Category: Switch

Posted on

Game Ramblings #104 – Octahedron

More Info from Demimonde Studios

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam, Xbox One, PS4

Octahedron is a wild ride. At its core, it’s a really mechanically tight puzzle platformer. However, that’s way oversimplifying it. As you dig in, it becomes a wildly fun experience dripping in an ’80s color palette that moves wildly between tight platforming sections, quick movement sections, and even a little bit of offensive weapon flair to your move set.

I figured I’d start with this short video, because it kind of shows a bit of everything. You see the core mechanic of the game – the ability to create a platform that moves underneath you. There’s a bit of the puzzle and offense, where my platform drops an explosive to open up my path, then I use my platforms to get around the enemy spawner. You’ve got the over the top visual style and audio, which the game is largely synced to.

The most important thing about all of this is that it’s mechanically really tight. That’s always the big differentiator between good and bad platformers. Jump heights and jump distances feel really consistent. The height gaps between platforms as you move up and down are obvious, so there’s no second guessing whether you are going to make a jump or need to lay down a platform of your own first. The obstacles moving in time with the background music sets a great internal rhythm to threading the needle through the level which added a nice secondary layer of confirmation to the way I was playing the game.

That’s not to say that things are necessarily easy. What it comes down to is the precision places everything on player skill to complete the game. Generally speaking there’s levels of difficulty to this. Simply completing the level generally provides a nice challenge that ramped up slowly throughout the game. Doing a full completion pass on the level started to add things to grab that were in out of the way or more challenging spots. Then completing a level quickly and with minimal use of player-created platforms is another level of difficulty altogether.

This ends up providing a bit of a choose your own adventure style to the game, and is where it really leans into the puzzle side of things. You’re no longer simply getting from point A to B in safety. You’re now having to be more precise with your jumps to minimize platforms. You’re taking some risks to move through the level as quick as possible. You’re keeping an eye out for secret areas that hold the last few bits of collectables that you need to grab. It all just works very well as a whole. If you’re having trouble with a level, you can kind of pick and choose what your goal is and come back later to wrap things up, so even the hardest content has ways to alleviate frustration and keep you moving forward.

Also a bit of a shoutout to Demimonde themselves. I hit a bug where a section of a later level wasn’t aligned properly until I restarted a couple times. We had a bit of a back and forth trying to narrow down what was going on. While we ultimately don’t have an answer, it was good to see them digging for info to potentially fix the issue, especially in light of the great speedrunning potential for a game of this style.

This is going to sound kind of weird, but if I were to give this one a comparable, it would probably be Super Mario Bros 2. Something about the way that the platforms you create move and glide with you gives it the same sort of floaty kind of platforming feel with similar amounts of precision really feels like that one. However, Octahedron is so much more when you really start digging into it. It takes those tight mechanics and adds a bunch of completionist tasks to really hone in on a super tight puzzle platformer. Combined with great audio and visual style, this one’s a pretty easy game to recommend.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #56.1 – A Hat in Time – Switch + DLC

Original Ramblings

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

I picked up A Hat in Time on Switch, largely so I could have a physical copy of it for my collection. However, a secondary reason was to go back and play through the DLC that’s come out in the last two years since the original release. Going back and playing through the game in full was just as fun the second time around. New content, plus a whole lot of additional polish made this a really easy game to fall right back into.

The new content in place is definitely a bit of a mixed bag, but what’s there is still a lot of fun. I basically got two new worlds to play through, plus a bunch more side content. Arctic Cruise was a short chapter, falling in at only three acts. However, it’s got some of my favorite pure platforming in the game. It’s also a largely fetch quest-based level, where you’re running around doing chores and collecting people. Nyakuza Metro was a much larger free roam world. The free roam part was a lot of fun, but I was probably most impressed by the fact that it had an escape sequence instead of a boss at the end. It wasn’t quite a Metroid timed escape, but the change of pace right at the end of my play through was definitely welcome.

On the other side though, I really got nothing out of the new Death Wish mode. It’s basically a set of tasks where you replay previous time pieces with some tweaks and secondary goals. Had I been going back to the PC version, this would have been a good way for me to fall back into the game before the DLC. However, after playing through the game fresh I really didn’t want to replay the content AGAIN. Definitely an interesting idea given the release schedule, but really didn’t work out for my timing in how I was playing.

As far as the Switch goes, it also did a pretty solid job of keeping the game running. Visually it’s definitely not up to the PC version, but it fell into what I’d generally call good enough. Everything looks pretty good in motion, and it’s not jarring in a way that I wouldn’t come back to the game on the platform. The framerate is also generally pretty solid throughout. Ya there’s a few places where the framerate obviously dips, and there’s definitely a handful of spots where as an Unreal developer I’m left groaning at garbage collection hitches, but by and large it was never a particular issue.

Controls wise, it also nailed it. While that shouldn’t be unexpected given it was a standard platformer scheme, I was super comfortable playing on TV with the pro controller, as well as handheld on the Joycons in bed. There’s definitely been a layer of polish added to overall movement and camera work in the two years since as well. While that was never a particular issue when I last played it, it was nice to see that things had seen that push to improve anyway.

In general, it’s pretty rare that I go back to games and actually finish them again, let alone play through more new content that I’d never played before. There’s usually something stupid in my replay that makes me go “forget this, moving on.” I’m glad that this was one of the cases where the game was worth playing again front to back. It was a more polished experience, with more content, on a completely different platform, and it was just as fun the second time around.

Posted on

Game Ramblings #99 – Sparklite

More Info from Red Blue Games

  • Genre: ARPG
  • Platform: Switch
  • Also Available On: Steam (Windows/Mac), PS4, Xbox One

This one’s kind of been floating around in my brain for a while. One of the folks working on this did some contract work with my team a couple years ago at Tripwire, and I couldn’t be more thrilled to see the game finally come out. I’m even more thrilled to find that it lives up to what I was envisioning back when I was hearing their plans. While it’s easy to look at this and shake it off as a Link to the Past clone, the game makes some clever use of roguelike mechanics to provide both a way to change the environment throughout the game, as well as a positive feedback loop to the process of dying. It’s an interesting change to a genre that typically penalizes dying, and it ended up working out well.

Let’s get the simple things out of the way in a real hurry. The game uses an entirely pixel-based visual style and it’s pretty damn gorgeous. The soundtrack is also fairly catchy and never started to wear on me despite hearing the same general set of themes throughout each region. Yes, the core gameplay loop here is LttP. You have a melee weapon that swings in an arc. You run around the environment killing things for upgrades. You eventually get to pattern-based bosses that you take out to get your big upgrades. That all is pretty familiar to fans of the genre, and really it’s done well here. It feels mechanically solid, and probably most importantly, I was never feeling cheated if I was taking damage. If I was taking a bunch of damage, it was entirely my fault. It’s worth noting that damage does ramp up REALLY fast here, and it’s easy to get one shot later in the game if you’re not paying attention. That’s entirely where the roguelike mechanics start to come into play.

Boss fights are where you typically die the most, and where the roguelike growth elements really come into play.

The first thing to note is that the world changes each time you play through it. This plays a nice balance of randomness and non-randomness in that the regions are always in the same general area (desert is west, snow is north, etc) but the regions themselves are fairly randomized each run. There’s always going to be a set of standard features in each region (boss dungeon, random enemy dungeon, an area to pick up an upgrade, etc) but the rest of the area is going to be pretty different between runs. Sometimes you’ll find random underground areas with currency to grab. Sometimes you’ll find areas with people that you can rescue. Sometimes you’ll find areas with side-quest collection stuff to do. Basically, you’ll always have some reason to both move forward to new spots, but also return to old spots just to see what else you can find.

The core hub that you end up at on death also follows the roguelike pattern of slow incremental upgrades. There’s a main shop with player upgrades for purchase that also serves as a spot to handle the equipment chain. There’s a spot that can be upgraded that provides some free consumable items (ex: health potions, bombs, etc) that you can grab before going down for a world run. There’s a shop that can be upgraded to build out secondary ranged items. This is also the core spot where you’re going to find a lot of the lore of the game. Overall the town serves its purpose well as a bit of a power curve spot for the player. It’s easy to get around in the town, the purpose of the shops is always super obvious, and you’re going to be finding some reason to dump all your currency into something before heading back down to the main game world.

The main weapon’s upgrade system is super customizable and ends up being an interesting way to build in limits and choices in a meaningful way.

However, the main power curve comes all together in the hammer equipment. The hammer is both the main weapon in the game, as well as the main equipment handler. It can be packed with a bunch of upgrades ranging from damage to armor to health to map helpers and more. However, this takes the form of a grid-based screen that honestly reminded me a lot of the sort of classic PC ARPG approach. These upgrades all have some specific grid size and shape, so you spend a bunch of time min/maxing both the upgrades themselves, as well as the space they take up within the grid to get everything you want packed in there. As an example, a shield upgrade is a 1×1 square, attack upgrades are 2×2, but something like the gadget power is a 2×1 bar. The upgrades of common types can also be combined at a cost into more powerful versions from bronze to silver to gold.

This process of upgrading and playing a bit of inventory Tetris is the core power curve loop of the game, and it’s really effective at playing into how I got through the game. I initially started off stacking health upgrades just to stay alive. As I got more comfortable with the game mechanics, I started backing off of health and going more towards offensive upgrades. However, boss fights started doing a lot of damage all at once, so I started pulling some direct armor in to keep the individual hits down to smaller amounts. It was a really fun way to manage my overall power, and is a lot more interactive than the typical ARPG style of hunting a dungeon for the same direct upgrade that everyone else was going to take.

I really just wanted an excuse to post this map, because damn is it gorgeous.

For as cynical as I can often be about working in the game industry, it’s always fun to see something come out made by folks you know and have worked on. It’s even better when the thing they’ve been working on as a passion project comes out and is a lot of fun to play. This is definitely one of those cases. It’s a game in a small niche genre mix made by a small team because it’s what they wanted to make. If the idea of playing a roguelike Link to the Past sounds at all appealing, this is definitely worth the play.