Category: Adventure

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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.

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Game Ramblings #52 – Metroid: Samus Returns

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Action/Adventure, Metroidvania
  • Platform: 3DS
  • Originally Released on: Game Boy

TL;DR

  • Fantastic re-imagining of Game Boy’s Metroid II: Return of Samus
  • Additions to game break some of the expectations of the genre, but allow for a much higher challenge level of the base game
  • Core loop of 40 effective mini boss fights keeps action high, but doesn’t get stale due to increasing power level of the Metroids
  • Random note since it gave it to me, but my clear time was 8:38:13, which seems a bit on the low side of average to my surprise.

Nintendo is having one hell of a year.  Breath of the Wild and the Switch in general have been a runaway success.  Mario + Rabbids showed they could give control of their games to someone else and still maintain the high quality Nintendo feel.  Now with Metroid: Samus Returns, they’ve shown there is both life remaining in the 3DS, as well as some new ground that can be explored in one of their storied IPs.  This re-imagining of Metroid II is another fine example of what can happen when this series is given to outside developers, much like Retro and the Prime series, and also shows that 2D Metroid games don’t have to stick to their conventions and still be fantastic on their own.

Since some fans of the Metroid series are going to find these controversial, let’s start with some of the little changes and additions that this remake brings.  Fights against Metroids start and end with checkpoints, allowing you to not have to trek all over the place to guarantee save locations.  Along with some more generally helpful abilities, you have a rechargeable map scanner that also acts as a way to show blocks that can be broken.  In addition to the usual save points and ammo/energy recharge stations, there are also now teleport stations as a means of fast travel.  All of these things in general break some of the mold of exploring every little bit of land in Metroid games, and also break some of the re-traversal expectations of the series.  However, the actual end result is that the developers have been able to drastically increase the difficulty across the board, much to the game’s advantage.

Traversal in most Metroid experiences has usually brought relatively little danger outside of boss fights.  Enemies would do damage if you got hit, but more often than not the health drops they left behind would more than suffice to heal you back up.  This one definitely doesn’t follow that pattern.  It’s not unusual for a melee hit from a normal enemy to do half an energy tank or more of damage, and that’s just on normal difficulty.  Once you get to the Metroids and eventually bosses, multiple energy tank loss from one hit is expected.  The short version here is that even by end game, I could expect to maybe take 4-5 hits in a boss fight before I was dead, so being able to respawn in a checkpoint next to the boss room was particularly appreciated while I was learning fights.

This is particularly important, because the combat system in place definitely had some things that have to be learned for Metroid veterans.  On the smaller side of things, Samus can now root herself in place and aim 360 degrees with the analog stick.  While this does offer up significantly better precision for attacks, it also leaves her extremely vulnerable to quick attacks.  This is balanced by the new melee counter attacks.  If an enemy flashes, Samus can activate a melee swing to counter an enemy, leaving them open for high impact damage.  For boss fights in particular, this activates a little mini-cutscene where you can unload missiles without repercussions, which ends up being the biggest damage dealer against Metroids.

In general, these changes were a much larger positive than I was expecting.  The 360 aim opened up a lot of possibilities for much more dynamic boss fights, where they would hover around the room in spots where I had to play a balance of moving to avoid projectiles vs. stopping in place to get off a few precision shots for damage.  Once the enemy then came in range, the timing skill behind watching for opportunities for melee counters gave the game a feel more typical of heavy melee action games, which Metroid typically has not been.  Given that the developer MercurySteam was also behind the Castlevania: Lords of Shadow games, this perhaps isn’t that surprising, but it was very welcoming.

I think the best way to wrap this up is that I’m pleasantly surprised.  The studio behind this has released some great games, but it’s been a while since a 2D Metroid came out (seriously, Zero Mission was in 2004) and I was surprised they were being given so much of a chance to take liberties with the core gameplay.  By and large they’ve also worked really well.  The studio has been on record saying that they had originally pitched a remake demo of Metroid Fusion and been turned down, which led to this project.  It’s clear they had a lot of passion for the franchise anyway and it’s evident in the quality of the game they’ve released.  It’s also worth noting that a post-credits scene shows the rise of the X parasite from Fusion, which makes sense given it also takes place on the planet SR388 of this game.  Whether or not that’s just there as a tongue in cheek reference to their original hopes or the sign of something else, I can only hope that this and the upcoming Metroid Prime 4 are the beginning of more for this franchise.  It’s been on the side lines for way too long.