Category: Adventure

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Game Ramblings #183 – Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Metroidvania
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, PC, Luna

I wanted to say that this game was a huge surprise but given the fact that this was made by the studio behind the fantastic Rayman games of the last decade, I probably shouldn’t be surprised. This is a game that just nails so much of what make Metroidvanias something that I go after. It combines a great sense of that side of the platformer genre and mixes in some really gratifying melee combat to make an experience absolutely worth playing.

For me it was the little things that it did right that make this such a memorable thing as a Metroidvania.

On the traversal front it doesn’t simply have retraversal like most games in the genre. What it often instead does is have a little puzzle/platforming loop that ends with a door opening a shortcut for later use. It’s a level beyond the usual changes brought about by gaining new powers that I really found interesting. It made core paths and side paths really obvious and allowed me to focus on filling out the map in areas along the core path, with the knowledge that I very likely had completed an entire section of the map when it ended in a loop. These areas were also very well marked on the map, where the end of these loops were generally marked by a one-way door. It gets rid of the sort of missile door typical of Metroid games and makes it obvious that you will just unlock this area when you’re done and be good to go.

Speaking of the map, the game is both a little less automatic but also incredibly more flexible than recent Metroid titles that I’ve played. This game doesn’t really automatically place much in the way of iconography when traversing new areas. Yes, it will unveil the areas you walk through but beyond one-way doors you’re kind of on your own for placing icons. What it does have is a particularly good tool for doing so. Beyond manual placement of various icon types – which is greatly appreciated – it has a very specific thing you unlock early that lets you add screenshots to the map. These are hugely important to retraversal. See some weird looking area you can’t get into? Add a screenshot. Chest out of reach with your current set of tools? Add a screenshot. Suspicious door? Add a screenshot. What you end up doing is scattering the map with these things and as you come back later for various reasons, you can get a very obvious visual representation of your own past with the areas and be reminded of the specific thing you wanted to check later. It’s such a nice built-in note taking aspect that feels very natural in the genre.

The other thing I found really good was how well the traversal moves actually integrated into combat, keeping flow between the two really natural. For example, one of the early moves you get is a horizontal teleport. This has obvious uses to clear large gaps in traversal. However, they also start having you face enemies and bosses that encourage using the teleport as a dodge mechanic to get behind and break protections. A later upgrade is effectively a grapple hook, which is useful for grabbing onto spots in the world but is also useful for pulling enemies to you/pulling yourself to enemies at range. This is pretty universal for all mechanics. If it can be used for combat it likely has a traversal use and in practice it means you are constantly reinforcing mechanics at all times, allowing for the player to naturally fall in and out of combat in an engaging way.

However, the thing about combat that surprised me is that the game got significantly easier as the game went on. To some obvious extent this is the natural state of the power curve. You get more powers and more tools in your tool box, and things will get easier. However, to me it felt like the mechanics of enemies didn’t get more complex at the same rate as I was upgrading. Sure, I was gaining things like heals on parry that helped me out, but the bosses weren’t throwing out crazy amounts of new stuff causing me damage. Yes, I was gaining more effective dodging mechanics, but the bosses weren’t necessarily causing me to dodge more often. What it meant was that as the game was getting marginally harder I was getting significantly more powerful, and the most difficult bosses were really the ones near the start of the game when I didn’t have the tools to compete as well against the mechanics. By the end of the game I was having little difficulty, even accounting for the fact that I was getting naturally better as time went on.

I do want to also shout out the flexibility of options here, which admittedly does lead to the game potentially being easier. Early on I noticed that I was missing a lot of what I thought were parries that I was timing correctly. It didn’t really feel like I was missing them, so much as the game was eating my parry inputs – kind of a weird battle against inherent input and screen latency. I dug into the difficulty options and noticed that I could adjust the parry window independent of all other difficulty options. A little bit of extra flexibility here completely solved the problem for me. I didn’t necessarily want an “easier” experience, but one that matched my expectation of timing with what was happening on screen and I was able to fix the specific thing that was causing me issues. That level of granularity is something I really love to see in place because it lets the user tailor the experience to the specifics of both their play style and their play setup without needing to just globally make the game easy.

I’m pretty happy that this is the game that brought the Prince of Persia series back, rather than the seemingly doomed Sands of Time remake. I don’t necessarily have an issue with the 3D entries in the series, but this feels so much more like the natural extension of the original games. It expands upon the open platforming of the original and goes with a very good modern combat layer on top of it to end up in a place where the series now feels pulled into the modern day, without really sacrificing the original vision.

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Game Ramblings #180 – Assassin’s Creed Mirage

More Info from Ubisoft

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, PC

Is it weird to say that the thirteenth entry in a series feels like a breath of fresh air? This one absolutely does. If I look at the recent super open world AC entries I loved Origins, I liked Odyssey, and then Valhalla totally lost me. As the series got bigger it became less about stealth and more about RPG systems. The environments were impressive as hell, but they grew increasingly empty. The games just lost what made AC fun for me. In going smaller for Mirage, it feels like a return to form combined with iteration learned in the larger entries, leading to something that feels like a better version of where the series was going for the AC2 trilogy of titles.

To me, one-hit assassinations were essential to Assassin’s Creed. The open world titles starting with Origins did away with that. You could improve your gear and get skill upgrades to eventually get to that point in those games, but by the time Valhalla came around it was clear that they wanted to steer you into combat. My issue there is that the combat was ultimately not that great. One-on-one it worked pretty well, but as the target count increased it became increasingly annoying to deal with the timing of parries and dodges. Oddly enough, Mirage manages to kind of solve both problems.

In the few situations where I did get into combat it was much improved, and to me it was simple – parries were hugely powerful. My target count problem in AC was ultimately that clearing out the crowd was a huge chore. You could parry and dodge, but it would take what felt like forever to clear a crowd. In Mirage, it’s one or two parries max to stun an enemy and the stun state is a guaranteed kill. That puts it in the territory of assassinations in terms of speed and efficiency. It removes so much of the drag of combat and makes combat fun again. However, they also improved some of the enemy attack order, so it feels more like watching for one attack at a time, and less like randomly being spammed by a group. It’s a small change with huge ramifications.

However, the big thing is that literally EVERYTHING can be assassinated fully. Normal NPCs, armored NPCs, all but a handful of bosses. If you choose to, this game has returned to the point where you can run the experience full stealth and treat it as more of a puzzle game instead of action. To me that is the perfect experience. I love the process of finding paths through enemy bases; the process of pulling enemies to stealth areas to get rid of them safely; the process of finding ways to get through locked doors into safe areas. Being able to solely focus on that is the best way for me to enjoy this type of gameplay, so it being a sole focus is such a huge improvement back to what I wanted from this series.

The other important thing I suppose is that this game is short. It takes place specifically within Baghdad and a very limited surrounding desert area and focuses on a single quick 5 target story. However, that isn’t saying that it feels like a skimpy amount of content. What it feels like is a practical and good amount of content. Each core target takes place within a series of smaller subquests, often involving the search for clues to their location and name. There’s a nice pattern that evolves here where you get some story and interactions with NPCs, then a bit of stealth for investigating, then a big final segment to assassinate the target. It’s got a rhythm that works perfectly in terms of pacing. All told it ends up being about 20 hours if you do most of the content in place, which was long enough to feel meaty but short enough to not drag out.

In my Valhalla ramblings I said:

This series is ready for that next step forward, and it’s got some great examples to look at if they’re ready to make that push.

I can’t tell if Mirage is necessarily that step forward, but it at least feels like recognition that the formula was stale. This is obviously a DLC that got turned into a standalone title, but whether or not that was an accident it ended up to the series’ benefit. This is such a focused and fun experience that it makes me hope that they push for these tighter experiences. It gets rid of so much unnecessary bulk to just make a fun game and ended up being my favorite AC since at least Origins, and likely since Black Flag. If you’ve been on the fence for the series for the past few years that’s probably for good reason, but this is a pretty good spot to jump back in if you’ve got the itch for sneaking around.

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Shelved It #20 – Tunic

More Info from Isometric Corp Games

  • Genre: Action/Adventure
  • Platform: PS5
  • Also Available On: PS4, Xbox One, Xbox Series, Switch, Steam

Tunic is one of those games that just convinces me that somewhere along the way I’ve been left behind by a certain subset of games. It’s the type of game that I can see why people enjoy, but for the life of me I just cannot wrap my head around. There’s little things that annoy me that should be relatively minor, but as a whole just frustrated me to the point where I go, “nope, this isn’t for me.” I guess for me it comes down to too much Souls in a Zelda game ruins my fun.

This is absolutely the type of game that I should love since I’m a huge fan of the 2D Zelda games. It’s got a similar approach to combat. It’s got a similar approach to world design. It’s got a similar approach to exploration. However, I just could not grok any of that in the same way that I could a Zelda game. In a couple of nights of sitting here trying to suss out my frustrations playing this, I’ve been able to narrow it down to two specific things that really got under my skin – core combat delays and overworld design.

Core combat is really down to one thing for me, and it’s an inherent difficulty of the game, not necessarily because the game is hard, but because of how they handle specifically the attack animation. Anything that happens after the attack animation must wait for the animation to complete. In particular that means you can’t dodge and you can’t defend with your shield. Because of this, I found myself taking a lot of what I thought were unnecessary hits. I could start an attack, see that the enemy is about to attack themselves, and be unable to do anything about the incoming damage. I would just have to eat the damage and hope for the best. This is the same issue I have with the Souls series, which is another one that has me convinced that some part of gaming has left me behind.

Ultimately, I guess my frustration here isn’t so much that I can’t dodge when I want to and cancel the attack animation – although frankly I think that is a good option to have – but that it slows the pace down in a way that feels not fun. Rather than being in the attack and actively using my defensive measures, I’m staying back in a full defensive posture, making sure that I’m in an absolutely safe position to attack, and getting in a single swing. If I happen to notice that I knocked an enemy back I could go for a combo, but it often wasn’t worth the risk. There’s too many situations where the game has you fighting 1v3 or more, so getting a combo in on a knocked back enemy just opens you up for damage from other targets. This sort of pace of play is something that I never enjoy, and having it be because I simply can’t play at a faster pace safely is something that I really don’t enjoy in modern Souls-ish games.

The other thing that really killed a lot of my enjoyment ended up being the overworld design, and this can be traced to a culmination of a few things. The first is that there’s not really an effective map in place. You get a sort of overworld map early on, but it doesn’t show where the player is so you have to contextually know roughly where you are to make much use of it. It also doesn’t extend to the sort of dungeon areas at all, which is less helpful. The second part is that the overworld is intentionally built like a maze, so it doesn’t exactly match up with the provided map anyway. This is then tied to a distinct inconsistency in finding save points. In the main overworld area, the only one that I actually found was the one in the first picture, which I happened to accidentally keep looping back to while I wandered around lost like an idiot, or when I died running into something that I wasn’t ready to fight.

I guess ultimately I feel like you kind of have to pick your poison. If you want difficulty, I feel like you need to be consistent in the player’s ability to save their progress as they make it. If you want to avoid hand holding their progress, then you need some clarity over where the player has been. If you want to not really give an effective map, the player should have a pretty clear path through the world. It’s not like the genre has never had these things. Even the old Game Boy Zelda games had pretty clear maps, pretty clear idea of what the player needed to do (follow the dungeons in order, but we aren’t telling you precisely where they are), and pretty fair difficulty. The combination they picked is none of that, and in doing so it just kind of felt like the worst kind of 90s gameplay where you’re wasting time for the sake of wasting time in trying to figure out what you’re doing, and more often than not accidentally going the right way eventually.

As I was playing through the first sort of side dungeon area, I thought I was getting to a point where I was starting to wrap my head around the game, but getting back into the main overworld made it clear to me that it just wasn’t coming together for me. I think there’s something there when the game works, because a legitimately harder 2D Zelda I think is something I want to like, but this one just didn’t hit for me. It felt like the worst combination of things that I don’t enjoy in the sort of Souls-adjacent rush to market that’s happened in the last few years and it just left me wanting to move on.