Author: schenksmill

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Year End Ramblings – Things You Should Play From 2021

2020 was a weird year. 2021 wasn’t any better. Luckily, just like last year I played a bunch of cool shit this year. By my count we got through 28 ramblings, 5 shelvings (4 of which were JRPGs….grindy ones really missed hard for me this year), and a big ol ramblings on some early thoughts about UE5. Feel free to dig through the past year’s stuff, but let’s get to the things I think you should really focus in on.

Game Ramblings #126 – Ori and the Will of the Wisps

I shelved this in 2020. In 2021 it was one of my favorite games. Having a game that is completely based in accurate platforming and fast movement be hobbled by poor performance was gutting. Replaying it again on an Xbox Series X was such a wildly different experience that it might as well have been a different game. Play this – as long as it’s on appropriate hardware.

Game Ramblings #131 – Bowser’s Fury

I mean, play this for what it represents – a path to an open world future for Mario, but also play it because it’s just a lot of fun. It’s not that everything hits, because frankly the Bowser fights are boring, but the open world nature of this one just clicked for me. Seeing a general area to go to, being able to walk over to it, then finding a bunch of shines all seamlessly is a great experience. It ends up being a streamlined version of what the Galaxy games did years ago, and if we can get a full 3D Mario in this style I think it may reinvigorate the series in the same way that Odyssey did a few years ago.

Game Ramblings #134 – Yoku’s Island Express

I know this came out in 2018, but I was just getting around to it, so I’m hoping that a few more people have that same accidental path to it. It’s a completely fucking baffling mix of genres – pinball and Metroidvania – but it somehow works. And it works incredibly well. There’s great platforming, great puzzles, and great boss fights. There’s no reason why this should have worked, and I frankly couldn’t tell you why it does work, but it’s a rare PS4 platinum for me, and that’s usually a sign that a game has really caught on something interesting.

Game Ramblings #135 – Fantasian

I don’t play mobile games much anymore, but Mistwalker releasing a high-end JRPG caught my attention. This one feels like a console game in practice while still bringing some unique board-manipulation features to the combat system that work well on a phone screen. In a year where traditional JRPGs burned me on grind, this one really hit. It fought against grind in unique ways while still making large scale fights incredibly fun, so the game had a relatively short play time for a JRPG. It worked well before running out its welcome, and given the games I shelved this year, that was welcome.

Game Ramblings #141 – Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart

Look, I fucking love this series. If you have a PS5, get this. If you don’t have a PS5, put this on the short list of games to get when you do. It’s got great weapons, great visuals, a neat portaling mechanic, and great use of the PS5 controller features. This is entirely a system seller.

Game Ramblings #149 – Metroid Dread

This is probably my game of the year. That’s definitely partly just love for the series, but it really is that good. In terms of core 2D Metroid gameplay, this is the best of the best. It’s got the completely directionless exploration of the old games. It’s got the much better combat of Samus Returns. It’s got some small iterations (ex: pickup suction, hidden item radar) that clean up rough points of older entries. It’s got fun high difficulty in boss fights while also making trash tremendously quick to just run through. It’s basically the peak of what the 2D Metroid games have been in the past, and given how many Metroidvania games I play, that bumped it immediately to the top of my list.

Anyhow, that’s my year. If there was a common thread it’s that JRPGs really disappointed me this year. I don’t know if I’m just getting tired of grinding or if they really aren’t moving the genre forward, but I found myself playing fewer and shelving more of them. Fantasian and Atelier Ryza were bright spots for turn-based ones, and Tales of Arise certainly hit a lot of good places for action-based ones, but by and large I found myself turning away from the experiences this year. Where things really picked up for me were action games in established series – the games above, but also things like Forza Horizon 5 and Monster Hunter Rise) – or indie experiences picking up the slack – things like Manifold Garden or Spiritfarer. There’s definitely a lot out there to play, so even if I’ve left JRPGs behind I’m at least constantly entertained.

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Game Ramblings #153 – Eastward

More Info from Pixpil

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam

Unless something drastic happens, this is likely my last completed game of 2021, and it really wasn’t a bad one to end the year on. I’d seen this one described as a Zelda-like, which is really what caught my attention. That’s not necessarily a bad description, but it’s definitely an oversimplification. There’s a much greater emphasis on narrative moments and linearity than the 2D Zelda games, and frankly the combat is a lot different. However, it does share the DNA. While it doesn’t necessarily reach those lofty heights, it’s still a title worth checking out.

Once you get into combat in Eastward, it’s pretty obvious that this isn’t really a Zelda-like. It’s simultaneously simpler in some ways, but more complex in other ways, and that really breaks down into the interaction between the two characters. John is basically your primary attacker – he’s got a pan for melee and a handful of guns with slightly different characteristics, as well as a handful of bomb types for AoE purposes. Sam is not a damage dealer at all, apart from one specific enemy type, but importantly can shoot out a magic attack that causes time to freeze for the enemy that got hit. That ability is where she becomes special.

A lot of the core enemy combatants are frankly annoying to try to hit. They move fast or jump around a lot or do dash attacks through the player. They basically exist to be annoying and deal as much damage as possible while staying at range. The rhythm of the combat then becomes a pattern of switching to Sam, freezing enemies, then whittling them down with John. That can be freezing to hit at range with a disc gun or to hit in melee with a pan, but the end result is the same. Sam is an incredibly effective crowd controller, John is an incredibly effective damage dealer, but their abilities work in tandem to maximize effectiveness. Large count encounters can still be somewhat chaotic in a less fun way, but this is outweighed by the fact that the combat really hits its mark well during boss fights.

The other interesting mechanic that comes out of two PCs with different abilities is separation for puzzle solving purposes. Sam is short and can fit through tubes, as well as activate magic switches. John is strong and can pull large crates and blow up walls with bombs. Separating the two during puzzles often means chucking things across impassable barriers to help the other person move forward just a bit more until they can eventually reunite.

This is put to the test very well near the end of the game. At that point, there’s a string of puzzles that are all time limited. These were by far the most fun puzzles to complete because of the added level of stress. You’re really pushed to be accurate and fast, while also minimizing the use of resources so you can crank through a puzzle before time runs out. You may need to drop a bomb, charge an attack, and launch it across a gap to hit a switch, but if you’re not accurate it’s going to send you back to the start. You may need to separate the two characters, but if you hit switches in an inefficient manner, it may mean you’re wasting precious seconds waiting for a platform to move back through the world to you, causing you to miss out on time. It really ended up proving out the systems in a surprising way to me, largely because I typically despise time limited segments that remove my ability to plan out my actions more carefully.

Ultimately it’s the progression that really separated this one entirely from Zelda. It’s not that it’s entirely linear, but it’s not far off. The game takes place across a number of smaller hub worlds, typically with a couple of specific types of shops (upgrades, food stuff, general goods) and you’ll spend a couple of hours in the general vicinity, but this isn’t the open world of something like Link to the Past. This becomes especially true in the last few hours where the game is totally linear. Once you leave an area, it’s also not somewhere you can return to. If you miss something, you’re not getting it later on. This wasn’t a particular issue for me as one of the first upgrades you can buy is a hidden item sensor and everything is generally near the golden path, but it’s worth noting.

It’s also worth noting that this game had some weird stability issues on Switch. Throughout my play, this crashed probably about a half dozen times in about 20 hours. Particularly annoying were crashes that happened at the end of boss fights on a few occasions. This was also combined with some odd framerate issues when the enemy count got high. Having done some work on Switch titles, I get that the hardware is limited, but this wasn’t the type of game that I would have expected these kinds of problems to crop up in.

So at the end of the day, this may not be a game that will totally blow your socks off but it’s still something worth playing. It’s got a charming story backing generally fun combat and generally fun puzzle solving. It takes the general Zelda formula and changes enough about it to make this game feel unique without being unfamiliar. It makes a two-character core loop work well without feeling like a neverending escort quest. In general it just proved that it was worth the time.

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Game Ramblings #152 – Manifold Garden

More Info from William Chyr

  • Genre: Puzzle
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PC (EGS/Steam), Apple Arcade (iOS, macOS, tvOS), Switch, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series S

This game broke my brain in the best ways. Any time you can look at an art style for a game and immediately know what you’re getting into, that’s a good thing. When you look at this one and recognize the Escher-esque style, you know you’re in for trouble. Good trouble.

This game does so much with so little, and it’s an amazing thing to behold. You can run, you can change what direction down is, and you can manipulate a small set of blocks. That’s it. That level of simplicity means that the game spends its entire time manipulating your brain, and not your hands. Every single puzzle is a set of maybe three or four steps, but figuring out what those steps are is always the trick.

In some places, it may be that you need to manipulate blocks of different colors to hold each other up and activate buttons. In some places, it’s using the blocks to redirect streams that you can then freeze and use as walkways. In some places it’s simply trying to figure out which up is the up that you want, and trying to rotate around to get there. However, none of this would work without the game’s use of portals to support the visual and gameplay style, and it’s by far the game’s most impressive – and most hidden – feature.

Everyone knows what a portal is in the hit Valve game sense. You have a spot on the wall that you can walk through to teleport to another spot. That tweet there is a very simple version of this, but it shows off the core of the tech. They have a portal in the door to allow the player to teleport from one room to a completely different room seamlessly. They use this for simple tricks like that, but they also use it for some core functionality in very non-obvious ways.

In this screenshot, they’re also using portals. The tower out there in the distance is actually the same tower. The little thing coming out of the ceiling above them is actually the bottom of the tower poking through the floor. In this case, there’s portals allowing the one tower to exist as an infinitely expanding world in multiple directions, but to the user it’s just a crazy never ending landscape to move toward. This version of their portals is used all over to support falling as a gameplay mechanic. Need to bring a colored block from the bottom of a tower to the top? It can only be moved while you’re on its plane of existence, so simply fall down to the top of the tower.

That is really where the game broke my brain. Contextualizing a 3D space not as something finite or fixed, but as something where it can stretch infinitely in arbitrary directions is weird. Down is down, but there’s also 6 planes of “down” that are all valid. Up is also down if you can fall. It gets even crazier when you start doing things like redirecting water flow to create a waterfall so you can get water to some wheel above the source of the water. It’s crazier when you get environmental pieces to fall left so they can get stuck on something to your right. It’s even crazier when they only way to hit a button is to get a block to fall up.

However, for as weird as it is it’s also incredibly natural. You get a piece of the game at a time, so you mold your thinking to a new mechanic in isolation. It’s a very oddly Nintendo approach. At the start, you only have the gravity shift in fixed hallways, so you get used to changing the meaning of “down”. They then introduce a spot where you can fall infinitely, so you get used to the wrapping environment. They then start introducing colored boxes, so you get used to bringing them around to triggers that open doors. Etc, etc, etc. It’s that little bit at a time that turns something that should be a complete mindfuck into something that is both completely manageable and completely natural. It’s incredibly well executed.

From front to back this was just an incredible experience. It’s extremely tight mechanically and extremely impressive visually. The puzzles are well crafted to take advantage of a limited set of mechanics. It’s long enough to feel good, but short enough to not wear out its welcome. It’s just really fucking good.

Go play it.