Category: Adventure

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Game Ramblings #61 – Oceanhorn: Monster of Uncharted Seas

More Info from Cornfox & Bros.

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4 (previously on iOS)
  • Also Available On: Windows, macOS, Xbox One, Vita, Switch, iOS, Android

TL;DR

  • Decent take on a mashup of ideas from Zelda entries A Link to the Past and Wind Waker
  • Much improved experience playing the console version
  • Biggest weakness is in simplicity of the puzzles, though a end/post-game island shows promise in a sequel

The biggest surprise to me in playing this is how much the actual flow of the game had improved over the original iOS release.  I’d played it a few years back using one of those clamshell controllers for my phone, and while the game showed a lot of promise, it was extraordinarily easy to kind of lose track of what you were actually supposed to be doing.  Patches since that initial release, as well as the release on other platforms have brought a much better game, complete with additional cutscenes, voice acting, and some new items to help things out.  While it’s still a bit weak in the puzzle solving department, this ended up being a pretty solid take on the classic top-down style Zelda game.

While the camera is spun 45 degrees, there’s no mistaking the viewpoint straight out of the top-down Zelda games.

Let’s get this out of the way; yes this is a direct take on the Zelda series.  You go around to a series of dungeons, use a sword and shield as primary weapons, a handful of items as secondary helpers (including bombs, a bow, and a few helper magic spells), puzzle solve your way to a master key, fight a boss, and repeat.  It takes place in a world where you have to sail around to small islands after a large apocalyptic event killed nearly everyone (hello Wind Waker!), where you ultimately set forth the events that should help rejuvenate the world.  It’s a direct take, but it does a solid job of taking it on.

One of the big positive changes is that due to the inclusion of analog movement, you aren’t restricted to swings from a specific direction like the typical 2D Zelda games.  This allows for a lot better fine-tuned control over attacking enemy weak points.  The sword swings also have a small combo chain, rather than a single fixed swing and stab, giving a lot more potential in fighting in a more nuanced way.  This is backed by some nice changes to secondary weapons.  The bow and arrow is pretty solid on its own, with a bit of shot magnetizing to make things a bit more feasible at range.  However, the inclusion of being able to shoot through flames to make fire arrows is a nice touch.  On the bomb front, they basically work like Zelda items in the environment, but when thrown at enemies they explode on contact, giving a lot more direct way to use them offensively, and not depending on timing as much.

There’s a boss in every dungeon, each with its own set of mechanics to deal with.

However, that mechanic change can be exploited, particularly on bosses.  The bosses in the game all have their own mechanics to learn.  The one above for example has tentacles that have to be killed out before the weak point is exposed.  In another, the player has to use a reflective shield to deflect a laser into the boss’ weak points.  However, by the time I got into about the middle of the game, bombs were my weapon of choice at a boss.  They have AoE damage to hit multiple targets, which is nice for taking out spawned adds.  They also do significant damage on their own at range, so I didn’t generally have to get into a dangerous spot to throw them.  Overall it made the difficulty of the bosses go way down, where I’d have preferred to see a little more use of clever mechanics to make specific items the preference, similar to Zelda series bosses.

There were other areas where I also saw this sort of not quite to Zelda level experience.  The dungeons have the typical puzzle solving, but by and large they consisted of simple box maneuvering or one-time use of items (shoot a target, drop a box on a switch, etc), rather than more involved experiences.  In general it made the actual puzzle solving pretty simple, which was a bit of a disappointment.

The Island of Whispers is the best puzzle-solving in the game, involving the collection of 10 cursed skulls.

The Island of Whispers is the one exception to the easy puzzles in place.  This island came out in the 2.0 release of the phone SKU, and has been in the subsequent PC and console releases, and involves the collection of 10 cursed skulls across an entire island.  Due to this, the entire island becomes the puzzle area, instead of a cramped dungeon.  Some skulls are simply there to find if you’re paying attention.  However, some require specific use of certain items, or chained use of multiple items.  Some require manipulation of the environment in order to gain access to new areas.  Basically, this one island shows a lot of potential for the sequel’s ability to grow in interesting directions, as well as the potential of the growth of team in tackling the ARPG genre.

So is this going to stand up against the Zelda series? No, not really.  While it is solid, there are some core things that bring it down a few notches.  However, I would say it’s worth the $15 asking price to play it.  It’s an entertaining experience with at the very least solid mechanics, has about 10 hours of content to run through, and at least brings this style of game to some platforms that are often missing out on Zelda.  While it’s not quite up to the level of the upper echelon, continued improvement by the team could bring us something really interesting when Oceanhorn 2 comes out some time here in the future.

So I also want to have a bit of an aside here on a particular fish (and ignore my PS4 typing skills), because I’m a sucker for fishing in videogames.  The fishing system in place here is one that is inherently RNG-focused, with an emphasis on player endurance to catch the fish.  The fish will somewhat randomly move left or right, with the player pulling against it.  After a period of pulling in the correct direction, the fish strength meter will go down.  If you pull in the wrong direction, or the fish is dancing back and forth, the meter goes up.  In general, this means that the way to catch a fish is to ride out the points where you can’t make gains (and usually have losses), while holding out for the moments of rest where you can chip away at the fish.

Generally speaking this is a fun way to make use of an inherently RNG-based system.  Skill can’t entirely stop the fish from fighting back, but it can stop things from running away from the player entirely.  However, this all falls apart when the fish adds in an offensive mechanic that kills the player.  Now instead of enduring for the big moments of gains, you’re rolling the dice that those moments of big gains will actually happen in time for the fish to get caught.  It’s a weird change in mechanic that eliminates the skill factor and turns the entire system into an RNG mechanic.  This is made worse by the fact that missing the fish LITERALLY MEANS YOU DIE, so you have to backtrack to the last checkpoint, heal up, do whatever is involved with that to get back to whole, and try again.  It was a weird change that I only happened upon because I enjoy fishing.

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Game Ramblings #59 – RiME

More Info from Grey Box

  • Genre: Adventure/Puzzle
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Windows

TL;DR

  • Light puzzle-based gameplay feels like it aspires to be Ico/Journey, even if it doesn’t quite reach those heights
  • Fantastically good soundtrack and beautiful visual style
  • Disappointing performance problems on the Switch, even in docked mode

Admittedly this is a game that should be played on something other than the Switch.  At the end of the day this is more of an experience than it is a straight game, with the bulk of the gameplay existing as small and simple puzzle segments wrapped around a lot of audio and visual mastery.  As such, it deserves to be played in as high fidelity as possible.  That said, I’m an Unreal Engine developer, and this is using UE4, and my curiosity got the better of me.  While the Switch did an alright job keeping up, it was clear that the folks couldn’t quite wrangle the hardware in a great fashion, but the downfalls there couldn’t stop this from being a worthwhile play through.

The story runs through the five stages of grief, with visuals matching the appropriate area. In this case, depression carries the theme with rain and dark lighting throughout.

Any game that tries to be more of an emotional experience than a typical game needs to carry a strong theme, and RiME does a lot to succeed here.  In this case, the story takes place going through the five stages of grief, with each of the four main levels and epilogue covering one of these.  While your typical gameplay was the same in each area, the dangers associated with each spot tended to carry towards the theme.  In bargaining, for example, the player is attempting to resurrect robots in a series of dark caves while attempting to avoid a horde of faceless humanoids.  By the time we get to depression, these faceless creatures have stopped even attempting to interact with the player, leaving him to his own as things start to crumble around him.

In the anger level, the player is constantly harassed by a bird-like creature, attempting to stop his journey.

The best use of this though is the anger level.  Immediately upon entering it, the player character is thrown by a flying creature down into a small desert area.  Throughout the rest of the level, he has to dart from hiding place to hiding place avoiding being attacked, and never really being allowed to rest.  While there’s no actual dialog in this game, the idle animations make it clear that the player is afraid of his situation, and the direct anger shown by the creature plays right into the theme of the area.

The fox partner is an important helper in showing the player where to go, which is often necessary due to somewhat inconsistent level design.

That said, the gameplay doesn’t quite keep with the rest of the presentation aspects.  One of the most obvious problems is that it can often be REALLY easy to get lost.  While there is some merit to exploring and finding some hidden artifacts and collectibles, there were quite a few times where I simply didn’t know what direction I was supposed to be going.  The real main clue that something is the right direction tended to be looking for climbable ledges in weird spots, rather than more elegant environmental solutions.  This is solved through the use of a fox, which tends to place itself in the direction you want to go, yelping away to lead you in the right direction.

Beyond that though, the rest of the gameplay is pretty basic.  The pattern has a tendency to be a single room puzzle, followed by a bit of traversal, or a single room that can be looped back into itself in multiple vertical layers.  Puzzles run the gamut from block pushing to light manipulation to the use of physics to get through the environment.  However, they don’t really ever get to a point where the solution isn’t pretty easy to arrive at, and feel like they serve more as pacing instruments than actual gameplay.

While the Switch version doesn’t lose as much visual fidelity as I expected, performance suffered as a result.

Having played this on the Switch, I can also only recommend to play it elsewhere.  It’s not that the Switch version is bad, but the performance was pretty typically under 30 FPS.  In general, as an Unreal developer this was a disappointment.  There’s some areas where things could have been obviously cut to improve frame times (sight lines in open areas are huge, and could have used more aggressive LODing).  The level streaming the other platforms use to break up the levels is also in place here, but causes a much more significant framerate impact.  That wouldn’t typically be a huge issue, but a lot of the streaming points took place at areas where more important interactions with the environment were occurring, rather than at more passive hallway areas.  In general, it doesn’t feel like a game that should be suffering from the sort of performance issues I was seeing, especially relative to its competition on the system.

All that said, this is absolutely a game worth playing.  While it’s not quite the classic that Ico or Journey have been recognized as, it’s still a pretty solid example of a game as a piece of art.  Visually it uses a simple art style to very cleanly represent the emotional state of the player’s story arc.  The audio design is fantastic, and its soundtrack is one of the best of the year.  However, play this one on as high-performance of a platform as possible; it’ll be absolutely worth the bump.

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Game Ramblings #58 – Assassin’s Creed Origins

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Combat’s is serviceable.  Best part of actual combat is in the capabilities around stealth and distraction-based kills
  • Fantastically gorgeous imagining of what ancient Egypt may have looked like
  • Story serves as an interesting starting point to the lore for the overall story, without the usual distractions of the assassin vs. templar nonsense

So after a year off, I suppose the question became Is this game actually good?  In general, the answer to that is a pretty resounding yes.  However, I also enjoyed Unity and Syndicate a lot, despite them being an obvious step back from Black Flag.  What this one has managed to do is smooth out a lot of the core mechanics in the previous titles, while also shedding a lot of the collection madness that plagues later entries.

The visuals of the game are an obvious starting point. They’re pretty universally fantastic.

I’ll start with the obvious one and keep this quick, this game is up there on the list of best looking games ever.  A lot of this feels like the culmination of a lot of past games.  The water from Black Flag is used here a lot, whether it’s in sailing down the Nile or puttering around the edge of the Mediterranean.  When sandstorm are rolling in they look imposing; when you’re stuck in a sandstorm it’s threatening.  Humans during cutscenes are significantly less derpy than in the past, and now actually do a good job of getting the emotion of the scenes out there, even if hair is still a bit of a struggle.  Even moving into the non-desert areas in the northwest, the plains full of grass and flowers swaying in the breeze are a sight to see.

However, that’s not important in the grand scheme of things.  Let’s get into gameplay.

Climbing and exploring is still a huge part of the game, and pyramids everywhere give you lots of opportunity.

I suspect most people would talk combat, but to me the core of the Assassin’s Creed games that I enjoyed was the exploration and stealth, and that’s still a great thing here elevated to even greater heights thanks to the landmarks you get to climb.

The synchronize points were always a fun distraction in past AC games.  However, it’s another entire level when the point is at the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza or at the top of the Pharos of Alexandria.  These areas have some of the better pure climbing in the game, and the views from up top are always spectacular.  Even better is the fact that any of the historical landmarks you go up to generally have some sort of puzzle-based temple in them.  While these are generally quick hitters, some of them get into some pretty neat use of weight-based physics segments to make sure that crashing a temple isn’t just about climbing in a straight line.

Getting around is easy thanks to autopilot camels.

Exploration is aided by the fact that moving around in the environment just doing random things is generally just really easy and a lot of fun to do.  Origins has had a severe reduction in pure STUFF to do.  Ya there’s still sync points, there’s still side quests, but there’s no longer fluff things in the map like paintings or unguarded treasures.  What this has been replaced by are small areas such as forts, trading posts, abandoned temples, etc that may contain things to collect.  Ultimately this ends up resulting in a lot of time in-stealth either shanking or avoiding enemies, but at least providing some amount of gameplay beyond just walking up to a thousand icons on the map.

The best part of all of this though the process of moving around the world.  At the end of the day, the game feels a lot like Black Flag despite the lack of pirates and sailing, and it comes down to how you travel.  The lack of a distinct singular large city opens up the map.  Sure, you have larger areas like Alexandria or Memphis, but the bulk of the map is small villages with a few shops and people, similar to the smaller forts and villages in Black Flag that were found just in sailing around the Caribbean.

The horses and camels basically become your sailing replacement.  Sure you can move around manually, but the best thing to do is set autopilot and let the horse do its thing.  This combines with the ability to swap to the main character’s eagle, allowing you to scan for resources, look out for enemies, or search for objectives all while your horse heads towards where you want.  It takes a lot of the tedium out of travelling, allowing you to focus on other things as you go.

I can’t avoid the topic of fire. It’s everywhere and always great.

I guess that leaves us at combat.  In a lot of ways it’s definitely the weakest part of the game, but not necessarily because it’s bad.  In general it’s just kind of simple, and feels like the backup for when things don’t go as you want.  There’s both bow & arrow and melee weapons in place.  When going into melee, you can do a shield bash as a parry or a dodge maneuver, both of which can be timed against solid and obvious tells in the enemy actions.  However, that’s about it.  Ya there’s some subtleties in the usage of the attacks, but it’s basically details at that point.  The real strength of the combat systems is when you avoid it entirely.

Pure stealth is still the ideal way to go about the game.  You’ve got your straight stealth kills, which is still an effective way to deal with baddies.  There’s also a number of tools in place to cause havoc.  A couple of the highlights are the ability to set poison traps on dead bodies or the ability to enrage enemies resulting in them attacking each other.  There’s also the little use of fire.  You can have swords with fire, bows with fire, set horses on fire, shoot pots that explode into fire.  Basically, when things go on fire it usually results in hilarious things, even if it’s a bit dangerous to be around.

So is this a big redeeming game that was worth Ubisoft skipping a year for? I dunno.  It feels like a natural extension of Black Flag, and not something that they spent an extra year doing something groundbreaking.  However, it’s still a pretty solid game.  If you enjoyed Black Flag but were pretty cold on the games since, this is a pretty solid spot to jump back into the story.