Category: Switch

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Mini Ramblings #4 – Gap Fillers

I had a bit of time to fill in between Dark Cloud 2 and the release of Final Fantasy VII Remake, so I took the opportunity to run through a whole slew of short games on my backlog. Below are some of the random notes about the ones I selected.

Gorogoa

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

Ultimately this is a really well crafted puzzle game that is meant for touch screens or mice, so I’m glad I played it on Switch. Originally released for Windows and iOS, the Switch version came over with full touch screen support, and that’s how I ended up playing it.

The core loop involves a 2×2 square board where interactive tiles can be moved around, layered on top of each other, pulled apart, and more. As a player, you end up interacting with multiple of these tiles at once to try and find the connections between them and move the story forward. This could be as simple as changing the zoom on a couple tiles until they can be placed next to each other, allowing a person to walk between tiles. This could be something like lining up two tiles with parts of a gear in order to rotate a third tile and find a new way to zoom into the interaction.

In practice, it’s incredible how much the game finds ways to just keep the interaction moving. At the start of the game you have one tile, and until the end of the game, you’ll never be at zero tiles. It sounds so simple to have a puzzle game of 2×2 tiles, but the amount of interactions that come out of it was astounding. This is all helped by a really vibrant art style that really pushes color as a helper for finding those puzzle connections. All of that made this a really enjoyable couple hour experience that I think is worth playing, particularly on a touch screen.

The Garden’s Between

  • Genre: Puzzle
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Linux, macOS, Windows, PS4, Xbox One, iOS

This was another surprising puzzle game that I pulled out of the pile. The core idea is that you manipulate time to move the main characters through a linear level. The only other thing you really can do is interact with a handful of in-level objects that can move around, or pick up torches to clear away some obstacles.

The bulk of the puzzles involve generally passing the torch around in a fairly common pattern, moving time forward to grab the torch, backing up to get it to some important thing that is moving around or needs to be cleared, then moving time forward again through the new path. On the surface, it sounds simple but it’s an effective pattern that is used in surprisingly varied ways.

This was a pretty quick play through in about an hour and a half or so, but was an enjoyable experience that didn’t overstay its welcome.

Old Man’s Journey

  • Genre: Adventure
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Android, iOS, macOS, Windows, PS4, Xbox One

This was my complete relaxation game during this whole stretch. While it’s technically an adventure game, and technically has puzzles, the game is really best thought of as a relaxing visual journey. The only real mechanic at play is the ability to drag the landscape in different directions, opening up the path for the title’s old man to move around.

Beyond the core mechanic, this was just a really relaxing little adventure. It tells a light story about an old man travelling to see an ex before her passing, but really it’s a replay of his memories along the way. If you’ve got an hour to kill, and want something to hit on the same relaxation level of a book, this is a good place to end up.

Gunvolt Chronicles: Luminous Avenger iX

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

Describing this as anything but Mega Man X would be a complete lie. The gameplay is the same, the pattern of killing bosses to unlock their powers is the same, the game’s structure is the same. Where it’s different though is in how it handles health, and it’s far more forgiving for it.

While there is a standard health pool there, if the player is playing well they won’t ever use it. Core to the experience is a reloadable energy store that powers both an impenetrable shield as well as things like an air dash. It can be reloaded quickly at any time with a quick double tap down, leaving it up to the player to manage it effectively. At its core, the real sway becomes less of a health management game and more of a choice of doing more damage quickly or staying safe.

While this may sound like it’s just making the experience easy, there’s still options for truly skilled players to show off. Avoiding being hit allows a score combo to grow, so truly good players are able to use the score and completion time as true measures, while less skilled players can still complete the game on their own terms. It’s one of the more interesting ways I’ve seen in this style game to open up the experience to more players, and I think it ends up working really well.

Jupiter & Mars

  • Genre: Adventure
  • Platform: PS4

In a lot of ways, this was a modern take on specifically the Dreamcast version of Ecco the Dolphin. You play a dolphin going around trying to save the planet from environmental catastrophe, either shutting down machines or rescuing other animals along the way.

This was ultimately a better experience than it is a game though. There’s nothing particularly offensive about it, but there’s nothing particularly standout either. Controls are alright, but weird since you control a dolphin in first-person. The AI companion that you command generally does what you want, but often gets stuck behind obstacles. Your goal is generally not that clear, but there’s not a ton of exploration to do so you generally end up finding your way. From a gameplay experience, I’d probably describe it as something akin to Flower, but with significantly less polish.

However, this is an absolute standout visually. The entire game takes on a sort of realistic, but also sort of Tron style and it’s generally a sight to behold. Things are already lit up in interesting ways, but then you activate sonar and the whole scene lights up in crazy colors. If there’s anything to point at as a reason to experience this one, it’s easily the visuals.

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Game Ramblings #106 – Splatoon 2 Single Player + Octo Expansion

More Info from Nintendo

  • Genre: Third-person shooter
  • Platform: Switch

I really enjoyed the original Splatoon, despite the fact that I was tragically bad at it in multiplayer. However, the thing that surprised me was how solid the single player experience was for a game where that was clearly not the focus. Some of that may have just been how fresh it was to play what is a third-person shooter in a very new way, but it really left a mark. For Splatoon 2, the initial single player was more of the same. While it was fun, it was a bit disappointing…..until I played the Octo expansion, which was an entirely ambitious push of single player content that I wasn’t expecting.

Mechanically speaking, this is still a fantastic game. This is one of the best shooter experiences I’ve had on console, thanks to it intelligently using motion controls to improve aim, rather than feeling ham fisted. It’s got your typical twin stick movement and aiming, but then you do little tilts of your controller for finessed aiming, and it all just clicks. Large motions go on the right stick, and kills come out of motion, and it’s as effective as any aim assists I’ve ever seen out of more traditional shooters.

The base single player is a pretty by the numbers copy of the original game. You’ve got a handful of worlds where you go through a series of puzzles and light AI combat levels, capped with a boss fight. What it ends up being is basically a tutorial for the core gameplay to lead you into the multiplayer. From that perspective, it’s super solid. From the perspective of a returning player, it’s repetitive. I’ve seen this content before, down to some of the bosses returning with only light mechanical changes. It was nice to see them pushing the lore of the series a bit, but it didn’t feel like something I needed to play again.

That feeling changed when I started the Octo expansion.

From a very high level, the Octo expansion is basically Portal. Like the screenshot above says, you’re literally doing a bunch of test chambers to prove your skill. After you pass through that section, you end up in a fairly linear sequence of levels to escape the facility. If that sounds familiar, it’s definitely intentional.

At its core, the thing that makes the Octo expansion work is the sheer amount of variety to play with. Each test chamber has its own little gameplay tweak to play with. Some levels are straightforward puzzles to get to the end of the level. Sometimes they get a bit cheeky and give you limited amounts of paint to use. Sometimes they force you into stealth segments. Sometimes they don’t give you any weapons at all, and make you traverse intelligently through.

However, it’s when things go off the rails that it’s really fun. There’s levels like the one above where you’re literally playing Breakout with paint. There’s some levels where you’ve got to push a giant billiard ball around the world without knocking it off the level. There’s some levels where you gain a jetpack instead of using the paint to traverse around. There’s even a level where you play Picross 3D to create a box fort shaped like a dog.

It’s the variety and jumps between traditional and fun levels that really give the expansion a really great pace. You’ll do something normal for a bit or hit a really high tension combat level, then be given a breather level to bring down your heart rate. You’ll go from using the typical shooter mechanics to using your paint gun to play tic-tac-toe. It’s all bite sized chunks that are the right length to want you to keep playing just one more level, until suddenly you’re 30 levels in and hours have accidentally gone by.

This is all capped by a fantastic escape sequence that culminates in a boss battle against the giant human statue above, combining all the skills you’ve learned in the single player game into a super intense and super fun sequence filled with platforming and firing.

The whole of the Octo expansion shows a level of creativity that is so typical of Nintendo, and yet was not present in the Splatoon series up to this point. The two games were both fantastically well crafted, but distinctly multiplayer-focused. What the expansion has done is shown that there’s a lot of room for this series to also have a single player tilt. Ya they’re sort of being tongue-in-cheek in riffing on the overarching Portal pattern, but there is so much more content here than that game brought to the table. At its core, Splatoon is an easy recommendation for me anyway just to experience what that multiplayer is like. However, with what I’ve played here, I think it may be worth getting Splatoon 2 + Octo expansion just for the single player experience alone.

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Game Ramblings #105 – New Super Lucky’s Tale

More Info from Playful Studios

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Xbox One, Windows

This was another one that snuck into my start of the year kick into platformers. This game isn’t necessarily doing anything new and interesting, and it’s certainly not an overly challenging game. However, what it does end up being is fun; fun in the most pure way that mechanically solid platformers can be. The world and characters are colorful and charming. The levels you hop around in are extremely varied in their platforming styles. The little side challenges provide enough of a reason to explore every location. It just ends up with you having spent way more time playing the game than you expected because you never stop having fun.

Variety is really the name of the game here. At the start of the game, it looked like this one was going to be a standard 3D platformer experience. But then they throw you into a side scroller level, then an isometric level, then an auto runner level, then a Super Monkey Ball style rolling maze. The game really takes great advantage of using the core mechanics that are in place and putting them in all sorts of new environment types. When this is combined with a distinct overworld, it meant that I was never growing tired of the kind of gameplay being presented to me. You’re not going to play the same kind of level back-to-back, so it feels like there’s always something new happening, even if the mechanics are largely the same.

This is combined with a level structure that really encourages a bunch of exploration. Each level has the general end-level reward. It also has rewards for finding LUCKY letters, a hidden secret area, and a reward for collecting a bunch of coins. These all provide built-in excuses to go running around checking every corner It’s these kinds of little things that bring the levels from being just a straightforward point A to B to something that lets you get lost in them.

This is all helped by the fact that the game is mechanically very sound. This does all the little platforming things really right. Jump heights and distances are very obvious, and that surprisingly carries through despite the large differences between the various gameplay types. Where you’re landing is really obvious thanks to having drop shadows directly under the player at a long visible distance. These all seem like obvious things, but they’re all things that a lot of platformers get extremely wrong. When done well like here, they’re simply things that work as expected instead of being deterrents.

However, the mechanic details extend to things like boss fights as well. Take the screenshot above. Early in the fight, the purple patches are small and easy to avoid while showing very obviously that they’re damage zones. It immediately enforces that you want to move towards blue as the boss fight progresses and the safe zones get smaller and smaller. Other bosses have similar paths, such as single laser sights becoming multiple sights. These all play well into the fairly standard multi-phase platformer boss fight gameplay, but again to where them working well means they are simply working as expected, rather than being a deterrent.

The game’s biggest issue overall is that it’s ultimately a fairly easy game to play. Ya, you’ll lose lives occasionally, but the game is both generous with health pickups and generous with additional lives, so you’re not going to be pressed to stay alive. Realistically this might as well have gone with the more modern approach of just not having lives, and having a death be a level reset or checkpoint reset. However, that lack of difficulty was never a particular deterrent. Figuring out where the secrets were became the real fun of the game. Puzzling out what the boss’ mechanics were, then defeating them with those mechanics became the real fun of the game. I wasn’t having to slam my head against long fights and long precise levels, but instead simply enjoying the game for what it was.

To be perfectly honest, that lack of difficulty in place of just having fun is something that I find myself enjoying more and more these days. I just don’t have the time anymore to repeat difficult experiences getting incrementally better for the sake of difficulty, and have found myself enjoying experiences that are fun for the sake of being fun. Super Lucky’s Tale really hit that mark for me. It puts together an experience that is mechanically sound to the point where you don’t think about the game mechanics, combines it with a bright and enjoyable world, and gives you enough of a reason to explore that each level is its own little self contained playground. It unfortunately sounds like the studio has been having some financial trouble, so I don’t know how much more we’re going to see specifically of Lucky, but it’s clear that the devs behind this are going to end up making fun experiences wherever they end up.