Category: Platformer

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Game Ramblings #100 – Indivisible

More Info from Lab Zero Games

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows, macOS, Linux, Switch

I’m glad that this game was a milestone number for my ramblings, because it’s the kind of game I really live for. It’s both instantly recognizeable, but completely unique. It’s kind of an ARPG, kind of a JRPG, kind of a Metroidvania, but really it’s none of those things alone and all of those things together. It takes a bunch of pieces that shouldn’t work together, mashes them together, and spits something out that is phenomenal.

The first thing that really stood out was that the game was flat out gorgeous, though that isn’t much of a surprise. This is the team behind Skullgirls, which gameplay aside, was always known for its visual style. Right from the start, it’s a great mix of 3D backgrounds and 2D character art that pops like very few games do. Particularly in battle, the animation is all ridiculously well crafted hand-drawn art that really brings a bright and fun visual style to life. Amidst the chaos of battle, it’s all a joy to watch.

However, it’s that battle that really pulls you into the game. This is a bizarre mix of two RPG subgenres that somehow mash together. On the one hand, the battle system is very much an almost ATB-style system, where the characters charge up attack slots at different speeds up to a cap. However, those attack slots are not your typical menu slots – they’re instead button presses tied to each character, which can be comboed with directional inputs to do any sort of mix of functionality. This is expanded by different characters having different capabilities to really bring a simple but extremely deep combat system to life. It’s not unlike Valkyrie Profile in a lot of ways, but it definitely feels very much its own.

For example, Ajna can break enemies that are shielding with an up+down combo. I used a healer named Ginseng that built up power with straight attacks, then activated a power scaled group heal with their up attack. For flying enemies, I had an archer named Zebei that could shoot enemies out of the sky to be attacked by the rest of the party. At one point I even had a dog named Lanshi whose sole fight pattern was to bark at the enemy party, dealing large AoE damage. This is backed by a charged special attack bar that the entire party could use to do significantly large and flashy attacks to all enemies, like the one below.

On the defensive side, it’s all timing based. Correctly timing a button press when being attacked can block incoming damage, starting with partial block and growing all the way to character heals by the end of the game. This ability to block damage means that missing the button press is absolutely hazardous, as the game is scaled around the player preventing incoming damage as much as possible. A good player will basically never take damage, while a lesser player will likely need to grind a bit to become stronger, so this also works as a pretty solid built-in difficulty mechanic to allow better players to simply move forward.

In general, this battle system was just straight up fun. I spent a decent amount of time when grabbing new characters playing around to see how they felt, but over time settled on a party that really fit my preferred style. For me it was all about fast charging characters with good single target attacks, backed by Ginseng’s healing capabilities, and very little defense other than good timing. It fit a really fun sort of zerg rush pattern that I leaned hard into by the end of the game.

The Metroidvania aspect of the game is generally the weaker part of this mash of genres. It’s not that it’s implemented poorly – the levels all have a ton of side paths that are slowly unlocked as the player gains new abilities. It’s that the level layouts don’t really feel tuned to Metroidvania-style retraversal. It was pretty much without fail that I’d start on one end of a region map, get all the way to the far other side of the region map, and hit a story block with no new power helpful to the current region, requiring me to go completely back across the map to get to a ship and move to a different region. More often than not, the new paths opened with new abilities were typically smaller side paths that existed to collect upgrades, and not necessarily new paths for traversing the level in a different fashion. By doing this extreme side to side layout design, it really ended up making me retraverse the levels with nothing new to do, rather than the more Metroid-typical pattern of earning powers often, and traversing a region with full new paths. Things opened up a bit more by the end of the game, but by that point it kind of felt like too little too late.

That being said, the traversal not being great didn’t minimize my enjoyment of the game. This was ultimately one of my rare PS4 platinums, clocking in at a bit under 20 hours to get the full trophy set. Within that, I got to experience a bunch of great combat, some fantastically flashy and memorable bosses, and more than a few laughs at the party’s expense. For me this is even better, as I was a backer of their Indiegogo campaign, so watching this one come to life, and having it live up to my hopes is something that I’m always wishing for. At this point, it’s been a long time since we’ve seen a proper non-mobile Valkyrie series entry out of Square, and if Indivisible is the way that someone runs with the gameplay, I’m certainly excited about the end result.

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Game Ramblings #86 – Yoshi’s Crafted World

More Info From Nintendo

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch

TL;DR

  • Classic Yoshi gameplay, accessible but deep with great replayability of the levels
  • Another fantastic visual style from the team at Good-Feel

This could be a really short ramblings from a practical perspective. If you liked any past Yoshi games, you’ll probably like this. The gameplay still revolves around heavy exploration of side scrolling levels, eating enemies to get eggs, and using those eggs to find things hidden around the levels. This one does a few things to separate from past titles though – particularly in the replayability of the individual levels – that really make this a solid new entry that plays well on the go.

This is a Yoshi game through and through, eggs, cute visuals, fun levels – it’s pretty familiar on the surface.

There really is a lot of familiarity at play here, but really that isn’t very surprising for the Yoshi series. The Island games and Woolly World were a lot of fun, but really all had similar mechanics. Manipulating the firing of eggs is still the real core skill here other than staying alive. The point of each individual level is still to basically collect everything, and the objectives are still largely the same – find flowers, find 20 red coins, don’t lose hearts. There are a few core differences here though. Each flower is an individual goal on its own, along with flowers gained from the coin/heart objectives, but there’s other ways to gain flowers that become more important. In addition, flowers are used as progression blockers in a way similar to stars in Mario games, though most players will never have trouble having an overabundance. The differences in star collection are what really drive replayability in this game though.

Back side levels are one of the replay options, and also serve as a way to lean into the Crafted World gimmick.

Replaying levels really becomes key to the core loop here. Back side levels are one of the big options, where the player runs through the level in reverse to find Poochy Pups. These serve a two-fold purpose; they’re an additional goal using the same content, and they also use a speedrun timer that forces the player to ignore exploration in favor of speed. In doing so, these levels really change how the player thinks about the core gameplay in a fun way.

From a visual perspective it also really pushes the crafted aspect of the game world. You see the labels on the back of cardboard boxes, the tape holding everything together, the enemies that are holding up stage props. It all serves to give a fairly adorable setting to the world and a reason for the way the game visually exists.

These aren’t the only replay tools though. In addition to the obvious goal of finding everything, each mini world has a series of collection tasks that also provide flowers to the player. These all involve finding one to a handful of a specific prop, and the player has to shoot eggs at them to collect them. They’re small goals, but act as an addition gameplay layer to complete.

All of these replay tools really serve to push the purpose that this is a game that works as well on the couch as it does on the go. If you’ve got a large chunk of time, it’s easy to run through a bunch of levels or spend a lot of time looking for every little detail on the front side run throughs. If you’re in a commute and only have a few minutes? Go ahead and do a quick back side run or one of the collection tasks. Either way you’re earning rewards and finding new things to do, and the game works phenomenally well in allowing you to tailor your minute to minute experience to the time you have available.

There’s also some neat non-traditional diversions to do, such as this level where Yoshi balances a kart to get it through the world as fast as possible.

Realistically there isn’t much new to be had here compared to other Yoshi games, but this one definitely does the best job of sitting somewhere in the middle of a home and on-the-go experience. The huge variety of different types of tasks to accomplish means you can do things that run from taking minutes to taking hours, and this is the same thing that some of the best Switch titles I’ve played have typically pulled off. It also helps that the core Yoshi gameplay was already a lot of fun to begin with. Although this doesn’t end up being your traditional platformer gameplay like a New Super Mario Bros game, I’d still have a pretty easy time recommending this one straight out for anyone looking for a game in that genre.

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Game Ramblings #84 – Unravel Two

More Info from EA

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Origin, Xbox One, Switch

TL;DR

  • Mechanically fantastic puzzle platformer that works just as well in single player or co-op
  • Not as big an emotional impact as the first game, but is mechanically far better as a game

It’s worth noting that I pretty much did a marathon of both the Unravel games in a few sittings. Where the first game was a solid puzzle platformer with a fantastic emotional arc straight out of Journey, the second was a much more laid back affair. However, it added a few mechanics that made it a much more solid game experience and added on a great implementation for couch co-op, so I decided that this one was the one I would ramble about. Really though, both are absolutely worth playing.

Most of the core mechanics of the game are present in this one screenshot, so it’s a good place to start.

Unravel is entirely a game about yarn, it’s the core visual feature of the main characters, it represents the binding of the two background story characters, and it’s the core limitation that keeps the players from being separated throughout the game. Like the first game, it’s also the big core physics piece that allows most of the puzzles in the game to work. Where the first game gave you limited yarn between checkpoints, this game gives you limited yarn between the two characters, which is also why this game works so well whether in single player or co-op.

The big physics mechanic that you gain with the yarn is swinging. You can hook up to points in the world and swing from them. Like the screenshot above, you can also create points by wrapping your yarn around objects that block the yarn. However, the swinging in the sequel feels a bit less physically realistic, and the game is much better off for it. The first game was generally alright for swinging, but there were a number of points where it definitely felt like I was battling the physics engine for just the right swing. In the sequel, swings feel much more set on perfect arcs (although they definitely massage this visually), so my swings and especially my jump releases were far more accurate. This move away from super physics realism also extended to some core movement. Running was distinctly faster and jumps were more rigid, giving the game a much more distinctly typical platformer feel in practice. It was definitely to the benefit of the game for them to go this direction.

The yarn can also be used just to hang, and like the screenshot above this can be used for other sorts of maneuvering. Since the two characters are independent, one can hang and move around on the rope while the second player physically swings them along. It’s a clever use of the typical platformer moving rope mechanic in a way that the player has significantly more control over the result. Done in co-op, it also means that the two players work together in a way that gives great instant feedback to what they’re doing.

The other big game mechanic added for the sequel is wall jumping. It may sound weird for something so simple, but this tremendously improved the pace of the game. The first game had a lot of sections where there wasn’t really a whole lot going on between puzzles. By simply adding wall jumps, the design toolbox was allowed to expand in a way that encouraged more simply fun platforming set pieces between puzzle areas, so the overall fun factor of the entire game improved as a result.

Puzzles definitely require both players to be doing something, which really makes co-op work well.

It’s also worth noting how literal the Two in the game title is. The entire game is playable in single player where the player switches between the two characters, or in co-op where each character is controlled separately. This co-op extends to the entire game, and the puzzles really take advantage of this. The screenshot above is a pretty simple example, where the players take turns distracting the bird to move to the end of the puzzle. However, these extend to areas where the co-op players activate weights to move set pieces around, to puzzles where the players have to heavily use the yarn rope physics to swing themselves to the right spots and help each other up, and more. This is as good of a couch co-op experience as I’ve ever seen in a platformer, and unlike New Super Mario Bros U, this is definitely designed to make co-op fun instead of frustrating.

I can’t leave this without mentioning the visuals – this game looks fantastic throughout.

The two Unravel games are pretty damn special. The first is an emotional gut punch that follows a similar arc to Journey, and in doing so gives a really strong puzzle/platformer game. The second makes the game mechanically far better, and at the same time adds one of the best platformer co-op experiences I’ve ever seen. This is on top of great visuals, great audio, and a phenomenal soundtrack backing it all up. These two games have been pretty easy to miss, especially on PC where they’re relegated to Origin, but it’s absolutely worth putting in the effort to seek these out, especially the sequel.