Category: PS5

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Game Ramblings #211 – Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time

More Info from Level 5

  • Genre: Action RPG
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Switch, Switch 2, PS4, Xbox Series, Steam

This game is the very definition of low friction. It has a ton of systems for crafting, a ton of systems for combat, a ton of systems for collecting, systems for building, and systems for customizing. From a high level view it looks like absolute chaos, but they all work together and they all work similarly so doing any particular thing constantly feels familiar. In building out the game this way they’ve created something that feels like Animal Crossing through the lens of RPGs and it just becomes an absolute joy to sit down and play.

If I look at the individual systems in place and tried to pull them out into its own game, it’s pretty clear that you’d have a series of pretty shallow games. Combat is fairly effective, but it’s clearly simple. You can do a set of different melee types and a couple of ranged types, but they generally play similar enough to be a preference selection. They have a handful of attack types for variety but largely play the same. The crafting side of the game is similar. Each crafting life has a whole huge list of recipes but they are all crafted the same way so 1:1 against each other it’s pretty irrelevant. Ultimately what really makes the game work is the loop tying everything together and how seamlessly you transition between the various lives.

To me the story is largely irrelevant. It’s something to push you forward into higher level zones – which has its use – but it’s not what had me playing the game. The Animal Crossing portion of this is really what did it for me. Like Animal Crossing, you’re essentially building a customizable town and recruiting people in it, but with more direct control over the things that you place. Rather than props coming up in the shop, you have to make them. If you want that fancy new staircase type to pull off a new block of housing? Go build it. You want that cool new wall art for your personal house? Go make it. What comes out of that is that each decision on what you’re adding to the town has a lot more impact than Animal Crossing. It’s a series of checklists to get to it. Do you have the recipe? Do you then have the materials? Do you then have the skill level to create it? If not, do you have a townsperson with the matching skill to assist you in creating it? That is where the simplicity ends up shining.

The individual lives that you work through to create a single thing don’t need complexity when the game loop is short. Recipes generally come out of quests of some sort, so completion of them is generally a small amount of item creation or enemy kills to complete. It doesn’t try to bog you down in a large grind. Each recipe has some handful of required items – maybe it’s some ore or some fish or some flowers or some wood, or some other craftable subitem like paints or boards or metal ingots. Rather than making that process slow and plodding, getting those items is relatively quick. Yes there’s leveling, but crafts or kills at the same relative level as you provide a ton of experience, so you aren’t grinding to earn new things. Each little piece of a whole item is its own couple minute game loop that is fast and fun enough without providing unnecessary friction to the player. At the end, you create your item, put it where you want, and move on to the next thing.

It is then helped that in the process of completing these mini game loops you’re also just generally grabbing other items as you go. On the way to some specific ore there’s probably some monsters or trees or any number of other things that you quickly dispatch to get more stuff that you can use later. It’s then easy to transition between all this because the fundamental controls are the same across the board. Each gathering life type has the same type of setup where there are weakpoints you can scan for and hit to more quickly dispatch the item. They all have the same setup of a critical finishing blow to gain more items. This extends to combat where the combat controls similarly have charge attacks on the same buttons for more damage to keep a similar sort of rhythmic flow to combat and gathering. On the crafting side, the setups are the same picture matching with the same clicks, hold, and button spam types so transitioning between woodworking and blacksmithing and cooking is all seamless.

This is ultimately what I mean by everything being low friction. The entire game is a series of small systems that are good enough on their own to be fun enough. They wouldn’t stand well over time isolated in their own game, but as the sum of parts to create a more advanced Animal Crossing experience they just all enhance each other. The systems have a short loop to keep you going to the next part of your checklist in a way that reminds me a lot of DS/3DS era games where everything was really tuned down to a 5 minute game loop that you can pick up and put down at any time, but can also just be played in hours long sessions because they are so smooth to get through. Creating your town is easy and fun but still requires enough effort to complete that it doesn’t feel trivial. It all just ends up working well in a way that makes this an easy recommendation for anyone looking for that Animal Crossing fix.

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Game Ramblings #208 – Shadow Labyrinth

More Info from Bandai Namco

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox Series, Switch, Switch 2

For a game that has Pac-Man levels, I actually found those segments to be by far the least fun sections of the game. The platforming involved in there was just never fluid or interesting. Anyway, that’s beside the point. What is there most of the time is a melee Metroidvania that surprised me in how well it took simple combat and crafted it into something fun with a very limited set of mechanics.

I can’t really think of a boss fight in this game that had more than four or five attacks, and generally they had one or two. What that really meant was that learning and avoiding the attacks was the most important part of combat, and not actually doing damage. You could ultimately indefinitely extend a boss fight via well timed defense.

Where this came in for the player was dodging and a chosen defensive maneuver – parry, shield, etc. The dodge is really what made the game sing. It’s a very fighting game-style dodge where you get pass through and immunity frames. This pushes combat in a direction where timing is the most important element. During a new encounter I’d lay back, learn the attacks, probably die a couple times, then come back in and know my timing. You hit your defensive move, lay in a handful of attacks as necessary, maybe use some excess energy on bonus damage, then time the next attack. In action games that work for me I generally talk about how the combat has a good rhythm and this has that. Once learned, most of the boss fights have pretty reliable segments of two melee combos followed very quickly by an attack with little downtime in there.

So let’s go back to probably die a couple times. Normally that’s where I find a lot of issues and even going back to ramblings like Hollow Knight that was where the game fell flat for me. Shadow Labyrinth feels like it was designed to mitigate the downsides of death. For one thing, nearly every major boss fight had a save point immediately before its room, if not a full on teleport location. This allowed the boss fights themselves to be isolated in their difficulty and let you focus on going in, learning, and immediately executing on learnings instead of having to do a death run back.

The second thing that really stood out was how many places existed that could be opened as shortcuts through the world. The map when completed really feels like it’s a series of compact loops. There’s an obvious first path through an area that you run through and find a bunch of impassable doors. You then start hitting branches in that path that loop back and end at one of those doors. If I was to really visualize it, it would be like taking a winding river as the main path and a straight line through it as the path that gets opened once you finish all the loop backs. It highly encourages exploration, often leading to upgrades, while also encouraging fast retraversal. Combined with a really solid teleportation network, every time I earned a new traversal upgrade (hook shot, double jump, air dash, etc) was very quickly followed by me happily going back to past areas to find new stuff.

Where things weren’t necessarily as positive for me largely centered around progression. This is a game that just does not offer any progression hand holding. In some ways that’s good because it forces exploration. However, in a lot of cases I want to know vaguely what direction I should be going. At one point around the middle of the game I was tasked with finding two major power sources to move the story forward but it took me about 10 hours of gameplay to complete that. It’s not that I was having trouble, but that I just kept picking the wrong direction to go in. I would go down a path for 20 or 30 minutes and hit a wall, then have to wander back and find a new direction. This continued for a long time. It’s not that I was suffering for it, because I earned a ton of upgrades. However, what it generally meant was that by the time I found the right path to where I was supposed to go I was tremendously overpowered and had nearly completed the entire map in the game. The couple hours immediately following it were just a breeze. Had I had a little bit of direction to say “go roughly into this region” I think the flow of the overall game and my character’s power curve would have been more appropriately challenging and interesting.

I could also just do without the Pac-Man challenges and I think that really differs from a lot of reviews that I read. I just found these to generally be a chore. Platforming as Pac-Man was always some variation of stiff and inconsistent. Switching between the always moving default mode and player-controlled movement mode felt like switching between two modes with equally bad weaknesses – always moving had huge weaknesses in directionality of jumping and player-controlled really felt sloppy once in the air. Getting good completion times felt like it was just learning precise movement patterns instead of actually being good at the game, and later higher challenge levels felt more like fighting mechanics than actually having fun gameplay. It felt like a bad implementation of Pac-Man on the surface and a weird distraction from what was otherwise a really solid core Metroidvania game.

Wrapping Pac-Man into the wider Namco space force lore and turning it into a Metroidvania was certainly a bold choice, but I think more than not it worked out well. Combat was a real pleasant surprise for me in that it took a simple set of mechanics but did them incredibly well. Things around that experience may not have been as solid as other entries in the wider genre, but there’s enough that works out well here for me to give this a pretty easy recommendation.

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Game Ramblings #205 – SteamWorld: Build

More Info from The Station / Thunderful

  • Genre: City Builder
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: Steam, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch

I know it may seem weird to play a city builder on console and I can’t say I really disagree. However, one of the things that I’ve been poking around with as UE5 R&D is a set of gameplay systems around top-down grid-based gameplay, so this kind of fit the bill as something I should at least give a look. What this turned out to be was a wonderfully compact city builder that may be a bit on the simple side, but also made sure it was complete before it wore out its welcome.

This has all the pieces to make a fun city builder, but admittedly the city building is the part that I probably spent the least time in. It has some interest in that housing is upgradeable. You go from workers to engineers to aristocrats to scientists in tiers, and each one is its own class of employee for specific buildings. However, it’s all simple. You kind of just do it in order. You have a ton of different building types that generate different resources that leads up to the final resource to shoot a rocket into space. But again, it’s all simple. You place them down, location isn’t really important, and they are all necessary to get to the end game. You again kind of just do it in order.

The real interest of the game for me was the mining section. This isn’t really all that different from the city building in that you’re placing down workers and buildings to achieve a goal but it feels much more nuanced in a positive way. For one thing, placement does end up mattering.

This is a bit of a long-term change over a play session, but placement of where you put things changes pretty drastically over the course of a play through. At first you’re placing down workers wherever they fit and making it work. They all mine manually, they collect resources manually, and you push through. By the second mine level you start getting enemies, so now placement of defenses matters. The ultimate goal is to be efficient with your outgoing money, so catching as many enemies as possible with weapons means fewer costs to defense bots and a better run city. You also get access to conveyor belts at this level. This allowed me to basically automate resource gathering, but with the caveat that conveyors cannot run through pillars supporting the mine ceilings or camps supporting the workers. Again, placement gets more important as does the general efficiency of building the conveyors. By the third mine level you earn teleporters, which now had me min-maxing where I’m placing camps. Camps were far away from resources with a teleport network connecting important spots, then conveyors linked resources automatically to the surface. Maxing the resource gathering let me maximize trading, allowing me to then maximize money generation.

Admittedly part of the interest here is also that you are to some extent directly manipulating your citizens. You’re sending your miners or prospectors or defense robots to the locations that you want them to be investigating. It’s again pretty simple, but even that small bit of interaction is a lot to add some variety and direct presence to how you’re interacting with the game.

The mine section of the game is where I got it. I just wish there was more tying this to the surface game. I want the surface gameplay to make me also efficiently move resources out of the mine and to both workplaces and housing that need them. Right now it’s just kind of too simple. There’s technically resource movers from warehouses to work sites, but the layer of mine to warehouses is automatic. This level brings to mind possibilities from games like Pharaoh or Timberborn where efficient movement of goods isn’t just there but is crucial to a well run city, and I think this is where the general gameplay has the most chance of growth in a sequel.

However, the main reason I was playing was to check out the gamepad integration and this was surprisingly elegant and far more useable than I imagined a game of this type would be. There’s basically two places you can be interacting with at any time – build menus or the world. You switch between them with the press of a button, which served as a really consistent and clean way in both the city and mine segments to quickly change your mindset. This is helped by the build UI going away when you’re in city mode to reinforce the change.

The other thing that surprised me in its simplicity was that they just totally did away with a virtual mouse cursor when interacting with the city. You are just locked to the center of the screen, and whatever is there is what you can select. I honestly expected this to be really restricting, but it generally just worked. There’s definitely some oddities around the edge of cells where you can get stuck quickly swapping between adjacent cells, but the game largely just worked well with screen center selection. I suspect that this is a combination of buildings generally being large in screen, but you can scroll around the world visually pretty quickly and lock in one what you need easily so it easily exceeded my expectations.

It’s not necessarily what they appear to have been going for but there’s definitely a good city builder within the mechanics of this game. It just needs to have a bit more breadth to everything. Resource gathering needs to be less easy to just max out while resource movement needs to be more important. Building new things need to be a more impactful decision making moment instead of just build in order. The location of housing relative to goods could stand to be more important. Growth through worker types could stand to be a little less rigid – instead of requiring everything, let it be some combination of a list of things with the player steering the direction of city growth. Maps could have resource restrictions, allowing for the trade system to have more importance. Mechanically the pieces are all there for a sequel to push further into the genre, rather than being what feels like a starter entry to the genre.