Some games I played in early 2020

[roadrunnertwice]

Oh huh, I was thinking I had so many games to review because I've been playing more than reading during the pandemic, but looks like these ones were all wrapped up before things really kicked off in the US.

Bonus Level: Return of the Obra Dinn

Feb. 9

My friend Isaac summed this excellent game up best, so I'll just try and quote him as best as I can remember:

In a lot of other games where your character does detective stuff, like in Witcher 3, the effect ends up as "Geralt is an awesome detective." But the effect in Obra Dinn was "I'm an awesome detective!"

The actual game part of this is basically a huge logic grid puzzle, except many of the clues are visual or auditory instead of textual. If you have fun with logic grids (I do), then this is a blast. A+, felt like an awesome detective.

The dramatic presentation part of this was SUPER WELL DONE. I loved the weird old one-bit halftone "school library Macintosh except IT MOVES" graphics, and the voice acting was stellar, and the weird conceit of the death pocketwatch just really made for a unique experience.

Random sidenote: At one point I briefly started a new game just to show someone how the gameplay works, and the player character (who has maybe four lines, and whose hands are all you ever see of them) had a completely different voice! It was a woman when I played all the way through, but in that scratch newgame it was a man. (...or was that the other way around? Anyway.) I don't think I've seen that before, where there's multiple gender options except it's completely randomized and also has no effect on anything.

Edit: Kar's comment below reminded me that I'm sloppy with content warnings sometimes, so just fyi: nearly everyone on this ship died nastily (this is not a spoiler), and corpses and phantoms pile up in the walkways over the course of the investigation. The bodies are at roughly an old newspaper woodcut level of visual detail.

Bonus Level: Hollow Knight

Jan. Something

My brother had to nudge me to get over the floaty controls and the drab palette of the starting area. I'm glad he did! This ended up being a really good time. (The controls are precise, satisfying, and masterable; it's just that they don't initially feel that way if you've played any other 2D games this year. And the art is beautiful, it's just that they wanted that first zone to have a very particular effect.)

I REALLY liked the atmosphere, environments, characters, and voice acting. The plot, well, that was a mixed bag. A lot of the stuff you need to do to get the good ending and reveal the story of what actually happened down there (or, reveal the subset of it that can ever be revealed) was really obscure and arbitrary, without nearly enough signposting IMO. Which is frustrating, because for me a lot of the satisfaction of a good metroidvania comes from investigating and sniffing around and unlocking stuff on my own, and genuinely arbitrary obscurity sabotages the stuff that isn’t obscure — looking up some nonsense always spoils a few other things that I would have figured out on my own.

Anyway, that doesn't ruin the game, it just makes it a flawed gem. And this one was so combat-heavy and technique-heavy that there was plenty of satisfaction to be had just from successfully executing on stuff, even if the exploration suffered from obscurity.

Bonus level: CrossCode

Feb 1

I played the demo of this game, and very nearly decided not to play it. So don't play the demo!!! It doesn't put its best foot forward, and it isn't very representative.

But do consider just going for it and playing the game, because I had a great time with this. The story ends up being quite good, and the sentence-to-sentence writing improves greatly once you escape the intro zone and make it to Rookie Harbor.

The exploration and dungeoneering gameplay is the star of the show here, and man, it's good. It starts with the best parts of the action RPGs of the 16- and 32-bit eras (the outrageous dungeon puzzles from Alundra, the big technical melée movesets of Illusion of Gaia and Terranigma, and even a smidge of the party-based chaos of Secret of Mana*), then expands on that with a twin-stick shooter moveset, looting and crafting, a system of elemental weaknesses and bonuses that becomes legit frantic when juggling multiple enemy types late-game, and some seriously delicious pixel art.

A lot of the structure of the game is MMO-like; the conceit is that you're playing an in-universe MMO (which takes place in a real physical landscape with telepresent avatars), and they went ahead and just embraced all the tropes and conventions. So there's a whoooooole lot of hunting and herb gathering quests. But I was fine with that! Yeah, some of it is rote, but when the ass-kicking feels this good, I don't need a 100% unique excuse to go kick some ass. Plus the dungeons were top-notch, and the "real world" plot provided some fun ways to mess with the MMO shape a bit.

I totally plan to re-play this at some point. I think maybe the New Game + lets you choose what to carry forward? If so, I'd be down to start fresh except for the botany collection;** the challenge level was excellent, and the reason I'd replay it would be for the challenge. So... I guess [REDACTED] was right after all. (Although I saw in a video that they made a bunch of special dialogue for if you go into ng+ at level 60+, which was pretty hilarious — since it's taking place in an MMO, everyone around you KNOWS you're level 60 and are NOT necessarily cool with it!)

* Not very much, mind; party members are NPCs, and they can only join you on the overworld, not dungeons. Still though! More than anything else has given me!

** Update: Yes, it totally let me do that. 🤩 I fired it up again the other night and got to the start of the Bergen Trail.