I played a few video games recently! I've been tagging these as #aysámanra reviews, in case you want to go back and read my earlier ones, too. Unlike the previous ones, there are a few screenshots in this one, and I am gonna try to do that more as I do more of these in the future.
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Turnip Boy Robs A Bank (finished, pretty good):
I enjoyed the previous game in the series, Turnip Boy Commits Tax Evasion, quite a bit! This one I'm a bit less enthused by but I still enjoyed it: instead of a Zelda clone like the last one, this one is an action roguelite where a "run" is, uh, an attempt at robbing a bank, limited in part by how quickly the authorities can arrive after the alarm is tripped. It gets a tiny bit repetitive, but luckily the game is short enough that it never feels too tedious.
A big part of what sells this game is its writing. It's very silly and very snarky and very Online™. I mentioned the authorities, for example: many of them are peaches, which the game explains is why they're called "the fuzz". One of the side quests is to buy an anime girl body pillow from the dark web for a socially awkward goblin. Another is to deliver a GPU to someone who wants it to mine cryptocurrency, and in exchange you get a "Non-Fungus Trinket," which the game remarks is, "…worthless, but uniquely yours!" For a game with more heft or more staying power, I think this sense of humor might get old, but I put about five hours into this game and got 100% of everything, which meant it ends up being a fun diversion instead.
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Viewfinder (finished, great, a bit on the short side):
This was a very well-put-together puzzle game. The central mechanic is that you can hold up photographs, press a button, and the space depicted in the photograph takes the place of whatever was there before. (If you're having trouble visualizing it, it's worth watching a trailer to get a feel for it.) This starts out simple—bridging gaps between places by inserting platforms in between, or removing walls by replacing them with photos of empty space—but gradually gets rather mind-bending. It was well-calibrated, gradually increasing in difficulty, giving you challenged but never leaving you too lost.
The world is colorful and the writing works well, as you're exploring an explicitly digital space where a group of scientists were researching and simulating last-ditch efforts to thwart a coming climate apocalypse. It's a standard journal-pages-and-audiologs affair, and I wouldn't rank it as the best example of that kind, but it's done effectively and there's enough there to keep you invested.
My one complaint is with the final chunk of the game, which introduces a time limit in a way that I felt to be a bit more annoying than challenging. I would have preferred a final level of really mind-bending puzzles, instead of mostly-straightforward-but-you-gotta-do-'em-fast puzzles, but otherwise I had a great time with this game as a whole.
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Chants of Sennaar (finished, great):
Full disclosure here: my background is in linguistics, so this was a game pretty much laser-targeted at me. It's a puzzle game based loosely around the story of the Tower of Babel, where each layer of a tower is populated by a group of people with their own language and culture, and as you progress you need to bit-by-bit decipher each language to solve puzzles.
I say language, but they're all ideographic systems with slightly different syntaxes. As you pick out words, you assign them tentative meanings based on contexts where you see them used—signs, labels, snippets of conversation, even a few Rosetta-Stone-esque bilingual objects—and sporadically the game will present you with journal pages to check your understanding, at which point (if your hypothesis was correct) the meaning of the words becomes fully confirmed. It's simple and effective and fun, and I enjoyed those parts tremendously!
My big complaints are 1. the thankfully-not-too-common-but-still-present stealth sections, which were just a tiny bit finicky and didn't add much to the game as a whole, and 2. the thematic setting swerve near the very end, which wasn't awful in any way but which I thought was less interesting than the rest of the game. Neither of these was big enough to really put me off the game as a whole, though, which I still wholeheartedly endorse.
An aside about politics, though:
When I looked up other reviews of this game, I also saw another criticism that I don't entirely disagree with: that the underlying politics of the game is anodyne to the point of being incorrect. As the game progresses, the various peoples of the tower also learn each others' languages, and that communication ends up reducing enmity and causing unity among the peoples of the tower, with the ultimate theme being that the previous isolation and xenophobia seen throughout the tower was just from a lack of shared understanding.
I don't disagree in general that this is a reductive way of thinking about the world. Not all divisions can be healed by a shared language! After all, I'm a queer person living during an era of rising fascism, which means there are plenty of people who share my language and culture who would nonetheless love to see me and people like me dead. And I do think the game sets itself up for this criticism, since one of the peoples of the tower are the "warriors" who explicitly see the monks of the lower layer as "impure" and who have the stark fortresses and bright red banners and lines of soldiers that serve as shorthand for fascism. In the real world, the ideology of fascism has never been defeated by "reaching across the aisle" and sitting down with a warm conversation, and yet by the end of Chants of Sennaar, it took nothing more than bilingualism for the warriors and monks to put aside their differences and become friends.
But while I agree with the political point as a whole, I don't care for it as a criticism of this game in particular, for two major reasons. The first reason is that I'm willing to defend utopian themes in fiction explicitly because they doesn't take into account cynical realities. It's very, very easy—especially in modern political climates—to accumulate so much cynicism that you end up being defeatist about any attempts to improve the world. There are people who start from, "fascism as a whole cannot be defeated by conversation," and end up concluding, "no individual fascist can ever be talked down from fascism by a conversation," and that's not true! It's true that not every division can be cleared up by bringing people together, but some divisions can, and firmly asserting otherwise is, quite frankly, doing the fascists' job for them. In light of that, I think it's useful to experience some naïve utopianism from time to time, because sometimes that hopefulness can be a balm against overwhelming, paralyzing cynicism. (This is also why I still love the sometimes-corny utopianism of classic Star Trek.)
The second reason is that it's a light six-hour puzzle game. Like, come on. This is like, "I can't believe Luigi doesn't have to do suspension maintenance in between races in Mario Kart," type shit. Sometimes the realities of the world are simplified for the purposes of video games. Deal with it.
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Bomb Rush Cyberfunk (finished, great):
I love Jet Set Radio and this is a spiritual sequel that, in many ways, might as well be a sequel. You've got colorful cel-shaded low-poly graphics! You've got a great soundtrack! You've got wall-running and grinding and graffiti! You've got the wonderful early-2000's stylings of everything, down to the title screen font and the flip-phones used by all the characters!
I wanted more Jet Set Radio and that's what this was.
My only real complaint is that the combat is clunky and quite frankly didn't entirely need to be there. The rest of the game feels so smooth, and then the cops come after you and you get wooden animation with almost no sound effects until you shake 'em off. But thankfully, that's a relatively small part of the game, while the rest of it feels great.
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Hylics 2 (finished, pretty good):
My first exposure to Hylics was a Tumblr post that described it as, "…basically what you’d get if a space alien who’s only had RPGs described to them decided to design one." It's not an inaccurate description! It's absolutely dripping with style: much of the look of the game comes from filmed real-world claymation incorporated into clay-inspired 3D graphics with wild posterized colors, all coupled with a chaotic soundtrack and deliberately semi-nonsensical writing.
Like the first game, this is mostly a Japanese-style RPG, with turn-based party combat, although recast in surreal ways: basic attacks are "snaps", while magical attacks are "gestures" that you learn by watching TV and have names like "Poromer Bleb" or "Nematode Interface". Enemies include "Post Dogs", "Feral Hydrostats", and "Road Fleams". It's all structurally familiar while also being very, very alien.
Hylics 2 adds a few other game modes, including a recurring side-scroller game or a 3D airship mode, and those are fun as well, but the bulk of the game is about traveling around the world trying to prevent the resurrection of the primary enemy from the first game, Gibby.
My complaint here is mostly that the difficulty is a bit wonky, although part of that might have been because of stuff I missed. If you aren't careful about getting better equipment and tenderizing as much meat as you can—which is how you gain HP, or "flesh" in the parlance of the game—you can find battles quickly get overwhelming. A few fights in particular were more annoying than difficult, especially when you come across groups of enemies that can inflict combinations of status effects that are quite difficult to counteract. I ended up lowering the difficulty at some point rather than try to hunt out fights and equipment I'd missed. (That said, I probably underused some of the items—I was worried I was using them too much early on, and then when I checked my inventory at the final boss, I realized I had tons I could have been using that might have turned the tide better in the tougher fights.)
But even with the difficulty complaint, the overall feeling and experience was still overall very enjoyable. It's so fun to experience, because there's so little else like it.
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Lost Nova (finished, pretty good):
This is a short little crafting-and-exploration game that is very, very explicitly about burnout.
It's pretty short! I finished the main plot in about three hours over a few sessions. You could probably finish it in one, but that seems contrary to the thematic focus of the game. You have crash-landed on a planet, and you need to repair your ship by finding resources and doing some quests for the idiosyncratic locals: plant-people, bear-people, robots, and so forth.
The gameplay might not be anything too unique, but the look and feel of the world is great—colorful and soft in a really inviting way—and the writing is charming. The story leans strongly on the idea of taking breaks to avoid burnout, and a recurring theme is the protagonist giving great advice to others about how they're hurting themselves with overwork while inching closer and closer to understanding her own advice. It's cute and I had a good time with it!
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Spiritfall (still playing, not bad):
I have a confession to make here. I… didn't much care for Hades.
I didn't think it was a bad game! I was capable of seeing what others saw in it. There are a lot of games where I understand, in the abstract, why people enjoy them, but which just don't grab me in the same way: games like Factorio or Monster Hunter or anything that's a deck-builder. Hades was like that for me: the writing is good, the world is lovingly fleshed-out, the gameplay is fluid and the systems are interesting, and yet actually playing it felt like a chore to me.
So it's a bit interesting to have picked up Spiritfall, a game that dares to ask, "What if Hades was also Super Smash Brothers?" and find I haven't bounced off it quite as hard.
It is, structurally, the same as Hades in nearly every way: you choose a weapon, you start a run, you get various boons from various deities which upgrade specific abilities, you choose between one and three next rooms with the knowledge of what upgrades they might give you. Eventually you're funneled to a boss, at which point you arrive in a different biome and repeat. The only difference is that it's a lightly floaty side-scrolling brawler: lots of jumping and moving around, lots of stunning and crowd control mechanics.
(Well, the other difference is that it's less overtly horny than Hades, which is a shame, but I do like the colorful cartoony animal gods of Spiritfall as well.)
I suspect I might eventually run into the same problem I had with Hades, where the repetitiveness of the early areas—which you effectively need to re-traverse to get the currencies for upgrades which make it easier to get to the late game—outweighs the enjoyment I'm having overall, but I think I'm more willing to forgive that in this side-scrolling context where my expectations for exploration are lower. We'll see if that stays, because I'm mostly enjoying picking this up for a run or two and putting it back down afterward.
