okay so i've been playin' some fuckin. some fuckin. some videos game. some jeux videaux. some fuckin. JAMES.
three on the docket in the past week or two:
Sakuna: of Rice and Ruin
Paradise Killer
Lake
so let's start at the top!
Sakuna is a combination "2D action-platformer" and "farming sim but for exactly one crop: rice"
Which is neat, because rice is grown extremely differently from most other crops, and it lets you get reeeeeal granular with it. You're seeding, tilling, mixing your own fertilizer (and adjusting the recipe as needed!), managing water levels, temperature, harvesting, drying, threshing, and polishing, inbetween going out to retake the island from a horde of neverending demons.
It's also, as one may have guessed, extremely Japanese. I hesitate to say it's "like Okami," but it has some similar vibes, what with you playing a goddess working to grow your power and the art style having similar inspirations, although it isn't quite as stylized.
I'm in the last leg of it (probably), and I'm having a fucking blast.
I've also been surprised at some of the emotional depth to the story; I went into it with low expectations in that department and was surprised at how realistically some relationships were portrayed. Now that I'm giving it more credit, new developments are consistently living up to my higher expectations!
Paradise Killer, meanwhile, is a no-action vaporwave 3D platforming collectathon that is also a murder mystery visual novel. You're tasked with finding out who was responsible for committing a grisly political assassination, and, true to form they already have a suspect in custody who admits that he probably committed the crime and was found at the scene with the victims' blood on his knife and in his belly.
This one's charming as hell; the items you find all contribute to the worldbuilding, and finding more about the islands, the Syndicate, and the whole setting's backstory is a delight (also: frequently horrifying), and the characters are all interesting pieces of work (also, most of them are at the very least regular-people hot, with a few--shout out to the goat-headed Crimson Acid--especially hot to us freaks).
It also ain't for the squeamish. CWs include mass abduction, enslavement, mass murder, throat-cutting, demonic possession, suicide, body horror, a whole lot of blood, corrupt AI, and just so, so, so many implications all over the place. That said, a lot of it is in text rather than directly portrayed (exceptions being the blood and body horror), so your mileage may vary. As a moderate weenie myself, I only grimaced a couple of times.
Also the soundtrack is just banger after banger.
And then there's Lake. It's an indie game that takes place in 1986 about a woman hitting her middle age, flying back to her hometown to take over her father's mail route for a couple of weeks as a break from her programming job. Gameplay consists of driving around Providence Oaks (get it? P.O.?) and delivering mail, getting to know the town's inhabitants, and making a few important decisions about the shape of Meredith Weiss's life afterwards.
I had some issues with this one. The bones are good, but for a game centered around delivering mail, it's weird that it gets so much about mail delivery wrong--specifically, in ways that make the game more tedious. The mail truck's steering wheel is on the left and the mailboxes are lawnside instead of curbside, forcing you to get out to deliver every single letter on foot. It wouldn't be a fast-paced game otherwise, so this was more annoying than relaxing.
The script has good direction overall, and most of the voice actors did a B+ job, but I can never tell if the game is trying to present something that's supposed to be good or bad (from a comedy routine featuring two jokes I've heard a hundred times each to two different original songs), because everything's just kind of... fine. Good overall, but it could use a punch-up.
I felt similarly about most of the characters, with most being annoying, tedious, or tepidly positive. I definitely could feel a lot of potential here, it just... didn't quite reach it.
But then again, that does capture the feel of spending two weeks in your hometown reconnecting with old friends, doesn't it?