Some games and a comic

[roadrunnertwice]

Right, here goes: the last didread post of 2022!

Bonus Level: Chicory

Oct 2

This cozy nonviolent Zelda-alike about cartoon animals with food names went WAY harder than I expected it to. It’s actually a fairly raw meditation on fame, societal expectations, self-expectations, the myth of the artist vs. the messy reality of the creative drive, professional jealousy and mentors who violate trust, early hyper-specialization and how it corrodes your sense of self into a brittle crust, and some other Real Live Shit.

Man, also, the (optional, and basically nonjudgmental) artistic challenges in this game kinda pushed me out of my comfort zone. Drawing is already hard and soul-bruising, and the primitive controls they give you to work with would preclude doing a “nice” job even if you draw a lot better than me! Good emotional strength-training. 😅

Anyway, this was a good game and a cool experience.

Tim Probert — Lightfall, Book One: The Girl and the Galudrian (comics)

Oct 4

A remarkably good kids’ fantasy adventure comic, in a very post-Amulet vein. The storytelling is solid, and the cartooning is really top-notch. Excellent uses of space and size to control time and intensity, and some really flexible, engaging, and expressive character work.

I got this for my nephew’s bday and read the whole thing before gift-wrapping it.

Bonus Level: Noise1

Dec. ?

(itch.io store page)

A weird experimental terminal-based stealth game, about two lovers trying to escape a nightmarish human(?) experimentation facility.

This was a nice concise experience (three or four half-hour sittings, maybe), and really cool from a design perspective. I'm honestly amazed at how well the core tenets of stealth action translated to a command-line interface.

Bonus Level: ZeroRanger

Dec. 21

This game is amazing! I was NOT expecting to get obsessed with an old-school vertically-scrolling shmup this year, but wow.

It's a labor of love from a tiny dev team, and it exudes an amazing amount of polish; the look, sound, and feel of it are all top-notch. And it's got a surprising amount of story and mystery to it! Even though it's structured like a stateless arcade game, there's a bunch of events, surprises, and changes that you only see once on a given save file.

It's hard but satisfying and fair. I played through to the true ending, and then got all the achievements in the shorter White Vanilla mode. Supposedly there's a third game mode under development, so once that drops I'll probably reset my save file and try and get good again.

Bonus Level: Ys I & II

Dec 28

These classic action RPGs are a matched set; act I ends on a cliffhanger and act II closes out the story. They've been remastered and re-released uncountable times, and I remember back in my video game message board days there were a couple people who considered the TurboCD version an underrated masterpiece. I'd never played em until now.

They're decent! I wouldn't recommend them to everyone; they hew to another era's measure of what's fair play, so it's easy to miss critical items, get pointlessly lost or stuck, or just find yourself underleveled for a boss with no recourse but to grind. They also seem to be a weird offshoot from the main trunk of action RPG evolution; there are some odd ideas in here that still feel new just because no one else went that way, and some of them work better than others. But I enjoyed them more than enough to finish them! I'd recommend them if you're a curious student of the action RPG form, or if you just want to play a cool old game and are fine with hitting a FAQ when you get stuck. The story is spare but perfectly serviceable, the atmosphere is cool, the pixel art in the current crop of remasters (vintage 2005) is lovely, and the mechanical oddities are genuinely really interesting.

The oddest bit of these games is the "bump system" combat, where instead of pressing a button to attack you just ram into the enemy. The hit resolution is asymmetric: if you hit the enemy square-on, you get hurt or trade damage, but if you hit them off-center, you're safe. I've never seen anything like this, and it's a really interesting and elegant idea! Much more fun than it seems at first. It's basically optimizing for keeping your momentum high while fighting a LOT of mooks with simple AI out in the field, and it does a really good job at that. I think Lilah was telling me a couple years back that CrossCode was one of the only games she'd seen that really seemed to have learnt about movement from Ys, and now I sort of see what she meant — it's totally about that sense of momentum in the field.

Unfortunately, its utility does NOT translate to large boss fights in enclosed rooms, and Ys I had some of the most boneheadedly frustrating boss fights I've ever met. In Ys II, the developers seem to have made the same diagnosis, because they give you some aimed fire magic that's rarely necessary out in the field and make almost all the bosses vulnerable to that and only that. This is a major improvement, but makes it so the bosses are effectively a different game than the field combat.