Category: Adventure

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Game Ramblings #197 – Kunai

More Info from TurtleBlaze

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PC

Metroidvanias are usually an easy to pick breather for me in between longer RPG runs, and we were definitely in one of those. After Metaphor and Mario & Luigi back to back I needed a break. This one kind of fell into my lap via my backlog randomizer, but it chose well. This is a compact experience with solid combat and great movement that really hit what I needed out of it.

The thing that really stood out at the start was how fast the game was. This has such a smooth movement set that really just worked and continues to get better as the game continues. Core movement is fast on its own, which prevents the game from dragging. You then get the kunai that act like a typical grappling hook. This adds a bunch of possibilities for vertical movement up walls as well as even faster horizontal movement. You then get double jumps to cover gaps and eventually an SMG that you can shoot down to hover to cover even LARGER gaps. Finally, you get a dash to extend your movement even further.

All of the movement feels like it’s in service to reduce friction in moving through the environment. The unfortunate thing is that despite it improving the main story line, I don’t think it really does much to improve retraversal. Ultimately this feels like more of a problem of the core path than the movement mechanics but there just isn’t that much reason to retraverse most areas. You’ll go into an area, maybe hit a few areas a second time on the wya out, then really not see it again. In a couple of cases you retraverse through old areas late in the game, but for the most part the central hub of the game is so conveniently located that you just go through it instead of old areas. If I wanted to do a 100% run I’d have visited more, but just to complete the game there wasn’t much reason.

The second thing that really stood out to me was how much combat changed over time, but also how naturally the change felt. The first half of the game is entirely melee driven, and it starts that way early. You get a katana and learn to use it both at close range and for deflecting projectiles coming at far range. The use of it opens up more as you get traversal mechanics – for example using the kunai to grapple and reposition. This on its own feels incredibly tight and fun. It’s obviously pretty simple and wouldn’t have had legs to support an entire game, but it’s incredibly effective as the opening half. It’s when ranged starts to come in that things really change.

The first ranged thing you get is a throwing star. Its main use in combat is less for damage and more for its stun capability. Being able to stun larger enemies brings them from things that need at least a bit of thinking to something that you can run over, and as a power curve thing it felt well timed to right around when fighting the larger enemies is becoming a bother. Once the speed of stunning starts to become bothersome, you get the SMG. Besides its traversal hover utility, this is pure damage. This allowed me to start taking out enemies as I moved. In large packs I would still need to slow down a bit, but ultimately I was getting rid of targets quicker. The rocket launcher finished converting the game into something entirely different. Now rather than slowing down I was simply lobbing rockets and watching everything explode. The power curve changes allowed the game to slowly morph into a ranged-centric game in a way that felt entirely natural.

The thing that impressed me about this was that while it made getting through trash quicker, the bosses were clearly designed with this change in mind. Each boss felt like a test of the new things you gained. Early bosses were largely stationary, allowing you to dodge attacks and get in close range for melee damage. As you gained ranged weapons, bosses started requiring those because they were fast or had a lot of movement or just stayed out of range. By the final boss, I was basically using all traversal while lobbing rockets to get splash damage and focusing purely on dodging. It was such a smooth transition that I didn’t think about it, but in hindsight it was handled much better than a lot of games handle the change.

I wouldn’t say that this is necessarily a game of the year candidate from the year it came out, but it didn’t necessarily need to be. In simply being good at what it did, it provided exactly what I wanted out of it – a breather from RPGs. In being short it also was something easy to run through without growing tired of it. Basically, it made itself easy to play, easy to finish, and easy to recommend.

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Game Ramblings #195 – The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: Switch

The big thing that came out of the pre-release press for this was obviously that you get to play as Zelda for a change. However, beyond it being set dressing that didn’t really make a huge difference to the feel of the game. What did was the core hook for the game – that instead of swinging a sword around (technically, kinda sorta….) you get to make copies of things that do the fighting for you. What you end up getting out of that is a 2D Zelda that feels like it’s Link’s Awakening by way of Tears of the Kingdom, and boy is it a lot of fun.

The thing that made this game work for me so well was the little moments. It’s the same thing that really worked for me about Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. Sure, the core loop is still fun and classic Zelda – go to a general location, puzzle your way through a dungeon, get a heart container and a shiny upgrade – but the little moments within that are magic.

That screenshot up there is one of those moments for me. You gain nearly immediate access to spawn echoes – copies of things you’ve found or defeated in the world – so my initial instinct for combat was “lol army of bats”. And that is a perfectly valid way to play the game. However, you get to flying things that bats are simply not good against; they’re simply too fast. One of the other powers that you get is the ability to lock onto objects that move and pull or follow them around. They don’t explicitly teach you use it as a combat mechanic, but in typical confounding Nintendo fashion they put the mechanic in front of you so often that eventually it just clicks. I ran into these birds and they were just obnoxious to me because they were fast and swarming, so I locked one down to just stop it for a breather. That’s when the light bulb went off. Lock it down and send an army of whatever after it since it can’t move. And it just works.

Those little moments happen all over. Large gap that you need to clear but is too far to jump? Well, you can use an echo of a classic 2D Zelda flying tile. Or you can build a bridge of beds. Or you can grab a bird echo and float over the gap. Or you can make a chain of spider echoes and climb on their webs. Or you can create a chain of water blocks to swim across it. Swarm of enemies about to attack hiding in grass? Well, you can use your Link transformation and fight them directly. Or you can send a pack of wolves to fight them. Or you can set the grass on fire to kill them. Or you can trap them in water blocks and drown them. Or you can create an elevator block and simply go over the top of them. Need to move a block onto a switch behind a fence? Well, you can use your attachment power and push it along. Or you can use a fan to move it. Or you can create an unnecessarily complicated stack of objects to knock something else onto the switch. Or you can spawn an Armos to path onto it.

If this sounds very much like a “play it your way”, that’s because it is. What I ended up finding the most fun was nearly entirely avoiding using the Link copy powers and focusing entirely on spawning echoes in weird fashions to get through the game. Even on the last fight I went in this direction. My focus there was on spawning echoes to fight for me and avoiding damage, making the experience a defensive dance in minimizing health loss. The game is basically a tool set for you to screw around and find solutions where the end result as a player is laughing because your absurd idea actually worked. In that way, it feels exactly like the building toolset in Tears of the Kingdom.

However, all of these options really gets into what keeps this game in simply “very good” category than being truly great. The UX around selecting your echoes is miserable. The entire selection process is being presented with an enormous growing list of echoes, at least 75% of which are completely useless by end game, and a few basic sorting options (most used, recently used, recently found, category, ….and one I’m forgetting). Finding an echo you haven’t used in a while is a needle in a haystack and there’s really no reason this couldn’t have been at least minimized.

One option they could have taken? Simply reduce the list as the game went on. There’s a whole bunch of spots where you get level 1, 2, 3 variations of the same general monster (ex: Spear Moblin). When you first get the echo, it totally makes sense that they both exist as the newer one is stronger and costs more to spawn. However, one of the upgrades you get throughout the game reduces the spawn cost of specific echoes. Once the level N and N+1 match, there’s no reason that the lower one couldn’t simply be removed from the list entirely.

Another option they could have taken? JUST LET ME TURN OFF SOME ECHOES. There are just so many things you can spawn here, and a lot of them I never found a good way to work into my combat experience. I get that there would probably be some hesitancy that the player would turn off something important to progression, but at the same time Nintendo has shown in the past that they are incredibly capable of tutorializing important things in ways that remind the player that “hey this is important”. But 4 beds? I don’t need 4 beds. I don’t need the 8 or 9 types of moblins that I found. I certainly don’t need the 5 or 6 statues that I found beyond the one dungeon where they were a mechanic.

The game really just ultimately suffers a bit from too many choices that don’t have any impact, and cleaning that up would oddly enough have really elevated the experience, as digging through menus for the thing you want at any specific time is really a grating experience.

That said, the game was still an absolute joy. It’s both a path forward for the 2D entries in the series in terms of overall quality and a great title on its own. It shows that Zelda games can still be full of action without necessarily requiring a sword. It shows that there’s still legs in dungeon-focused experiences instead of an open world. I suppose it also shows that Zelda can be a star on her own, though I’ve never really been convinced that Link being the hero really matters beyond it being set dressing. It’s the perfect title for the Switch where it is in its life cycle, providing something high quality and experimental while we wait for the bigger next console to come out.

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Game Ramblings #190 – Dave the Diver

More info from Mint Rocket

  • Genre: Action/Adventure/Sim
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, PS4, PS5

I’ll be 100% honest and admit that I took so long getting to this one purely because it didn’t have a physical copy and I had too many other games that did, but that problem was finally solved. What I was given a year after release was a game that surprised me in how well it blended a casual sort of roguelite and a sort of modern take on old arcade games like Root Beer Tapper. Played on the Switch it even really feet into a really good short session experience, with most game loops taking under thirty minutes in total. It really just hit all the marks for the type of experience I have time for right now.

The core of the game is really all about fishing, but it’s pretty easy to judge the entire game by that from an outside perspective. Luckily that part of the game is pretty solid on its own. It’s nothing complicated, but the small set of weaponry used to either harpoon or shoot fish is pretty varied and lets the player tune the experience to their liking. Confident with dodging? Go high damage close combat. Want some more safety? Build out as a sniper, but have less ammo as a balance point. Want to get higher quality meat? Build out sleep weapons, but potentially lose out on bigger targets that can’t be put to sleep as easily.

The nice thing about the entire result of the fishing is that it all feeds directly into the restaurant which feeds right back into fishing. Those fish you catch obviously become meat for sushi in the restaurant portion of the game, but shortly into the game it also becomes an avenue for getting fish eggs that you can farm, which opens up a new avenue for getting meat and lets you move on to new areas without worrying about a lack of supplies. Those supplies then become the avenue for sales, which gets you money to get upgrades for fishing gear – better weapons, more carrying capacity, more oxygen capacity, etc – which allows you to fish longer, which allows you to get more and better supplies for the restaurant.

If it was just that loop I probably would have been happy enough, but the game is broken up in a number of ways that really give nice breathing points at regular intervals. Every now and again you get big boss fights with unique mechanics. These come as parts of both the story and as just random events, so their cadence is that you get one every few in-game days. Besides generally offering unique items, they simply are just fun. These are the things that test your combat knowledge to the peak, requiring good dodging and good attack knowledge. Some of them are pretty standard gun fights but a few standouts used other mechanics. One used dodging as the core mechanic, with the player grabbing a weight to deflect punches that stun the boss. Another that really got my attention purely involved picking up and throwing rocks to cause damage as regular attacks were just not effective.

The breakup of mechanics also then extended to the restaurant experience. Every not and again you’d get restaurant objectives where you’d compete in an Iron Chef-style competition where the game turned into something akin to the Cooking Mama series. Other restaurant events involved getting specific ingredients to please VIP guests or getting a specific type of ingredient (ex: shark meat) to take on an entire party of guests. The nice thing about the restaurant side of things is that these more often than not opened up new mechanics. Early on it was things like the farm for rice and vegetables, but later on it even got to specific types of ingredients (ex: unlock eggs or specifically habaneros). These little things happening every now and again meant that I was never in a specific type of pattern of just going out and getting whatever, but instead going back and forth sometimes focusing on the story objectives and sometimes focusing on just fun little side things to then expand my repertoire with new and better recipes.

All of these mechanics combined to a place where it never felt like my time was wasted. Runs in fishing at least always got ingredients to feed back into the restaurant which then at least got money for upgrades. Deeper runs in the fishing portion would push me to find new areas to unlock new species and mechanics. New events in the restaurant would allow me to push for new mechanics. Every run felt impactful, which is a huge bonus on top of it being fun.

It’s all then a bonus that the DLC content is also fun. There’s things like playing as Godzilla above. There’s an entire set of night time events based on the game Dredge that add new items and types of fish that can only be caught on event nights. There’s an entire set of rhythm mini game sections expanded by a Guilty Gear Strive DLC that provide a fun musical interlude. Basically, this extends the entire game’s theme to this point – provide new ways for the player to have fun on any single run.

The consistency with which the game pulls that off is impressive, and it never wears off. I could do a single 20 minute dive run and do something useful. I could play for hours of multiple runs and just be engrossed by everything. It perfectly encapsulates how roguelites should work, with the player never feeling like their time is wasted and they’re always making forward progress. For that to happen in a game so inherently not tied to the usual death loop of the genre is therefore even more impressive.