded by a vast ocean, and was home to a civilisation of people who have long-since abandoned it due to drought, and as the player slowly scales the column, seeing the different levels of it, and the varying detritus left by the varying subcultures who lived on these different levels, they can piece together the mystery of what happened to them...
...and the reasons why the wanderer is climbing the column now.

Mechanically, Jusant operates as somewhere between a Walking Sim (in terms of narrative,) a puzzle game (in terms of figuring out the different methods required to climb different sections of the column,) wrapped in the trappings of exploratory traversal game.

 

The wandering stranger has various methods of climbing available to him - the use of ropes, placing of pitons, swinging and wall-running, and there are different in-environment elements that add different elements into the mix - climbable hand-holds, vines that the little ballast can "stimulated" to grow and create paths etc...
... and the player must manage a constant battle between stamina and gripping strength - finding platforms and new piton areas as they go, while maintaining their balance and strength, and contending with the terrain and weather. 
Rope length must be managed - there is a finite length of slack the wanderer can muster, before having to "reset" his safety rope...
... and each level that he reaches generally introduces a new element to this climbing arsenal - ether a new in-environment obstacle or aid to contend with, or a new element to the use of his own climbing tools.

 

These climbing mechanics form the majority of the game - and the method of control and mechanics are relatively loose. 
In some ways, Jusant feels similar in that way to another climbing game - Grow Home - in the sense that movement is done in a very "tactile" way, each hand being independently controlled, and each having its own "grip" button - L2 and R2 - so the process of climbing and exploring feels quite slow and deliberate, but also quite mechanically satisfying.
Unfortunately though, while the mechanics of Jusant are good, and fun to use, and in that sense bear some resemblance to Grow Home (a game I liked quite a bit)...
...Jusant suffers from some rather significant issues in terms of how these mechanics are applied to this specific game.

 

The biggest problem with Jusant is that while the gameplay feels, technically and mechanically, similar to something like Grow Home...
... unlike Grow Home, Jusant has only one viable path to progress at any given point.

 

In Grow Home, the loose, mechanical feel of the climbing - of putting one hand in front of the other, and finding a way to get higher and higher, and eventually looking down and seeing just how far you have come - felt like the player solving a problem, and achieving a goal based on their own efforts, because there were many different ways they could approach a climb. 
They could play it safe and go the most obvious path, or try a risky jump, or a difficult climb, or drop off and soar to a new vine to perhaps find a better way. Those decisions were all about the player finding their way to progress. There was no single, correct  path - there were many different possible paths of varying difficulty.

 

In Jusant, however, while the player does have the freedom to try many different actions, and to climb multiple different ways, only one of these paths is actually possible to proceed fully. Most end in dead ends.There is a correct path, and many incorrect paths.

As a result, rather than the player feeling like they have the freedom to solve the problem their own way, they instead feel like they have the freedom, simply, to fail over and over, before stumbling into the specific solution the developer wants them to find.

 

While there can be some fun to be had in figuring out which of these paths is the right one, the process of playing the game is markedly diminished by this. 
Climbing a long way up what turns out to be the wrong path is simply a frustration - and that frustration is actually compounded by the number of different actions the player has at their disposal. Because certain elements of the world are climbable, and some are not - and in some cases, a vine must be "activated" to make a path clear, or a certain distant texture must be identified as being "grippable" or not, or the movement of moving "hand-holds" identified, there is a real issue of the player getting so-far up the correct path, not noticing the small detail showing a possible way to continue...
... and therefore assuming that path is one of the many non-viable ones. 
That is liable to result in them discarding that path from consideration, and only returning to re-examine it after suffering similar issues in all other inviable paths around the area. 

In some games, that might be a smaller issue - indeed, it is an issue of some level in many games - but in Jusant, it is a particularly irksome one, simple because traversing these paths is the game...

...and it takes time. 

 

The mechanical looseness of the climbing actions don't really mesh very well with the strict, intractable pathing the developer has laid out, because the mechanics invite the player to experiment - to try many things - and so the viable paths have to be fairly well disguised, in order to avoid the player simply bounding up them too fast. 
That means a constant feeling of "is this going to be the right way" is put on the player - and when they discover it is not, (or they assume it is not, due to missing a context clue,) they then have no choice but to work their way back down, to try somewhere else.

The game does try to give some loose guidance to alleviate this issue - a button press will show a very loose indicator of the rough direction the player should be going - but these indicators are very vague. 
In most cases, they pretty much just indicate "up"...
...which, given that the entire premise of the game is to climb up, is not terrible helpful!

That means that Jusant isn't really a mechanically satisfying game.
It feels like one in which the player is given a toolset, but these tools only really exist for them to find a path that has a already been set for them, and the gameplay is essentially a simple trial-and-error process of establishing which paths are red herrings. 
Because the toolset is one that would be much more suited to a multi-path game (like a Grow Home,) that process of sorting the red-herrings from the "correct" path is also made unnecessarily and frustratingly irksome, because in order to avoid the player managing to "bypass" the correct path, and find their own way, the actual "correct" paths have to be particularly convoluted, hidden, and require specific sets of actions...
...and woe-betide any player who forgets one of the many actions they have available, and therefore discounts what turns out the be the only real path to victory.

Since Jusant isn't a mechanically variable game, what it has to fall back on for entertainment and artistic value is more akin to the elements something like a Walking Sim would. 
Namely: Visuals, Audio, Tone, and narrative.

Some of these are better than others.

 

Visually, and auditorially, Jusant is a success. 
The visual palate is a nice one - a pastel-shaded, low-poly-by-design visual style, akin to something like Rime, and it works very well for the kind of "mysterious mysticism"/ "forgotten world" tone the game strikes. 
The art and design of the cliff faces, and of the different biomes that exists at differing levels of the gargantuan structure are all distinct, and often quite beautiful - and things like weather effects and vistas, and textures on the surroundings, are lovely to see.

 

Sound is played in a minimalist way - but used pretty effectively. 
The scratches and scrapes of the rock faces, the tinkle of pebbles falling, and the odd, echoey sounds of the rocks, in caves and on cliff faces, and the grunts and strains of the nameless wanderer as he traverses are all quite evocative. The lash of rain or the crunch of snow in upper levels of the column add a lot to the game, and the infrequent uses of music all work very well.

 

The strange, unusual and distinct nature of the long gone society - the cliff dwelling peoples, whom the nameless hero is navigating the leftovers of and learning about via their writings and left-behind diaries - is played well, and leaned into effectively with the art design.  There is something quite unique about the culture being created - cliff-dwelling, yet most aesthetically and culturally similar to nautical or islander fishing communities - is all very distinct, and it makes for a fascinating and interesting history to the place that the player is immediately drawn into wanting to investigate.

 

The down side, to this, however, is that even once every single piece of text in the game is found and read, and every written element of that culture examined...
...the game still never quite manages to pay off the premise of this unusual culture with a satisfying conclusion. 

The immediate narrative - the reason why the hero is climbing the tower - and the secondary narrative - the discovery of the history of that strange, now-gone culture, and what happened to them - are both paid off to a point - but not terribly well, or thoroughly.

There is just not enough real information given to feel like the loop has been closed on the interesting premise. 

A generous reading of the games text might conclude that the developer is simply choosing to be ambiguous for artistic reasons - indeed, there are games (like Rime, or, more successfully, Ico, or Shadow of the Colossus,) which build their mystique by revealing less specific detail of their lore. They allow the art and the ambiguity to feed the player imagination better than any specifics might...
...but in the case of Jusant, that wasn't the feeling I got upon its conclusion. 

Perhaps the developer simply didn't land the ending as well as those games did...
...but I suspect the real reason that Jusant feels lesser than those other games that don't explicitly reveal their lore, is that the developer didn't have a satisfying lore to not reveal.

 

A game like Shadow of the Colossus works, because while the game never overtly states what the nature of the world, or the characters are, the sense the player gets that there is a complete lore - they simply are not privy to all of it. The world has the feeling that it is all worked out, and does all tie together in a cool and interesting way..
...they just aren't in a position to piece it all together.
With Jusant, however, the sense I got was that the ambiguity is not an artistic choice, but an artistic necessity... 
...because I suspect that the lore simply wouldn't add up if it were all explained away. The actual conceptual reality of such a society, and how it actually worked - and the reasons for the drought - are simply too wishy-washy and ill defined to feel whole. 
It feels like a world designed to show some interesting details that draw the player in, but not really designed to hold up to any scrutiny.

The feeling when playing Shadow of the Colossus, is that the player is privy to only some of the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle, but that there is a full puzzle that would work. 
In Jusant, it also feels like the player has only some of the pieces...
...but that if they had them all, they would realise they don't all fit together.

Overall, Jusant is a game that has good elements, but for every good thing it does, it seems determined to undermine itself.
It is a reasonable enough mechanical game - one where the actual traversal mechanics are fun to use, and varied enough to remain interesting - but they are hampered by its premise - in that it has all the elements of an exploratory game, but applies them to a much more linear, more stringent game design than they should be.

 

The artistic elements - the visuals and the sounds - are very good, and the set up and design around the forgotten culture, and the hero's quest, are well implemented and intriguing at the outset, but they are shown to be a little thin in premise, and the solution to that problem that the developer uses - to try and hide lack of detail behind artistic ambiguity - doesn't really work...
...and results in a conclusion that feels at best, baffling, and at worst, unsatisfying.

 

Jusant is a game that could have worked significantly better with a looser framework for progression, and a little more specificity and detail in the narrative...
...and that feels like a shame, as the bones and premise of Jusant are solid.
The game as released, however, never really feels it.
 

 

The Ranking:

So if it's not obvious from the number of comparisons in the review, the obvious game to provide an initial match-up for Jusant is...
...you guessed it: Grow Home.

 

Now, Grow Home is a mechanically similar game, and one that is much simpler - in narrative, in visuals, in gameplay...
...but Grow Home feels much more like the game these similar mechanics should be applied to. It works in a way Jusant doesn't really - and I think fundamentally, that has to be the decider. Certainly, while I like the visual look and the music and a lot of the tertiary elements of Jusant more, the fact is, I can state categorically that I would replay Grow Home before replaying Jusant, so it must be more awesome!

 

The games immediately below Grow Home, however, are odd ones to consider, as while I like the core mechanics of Jusant more than some of theirs, I do think the mis-application of them harms that as a positive. I like the act of climbing in Jusant a lot more than, for example, the gameplay fundamentals of Apotheon...
...but while Apotheon has issues, I think Jusant does too, and its are more core and fundamental.

 

I worked down from Grow Home, simple looking for games that had good ideas, but maybe flawed concepts of mechanics, and found a few here and there, but nothing that immediately jumped out, so instead, I simply asked myself "Would I replay this before replaying Jusant?"...
...and the first game down from Grow Home to which the answer was "Yes"...
..was another Don'tNod game: Twin Mirror.

 

Twin Mirror had some ideas, but again, didn't always know how to apply them well - and in a lot of ways felt like the red-headed step-child of Life is Strange, but without the heart and soul.
It was an interesting game, but fundamentally not one that really hit on any big fronts...
...and while I do think Twin Mirror at least did a better job of landing its narrative, Jusant does have the more interesting premise - and beats it on art design, visuals, audio, and has the fun mechanics, even if they are rather constrained by the game design. 

 

As such, Jusant outranks Twin Mirror, and finds itself ranked right above its Don'tNod brother!

 

 

 

 

 

Tinykin

 

 

Summary: 

A platforming collect-a-thon puzzler from Splashteam and released in 2022, Tinykin takes heavy gameplay inspiration from games like Pikmin and early mascot platformers, fuses it with a Paper Mario-esque sensibility and aesthetic, and adds it all to a  "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" design.... 
...to very winning effect!

 

The player take on the role of Milo - an archaeologist from the planet Aegis. 
Milo is human, but not human as we understand it... 
...as the year is 2748, and humanity has changed quite a bit! 

Almost microscopic in size now, humanity has long since abandoned Earth, and the origins of their race are somewhat lost to the annuls of history...
...but Milo - adventuring, curious, cheerful chap that he is - has set out to unravel some of those mysteries. 

Crash landing on a neighbouring planet - Earth - Milo finds himself in a rather foreign location: A perfectly ordinary family home, circa 1990... but one where the insects, bugs, grubs and various small creatures have formed a grand society, with different cultures having built up in each distinct room of the house... 
...and in which, mysterious blob-like creatures called "tinykin" have infested the entire place.

After meeting an eccentric inventor and scholar - Ridmi - Milo is made aware of a possible invention that might help him escape the house (and the planet) and return home to Aegis, and so sets about gathering the components required to craft it - each of which resides in a different room of the house. 
By using his adventurer skills - and with help from the strange tinykin, who take a liking to Milo - the player must gather each of these items while exploring each area.

From a gameplay stand-point, Tinykin is something of an oddity in 2023, as it harkens back to a much earlier style of gameplay, which has largely disappeared: the loose-platformer collect-a-thon. 

Each individual level (room) is essentially a large sandbox playground, and while there is a specific, distinct "end-goal" to each one (find the component), really, this functions simply as a way to push the character into each new area. The meat of the game is in exploring the house and seeing the imaginative and fun ways in which different household rooms and objects have been fashioned into large open-sandbox platform levels, and in the huge number of mini-puzzles and mini-games associated with each.

The basic loop of the game revolves around finding the eponymous "tinykin" in each new level. In each room, there are literally hundreds of these little creatures around - and finding them causes them to follow Milo around, and aid him in his progress.

 

There are different colours of tinykin, each of which have different abilities. 
The "basic" pink ones can lift objects, red ones explode, breaking objects, blue ones conduct electricity, green ones can "stack" to form a bean-stalk ladder, and yellow ones can connect to form a bridge...
...and virtually every interactable element within each level requires a certain number of a given type to make use of. 
A specific bridge, for example, might require 30 yellow tinykin to use, (something the game tells the player at each juncture,) a certain object might require ten red tinykin to blow up, reaching a specific platform might require 40 green tinykin to stack, etc.

 

This means each level essentially boils down to exploring, finding enough tinykin to proceed to a new area within it, in which more tinykin can be found, which grants access to more areas, which contain more tinykin... etc etc etc, building towards an eventual goal of finding the component hidden somewhere deep in the level.
Tinykin themselves, while friendly towards Milo, are tied to specific rooms, and do not move between them, so each level retains its own element of discrete progress - and the game avoids being "broken" by simply importing a huge number of tinykin from one to the other.

 

It's a very simple gameplay loop - and indeed, not one that can support a huge amount of playtime - however, it is one that is made very satisfying by the smart implementation of "soft progress barriers" via the availability of tinykin. Each level (of which there are 6 or 7) has a satisfying progression loop of around an hour or so, where the player begins simply exploring lower areas, and generally working their way up - reaching new areas, and always being able to see the full room, and get a sense of how far they are progressing.

A simple gameplay loop like that could become stale, of course - there isn't a huge amount of meat to it on its own - but that is never really a factor in Tinykin, simply because all the elements around it - the visual style, the tone, the sound and the narrative and humour elements are all vey much on point.

 

In terms of visuals and design, the game is a real slam-dunk.
The art style of Tinykin is gorgeous to look at - the whole house is rendered in lovely looking 3D, and every character is the kind of 2D "paper-cut-out" style where no matter what direction the player looks from, the characters "rotate" to face them straight on. 
The effect is rather old-school - it has some of the same feeling as the early 3D dungeon shooters like Wolfenstein or DOOM, but because the characters in Tinykin are lovely looking, well rendered, hand-drawn-looking cartoon characters, with a lot of personality packed into their expressions and details, it manages to make the game somehow look both old and new at the same time.

 

The design of the house and the levels is great too.
I have, full-disclosure, a real soft-spot for "small creature in an oversized world" design. 
From Micro Machines, to Little Big Planet, to Grounded, to even things like Little Nightmares, it's an aesthetic I always enjoy, particularly in the inventive ways everyday household items can become huge obstacles, or dangers, when the player is tiny by comparison. 
Hell, there is a reason why the narratively rancid and rather gameplay-soft It Takes Two still ranked relatively high on the list!)
The fact that Tinykin manages to do this trope so well, and combine it with some mystery element - what exactly happened to humanity, and why is this house abandoned seemingly in the early 90s? -  means simply being in the rooms has a double-edged element of curiosity. The player is both enamoured of seeing the different areas, and is constantly hunting for context clues about the people who live - or lived - here. 

 

It also affords the game a lot of forward momentum, as each room is distinct. It's difficult, when seeing the living room, or the bathroom, not to think, "I wonder what will be going on in the kitchen, or the bedroom?" - and because each area has its own distinct insectoid "society" there is both an element of "past mystery" (the human residents) and "current mystery" what is going on with this society now, to keep the player engaged... 
...and that's even before the individual puzzles and mini-games are considered!

 

Audio is good in the game too - there is a score that is jaunty and bouncy in all the right ways - upbeat and fun, without becoming grating or overly repetitive - but the biggest accolade for the audio has to go to the sound effects, which are excellent!
The pop of bubbles, or the explosions, or squishy-plops of tinykin bouncing along behind Milo are absurdly well done, and super satisfying in a strangely ASMR type of way.
That might seem like a small thing, but in a game like Tinykin, it's hard to overstate just how important sound effects can be - and this game shows why!

 

The narrative is something a little odd, as while I would say it is just perfect for 90% of the game - bouncy, silly and zany, with a cheery, fun tone and a perfectly pitched "some mild peril, but not taking itself too seriously" style of younger-audience-appropriate fun...
...it does, for some reason, rather sour itself at the very end.

I don't actually think it is a major downfall, as it is a very small section of the finale of the game, and really, only covers a few minutes of an 8-10 hour playtime...
... but for some reason, the game takes a hard swing away from the light, fun tone at the end, and gets into some rather emotive, sad, bleak elements.

It's a slightly baffling tonal switch, as this section feels wildly outside of the tenor that the entire rest of the game has cultivated, and feels like it would be rather sad and confusing for the younger players. Tinykin is definitely a game to be enjoyed by the whole family, and I - a 40-year-old man - had a great time with its fun, goofy story, great design and simply gameplay - but it is one game that is clearly approachable for the younger kids for the majority...
...so that ending feels particularly odd in that context.
More than that though - for all the great elements of Tinykin, it is still a very light-hearted game in terms of narrative and design - so going "emotional and maudlin" at the very end doesn't just feel incongruous - it feels rather unearned.

One narrative hiccup aside, however, I think the writing in the game is generally very good. 
It's a simple and silly story, and the characters work well - there is plenty of humour to them, and while there isn't a huge amount of dialogue, it is still peppered with jokes and amusing parts, and these work far more often than they don't. The tone put me in mind, (I think 100% deliberately,) of N64-era platformers, and that is a good pitch to hit.

Overall, Tinykin is a simple game - but one that I think does a specific type of simple, "harkening-back-to-an-earlier-era" type of gaming really, really effectively. 
It imports all the fun of those old platform games - where collectibles were everywhere, and the physics model was loose and freeing - while updating the visuals and design in such a way as to capture the fun and silliness of those game, but look crisp and lovely and distinct, in a way that holds up against any modern indie... even ones with markedly bigger budgets!

 

It's not a game that offers particular challenge - the game is very easy to play, and simple to pick up - but it's one that is extremely compulsive, super fun, always giving the player new things to do, and new, interesting areas to explore, and has a deceptively well structured and well worked-out puzzle loop tied into its in-level progression.

It's fun to play, fun to look at, fun to listen to...
...and while it won't take the player long to finish (and truth be told, could possibly have done with just a couple more levels to it,) it never gets boring or irksome, and the simple gameplay is plenty fun for the duration.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Tinykin is a very strange one for ranking, as there really isn't a single game in that precise genre that is already on the list. 

However, probably the closest starting point would be some of the remasters of the PS1 and PS2 era mascot games, and their franchises - since those games are generally somewhat cartoonish and fun, family-friendly for the most part, and generally have a heck of a lot of collectibles scattered around!

Probably the most analogous comparison I could come up with was the original Sly Cooper game - so I started there.

Obviously, visually, Tinykin would come out the winner in a technical sense - there is, after all, 3 or 4 clear console generations between the two! - however, looking simply at the art design and the flourishes and level design, it comes out a mixed bag. I actually think Tinykin has the superior level and environment design, however, there is less of it. In terms of characters, I think I'd still give the win to Sly Cooper though.
Music and audio in Tinykin is definitely better - but again, there is less of it. Sly has voice work that can be good and bad at times, Tinykin has none, but has the better score and sound effects.
Both games have a lot of personality and fun to be found, though I think Sly Cooper, simply because there's more of it, has to take that win - and so holistically, Sly comes out the winner in the aggregate.

 

I do think, however, that the next-highest rated Sly game - Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, has a harder time. I like that game more than a lot of detractors do - in fact, it is ranked quite a bit higher than Sly 2 or Sly 3 - however, it can't really claim any originality for character models and whatnot - and while it does look good, it is on a more even footing in terms of release dates, and I think Tinykin, while shorter, comes out the winner this time.
I also think, fundamentally, Tinykin has a smidge more fun to it than Sly Cooper: thieves in Time does - and in a genre where fun is the main draw, that clinches it!

 

In between those two is the original Ratchet and Clank, and while I do love that series, I actually think the ways in which it improved drastically in Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando showed up some of the drawbacks of the original, and I think, in 2024, I'd likely replay Tinykin before replaying R&C1... so I'm comfortable enough with Tinykin beating it.

 

There's a wealth of games between that aren't specifically comparable by genre, but are "family friendly fun" - and one that came to mind was Costume Quest.

I think that actually, Tinykin does enough to beat out the original Costume Quest in a few areas - both are charming as hell, and Tinykin has a little more in the way of gameplay variation and technical finesse - however, the writing and concept of Costume Quest still win out for me - and I suspect I would replay Costume Quest before replaying Tinykin...
...so I think Tinykin has to rank lower. 

There's just a few games between Costume Quest and R&C - none of which are direct fights - so it comes down to the old finale "Would I replay this before Tinykin?"

Working up from R&C, I think the answer is "no" for Chime Sharp, Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing and A Monster’s Expedition through Puzzling Exhibitions...
...but I struggle to say the same for Puyo Puyo Tetris.

 

As such, Tinykin finds its spot right below that one!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blacktail

 

 

Summary: 

A curious "Bethesda Engine Style" narrative open-world game from Polish studio The Parasight, Blacktail takes the Elder Scrolls/ Fallout model of gameplay, and applies it to a Slavic "old-world" fairytale mythology, sweeping in elements of various old slavic fables and grim-dark fantasy, amalgamating them to work in a single morality-tale style fable.

 

Taking on the role of a young girl, Yaga (a young incarnation of The Babayaga) - cast out from her village after accusations of witchcraft - the player discovered a semi-invisible hut in the centre of a large expanse of magical wilds, and establishes a home base, from which Yaga can explore the lands surrounding it. 
Guided, (rather cruelly and sarcastically,) by an inner voice - one that is not overtly assigned, be at various time seems to be either her lost sister, her powerful and largely absent mother, her mask (which she wears at all times,) or simply her true inner voice, (the one behind the mask she wears) - Yaga sets about unravelling her own past, the mysteries of the lands she now calls home, while seeking out her lost mother and sister.

 

As a game, Blacktail is a curious one - certainly mechanically. 
It is clearly playing in the broad "Bethesda-like" model - and in many ways feels like the next in a string of games that have (often successfully) taken the broad, loose, open and free model of Bethesda's giant open-world games, and shrunk them down to a more focussed, more manageable - and significantly less janky - canvas. 

The Outer Worlds, for example, and The Forgotten City both did the same thing - and both were notable successes. 

That is interesting to consider in the current landscape, where the latest giant Bethesda game - Starfield - has proven to be something of a disappointment to many. 
There is a distinct feeling, nowadays, that the era of "bigger is always better", and the idea that players will accept a certain amount of jankiness as necessary evil in the pursuit of giant expansive worlds, has fallen by the wayside...
...partly due to games like The Outer Worlds and The Forgotten City showing, first hand, how big a leap in depth and technical sturdiness can be achieved by sacrificing sheer size...
...and partly due to other, non-Bethesda-model open world games (Elden Ring, for example) showing that massive open worlds can simply be better than what Bethesda were offering.

 

In fact, Blacktail feels in some ways to be to The Elder Scroll what The Outer Worlds was to Fallout - i.e. a more focussed, more tonally specific, smaller version of it, injected with rather more personality. 
The Outer Worlds had many things in common with Fallout - the "retro future" look and feel, the feel of the shooting, even the broad structure of the narrative, with the player "awakening", exploring an unfamiliar world which split off from our own timeline at a specified point in our own history, and questing their towards a finale where they "save" the current world...
...but it also felt much more distinct and specific than Fallout ever did. Its world was smaller, but every part of it felt like it was better stitched together, and a single, more specific tone permeated throughout.  Fallout always feels something of a "broad canvas", within which multiple different tones and games can be crafted. That isn't a negative necessarily - there is a place for that kind of game, and when it works, it works well - but The Outer worlds felt more like a single, crafted narrative than that kind of open book. 

 

In that same manner, Blacktail feels like someone looked at The Elder Scrolls games - and specifically, at the Shergorath sections of the later games - Skyrim and Oblivion, (and particularly the "madness realm" Shivering Isles DLC for Oblivion,) - but used that only as a jumping off point: adding in a bit of American McGee's Alice sensibility, a bit of art design from some of the Eventide Artifex Mundi games, and a whole lot of Hans Christian Anderson and older Slavic Mythos...
...and the end result is something pretty unique.

 

The game plays, fundamentally, like a Bethesda-style game, however, there are a huge number of quite specific and quite unusual mechanics layered on top, that fit with the Slavic Fable theme. 

There is relatively standard combat - Yaga uses a bow and arrow, but combat also involves significant use of powers and modifiers - honey arrows to stick enemies in place, hexes, magic, lure-type distractions...
...and all of these operate via consumable collectibles found in-world. 

Enemies tend to be of a few distinct varieties - there are no human enemies (indeed, aside from Yaga, there are no humans at all seen in the game aside from some story-book style flashback cutscenes,) but vicious gnomes and trolls roam the land, along with goblin creatures, fairies, talking mushrooms (who form a large part of the fabric of the world,) talking cats, and all manner of other creatures.

 

Aside from the combat, however, the sheer number of systems and odd ways of doing things in Blacktail is unusual. 

The home base is "warped" to, via a magical talking cat...
...but if the player decides to shoot that cat, they find themselves in a pac-man style mini-game, in which they can rescue rat-souls... who will then appear in the Yaga Hut.

 

There are strange, giant roses with single, human eyes... which the player can steal the eye from if they wish, but if they simply put their weapon away, will reveal hidden objects or items based on where they are gazing.

 

There are special rocks around, which if Yaga fires an arrow at, will warp her to their locations. 

There are bees and birds and hedgehogs around, whom the player can interact with - either to their benefit or detriment - which then affects a fairly deep and curious "Morality System" which not only affects powers, skill trees and the ability to open special chests... but also affects which NPC quest-lines will be active, which Mushrooms will be friendly or hostile, and changes the actual outcome of the main narrative.

 

Virtually every element of the game seems to do things in a slightly different way that the player might expect, and there are so many unusual and strange elements to both the world and the game mechanics - many of which are not particularly made clear to the player until they simply experiment and try things - that while the actual world is significantly smaller than an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout, the sense of wonder and mystery is significantly higher. 
Using a comparison to Elden Ring or a Souls game is a live-wire - note, Blacktail is neither as good, nor stylistically similar to those games - but some of that Soulsian "this world is just so mysterious" element is actually present in Blacktail, simply because there are som many things that feel relatively unique to the game, without a lot of guidance, that the player is put is a sort of "what am I going to see next" mentality of simply wanting to explore and try things, to see what happens.

 

Not every part of this variety of gameplay is great, it should be said - There are a few sections of 2D platforming style "chase" sequences that accompany moments of the narrative storytelling, and these are never particularly good or fun to play, and the less said about the "pac-man-rat-finding mini-game the better...
...but the effect of having this much variety is a net benefit overall. While some are less fun than others, the game does feel like it has a lot of gas in the tank, and is always willing to show the player new things, which in a game like Blacktail, works...
...even if not every new thing is great on its own.

 

That unusual and curiously mechanically dense gameplay can be both a benefit and a curse. 
In some ways, the game can feel a little clunky with so many systems in play, and when in a Bethesda-style game, the tendency is for such oddness to feel, at times, like jank...
...but actually, I don't think it is the same thing. 
The fact is, Blacktail is actually a much more solid and functional game than any Bethesda game has been (certainly at launch), and while it can feel clunky (and it, at times,) that clunkiness tends to come from the volume of systems than any technical issues. The game functions perfectly well - it's just easy, at times, to mistake obtuseness or oddity - mechanical jankiness - for the old Bethesda technical jankiness.
One is certainly preferable to the other - and in Blacktail's defence, I would always rather have a mechanically obtuse game feel weird, than have a technical mess crash on me...
...but that also isn't a total defence.

 

The fact is, Blacktail feels varied and cool and mysterious by way of its mechanical oddity...
...but it does also feel over-egged, slightly too over-stuffed, and - at times - a little bit deliberately awkward.
There can be an exhaustion and frustration at times -  a feeling when playing of "oh Lord, why couldn't just ONE thing in this game work the way every other game does!"

 

What helps to alleviate that sense a bit with Blacktail, however, is that the art design, concept and narrative are all pretty good, and odd enough in their own right, that the mechanical oddities feel more at home.

The Narrative of Blacktail is actually very interesting. 
It's a relatively simple thematic tale of abandonment, resentment, regret and feeling like an outsider - and what people choose do do with that (added to quite a bit by the malleable karma system,) but the mix of Slavic fables and elements of the odd world Yaga inhabits are quite varied and well connected, so the story tends to feel grander than such a tale might in a more pedestrian setting.

As videogame players, we have seen more fantasy settings and tropes than we can shake a controller at, and Blacktail is not unique among them, but the strong Pagan and Slavic vibe, and the pretty hard-and-fast way the developer sticks to that theme, works well to give Blacktail its own distinct personality. The fact that while the game is certainly picking and choosing different elements of different Slavic stories and myths, it does stick strictly to that brand of tale. That means that the game feels a lot more rounded and grounded than something like an Elder Scrolls, which tends to be so broadly "Fantasy" that it can feel, at times, like simply a mishmash of every sub-genre that "Fantasy" can contain.

 

The writing though, is the one area where the game's fundamentals - looking and feeling like a Bethesda-style game - do harm the game though...
...and that is that there isn't really a lot of branching dialogue or choice in the narrative.
The ending and the way characters interact with Yaga can change - however, this is pretty much entirely based on her actions throughout the game, not on choosing what to say in the moment.

Now...

...lack of branching narratives and dialogue choices and speech-checks etc is not something every game has, nor something every game needs, however, games that look and feel like Bethesda games do generally have that side of dialogue as a core tenant. Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, The Outer Worlds, The Forgotten City, Starfield - what all of these games have in common is a dialogue system that is as robust and variable as the rest of the game.
In a lot of ways, players have come to not only expect that from these games, but to see it as part of the "trade-off". 

We, as players, accept the slightly wonky or loose, or imprecise combat and slightly janky or lower-poly worlds, because we get depth in other ways...
...and one of those ways is deep dialogue trees and lots of choice in conversations.

 

Blacktail doesn't have that, and as such, the natural feeling is - "so why make yourself look so much like those games, if we don't get this end of the deal?"

The narrative is more scripted and set, which means less scope for branching and choice within it. The game was - I'm sure - never intended to be a "Bethesda-like" in the dialogue sense, and the reality is likely that looking and sounding like a Bethesda game was what the developer was able to do at this budgetary level, rather than a specific desire to ape those games...
...but because it does ape those games in other ways, it invites an expectation for an equivalent system - and it can feel odd that it doesn't.

 

The art design is strong - the actual graphics and technical visual aspects are not cutting edge, and do certainly look like something that could have been crafted in the Skyrim engine ten years ago - but the designs and the aesthetic palate are well used. There is a lot of variety to different areas of the world, but they all tie together in a way that feels right, and manages to have a lot of unique and interesting environments, without them feeling totally disparate.
There are quite a few visual flourishes and non-standard parts too - cut scenes rendered like parchment motion comics look very nice, and some of the flashier effects at grand moments, or boss finales are pretty good - if a little dated feeling at times. 

 

Audio is decent in Blacktail too. The music in particular is both rousing and evocative, and befits the Slavic stylings, and the dark-fable aspects really well. Pretty much every piece of the score is additive - and even helps some of the less good elements of the gameplay at times. I think boss fights in the game are generally a little dull (certainly duller than the rest of the game,) but the rousing score during these sections helps quite a bit.

Voice work is also somewhere between decent, and pretty good. It's not exemplary - the voice work in Blacktail is not approaching the level of some higher budget, more cinematic games, but the writing does a pretty good job of pulling together a lot of require expositional and mythological elements without feeling too "lore-dump-y", and the delivery of the lines by the cast go further, to make that as natural sounding as it can.
There is actually a lot of voice work in the game considering the dialogue is set and not particularly variable on a conversation-to-conversation basis - many of the conversations with some of the more chatty mushrooms, for example, are a lot longer than one might expect for a game at this level, and these are fine.
The clear highlight in terms of vocal performances though, is the voice in Yaga's head and Yaga herself. There is a lot of antagonistic back and forth that happens in the game, with the voice teasing, or outright insulting or ridiculing Yaga (or the other characters,) and this is pitched just right, with the player - like Yaga herself - feeling both reliant on, enamoured of, afraid of, and annoyed by the voice.

Overall, Blacktail is a pretty strange game, all told.
It's one that has a lot more too it that one might expect for the budget and the scope, and is detailed and mechanically dense in a way that is not really expected at the outset.
 
It's a game that uses a well-worn and familiar base-template, but adds a lot to it in terms of mechanical complexity, to the point of almost feeling over-stuffed at times... 
...but the net effect is one that yields more positives than negatives.

 

It feels like a game brimming with ideas, and where so many concepts have been pulled together that it shouldn't work, and can feel a little overwhelming or obtuse at times...
...but while not all of these ideas work as well as they might, it does feel like just enough of them do, that the variety and oddity comes off as a benefit, rather than a curse.
 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Ranking Blacktail is a little rough, as all the obvious comparison points are - as indicated above - other Bethesda-style open world games: Skyrim, Fallout games, The Outer Worlds, The Forgotten City...
...however, as curious, fun and deceptively dense and interesting as Blacktail is, fundamentally, it isn't on the level of those games.

Certainly, as compared to the two other smaller games - The Outer Worlds and The Forgotten City - it is markedly less successful, partly due to the lack of depth in dialogue, and partly due to simply not being on that level generally...
...but it also doesn't benefit from the "broad canvas" elements of the bigger Bethesda games.

 

The lowest ranked of the Fallout games is - somewhat controversially - Fallout: New Vegas...
... but that game is really ranked there from the point of view of the PS3 version. In reality, Fallout: New Vegas is - on paper - the superior game to Fallout 3, and potentially also Fallout 4... but the technical issues are such that on Playstation specifically, it couldn't beat them out. (If this were a ranking of PC games, Fallout: New Vegas would almost certainly be the top ranked Fallout game.)

I do think that, even with its technical jank and serious issues, Fallout: New Vegas does have a lot more going for it than Blacktail does though, and while I enjoyed Blacktail quite a bit, when it really boils down, I suspect that I would probably replay New Vegas - and suffer the horrendous technical issues - before replaying Blacktail - which has no real technical issues, but simply isn't as malleable, long, or well written.

That is a real strange one though - essentially asking "how good does a game have to be, to offset the technical problems, and win over a game without the same problems?"

It's a nebulous and difficult thing to quantify...
...but I am reasonably sure that ranking Blacktail a little below the PS3 New Vegas is the right call.

Two spots below Fallout: New Vegas though, is the one other sort of "Bethesda-style" game on the list: Alpha Protocol.

That game is also filled with technical problems - not ones on the level of New Vegas, but rampant nonetheless - and that one is interesting in a fight with Blacktail. Unlike New Vegas, I think Alpha Protocol has fundamental design issues along with technical ones...
...and also, the actual game, as designed, isn't I think, quite as interesting of fun as Blacktail.

As such, I think in that case, Blacktail should outrank it.

 

The only game between the two is the not-as-bad-as-people-say-but-still-pretty-ropey red-headed step-child of the Mass Effect franchise - Mass Effect: Andromeda - and that game vs. Blacktail is interesting.
Andromeda has the better visuals, and the much more competent fighting model...
...but Blacktail has more imagination, better (if far less plentiful) writing, and a more fun sense of exploration.
Andromeda takes it on sound, music and voice work, but Blacktail takes it on story...
...and Blacktail feels fresh and original, whereas Mass Effect: Andromeda does feel like a pretty big let down within a storied franchise.

 

It's close, but I think I feel more comfortable with Blacktail outranking Andromeda...

...and so Blacktail finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains 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 February 12 by DrBloodmoney

[Platinum_Vice]

20 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Jusant suffers from some rather significant issues in terms of how these mechanics are applied to this specific game

 

Thank you for playing this. So many reviewers gave Jusant high praise in 2023 but it appears to me to be misplaced. 

 

Journey and Celeste are also games about climbing a mountain. They are metaphors. Does Jusant measure up? Doesn't look like it.

 

20 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

The immediate narrative - the reason why the hero is climbing the tower - and the secondary narrative - the discovery of the history of that strange, now-gone culture, and what happened to them - are both paid off to a point - but not terribly well, or thoroughly.

 

Journey and Celeste have distinctive gameplay mechanics. Journey's bespoke system matches players with others with very little identifying or communication features. Celeste has celebrated platforming mechanics. Does Jusant measure up? Doesn't look like it.

 

20 hours ago, DrBloodmoney said:

Climbing a long way up what turns out to be the wrong path is simply a frustration - and that frustration is actually compounded by the number of different actions the player has at their disposal.

 

 

[DrBloodmoney]

14 minutes ago, Platinum_Vice said:

 

Thank you for playing this. So many reviewers gave Jusant high praise in 2023 but it appears to me to be misplaced. 

 

Journey and Celeste are also games about climbing a mountain. They are metaphors. Does Jusant measure up? Doesn't look like it.

 

 

Journey and Celeste have distinctive gameplay mechanics. Journey's bespoke system matches players with others with very little identifying or communication features. Celeste has celebrated platforming mechanics. Does Jusant measure up? Doesn't look like it.

 

 

 

Yeah - the thing with Jusant is, you could certainly argue that "well, the journey is a metaphor in itself" - but I think to do that is a bit of a cop out, because the same is true for virtually any game about reaching somewhere - and there are plenty of other games that do that to much more striking effect, and also manage to have a wondrous, curious, interesting world that actually feels more stitched together and more fleshed out... even ones where the actual amount of info the player gets about that world is less.

 

Journey, for example, or Rime, or Ico, or Outer Wilds, or Shadow of the Colossus... heck, even things like Toem and Tunic and A Short Hike are basically about a journey though a foreign land, and therefore are somewhat metaphorical...

...but they also tie it into "the journey is about self discovery", which I don't think Jusant manages, since we know literally nothing about it's protagonist at the start, and still know basically nothing at the end...

...and they also pay off the players curiosity about the foreign lands they are in somewhat - either by remaining obtuse, but feeling like they fit together, while ALSO being a metaphor for the stages of grief (as in Journey or Rime,) or simply presenting a really alien culture (Ico / Shadow of the Colossus / Outer Wilds,) but tying the concept together better at the end.

 

I just got the feeling that Jusant built up a lot of steam in the early game, where I was fascinated by the culture, and what the history was...

...but that steam was never released, as very little of it is ever given much of a payoff, beyond "and that was that, make of it what you will."

 

I can be a fan of "make of it what you will"...

...but I need to feel that - on at least some level - the developer had an idea of what THEY make of it - and in Jusant, it felt more like they put a bunch of oddities together, and thought "well, that'll be enough to seem deeper than we are really willing or able to delve"

Edited February 13 by DrBloodmoney

[nyx770]

I really enjoy your write ups . The Tunic one was great. I had a great time playing that game in January. This whole tread is great for inspiration of games to play. Ty. For spending the time and effort to go into so much detail and thought  

[DrBloodmoney]

14 minutes ago, nyx770 said:

I really enjoy your write ups . The Tunic one was great. I had a great time playing that game in January. This whole tread is great for inspiration of games to play. Ty. For spending the time and effort to go into so much detail and thought  

 

Thank you mate, I really appreciate that!

[Don_Chipotle]

On 2/12/2024 at 6:37 AM, DrBloodmoney said:

 

  NEW SCIENTIFIC RESULTS ARE IN! 

 

 

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

 

 

Tchia

 

Summary: 

 

A 2023 released Action Exploration game, and the second from Awaceb, developers of Fossil Echo, Tchia sees the player take on the role of the titular Tchia - a twelve-year-old girl on a fictional archipelago, heavily inspired by the developer's home of New Caledonia.

 

After her father is kidnapped by the nefarious Pwi-Dua from the small island Tchia lives on with him, supported by an army of animated golems of cloth and wood, she sets out for the mainland, armed with her magical ability to "soul jump" to inhabit various living creatures and inanimate objects, to rescue him, defeat Pwi-Dua (and the demon whom he serves, unveiled through exploration of both the islands, and their mythos,) and restore harmony to the archipelago.

 

In terms of broad gameplay Tchia is something of a curiosity, in that while it is far more expansive in scope, and rather higher budget in feel, the games it feels closest to in terms of tone, pace and broad gameplay are ones like TOEM, Chicory, The Touryst and A Short Hike. 

All those games share common threads - a gameplay focussed on exploration and discovery, a relatively light tone, where even the perilous narrative elements (if there are any) are treated in a family-friendly way, a focus on mini games, and a derivation of enjoyment coming primarily from the simple satisfaction of being in a beautiful, "holiday-feeling" landscape.

While Tchia certainly pushes a little further into a more traditional, "world-in-peril" type narrative at times, the actual moment-to-moment gameplay remains pretty firmly in that "gaming holiday" camp, with the narrative arc forming only a loose framework to the game, and the majority of it purely working as a large, exploratory playground.

 

This gameplay style, applied to a much broader canvas than it usually is, is both the strength and the weakness of Tchia. 

 

On the one hand, it is inarguably one of the grander, more beautiful and most expansive implementations of that style of gameplay - and when it is at its best, adds a real sense of wonder to the mix, by way of the simple scale...
...but it can also serve to highlight why that type of game is usually reserved for smaller-scoped, shorter games.
In a game as long and large as Tchia, the variety and "bite-sized-mini-game-smorgasbord" effect is harder to maintain, and much more prone to player-exhaustion and "open-world-fatigue".

 

In A Short Hike (probably the most analogous game to Tchia that I have played,) the dotting between various mini-games always feels fresh and fun, primarily because there is a limited scale to the game. There are perhaps 10 or 12 distinct activities, but because they are all contained within a small environment, dotting from one to the other feels like eating a bag of jelly beans. There are a lot of flavours, and each one is fleeting, but they are all sweet, and simple. the player can "graze" without gorging themselves.

In a game the size of Tchia, however, that type of gameplay becomes harder to maintain. The jelly-beans are no longer in a bag... they're in a Scrooge McDuck style massive vault that the player is swimming through.

 The word is so large, that repetition of mini-games and content becomes a virtual necessity, and so any weaker mini-games become more of an issue - because the payer isn't doing it once or twice - they are doing it countless times. 
In some sense, the simple increase in scale switches the tone of the game from feeling like a game in the A Short Hike or The Touryst camp, to something slightly different - to something more akin to a Ubisoft "Map-Game" - a Far Cry or an Assassin's Creed...
...but without the primary focus on a deeper or more consuming narrative element, the game can feel adrift. 
It has all the side content of a big, open-world narrative game, but lacks the primary engine pushing the player through it, because the narrative elements are more akin to that of a much shorter, smaller game.

 

To be clear, there is a main narrative to Tchia - and it is reasonably compelling - but it is spread much, much too thin across the length of the game.
The enormous world (which lacks particularly user-friendly fast-travel options,) - results an a game which feels like it can't quite decide what it wants to be. Its exploratory, non-narrative elements are its strongest parts, but there are so many of them, that it really needs the engine of a primary narrative for pace...
...but that narrative feels too small for the world in which it takes place, meaning it is spread out so much, and dealt with in such a staccato, broken-up way, that the player never really feels like they are being propelled through the game effectively. 

 

Playing naturally, each new "story mission" is generally broken up by such an amount of side content, exploration, distance to travel and sights to see, that the player will often have forgotten what the previous beat actually was, when entering the next one. 
That can be alleviated by simply following the story, and ignoring side content, but the game is not really balanced that way - there is an expectation that the player will be "levelling up" - gaining new abilities via side content as they go - and so it behooves the player to do so in a mechanical sense, while harming the story in a narrative sense.

To be clear - most of the content in Tchia is actually pretty good. There are some fun races, a neat little wood carving mini-game, collectibles, small camps of demons to clear, some light puzzles, a quite smart treasure finding multi-quest line, some good collectible platforming etc...
...but there is just so much of it, that it's virtually impossible not to be a bit burned out with each type of activity before they are actually fully complete. 

 

The lack of reasonable fast-travel is also an issue. There is - in fairness - a fast travel of a sort - uncovering "docks" allows the player to fast travel between these - but this can only be done from one to the other. The player can't simply "warp" to one of these docks from the map screen. 
Because there are so few of these, and because traversing the large environment takes time...
... often, even travelling from a current location, to the nearest dock, to then fast-travel to another dock, to then travel to a desired location is still a lengthly endeavour.
That is not an issue at all during primary story play, but can be very irksome towards the end-game, where the player might be looking to clean up specific tasks scattered all over the map. 

 

The primary gameplay of the main narrative - and of the more "action-oriented" side content - involved Tchia defeating the cloth-and-totem golems is quite loose and cartoonish, but relatively fun...
...though could use a little more in the way of explanation!

To be specific - the way these sections work, is that Tchia must burn the totems - and the piles of cloth from which they spawn - using various found object - bombs, fire torches, etc, or by "soul-jumping" into flaming embers from a bonfire, and shooting herself at the target. 
This can be quite fun , though in some of the larger areas, with many targets, I found it particularly difficult to find enough bonfires or throwable objects to actually complete these - or to find fires in close enough proximity to them, meaning these seemed unusually difficult to complete, and took a particularly long time...
...and it was only much later in the game that I because aware that items like bombs could be stored in Tchia's inventory!
It's possible I missed this piece of information and it was delivered at some point, so I don't hold this point too hard against the game...
... but if it was, it was certainly not repeated, and so I can personally attest to the fact that I could have done with a tool-tip or two to make me aware of this fact!

The gameplay and narrative might be a mixed bag - in both cases, more good than bad, but neither is without issues - however, there is one area in which Tchia really excels, and that is visually. 

 

The game looks great. 
The fictional environment is, of course, designed to resemble a specific, real-world place, and it's clear that the developers love New Caledonia, because boy oh boy, do they make it a gorgeous looking environment in the game!

It's not a photo-real art-style - it's certainly heightened and "cartoonified" to some degree, but it looks fantastic, with gorgeous blue skies, lovely water effect, and some really surprisingly good looking weather effects. Exploring everything from the island cliffs, to the mountains, to the beaches and the farms and the grasslands is an absolute joy, and the highlight of the game experience.

 

Virtually every part of the game is stunning to look at, and more than that - the game conveys the feel of the atmosphere really well. It's difficult to travel around in Tchia and not feel the heat of the jungle, or the lushness of the air, or the sea breeze - a lot of care and attention has gone into making the island as much of a paradise as the developers believe it to be. 

In fact, in many ways, they the visual splendour, and the lushness of the environment it the primary reason why Tchia works, even when its gameplay can be lacking in places - where the narrative or the gameplay isn't quite enough to hold the player interest for some stretches, the fact that simply being in the environments feels as good as it does, and that there is so much to see, stops those issues being too detrimental.

 

The art style works pretty much perfectly for all elements of the environment - with the only slight exception being the one city area. The art style used is perfect for organic elements, but when applied to urban structures, where more geometric buildings are the norm, it does show itself to be a little more rudimentary and basic than most urban environments look nowadays, and looks a little "PS2-era"...
...but that's hardly a massive problem, given that the city area comprises a very small section of the game, and an even smaller percentage of the land mass.

Audio in Tchia is good - and quite distinct. 
Music, and specifically, native islander music - forms a large part of the games stylistic leanings and its character - in fact, playing along with songs throughout the game forms one of the mini-games - and while it's not a style of music I would personally listen to outside of the game itself, it is a unique hook, and a gives the game a distinct sound that sets it apart from most games.

The general score follows suit, sticking to traditional instrumentation and styles, and it works well.

Voice work is good - it's all in French or Drehu, as the native languages of New Caledonia, and subtitled into English, giving a nice feel of authenticity, and while not overly dramatic, does have the feel of authenticity to it... and the fact that 95% of players are probably unfamiliar with the language, does give the game some leeway in terms of acting. Whether the dialects, accents and intonations are "correct" is largely immaterial to the English-speaking player.... it has the feel of authenticity, and that's what counts.

Overall then, Tchia is a mixed bag.
 It's a game that is gorgeous to look at, and has a lot of heart, both in its devotion to showcasing a part of the world not often seen in games, and in delving into a mythos not well trodden - and does those things very well...
...but while its gameplay is fun and well crafted, it is spread a little thin across a world that, while lovely, feels a little too vast for the game it contains, and the game a little too long for the story it tells.

 

It's a game that can feel a little awkwardly crafted, in that it fits into a genre where virtually all other games are much, much shorter and smaller - and while it does an admirable job expanding that genre, the developers zeal to showcase the location they love somewhat overpowers the genre they choose to do it with. 

The result is a good game...
... that one cannot help but feel might be a better game if there was a little less of it.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

When it came to ranking Tchia, there was a real issue, in the sense that I think the games that are directly comparable to it are also generally much smaller, less expansive games. There is a tendency to feel like "Well, Tchia is a much grander game, so it would outrank them"...
...but actually, I think that is only really the case for the one game directly comparable - A Short Hike.

 

A Short Hike and Tchia do actually have a lot in common - I think I made the joke while playing it, that another name could have been "A Long Hike"... 
...and while I enjoyed A Short Hike, I do think the similarity in feel and tone means that the sheer size, visual step up and increased variety of Tchia - couple with the deeper story - means Tchia has to outrank it.

 

However, another of those games that plays in the same loose ballpark as Tchia - in the sense of the "Holiday Mini-Games Smorgasbord" approach to gameplay - is The Touryst.

While Tchia is still a much bigger and more expansive game than The Touryst, the benefits of that become more slight. The Touryst does, I think, pack even more variety into its much smaller scale - and as such, has the variety, and the absence of any kind of "Open World Exhaustion".
I also think that while Tchia would win in a match-up on music, The Touryst manages still to win on visuals...
... and even on narrative. 
The Touryst's narrative is smaller and sillier, but it has some genuine intrigue and a crazy, strange ending, and I think pulled me in more than Tchia ever really did...
...so looking at it holistically, Tchia has to rank lower than it overall. 

 

That provides the "floor" and "ceiling", without around 20ish games between them, without a lot of direct comparison. 

I think Tchia definitely outranks It Takes Two, which has decent gameplay in co-op, but must be played that way, and has nice art and design, but not on Tchia's level...

... but I'd hesitate to put Tchia above recently played Dicey Dungeons, for example, as while they aren't at all similar genre's, and Tchia stomps all over Dicey Dungeons in terms of visuals and music, the fact remains that I think Dicey Dungeons is the more fun and more original game - and the one I would return to given the choice of the two.

That leaves very few games left, none of which are similar at all, so it comes down to "Would I replay this before replaying Tchia?"

The first game, working up from It Takes Two, for which the answer is "Yes"...
...is Untitled Goose Game...
...and so Tchia finds its spot right below that one!
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2021-released Light-Narrative Puzzle game from Somnium Games, Inked: A Tale of Love sees the player take on the role of a nameless Samurai in a hand-sketched world, drawn on paper by a "real life" artist.

 

Initially living his idyllic, pen-and-ink-drawn life with the woman he loves, the Samurai's world is torn asunder when The Artist, in playing out his own anger and unhappiness over his own misfortunes, first toys with him, then steals away the woman, imprisoning her.
Setting out to cross the numerous hand-sketched worlds contained in The Artist's sketchpad, and navigate the many obstacles The Artist puts in his path - seemingly as both test, and punishment - the Samurai quests on to rescue his love...
...and to confront the misdeeds of his creator along the way.

As I occasionally do in these reviews, I'm going to upend the usual format, and talk visuals first. 

I do that fairly rarely, but in any case I do, it's generally because said visuals are either the primary focus, the main selling point, or the most exceptional element of the given game. 
In the case of Inked: A Tale of Love, I think all three of those points are true!

 

Inked: A Tale of Love is a fantastic  looking game. 

It not only has one of the more unique art-styles I can recall in a game, but does it to such winning and immaculate effect, that it really does become a selling point o the game all on its own. 

Doing "pen-and-ink sketchbook" as an art-style is not a completely unique idea in gaming - it has been done here and there, to varying levels of success, but it still remains largely under-used as compared to some other more artistic variants. Water-colour painting effects, cartoon-esque cell-shaded effects, paper-cut-out effect, black-on-white stencil effects, and even oil-painted, textured effects are all more often seen than simple pen-and-ink hatching style...
...and I suspect that has a lot to do with how it looks in full 3D. 

The fact is, pen-and-ink sketchbook style doesn't usually look particularly good in full 3D. 

A more cartoonish, black-on-white graphical design can certainly work - one only has to look at games like White Night, or MadWorld to see it working very effectively...
...but when it becomes more "sketchbook" in style, it tends to diminish in 3D very quickly... and end up looking a real mess. 
(Just look at the horrific, vomit-inducing visual style of Drawn to Death, if you don't believe me!)

It is also, however, a style that can't really shine too well in 2D. While sketchbook can work, it tends to look a little bland in 2D, as the lack of real colour means it would tend to fade a little when viewed simply in that way - and most games that have used it in such a manner have done so sparingly, and as an opening salvo to a change - where the sketchbook, colour-limited world is used as a highlight or punctuation, rather than primary art style.

 

The "sketchbook" style has only very specific applications in which it can really shine - where the "geometry drawn on a graph-paper-jotter" can look really effective...
... and that is where the environment is 3D, but the camera is at a static, isometric angle.
Notably, in a 3D puzzle game.
Luckily, Inked: A Tale of Love is exactly that.

 

The visuals are, as such, both unusual, and unusually well done. Every environment is lovingly created, and manages the not inconsiderable feat of being both interactable - at least, to the extent that objects and obstacles can be moved around to specific spots - but where every static screen looks like a work of art. 

Inked: A Tale of Love doesn't simply use this art style, it leans into that art-style in every facet - consistently adding new additions that stick with the theme - water shown as if drawn using a marker pen, using hatching textures for shadows, using new colours of ink to indicate new environments, or showing splashes of fountain-pen ink as flourishes - in a way that consistently builds on the theme, while never feeling out of place for the world as established.

 

Indeed, the only element of the game that seems dissonant is the one that should do - when, on occasion, The Artist's hands are seen, causing changes - and usually trouble - for the ink-sketched Samurai. 
These hands, I should note, don't actually look particularly great -they are fairly low poly and not hugely well rendered. However, it's hard to take that as a negative particularly, given they are shown for all of a few seconds, and so one can hardly expect the developer to spend too much resource animating them to the level of a full 3D game!

 

The art is a real triumph in Inked: A Tale of Love, and is absolutely the best thing in the game, though that's not to say everything else is a negative.

 

The puzzles themselves are generally decent...

...though I would caution: they are never much more than that. 

The fact is, setting their application into such a stylish and beautiful world aside, I'm not sure that I'd say any single puzzle ever feels unique, or hugely interesting. 
They are fine, but the the thing Inked: A Tale of Love does rather lack, from a gaming point on view, is any kind of gameplay element that can live up to the uniqueness of its look. 
While no puzzle is ever downright bad, the lack of any kind of specific gameplay hook, means that they tend to feel simply like elements of "generic" puzzle games - ones that could work - and indeed, generally have worked - in numerous other puzzle games before. 

 

All the best puzzle games have their "signature" - the thing that makes them stand out from other puzzle games. Portal had its portal gun, Viewfinder has its pictures. Superliminal uses perspective, Hue used colour swapping, The Witness used mazes. 
Not every puzzle within these games is unique to that game - indeed, I'd wager there are certain puzzle types that some variant exist of across every one of those games...
...but they apply their own mechanical signature to it, by way of their unique puzzle hook. 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love does have a hook - but it is purely an aesthetic one. 
The only thing really distinguishing it from other puzzle games is the fact that these "generic" puzzle types are done within a particular signature palate...
...but no matter how stylish it is, an aesthetic is not a mechanic.
A stylish look isn't distinctive enough from a cerebral point of view. 

The result is, while Inked: A Tale of Love looks amazing, it it essentially presenting the player with rather well-worn puzzles types, and making them look unique, without actually making them unique. 
An aesthetic can go a good way to papering over that flaw, and in Inked: A Tale of Love's case, it goes further than most...
...but in the end, no aesthetic could disguise mechanical dryness for the entire length of a game. 

 

Inked: A Tale of Love does somewhat alleviate this dryness by simply introducing new variants of puzzles, but each one does tend to feel like simply the next in aline of "generics".
Now we have elevator puzzles...
...now we have the "rolling ball" puzzles...
...now we have the "balanced weights" puzzles...

...but they are always types that we as players have seen before, and usually, they are in addition to a specific "mechanical signature."

The other big issue with Inked: A Tale of Love, is the controls. 

While the puzzles are simple, the actual control of the game can feel a little awkward to implement solutions, even once solved, because of these. 
Actual walking around the environment is fine - in fact, the smoothness of the movement against the sketch-pad backgrounds is admirable, and the Samurai moves cleanly and nicely...
...but when it comes to moving objects, rotating them, placing them, and doing all the elements of the game that are key to the puzzle solving, it is very, very clear that Inked: A Tale of Love was designed primarily for a mouse-and-keyboard, or for a touch-screen.

The controls on a controller feel stiff, fiddly and quite clunky...
...and the method of collecting collectibles - which are hidden in plain sight and must be "clicked" on - by entering a "view mode" and moving a cursor to the location - is clearly an awkward bolted-on addition to make a game not designed for a controller to accommodate one. 

In fact, the most appropriate venue for the game seems to be a hybrid console - a Switch, or perhaps a Steam Deck, where touchscreen and controller can be used - as I suspect mouse and keyboard would have the opposite issue - where collectibles and puzzle solving are easy, but controlling the character himself is more irksome. 

That controller implementation is, I should say, not a total deal-breaker in this particular game - this is not a case like Dokuro or (God forbid) htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries, where the awkward controls are a game-breaking issue due to the requirement for precise timing. 
In Inked: A Tale of Love, timing-required inputs are very rare...
...but it does have the effect of slowing the general pace of the game quite considerably, as every new puzzle tends to take a bit of fiddling and frustration in trying to enact a solution that the player likely established pretty quickly.

Narratively, Inked: A Tale of Love is... okay.
The actual story is fairly simple, and not hugely forefront, but the parallel tales of the Samurai's hardships, and their cause - The Artist, and his hardships, and his misplaced rage and anger - are dealt with reasonably well. Neither character really gets enough story telling to form a real connection to, though it is just about enough to feel some empathy and sympathy, however minimal it might be.

The narrative certainly does telegraph its finale well ahead of time, and the ending and message of the game is fairly predictable and sentimental, but that's not to say it's unworthy. A little sentimentality can work at times - particularly in smaller, artistic games like this one, and while I do think more could have been done with the story, what it is is fine - just a little sparse.

Audio is okay - there is some general narration - partly from The Artist, and partly from a bridging narrator, who speaks about both the Artist and the Samurai - and this is fine. The writing is simple, but largely effective, and the voice work, while not stand out or exemplary, gets the job done.

The actual musical score is extremely minimal - particularly early on - mostly comprising simple ambient notes, but it does build into a more musical game in the latter half, and it's pleasant where needed, and rousing on occasion too.

 

Overall, Inked: A Tale of Love is something of a mix - it's a pretty generic, rather too simple, and occasionally rather fiddly and cumbersome puzzle game...
...but one that tells a sweet, if simple tale, and does it while looking really quite remarkably good.

 

It's hard to recommend a game purely on visuals - but in the case of Inked: A Tale of Love, nothing else is particularly bad, and the visuals are so good, that it makes one of the strongest arguments for such a recommendation.

Is it a pity that the mechanics of the game couldn't live up to the visuals? 
Absolutely. 
A much better puzzle game with these visuals would be something pretty special...
...but as it is, Inked: A Tale of Love isn't a bad game - it's just something of a missed opportunity.

If the game itself could get even half way towards being as mechanically interesting as it is visually interesting, that would a hell of a thing...
...but as it stands, it is a gorgeous, if rather fleeting and occasionally frustrating game, that's tough to dislike, but also tough to really love.
 

 

The Ranking:

 

So ranking Inked: A Tale of Love gave me a very clear game to act as the "floor" - another game I recall having a wildly awesome art-style, which none of the rest of the game, while generally okay, never could live up to - and that was stylish detective-game / survival horror White Night.

Inked: A Tale of Love has the problem of its gameplay feeling less than the promise of its visuals, but I do think the gameplay is far less of a let down than White Night's was, and the game overall is much stronger, so it should definitely rank higher than White Night.

Looking at other visually striking puzzlers though, a ways above White Night is the awesome looking, if a bit janky and unfocussed Apotheon - and that game, while troubled, I do think has to outrank Inked: A Tale of Love. I think Inked: A Tale of Love is the stronger looking game (and that is saying something, because Apotheon is no slouch in that regard!), but while Apotheon has some real problems - particularly with combat - its issues tend to stem from jank, rather than lack of ambition.
The problem with Inked: A Tale of Love is that it just never seems interested in standing out mechanically, and just doesn't seem to have enough ideas for puzzles to make them interesting, whereas Apotheon had ideas, they just suffered for a lack of polish at times.

 

Some of the games in the field above White Night, however, are ones with rather more genuine or fundamental issues than Inked: A Tale of Love, and in a lot of cases, those issues do drag them down further than Inked: A Tale of Love should go...
...and there is a puzzle game in there that caught my eye - Cuboid.

 

Cuboid is an interesting match up, because it's a game where the puzzle type is static - it never changes, and is a pretty well worn type, and visually and auditorially, it does nothing that could compete with Inked: A Tale of Love...
...but I do think the focused "single puzzle type" game maybe works better than the "multiple-puzzle-type" game, if that "multiple puzzle type" game has no real ideas.
I pondered a while, but in the end, I think Inked: A Tale of Love does manage to beat Cuboid - though it's primarily on the visuals, audio and other elements than the gameplay.

It's quite a close call, however, and the game right above Cuboid - Metal: Hellsinger - is a game that while a little same-y, is a pretty unique style, and has some awesome music...
...and while I think the visuals of Inked: A Tale of Love beat it, that's probably the only element that does, so I think Inked: A Tale of Love has to rank below it.

 

As such, Inked: A Tale of Love finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Jusant

 

 

Summary: 

 

A 2023-released Puzzle / Exploration game from Don'tNod - developers of such games as Life is Strange, Twin Mirror and Remember Me - Jusant sees a nameless wanderer, accompanied by a strange, gelatinous blue pet called a Ballast, setting out to climb a peculiar organic structure - a seemingly impossibly high pillar of rock, standing curiously in the middle of a vast, sandy desert.

 

At the outset, it is clear that the column - now deserted - was once surrounded by a vast ocean, and was home to a civilisation of people who have long-since abandoned it due to drought, and as the player slowly scales the column, seeing the different levels of it, and the varying detritus left by the varying subcultures who lived on these different levels, they can piece together the mystery of what happened to them...
...and the reasons why the wanderer is climbing the column now.

Mechanically, Jusant operates as somewhere between a Walking Sim (in terms of narrative,) a puzzle game (in terms of figuring out the different methods required to climb different sections of the column,) wrapped in the trappings of exploratory traversal game.

 

The wandering stranger has various methods of climbing available to him - the use of ropes, placing of pitons, swinging and wall-running, and there are different in-environment elements that add different elements into the mix - climbable hand-holds, vines that the little ballast can "stimulated" to grow and create paths etc...
... and the player must manage a constant battle between stamina and gripping strength - finding platforms and new piton areas as they go, while maintaining their balance and strength, and contending with the terrain and weather. 
Rope length must be managed - there is a finite length of slack the wanderer can muster, before having to "reset" his safety rope...
... and each level that he reaches generally introduces a new element to this climbing arsenal - ether a new in-environment obstacle or aid to contend with, or a new element to the use of his own climbing tools.

 

These climbing mechanics form the majority of the game - and the method of control and mechanics are relatively loose. 
In some ways, Jusant feels similar in that way to another climbing game - Grow Home - in the sense that movement is done in a very "tactile" way, each hand being independently controlled, and each having its own "grip" button - L2 and R2 - so the process of climbing and exploring feels quite slow and deliberate, but also quite mechanically satisfying.
Unfortunately though, while the mechanics of Jusant are good, and fun to use, and in that sense bear some resemblance to Grow Home (a game I liked quite a bit)...
...Jusant suffers from some rather significant issues in terms of how these mechanics are applied to this specific game.

 

The biggest problem with Jusant is that while the gameplay feels, technically and mechanically, similar to something like Grow Home...
... unlike Grow Home, Jusant has only one viable path to progress at any given point.

 

In Grow Home, the loose, mechanical feel of the climbing - of putting one hand in front of the other, and finding a way to get higher and higher, and eventually looking down and seeing just how far you have come - felt like the player solving a problem, and achieving a goal based on their own efforts, because there were many different ways they could approach a climb. 
They could play it safe and go the most obvious path, or try a risky jump, or a difficult climb, or drop off and soar to a new vine to perhaps find a better way. Those decisions were all about the player finding their way to progress. There was no single, correct  path - there were many different possible paths of varying difficulty.

 

In Jusant, however, while the player does have the freedom to try many different actions, and to climb multiple different ways, only one of these paths is actually possible to proceed fully. Most end in dead ends.There is a correct path, and many incorrect paths.

As a result, rather than the player feeling like they have the freedom to solve the problem their own way, they instead feel like they have the freedom, simply, to fail over and over, before stumbling into the specific solution the developer wants them to find.

 

While there can be some fun to be had in figuring out which of these paths is the right one, the process of playing the game is markedly diminished by this. 
Climbing a long way up what turns out to be the wrong path is simply a frustration - and that frustration is actually compounded by the number of different actions the player has at their disposal. Because certain elements of the world are climbable, and some are not - and in some cases, a vine must be "activated" to make a path clear, or a certain distant texture must be identified as being "grippable" or not, or the movement of moving "hand-holds" identified, there is a real issue of the player getting so-far up the correct path, not noticing the small detail showing a possible way to continue...
... and therefore assuming that path is one of the many non-viable ones. 
That is liable to result in them discarding that path from consideration, and only returning to re-examine it after suffering similar issues in all other inviable paths around the area. 

In some games, that might be a smaller issue - indeed, it is an issue of some level in many games - but in Jusant, it is a particularly irksome one, simple because traversing these paths is the game...

...and it takes time. 

 

The mechanical looseness of the climbing actions don't really mesh very well with the strict, intractable pathing the developer has laid out, because the mechanics invite the player to experiment - to try many things - and so the viable paths have to be fairly well disguised, in order to avoid the player simply bounding up them too fast. 
That means a constant feeling of "is this going to be the right way" is put on the player - and when they discover it is not, (or they assume it is not, due to missing a context clue,) they then have no choice but to work their way back down, to try somewhere else.

The game does try to give some loose guidance to alleviate this issue - a button press will show a very loose indicator of the rough direction the player should be going - but these indicators are very vague. 
In most cases, they pretty much just indicate "up"...
...which, given that the entire premise of the game is to climb up, is not terrible helpful!

That means that Jusant isn't really a mechanically satisfying game.
It feels like one in which the player is given a toolset, but these tools only really exist for them to find a path that has a already been set for them, and the gameplay is essentially a simple trial-and-error process of establishing which paths are red herrings. 
Because the toolset is one that would be much more suited to a multi-path game (like a Grow Home,) that process of sorting the red-herrings from the "correct" path is also made unnecessarily and frustratingly irksome, because in order to avoid the player managing to "bypass" the correct path, and find their own way, the actual "correct" paths have to be particularly convoluted, hidden, and require specific sets of actions...
...and woe-betide any player who forgets one of the many actions they have available, and therefore discounts what turns out the be the only real path to victory.

Since Jusant isn't a mechanically variable game, what it has to fall back on for entertainment and artistic value is more akin to the elements something like a Walking Sim would. 
Namely: Visuals, Audio, Tone, and narrative.

Some of these are better than others.

 

Visually, and auditorially, Jusant is a success. 
The visual palate is a nice one - a pastel-shaded, low-poly-by-design visual style, akin to something like Rime, and it works very well for the kind of "mysterious mysticism"/ "forgotten world" tone the game strikes. 
The art and design of the cliff faces, and of the different biomes that exists at differing levels of the gargantuan structure are all distinct, and often quite beautiful - and things like weather effects and vistas, and textures on the surroundings, are lovely to see.

 

Sound is played in a minimalist way - but used pretty effectively. 
The scratches and scrapes of the rock faces, the tinkle of pebbles falling, and the odd, echoey sounds of the rocks, in caves and on cliff faces, and the grunts and strains of the nameless wanderer as he traverses are all quite evocative. The lash of rain or the crunch of snow in upper levels of the column add a lot to the game, and the infrequent uses of music all work very well.

 

The strange, unusual and distinct nature of the long gone society - the cliff dwelling peoples, whom the nameless hero is navigating the leftovers of and learning about via their writings and left-behind diaries - is played well, and leaned into effectively with the art design.  There is something quite unique about the culture being created - cliff-dwelling, yet most aesthetically and culturally similar to nautical or islander fishing communities - is all very distinct, and it makes for a fascinating and interesting history to the place that the player is immediately drawn into wanting to investigate.

 

The down side, to this, however, is that even once every single piece of text in the game is found and read, and every written element of that culture examined...
...the game still never quite manages to pay off the premise of this unusual culture with a satisfying conclusion. 

The immediate narrative - the reason why the hero is climbing the tower - and the secondary narrative - the discovery of the history of that strange, now-gone culture, and what happened to them - are both paid off to a point - but not terribly well, or thoroughly.

There is just not enough real information given to feel like the loop has been closed on the interesting premise. 

A generous reading of the games text might conclude that the developer is simply choosing to be ambiguous for artistic reasons - indeed, there are games (like Rime, or, more successfully, Ico, or Shadow of the Colossus,) which build their mystique by revealing less specific detail of their lore. They allow the art and the ambiguity to feed the player imagination better than any specifics might...
...but in the case of Jusant, that wasn't the feeling I got upon its conclusion. 

Perhaps the developer simply didn't land the ending as well as those games did...
...but I suspect the real reason that Jusant feels lesser than those other games that don't explicitly reveal their lore, is that the developer didn't have a satisfying lore to not reveal.

 

A game like Shadow of the Colossus works, because while the game never overtly states what the nature of the world, or the characters are, the sense the player gets that there is a complete lore - they simply are not privy to all of it. The world has the feeling that it is all worked out, and does all tie together in a cool and interesting way..
...they just aren't in a position to piece it all together.
With Jusant, however, the sense I got was that the ambiguity is not an artistic choice, but an artistic necessity... 
...because I suspect that the lore simply wouldn't add up if it were all explained away. The actual conceptual reality of such a society, and how it actually worked - and the reasons for the drought - are simply too wishy-washy and ill defined to feel whole. 
It feels like a world designed to show some interesting details that draw the player in, but not really designed to hold up to any scrutiny.

The feeling when playing Shadow of the Colossus, is that the player is privy to only some of the pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle, but that there is a full puzzle that would work. 
In Jusant, it also feels like the player has only some of the pieces...
...but that if they had them all, they would realise they don't all fit together.

Overall, Jusant is a game that has good elements, but for every good thing it does, it seems determined to undermine itself.
It is a reasonable enough mechanical game - one where the actual traversal mechanics are fun to use, and varied enough to remain interesting - but they are hampered by its premise - in that it has all the elements of an exploratory game, but applies them to a much more linear, more stringent game design than they should be.

 

The artistic elements - the visuals and the sounds - are very good, and the set up and design around the forgotten culture, and the hero's quest, are well implemented and intriguing at the outset, but they are shown to be a little thin in premise, and the solution to that problem that the developer uses - to try and hide lack of detail behind artistic ambiguity - doesn't really work...
...and results in a conclusion that feels at best, baffling, and at worst, unsatisfying.

 

Jusant is a game that could have worked significantly better with a looser framework for progression, and a little more specificity and detail in the narrative...
...and that feels like a shame, as the bones and premise of Jusant are solid.
The game as released, however, never really feels it.
 

 

The Ranking:

So if it's not obvious from the number of comparisons in the review, the obvious game to provide an initial match-up for Jusant is...
...you guessed it: Grow Home.

 

Now, Grow Home is a mechanically similar game, and one that is much simpler - in narrative, in visuals, in gameplay...
...but Grow Home feels much more like the game these similar mechanics should be applied to. It works in a way Jusant doesn't really - and I think fundamentally, that has to be the decider. Certainly, while I like the visual look and the music and a lot of the tertiary elements of Jusant more, the fact is, I can state categorically that I would replay Grow Home before replaying Jusant, so it must be more awesome!

 

The games immediately below Grow Home, however, are odd ones to consider, as while I like the core mechanics of Jusant more than some of theirs, I do think the mis-application of them harms that as a positive. I like the act of climbing in Jusant a lot more than, for example, the gameplay fundamentals of Apotheon...
...but while Apotheon has issues, I think Jusant does too, and its are more core and fundamental.

 

I worked down from Grow Home, simple looking for games that had good ideas, but maybe flawed concepts of mechanics, and found a few here and there, but nothing that immediately jumped out, so instead, I simply asked myself "Would I replay this before replaying Jusant?"...
...and the first game down from Grow Home to which the answer was "Yes"...
..was another Don'tNod game: Twin Mirror.

 

Twin Mirror had some ideas, but again, didn't always know how to apply them well - and in a lot of ways felt like the red-headed step-child of Life is Strange, but without the heart and soul.
It was an interesting game, but fundamentally not one that really hit on any big fronts...
...and while I do think Twin Mirror at least did a better job of landing its narrative, Jusant does have the more interesting premise - and beats it on art design, visuals, audio, and has the fun mechanics, even if they are rather constrained by the game design. 

 

As such, Jusant outranks Twin Mirror, and finds itself ranked right above its Don'tNod brother!

 

 

 

 

 

Tinykin

 

 

Summary: 

A platforming collect-a-thon puzzler from Splashteam and released in 2022, Tinykin takes heavy gameplay inspiration from games like Pikmin and early mascot platformers, fuses it with a Paper Mario-esque sensibility and aesthetic, and adds it all to a  "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" design.... 
...to very winning effect!

 

The player take on the role of Milo - an archaeologist from the planet Aegis. 
Milo is human, but not human as we understand it... 
...as the year is 2748, and humanity has changed quite a bit! 

Almost microscopic in size now, humanity has long since abandoned Earth, and the origins of their race are somewhat lost to the annuls of history...
...but Milo - adventuring, curious, cheerful chap that he is - has set out to unravel some of those mysteries. 

Crash landing on a neighbouring planet - Earth - Milo finds himself in a rather foreign location: A perfectly ordinary family home, circa 1990... but one where the insects, bugs, grubs and various small creatures have formed a grand society, with different cultures having built up in each distinct room of the house... 
...and in which, mysterious blob-like creatures called "tinykin" have infested the entire place.

After meeting an eccentric inventor and scholar - Ridmi - Milo is made aware of a possible invention that might help him escape the house (and the planet) and return home to Aegis, and so sets about gathering the components required to craft it - each of which resides in a different room of the house. 
By using his adventurer skills - and with help from the strange tinykin, who take a liking to Milo - the player must gather each of these items while exploring each area.

From a gameplay stand-point, Tinykin is something of an oddity in 2023, as it harkens back to a much earlier style of gameplay, which has largely disappeared: the loose-platformer collect-a-thon. 

Each individual level (room) is essentially a large sandbox playground, and while there is a specific, distinct "end-goal" to each one (find the component), really, this functions simply as a way to push the character into each new area. The meat of the game is in exploring the house and seeing the imaginative and fun ways in which different household rooms and objects have been fashioned into large open-sandbox platform levels, and in the huge number of mini-puzzles and mini-games associated with each.

The basic loop of the game revolves around finding the eponymous "tinykin" in each new level. In each room, there are literally hundreds of these little creatures around - and finding them causes them to follow Milo around, and aid him in his progress.

 

There are different colours of tinykin, each of which have different abilities. 
The "basic" pink ones can lift objects, red ones explode, breaking objects, blue ones conduct electricity, green ones can "stack" to form a bean-stalk ladder, and yellow ones can connect to form a bridge...
...and virtually every interactable element within each level requires a certain number of a given type to make use of. 
A specific bridge, for example, might require 30 yellow tinykin to use, (something the game tells the player at each juncture,) a certain object might require ten red tinykin to blow up, reaching a specific platform might require 40 green tinykin to stack, etc.

 

This means each level essentially boils down to exploring, finding enough tinykin to proceed to a new area within it, in which more tinykin can be found, which grants access to more areas, which contain more tinykin... etc etc etc, building towards an eventual goal of finding the component hidden somewhere deep in the level.
Tinykin themselves, while friendly towards Milo, are tied to specific rooms, and do not move between them, so each level retains its own element of discrete progress - and the game avoids being "broken" by simply importing a huge number of tinykin from one to the other.

 

It's a very simple gameplay loop - and indeed, not one that can support a huge amount of playtime - however, it is one that is made very satisfying by the smart implementation of "soft progress barriers" via the availability of tinykin. Each level (of which there are 6 or 7) has a satisfying progression loop of around an hour or so, where the player begins simply exploring lower areas, and generally working their way up - reaching new areas, and always being able to see the full room, and get a sense of how far they are progressing.

A simple gameplay loop like that could become stale, of course - there isn't a huge amount of meat to it on its own - but that is never really a factor in Tinykin, simply because all the elements around it - the visual style, the tone, the sound and the narrative and humour elements are all vey much on point.

 

In terms of visuals and design, the game is a real slam-dunk.
The art style of Tinykin is gorgeous to look at - the whole house is rendered in lovely looking 3D, and every character is the kind of 2D "paper-cut-out" style where no matter what direction the player looks from, the characters "rotate" to face them straight on. 
The effect is rather old-school - it has some of the same feeling as the early 3D dungeon shooters like Wolfenstein or DOOM, but because the characters in Tinykin are lovely looking, well rendered, hand-drawn-looking cartoon characters, with a lot of personality packed into their expressions and details, it manages to make the game somehow look both old and new at the same time.

 

The design of the house and the levels is great too.
I have, full-disclosure, a real soft-spot for "small creature in an oversized world" design. 
From Micro Machines, to Little Big Planet, to Grounded, to even things like Little Nightmares, it's an aesthetic I always enjoy, particularly in the inventive ways everyday household items can become huge obstacles, or dangers, when the player is tiny by comparison. 
Hell, there is a reason why the narratively rancid and rather gameplay-soft It Takes Two still ranked relatively high on the list!)
The fact that Tinykin manages to do this trope so well, and combine it with some mystery element - what exactly happened to humanity, and why is this house abandoned seemingly in the early 90s? -  means simply being in the rooms has a double-edged element of curiosity. The player is both enamoured of seeing the different areas, and is constantly hunting for context clues about the people who live - or lived - here. 

 

It also affords the game a lot of forward momentum, as each room is distinct. It's difficult, when seeing the living room, or the bathroom, not to think, "I wonder what will be going on in the kitchen, or the bedroom?" - and because each area has its own distinct insectoid "society" there is both an element of "past mystery" (the human residents) and "current mystery" what is going on with this society now, to keep the player engaged... 
...and that's even before the individual puzzles and mini-games are considered!

 

Audio is good in the game too - there is a score that is jaunty and bouncy in all the right ways - upbeat and fun, without becoming grating or overly repetitive - but the biggest accolade for the audio has to go to the sound effects, which are excellent!
The pop of bubbles, or the explosions, or squishy-plops of tinykin bouncing along behind Milo are absurdly well done, and super satisfying in a strangely ASMR type of way.
That might seem like a small thing, but in a game like Tinykin, it's hard to overstate just how important sound effects can be - and this game shows why!

 

The narrative is something a little odd, as while I would say it is just perfect for 90% of the game - bouncy, silly and zany, with a cheery, fun tone and a perfectly pitched "some mild peril, but not taking itself too seriously" style of younger-audience-appropriate fun...
...it does, for some reason, rather sour itself at the very end.

I don't actually think it is a major downfall, as it is a very small section of the finale of the game, and really, only covers a few minutes of an 8-10 hour playtime...
... but for some reason, the game takes a hard swing away from the light, fun tone at the end, and gets into some rather emotive, sad, bleak elements.

It's a slightly baffling tonal switch, as this section feels wildly outside of the tenor that the entire rest of the game has cultivated, and feels like it would be rather sad and confusing for the younger players. Tinykin is definitely a game to be enjoyed by the whole family, and I - a 40-year-old man - had a great time with its fun, goofy story, great design and simply gameplay - but it is one game that is clearly approachable for the younger kids for the majority...
...so that ending feels particularly odd in that context.
More than that though - for all the great elements of Tinykin, it is still a very light-hearted game in terms of narrative and design - so going "emotional and maudlin" at the very end doesn't just feel incongruous - it feels rather unearned.

One narrative hiccup aside, however, I think the writing in the game is generally very good. 
It's a simple and silly story, and the characters work well - there is plenty of humour to them, and while there isn't a huge amount of dialogue, it is still peppered with jokes and amusing parts, and these work far more often than they don't. The tone put me in mind, (I think 100% deliberately,) of N64-era platformers, and that is a good pitch to hit.

Overall, Tinykin is a simple game - but one that I think does a specific type of simple, "harkening-back-to-an-earlier-era" type of gaming really, really effectively. 
It imports all the fun of those old platform games - where collectibles were everywhere, and the physics model was loose and freeing - while updating the visuals and design in such a way as to capture the fun and silliness of those game, but look crisp and lovely and distinct, in a way that holds up against any modern indie... even ones with markedly bigger budgets!

 

It's not a game that offers particular challenge - the game is very easy to play, and simple to pick up - but it's one that is extremely compulsive, super fun, always giving the player new things to do, and new, interesting areas to explore, and has a deceptively well structured and well worked-out puzzle loop tied into its in-level progression.

It's fun to play, fun to look at, fun to listen to...
...and while it won't take the player long to finish (and truth be told, could possibly have done with just a couple more levels to it,) it never gets boring or irksome, and the simple gameplay is plenty fun for the duration.

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Tinykin is a very strange one for ranking, as there really isn't a single game in that precise genre that is already on the list. 

However, probably the closest starting point would be some of the remasters of the PS1 and PS2 era mascot games, and their franchises - since those games are generally somewhat cartoonish and fun, family-friendly for the most part, and generally have a heck of a lot of collectibles scattered around!

Probably the most analogous comparison I could come up with was the original Sly Cooper game - so I started there.

Obviously, visually, Tinykin would come out the winner in a technical sense - there is, after all, 3 or 4 clear console generations between the two! - however, looking simply at the art design and the flourishes and level design, it comes out a mixed bag. I actually think Tinykin has the superior level and environment design, however, there is less of it. In terms of characters, I think I'd still give the win to Sly Cooper though.
Music and audio in Tinykin is definitely better - but again, there is less of it. Sly has voice work that can be good and bad at times, Tinykin has none, but has the better score and sound effects.
Both games have a lot of personality and fun to be found, though I think Sly Cooper, simply because there's more of it, has to take that win - and so holistically, Sly comes out the winner in the aggregate.

 

I do think, however, that the next-highest rated Sly game - Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time, has a harder time. I like that game more than a lot of detractors do - in fact, it is ranked quite a bit higher than Sly 2 or Sly 3 - however, it can't really claim any originality for character models and whatnot - and while it does look good, it is on a more even footing in terms of release dates, and I think Tinykin, while shorter, comes out the winner this time.
I also think, fundamentally, Tinykin has a smidge more fun to it than Sly Cooper: thieves in Time does - and in a genre where fun is the main draw, that clinches it!

 

In between those two is the original Ratchet and Clank, and while I do love that series, I actually think the ways in which it improved drastically in Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando showed up some of the drawbacks of the original, and I think, in 2024, I'd likely replay Tinykin before replaying R&C1... so I'm comfortable enough with Tinykin beating it.

 

There's a wealth of games between that aren't specifically comparable by genre, but are "family friendly fun" - and one that came to mind was Costume Quest.

I think that actually, Tinykin does enough to beat out the original Costume Quest in a few areas - both are charming as hell, and Tinykin has a little more in the way of gameplay variation and technical finesse - however, the writing and concept of Costume Quest still win out for me - and I suspect I would replay Costume Quest before replaying Tinykin...
...so I think Tinykin has to rank lower. 

There's just a few games between Costume Quest and R&C - none of which are direct fights - so it comes down to the old finale "Would I replay this before Tinykin?"

Working up from R&C, I think the answer is "no" for Chime Sharp, Sonic & Sega All Stars Racing and A Monster’s Expedition through Puzzling Exhibitions...
...but I struggle to say the same for Puyo Puyo Tetris.

 

As such, Tinykin finds its spot right below that one!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blacktail

 

 

Summary: 

A curious "Bethesda Engine Style" narrative open-world game from Polish studio The Parasight, Blacktail takes the Elder Scrolls/ Fallout model of gameplay, and applies it to a Slavic "old-world" fairytale mythology, sweeping in elements of various old slavic fables and grim-dark fantasy, amalgamating them to work in a single morality-tale style fable.

 

Taking on the role of a young girl, Yaga (a young incarnation of The Babayaga) - cast out from her village after accusations of witchcraft - the player discovered a semi-invisible hut in the centre of a large expanse of magical wilds, and establishes a home base, from which Yaga can explore the lands surrounding it. 
Guided, (rather cruelly and sarcastically,) by an inner voice - one that is not overtly assigned, be at various time seems to be either her lost sister, her powerful and largely absent mother, her mask (which she wears at all times,) or simply her true inner voice, (the one behind the mask she wears) - Yaga sets about unravelling her own past, the mysteries of the lands she now calls home, while seeking out her lost mother and sister.

 

As a game, Blacktail is a curious one - certainly mechanically. 
It is clearly playing in the broad "Bethesda-like" model - and in many ways feels like the next in a string of games that have (often successfully) taken the broad, loose, open and free model of Bethesda's giant open-world games, and shrunk them down to a more focussed, more manageable - and significantly less janky - canvas. 

The Outer Worlds, for example, and The Forgotten City both did the same thing - and both were notable successes. 

That is interesting to consider in the current landscape, where the latest giant Bethesda game - Starfield - has proven to be something of a disappointment to many. 
There is a distinct feeling, nowadays, that the era of "bigger is always better", and the idea that players will accept a certain amount of jankiness as necessary evil in the pursuit of giant expansive worlds, has fallen by the wayside...
...partly due to games like The Outer Worlds and The Forgotten City showing, first hand, how big a leap in depth and technical sturdiness can be achieved by sacrificing sheer size...
...and partly due to other, non-Bethesda-model open world games (Elden Ring, for example) showing that massive open worlds can simply be better than what Bethesda were offering.

 

In fact, Blacktail feels in some ways to be to The Elder Scroll what The Outer Worlds was to Fallout - i.e. a more focussed, more tonally specific, smaller version of it, injected with rather more personality. 
The Outer Worlds had many things in common with Fallout - the "retro future" look and feel, the feel of the shooting, even the broad structure of the narrative, with the player "awakening", exploring an unfamiliar world which split off from our own timeline at a specified point in our own history, and questing their towards a finale where they "save" the current world...
...but it also felt much more distinct and specific than Fallout ever did. Its world was smaller, but every part of it felt like it was better stitched together, and a single, more specific tone permeated throughout.  Fallout always feels something of a "broad canvas", within which multiple different tones and games can be crafted. That isn't a negative necessarily - there is a place for that kind of game, and when it works, it works well - but The Outer worlds felt more like a single, crafted narrative than that kind of open book. 

 

In that same manner, Blacktail feels like someone looked at The Elder Scrolls games - and specifically, at the Shergorath sections of the later games - Skyrim and Oblivion, (and particularly the "madness realm" Shivering Isles DLC for Oblivion,) - but used that only as a jumping off point: adding in a bit of American McGee's Alice sensibility, a bit of art design from some of the Eventide Artifex Mundi games, and a whole lot of Hans Christian Anderson and older Slavic Mythos...
...and the end result is something pretty unique.

 

The game plays, fundamentally, like a Bethesda-style game, however, there are a huge number of quite specific and quite unusual mechanics layered on top, that fit with the Slavic Fable theme. 

There is relatively standard combat - Yaga uses a bow and arrow, but combat also involves significant use of powers and modifiers - honey arrows to stick enemies in place, hexes, magic, lure-type distractions...
...and all of these operate via consumable collectibles found in-world. 

Enemies tend to be of a few distinct varieties - there are no human enemies (indeed, aside from Yaga, there are no humans at all seen in the game aside from some story-book style flashback cutscenes,) but vicious gnomes and trolls roam the land, along with goblin creatures, fairies, talking mushrooms (who form a large part of the fabric of the world,) talking cats, and all manner of other creatures.

 

Aside from the combat, however, the sheer number of systems and odd ways of doing things in Blacktail is unusual. 

The home base is "warped" to, via a magical talking cat...
...but if the player decides to shoot that cat, they find themselves in a pac-man style mini-game, in which they can rescue rat-souls... who will then appear in the Yaga Hut.

 

There are strange, giant roses with single, human eyes... which the player can steal the eye from if they wish, but if they simply put their weapon away, will reveal hidden objects or items based on where they are gazing.

 

There are special rocks around, which if Yaga fires an arrow at, will warp her to their locations. 

There are bees and birds and hedgehogs around, whom the player can interact with - either to their benefit or detriment - which then affects a fairly deep and curious "Morality System" which not only affects powers, skill trees and the ability to open special chests... but also affects which NPC quest-lines will be active, which Mushrooms will be friendly or hostile, and changes the actual outcome of the main narrative.

 

Virtually every element of the game seems to do things in a slightly different way that the player might expect, and there are so many unusual and strange elements to both the world and the game mechanics - many of which are not particularly made clear to the player until they simply experiment and try things - that while the actual world is significantly smaller than an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout, the sense of wonder and mystery is significantly higher. 
Using a comparison to Elden Ring or a Souls game is a live-wire - note, Blacktail is neither as good, nor stylistically similar to those games - but some of that Soulsian "this world is just so mysterious" element is actually present in Blacktail, simply because there are som many things that feel relatively unique to the game, without a lot of guidance, that the player is put is a sort of "what am I going to see next" mentality of simply wanting to explore and try things, to see what happens.

 

Not every part of this variety of gameplay is great, it should be said - There are a few sections of 2D platforming style "chase" sequences that accompany moments of the narrative storytelling, and these are never particularly good or fun to play, and the less said about the "pac-man-rat-finding mini-game the better...
...but the effect of having this much variety is a net benefit overall. While some are less fun than others, the game does feel like it has a lot of gas in the tank, and is always willing to show the player new things, which in a game like Blacktail, works...
...even if not every new thing is great on its own.

 

That unusual and curiously mechanically dense gameplay can be both a benefit and a curse. 
In some ways, the game can feel a little clunky with so many systems in play, and when in a Bethesda-style game, the tendency is for such oddness to feel, at times, like jank...
...but actually, I don't think it is the same thing. 
The fact is, Blacktail is actually a much more solid and functional game than any Bethesda game has been (certainly at launch), and while it can feel clunky (and it, at times,) that clunkiness tends to come from the volume of systems than any technical issues. The game functions perfectly well - it's just easy, at times, to mistake obtuseness or oddity - mechanical jankiness - for the old Bethesda technical jankiness.
One is certainly preferable to the other - and in Blacktail's defence, I would always rather have a mechanically obtuse game feel weird, than have a technical mess crash on me...
...but that also isn't a total defence.

 

The fact is, Blacktail feels varied and cool and mysterious by way of its mechanical oddity...
...but it does also feel over-egged, slightly too over-stuffed, and - at times - a little bit deliberately awkward.
There can be an exhaustion and frustration at times -  a feeling when playing of "oh Lord, why couldn't just ONE thing in this game work the way every other game does!"

 

What helps to alleviate that sense a bit with Blacktail, however, is that the art design, concept and narrative are all pretty good, and odd enough in their own right, that the mechanical oddities feel more at home.

The Narrative of Blacktail is actually very interesting. 
It's a relatively simple thematic tale of abandonment, resentment, regret and feeling like an outsider - and what people choose do do with that (added to quite a bit by the malleable karma system,) but the mix of Slavic fables and elements of the odd world Yaga inhabits are quite varied and well connected, so the story tends to feel grander than such a tale might in a more pedestrian setting.

As videogame players, we have seen more fantasy settings and tropes than we can shake a controller at, and Blacktail is not unique among them, but the strong Pagan and Slavic vibe, and the pretty hard-and-fast way the developer sticks to that theme, works well to give Blacktail its own distinct personality. The fact that while the game is certainly picking and choosing different elements of different Slavic stories and myths, it does stick strictly to that brand of tale. That means that the game feels a lot more rounded and grounded than something like an Elder Scrolls, which tends to be so broadly "Fantasy" that it can feel, at times, like simply a mishmash of every sub-genre that "Fantasy" can contain.

 

The writing though, is the one area where the game's fundamentals - looking and feeling like a Bethesda-style game - do harm the game though...
...and that is that there isn't really a lot of branching dialogue or choice in the narrative.
The ending and the way characters interact with Yaga can change - however, this is pretty much entirely based on her actions throughout the game, not on choosing what to say in the moment.

Now...

...lack of branching narratives and dialogue choices and speech-checks etc is not something every game has, nor something every game needs, however, games that look and feel like Bethesda games do generally have that side of dialogue as a core tenant. Fallout, The Elder Scrolls, The Outer Worlds, The Forgotten City, Starfield - what all of these games have in common is a dialogue system that is as robust and variable as the rest of the game.
In a lot of ways, players have come to not only expect that from these games, but to see it as part of the "trade-off". 

We, as players, accept the slightly wonky or loose, or imprecise combat and slightly janky or lower-poly worlds, because we get depth in other ways...
...and one of those ways is deep dialogue trees and lots of choice in conversations.

 

Blacktail doesn't have that, and as such, the natural feeling is - "so why make yourself look so much like those games, if we don't get this end of the deal?"

The narrative is more scripted and set, which means less scope for branching and choice within it. The game was - I'm sure - never intended to be a "Bethesda-like" in the dialogue sense, and the reality is likely that looking and sounding like a Bethesda game was what the developer was able to do at this budgetary level, rather than a specific desire to ape those games...
...but because it does ape those games in other ways, it invites an expectation for an equivalent system - and it can feel odd that it doesn't.

 

The art design is strong - the actual graphics and technical visual aspects are not cutting edge, and do certainly look like something that could have been crafted in the Skyrim engine ten years ago - but the designs and the aesthetic palate are well used. There is a lot of variety to different areas of the world, but they all tie together in a way that feels right, and manages to have a lot of unique and interesting environments, without them feeling totally disparate.
There are quite a few visual flourishes and non-standard parts too - cut scenes rendered like parchment motion comics look very nice, and some of the flashier effects at grand moments, or boss finales are pretty good - if a little dated feeling at times. 

 

Audio is decent in Blacktail too. The music in particular is both rousing and evocative, and befits the Slavic stylings, and the dark-fable aspects really well. Pretty much every piece of the score is additive - and even helps some of the less good elements of the gameplay at times. I think boss fights in the game are generally a little dull (certainly duller than the rest of the game,) but the rousing score during these sections helps quite a bit.

Voice work is also somewhere between decent, and pretty good. It's not exemplary - the voice work in Blacktail is not approaching the level of some higher budget, more cinematic games, but the writing does a pretty good job of pulling together a lot of require expositional and mythological elements without feeling too "lore-dump-y", and the delivery of the lines by the cast go further, to make that as natural sounding as it can.
There is actually a lot of voice work in the game considering the dialogue is set and not particularly variable on a conversation-to-conversation basis - many of the conversations with some of the more chatty mushrooms, for example, are a lot longer than one might expect for a game at this level, and these are fine.
The clear highlight in terms of vocal performances though, is the voice in Yaga's head and Yaga herself. There is a lot of antagonistic back and forth that happens in the game, with the voice teasing, or outright insulting or ridiculing Yaga (or the other characters,) and this is pitched just right, with the player - like Yaga herself - feeling both reliant on, enamoured of, afraid of, and annoyed by the voice.

Overall, Blacktail is a pretty strange game, all told.
It's one that has a lot more too it that one might expect for the budget and the scope, and is detailed and mechanically dense in a way that is not really expected at the outset.
 
It's a game that uses a well-worn and familiar base-template, but adds a lot to it in terms of mechanical complexity, to the point of almost feeling over-stuffed at times... 
...but the net effect is one that yields more positives than negatives.

 

It feels like a game brimming with ideas, and where so many concepts have been pulled together that it shouldn't work, and can feel a little overwhelming or obtuse at times...
...but while not all of these ideas work as well as they might, it does feel like just enough of them do, that the variety and oddity comes off as a benefit, rather than a curse.
 

 

 

The Ranking:

 

Ranking Blacktail is a little rough, as all the obvious comparison points are - as indicated above - other Bethesda-style open world games: Skyrim, Fallout games, The Outer Worlds, The Forgotten City...
...however, as curious, fun and deceptively dense and interesting as Blacktail is, fundamentally, it isn't on the level of those games.

Certainly, as compared to the two other smaller games - The Outer Worlds and The Forgotten City - it is markedly less successful, partly due to the lack of depth in dialogue, and partly due to simply not being on that level generally...
...but it also doesn't benefit from the "broad canvas" elements of the bigger Bethesda games.

 

The lowest ranked of the Fallout games is - somewhat controversially - Fallout: New Vegas...
... but that game is really ranked there from the point of view of the PS3 version. In reality, Fallout: New Vegas is - on paper - the superior game to Fallout 3, and potentially also Fallout 4... but the technical issues are such that on Playstation specifically, it couldn't beat them out. (If this were a ranking of PC games, Fallout: New Vegas would almost certainly be the top ranked Fallout game.)

I do think that, even with its technical jank and serious issues, Fallout: New Vegas does have a lot more going for it than Blacktail does though, and while I enjoyed Blacktail quite a bit, when it really boils down, I suspect that I would probably replay New Vegas - and suffer the horrendous technical issues - before replaying Blacktail - which has no real technical issues, but simply isn't as malleable, long, or well written.

That is a real strange one though - essentially asking "how good does a game have to be, to offset the technical problems, and win over a game without the same problems?"

It's a nebulous and difficult thing to quantify...
...but I am reasonably sure that ranking Blacktail a little below the PS3 New Vegas is the right call.

Two spots below Fallout: New Vegas though, is the one other sort of "Bethesda-style" game on the list: Alpha Protocol.

That game is also filled with technical problems - not ones on the level of New Vegas, but rampant nonetheless - and that one is interesting in a fight with Blacktail. Unlike New Vegas, I think Alpha Protocol has fundamental design issues along with technical ones...
...and also, the actual game, as designed, isn't I think, quite as interesting of fun as Blacktail.

As such, I think in that case, Blacktail should outrank it.

 

The only game between the two is the not-as-bad-as-people-say-but-still-pretty-ropey red-headed step-child of the Mass Effect franchise - Mass Effect: Andromeda - and that game vs. Blacktail is interesting.
Andromeda has the better visuals, and the much more competent fighting model...
...but Blacktail has more imagination, better (if far less plentiful) writing, and a more fun sense of exploration.
Andromeda takes it on sound, music and voice work, but Blacktail takes it on story...
...and Blacktail feels fresh and original, whereas Mass Effect: Andromeda does feel like a pretty big let down within a storied franchise.

 

It's close, but I think I feel more comfortable with Blacktail outranking Andromeda...

...and so Blacktail finds its spot!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So there we have it folks!

 

 

 Hitman 3 remains as 'Current Most Awesome Game'!

htoL#NiQ: The Firefly Diaries finally remains 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! 

 

 

 

I heard good things about tinykin, good to hear its a good surprise, also, i will be looking for inked, looks great! amazing reviews!

Edited February 16 by Don_Chipotle

[DrBloodmoney]

 

!!SCIENCE UPDATE!!

 

 

The next (not at all) randomly selected games to be submitted for scientific analysis shall be:

 

 

 

New

 

Laika: Aged Through Blood

Chained Echoes

Thirsty Suitors

oOo: Ascension

Immortality

 

 

 

[No Priority Assignments this time - hopefully this is the last full batch playing catch-up!]

 

 

 

Can 'Current Most Awesome' game, Hitman: World of Assassination, continue its glorious reign?

 

Is gaming turdlet Htol#niQ: The Firefly Diaries  going to lose its new crown of 'Least Awesome Game'?

 

 

Let's find out, Science Chums!