Category: Platformer

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Game Ramblings #107 – GRIS

More Info from Nomada Studio

  • Genre: Adventure/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Windows, macOS, iOS

I’m honestly not going to spend much time talking about the game itself here. Mechanically speaking, it’s a super tight and really well constructed game. It hits a nice mix of platforming precision and intelligent level design to make a really relaxing experience. It’s also phenomenally gorgeous, especially with some of the improvements done for 4k support on the PS4. As a core adventure experience, it’s worth playing for that alone.

What I am going to hit on is where my brain was going as I was playing this. There’s not that many games that I recommend based on me thinking about things outside of the game – really the only ones I can think of off the top of my head are titles like Journey, Hellblade, or Firewatch. However, this one really hit on two main things that were really personal to me, and honestly really unexpected.

One of the things that I’m always trying to find as a developer is a way to ship a game that has an impact on my players. I’ve spent a lot of time festering on my jobs thinking on how to achieve that, but never really knowing where that thought leads. I’ve been lucky enough to work on games like Rocket League or Smite or Killing Floor, which have clearly had large enough audiences to be considered impactful in some way, but to me I’ve had various levels of enjoyment out of actually having been involved in those.

I’ve always looked at some of the indie darlings and thought “hey, I can pull that off easily enough, maybe I should just do that.” However, playing GRIS has kind of solidified what I actually want out of development. GRIS is ultimately a game that I really loved playing, and has had a heavy impact on players, but in hindsight, making a game like it was never going to be interesting for me. Mechanically speaking, it’s super simple and isn’t something that really needs much in the way of programmer help to achieve the gameplay mechanics that it has. What it does in really special ways are the visuals and story telling, both things that I’m not at all interested in from a development perspective.

The things that I’ve always gotten the most enjoyment out of from a development perspective have been the crazy mechanics that I get to work on as a gameplay programmer. It’s things like working on an open world spawn system in Maneater, even if I don’t think the game is that good. It’s working on things like predator stealth for Medusa in Smite, even if that didn’t end up shipping. It’s things like working on Star Fox-style ship movement in Arc Squadron or FF Tactics-style combat in Smite Tactics because I love both of those inspirations, even if both of those games were complete bombs. Working on stuff like that is why I stay up at 3am in Visual Studio; not the end result of shipping something off to players.

Combining those mechanics I love working on with a title that has an impact on players is kind of the ultimate goal, and while I’ve been pushing in this direction with my thoughts, GRIS definitely helped solidify that I want to focus on the smaller picture over the bigger picture for the sake of my own happiness, and if something more comes out of that? Fantastic.

This bird….

From a high level, GRIS is a travel through the five stages of grief. The bird section of the game ends up falling between Anger and Bargaining as far as the game’s travels go. It also hit really close to home.

Everyone’s got their issues with depression or anxiety, and I’m no different in that regard. Everyone’s also got their own ways to manage and deal with it. In the past I generally dealt with it by bottling it up until I got stressed out and lash out.

Which is exactly what that bird does.

That whole pattern comes in waves. I’ve gotten a lot better as I’ve gotten older at recognizing when it’s starting with me, and I’ve gotten a lot better at finding ways to mitigate whatever stress is causing me issues. However, I’m not entirely there yet, and I don’t really think I’ll ever truly solve it. Coworkers will probably recognize this as “Dan being grumpy”, and while there’s some truth to that being the public-facing outcome, it’s deeper than that for me. At this point it’s something that I usually work myself out of pretty quick through some quiet time or taking a bit of time off. However, seeing it in game form was entirely jarring.

I shut the game off after the level and didn’t come back to it for a couple days. It’s not that I’m particularly going through a period of stress right now, but seeing something like that level wasn’t something I was really ready for. In this case, fixing a lego kit was a good distraction until I could get back to it, and really the rest of the game matched coming out of any one of those periods. However, it was an unexpected reminder that I’m not there yet.

So ya, go play GRIS. Maybe you’ll simply play it for the experience and be better off for the enjoyment. Maybe it’ll hit some note for you like it did for me, and you’ll get further meaning out of the experience. In either case, it’s something positive on the other end.

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Game Ramblings #105 – New Super Lucky’s Tale

More Info from Playful Studios

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

This was another one that snuck into my start of the year kick into platformers. This game isn’t necessarily doing anything new and interesting, and it’s certainly not an overly challenging game. However, what it does end up being is fun; fun in the most pure way that mechanically solid platformers can be. The world and characters are colorful and charming. The levels you hop around in are extremely varied in their platforming styles. The little side challenges provide enough of a reason to explore every location. It just ends up with you having spent way more time playing the game than you expected because you never stop having fun.

Variety is really the name of the game here. At the start of the game, it looked like this one was going to be a standard 3D platformer experience. But then they throw you into a side scroller level, then an isometric level, then an auto runner level, then a Super Monkey Ball style rolling maze. The game really takes great advantage of using the core mechanics that are in place and putting them in all sorts of new environment types. When this is combined with a distinct overworld, it meant that I was never growing tired of the kind of gameplay being presented to me. You’re not going to play the same kind of level back-to-back, so it feels like there’s always something new happening, even if the mechanics are largely the same.

This is combined with a level structure that really encourages a bunch of exploration. Each level has the general end-level reward. It also has rewards for finding LUCKY letters, a hidden secret area, and a reward for collecting a bunch of coins. These all provide built-in excuses to go running around checking every corner It’s these kinds of little things that bring the levels from being just a straightforward point A to B to something that lets you get lost in them.

This is all helped by the fact that the game is mechanically very sound. This does all the little platforming things really right. Jump heights and distances are very obvious, and that surprisingly carries through despite the large differences between the various gameplay types. Where you’re landing is really obvious thanks to having drop shadows directly under the player at a long visible distance. These all seem like obvious things, but they’re all things that a lot of platformers get extremely wrong. When done well like here, they’re simply things that work as expected instead of being deterrents.

However, the mechanic details extend to things like boss fights as well. Take the screenshot above. Early in the fight, the purple patches are small and easy to avoid while showing very obviously that they’re damage zones. It immediately enforces that you want to move towards blue as the boss fight progresses and the safe zones get smaller and smaller. Other bosses have similar paths, such as single laser sights becoming multiple sights. These all play well into the fairly standard multi-phase platformer boss fight gameplay, but again to where them working well means they are simply working as expected, rather than being a deterrent.

The game’s biggest issue overall is that it’s ultimately a fairly easy game to play. Ya, you’ll lose lives occasionally, but the game is both generous with health pickups and generous with additional lives, so you’re not going to be pressed to stay alive. Realistically this might as well have gone with the more modern approach of just not having lives, and having a death be a level reset or checkpoint reset. However, that lack of difficulty was never a particular deterrent. Figuring out where the secrets were became the real fun of the game. Puzzling out what the boss’ mechanics were, then defeating them with those mechanics became the real fun of the game. I wasn’t having to slam my head against long fights and long precise levels, but instead simply enjoying the game for what it was.

To be perfectly honest, that lack of difficulty in place of just having fun is something that I find myself enjoying more and more these days. I just don’t have the time anymore to repeat difficult experiences getting incrementally better for the sake of difficulty, and have found myself enjoying experiences that are fun for the sake of being fun. Super Lucky’s Tale really hit that mark for me. It puts together an experience that is mechanically sound to the point where you don’t think about the game mechanics, combines it with a bright and enjoyable world, and gives you enough of a reason to explore that each level is its own little self contained playground. It unfortunately sounds like the studio has been having some financial trouble, so I don’t know how much more we’re going to see specifically of Lucky, but it’s clear that the devs behind this are going to end up making fun experiences wherever they end up.

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Game Ramblings #104 – Octahedron

More Info from Demimonde Studios

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

Octahedron is a wild ride. At its core, it’s a really mechanically tight puzzle platformer. However, that’s way oversimplifying it. As you dig in, it becomes a wildly fun experience dripping in an ’80s color palette that moves wildly between tight platforming sections, quick movement sections, and even a little bit of offensive weapon flair to your move set.

I figured I’d start with this short video, because it kind of shows a bit of everything. You see the core mechanic of the game – the ability to create a platform that moves underneath you. There’s a bit of the puzzle and offense, where my platform drops an explosive to open up my path, then I use my platforms to get around the enemy spawner. You’ve got the over the top visual style and audio, which the game is largely synced to.

The most important thing about all of this is that it’s mechanically really tight. That’s always the big differentiator between good and bad platformers. Jump heights and jump distances feel really consistent. The height gaps between platforms as you move up and down are obvious, so there’s no second guessing whether you are going to make a jump or need to lay down a platform of your own first. The obstacles moving in time with the background music sets a great internal rhythm to threading the needle through the level which added a nice secondary layer of confirmation to the way I was playing the game.

That’s not to say that things are necessarily easy. What it comes down to is the precision places everything on player skill to complete the game. Generally speaking there’s levels of difficulty to this. Simply completing the level generally provides a nice challenge that ramped up slowly throughout the game. Doing a full completion pass on the level started to add things to grab that were in out of the way or more challenging spots. Then completing a level quickly and with minimal use of player-created platforms is another level of difficulty altogether.

This ends up providing a bit of a choose your own adventure style to the game, and is where it really leans into the puzzle side of things. You’re no longer simply getting from point A to B in safety. You’re now having to be more precise with your jumps to minimize platforms. You’re taking some risks to move through the level as quick as possible. You’re keeping an eye out for secret areas that hold the last few bits of collectables that you need to grab. It all just works very well as a whole. If you’re having trouble with a level, you can kind of pick and choose what your goal is and come back later to wrap things up, so even the hardest content has ways to alleviate frustration and keep you moving forward.

Also a bit of a shoutout to Demimonde themselves. I hit a bug where a section of a later level wasn’t aligned properly until I restarted a couple times. We had a bit of a back and forth trying to narrow down what was going on. While we ultimately don’t have an answer, it was good to see them digging for info to potentially fix the issue, especially in light of the great speedrunning potential for a game of this style.

This is going to sound kind of weird, but if I were to give this one a comparable, it would probably be Super Mario Bros 2. Something about the way that the platforms you create move and glide with you gives it the same sort of floaty kind of platforming feel with similar amounts of precision really feels like that one. However, Octahedron is so much more when you really start digging into it. It takes those tight mechanics and adds a bunch of completionist tasks to really hone in on a super tight puzzle platformer. Combined with great audio and visual style, this one’s a pretty easy game to recommend.