Category: Action

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Game Ramblings #134 – Yoku’s Island Express

More Info from Team 17

  • Genre: Pinball/Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox One, Switch

Talk about a pleasant surprise. That genre listing up there isn’t wrong. This is a pinball game that’s also a Metroidvania. It’s a completely batshit blend of genres…..and it works. It’s a bit of a baffling game to start, but once you fall into how the game functions it feels far more natural than it should.

It’s a bit strange to play a Metroidvania that only has three main controls – joystick to move when you’re on the ground and two buttons for flippers. That’s it. This game gets away with it by really compartmentalizing the experience into rooms that fit the pinball side of the game. Each pinball table is less about being a pinball score running marathon, and more about solving a pinball oriented puzzle. How can you get an explosive over to the rock that keeps getting in your way? Can you light up a row of lights by repeatedly hitting a bumper element to unlock a door? Can you reliably keep hitting a spinner to push you forward? Can you really hit a tough angle to run up a chute and on your way? It’s all obvious stuff in a pinball game, but it works well as a puzzle experience within a larger game.

This all comes together in the handful of surprising boss fights. Consistency is the key here where hitting targets randomly doesn’t do you any good. You’ve got to hit specific targets quickly and repeatedly in order to push the bosses through their phases. That’s not to say you do that for any danger purpose, but just to get through the fight as efficiently as possible.

The surprising mechanic in all of this is that there’s no damage and no death in the game. Sure, you can fall out of the bottom of the pinball tables, but you get shot right back up and at most you might lose a couple pieces of the fruit-based currency. You won’t lose progress, you won’t hit game overs, and you just kind of move on with your life. The challenge therefore is entirely in execution of the mechanics in an efficient way, and never about playing it safe in order to preserve your lives. It feels appropriate for the game to be this way, and it lets the game really focus on being challenging on its own one room at a time, rather than artificially through progression loss. It’s honestly a way to handle games that I’d prefer to see more often.

So then you might ask, how does the Metroidvania part of all this fit in? Beyond just travelling for the sake of travelling, there’s some good use of genre expectations to allow you to re-traverse areas. Finishing pinball rooms leave them in a completed state, allowing for faster general movement the second time through. Pushing through the story unlocks some options that open up new ways to get through previous areas, such as the ability to dive into water or grab onto grapple points for climbing purposes. It’s generally obvious targets, but in a game that revolves around rolling a ball through the world, I was constantly surprised by how smooth the whole re-traversal aspect integrated itself into how I was playing.

This is a pretty unique one. It’s a strange mix of genres that works out well as a combined experience. It’s relatively short (I platinumed it in about 10 hours), but hits that nice place where it doesn’t wear out its welcome and you’re still having fun at the end. I’ll readily admit that I picked it up on a whim when I saw it was under $10 for a disc and had a good Metacritic rating, but given how much I love Metroidvanias, I’ll consider it a happy accident and go on recommending that people check this one out.

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Game Ramblings #129 – Shantae and the Seven Sirens

More Info from WayForward

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, Apple Arcade

I fucking love Metroidvanias. I fucking love the Shantae series. Guess what? I fucking loved this game.

Alright, that was probably too simple of an opening. A lot of what I’d say about this game matches with exactly what I said in the ramblings for Pirate’s Curse or Half-Genie Hero, and that’s a good thing. This is another iterative release in the series, and it takes what made the past games really work and moves it forward in important ways.

The first big one is that instead of being level-based, this is 100% a true Metroidvania. The entire game takes place on a single unified map and new areas open up purely based on upgrades you receive. While I definitely liked the way previous entries encouraged re-traversing levels once you gained new abilities, there’s just something to having a pure open environment. You see and make note of those open ends of hallways that you can’t quite get to or those things in the environment that are obviously something that you can interact with, and make mental notes to return to later.

Where they end up making use of their history of level-based gameplay is in the handful of labyrinths that come up. These act as pillars to the overall story and upgrade path, but also serve as mini-tutorials to learn new powers, as well as the core spot for the big boss fights in the game. It gives a nice on and off pace to exploration where you kinda futz around finding new areas and exploring for hidden stuff, then go into a labyrinth and really focus on combat for a while in a controlled linear environment.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how well integrated the transformations were into gameplay. In a lot of ways, this felt very much like Pirate’s Curse. That game required upgrades to be fast and easy to use due to story reasons causing the loss of transformations. In this one, the transformations are automatic. There’s things like the newt form which gives you a dash and wall climbing. There’s things like the frog form which the frog which gives you the ability to swim. Thematically they make a lot of sense, and the fact that they’re automated makes the game flow pretty much a non-stop affair, which is a huge benefit to the game pace.

That’s not to say there aren’t dances, but in the case of this game they’re all there as one-off attacks that don’t have permanent transformations. These are definitely useful in their own right – for example an electric attack does AoE damage to all things on screen, as well as powering up mechanical devices – but they definitely have a much more straightforward use that isn’t tied to moving through the world.

This is just a really fun game. There’s not been that many Metroidvanias that really have high pace gameplay and almost purely melee combat, and the Shantae series continues to be at the forefront of that style. Movement is fun, combat is fun, the bosses are fun. It’s just all fun and I can’t think of many better series to recommend in this genre right now.

….and don’t worry. Everyone’s favorite Squid Baron makes his return.

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

More Info from Moon Studios

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Xbox Series X
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Switch, Windows

I guess this is going to be a bit of a weird ramblings in that I don’t really plan to talk about the game, at least not directly. It’s been out for long enough that it’s been done to death. What I will talk about is the fact that playing this on the Series X redeemed the game for me. The first time I tried playing this I was incredibly disappointed. The gameplay was definitely there, and when it worked well it was really solid. But that was the problem, it generally wasn’t working that well. Framerate problems, load hitches, and crashes were all over, and it made getting through the game incredibly frustrating. Luckily we’re now back with faster hardware, not to mention a patch or two along the way. Now that the game’s unimpeded, it was exactly what I wanted – a Metroidvania with great flow, fun puzzles, and a lot of good reasons to re-traverse things as you gained new abilities. Simply put, this is now what I expected the first time around, and I couldn’t be happier about that.

I start here not because the screenshots are important to gameplay, but because I took damn near the same screenshot on the Xbox One and Series X, so it’s as good a visual comparison as I have. This level of change is indicative of the difference between the initial release and the one I played this second go around. It’s not just that things are clearer, but that certainly helps. Instead of running at 30ish, it now runs at flat 60 (or higher if your TV supports it). Instead of having load hitches all the time, there’s none. Where I was seeing crashes maybe every 30-40 minutes before, I didn’t see a single one this entire play through. It was such a completely different experience to play it without technical issues this go around.

The thing about me shelving the original one is that while it really came down to technical issues, it was ultimately a boss that did me in. The boss is against a large frog enemy in a sort of swampy area, and about half way through the fight you get sent underwater for good, which eliminates your ability to spend time healing in a pinch, adding a certain level of tension to the fight. Mechanically I knew the fight, but frustration absolutely got to me on it. The underwater phase just would not perform in a way that made the fight fun. In about a dozen deaths, I’d seen about a half dozen load hitches that would last for upwards of 3-5 seconds. The underwater phase itself basically guaranteed a framerate tank, which made fast movement difficult. At one point I’d gotten down to about 20% health remaining, and the game crashed.

Ultimately, frustration begets frustration. I get to a point when playing games where frustration at things just causes a landslide. Missing a jump can be frustrating in isolation, but is controllable. Dying to a boss is controllable when it feels fair. However, you start stacking these things up and I start losing those gaps where I have time to breathe and decompress. That causes impatience, which causes mistakes, which causes more frustration. When a game is crashing or having load hitches, all that’s happening is annoyances start to pile up that are not in my control, which just accelerates the problem. That is why I ultimately shelved it. It just wasn’t worth the cascade of frustration causing me to play worse.

This go around? I beat the boss on the third try, with the first two tries largely being me remembering the mechanics. No out of control frustrations, less annoyance, more patience, fewer mistakes. Now that I’ve beat the game completely, it turns out that for me that was by a long shot the most difficult fight anyway so doing it in the progression order I did the first go around was probably a recipe for disaster, but I did roughly the same progression this time and got through it. Not really because the game was different, but because it was now running great and I wasn’t pissed off about technical problems.

Cyberpunk was the big one this year that launched and had major obvious issues on console, but for me this one was my Cyberpunk months earlier. Metroidvanias are probably the one genre that comes close to JRPGs for me in terms of games that I will absolutely play above all else. Ori and the Blind Forest was such a spectacularly good game that shelving the sequel was something so unexpected that it blindsided me. Luckily, the current state of the game – especially on better hardware – has completely redeemed it for me. This is now the game I wanted to play, and not the game that crashed and burned. It’s now the mechanically fantastic game with incredible platforming flow. It’s now one of the flag bearers for the genre, instead of a game that wasn’t ready for launch.

It’s now a game that I recommend without question.