Tag: platformer

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Game Ramblings #41 – Shovel Knight: Specter of Torment

More Info from Yacht Club Games

  • Genre: Platformer
  • Platform: Vita
  • Also Available On: Windows, Linux, OS X, PS3, PS4, Wii U, 3DS, Xbox One, Fire TV

TL;DR

  • As mechanically tight and satisfying as the original Shovel of Hope campaign.
  • Fills a neat void as a prequel story to the original campaign.  Gives a lot of great backstory to one of the original bosses.
  • Changes to core mechanics greatly benefit traversal-based puzzle solving and bring a nice twist to combat.

Let’s get this out of the way.  If you’ve never played Shovel Knight, go grab the original campaign right now.  It’s one of the greatest examples in the past few years of a mechanically solid 2D platformer, regardless of the fact that it then goes even further and solidly represents an 8-bit style to great effect.  Specter of Torment is now the third campaign under the Shovel Knight umbrella, covering the prequel backstory to the Specter Knight boss from the original.  It brings some interesting mechanics with the change in weapon that really benefit the expansion overall.

The big obvious change here is that you’ve got a scythe instead of a shovel.  This has some pretty big ramifications to both combat and traversal.  Straight away the shovel bounce is replaced by a lock-on melee dash used for both traversal and combat.  For traversal, this ends up giving a lot more interesting and challenging traversal options.  Enemies, obstacles, and projectiles can all be used as traversal targets, meaning that entire rooms can be traversed without touching the floor.  This is used extremely effectively in getting the Specter through auto scrolling segments where falling down would mean death.  There’s also entire runs through boss fights where I would combo dashes the entire time without touching the ground.  While the original campaign was pretty quick paced, Specter had an entirely higher level of speed, and greatly benefited from this change.  While this will feel pretty immediately familiar to players of the original, at this point I’m leaning towards a greater enjoyment of this expansion purely because everything feels so fast.  It’s one of the best feelings a game can bring when I sit there comboing enemies while juggling them in the air, and it’s rare to see a game nail it so well.

Because of the emphasis on speed over safety, the items that are earned throughout the campaign also play into this.  Rather than being generally offense focused, a lot of the items are generally interesting helper items.  There’s a healing item that allows you to take greater risks and focus more on slash combos over a defensive play style.  There’s a hover item that lets you stay in the air to extend combos or get to a platform out of reach.  There are items that spawn a secondary clone of the Specter, as well as one that spawns a projectile firing skeleton.  In general, the items are used to effectively extend the speed focus on combat, rather than being used as purely secondary weapons, and all play into making sure the speed of encounters is kept as high as possible.

Overall this was a pretty solid expansion that I think ends up surpassing the original from a pure gameplay perspective.  Like Plague of Shadows, it’s also a nice touch to see the backstory to one of the original bosses, and give them more life than simply being a target of the Shovel Knight.  Given development of these campaigns seems to be continuing, with the King Knight’s campaign being up next, the Shovel Knight as a platform seems to have a lot of life.  We’ve now got three campaigns that all play fairly differently, and Specter of Torment shows to me that they are only improving as they go along.

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Game Ramblings #39 – The Swapper

More Info from Facepalm Games

  • Genre: Puzzle/Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Windows/Mac/Linux PC (Steam, GOG), PS3, Vita, Wii U, Xbox One

TL;DR

  • Fantastically well crafted puzzle/metroidvania style game
  • Interesting sci-fi driven story presented with a light touch, invites players to connect a lot of dots on their own
  • Great visual style based on a unique clay-model construction

The Swapper at its core is a game that derives straight from its title.  You play a lost explorer that finds a tool allowing them to create and swap with exact clones of themselves.  This is wrapped in a set of pretty simple mechanics and a Metroidvania-esque traversal that expand out into a huge amount of puzzle depth.  This is combined with some good visuals, and a simple but effective audio backing to create a really fantastic game.

When dealing with a puzzle game, the obvious question is whether or not the mechanics work to create interesting puzzles, and in this case, the answer is a resounding yes.  The swapper tool that the player has can only spawn new clones (to a limit of player + 4 clones) and shoot a projectile to swap to a clone.  Clones then all follow the same inputs that the main player character is doing, moving as a largely controlled herd.  However, the lighting in the levels can disable these abilities; blue lights disable clone creation, red lights disable swap projectiles, and purple disables both.  On its own, these combine to slowly ease you into the gameplay, with some of the early puzzles being some clever mix, with the player creating and moving around to platforms that are out of reach of just plain jumping.

One of the first things I noticed when I got the tool is that when I was creating clones, the game would go into a super slo-mo state.  At first this didn’t make much sense to me, until the puzzles started requiring multiple swaps in mid-air, then it became another fantastically fun ability to use.  Later puzzles started introducing gravity manipulation and pressure pads, mixing all of them together into rooms where the control of your clone herd became the ultimate goal.  By the end of the game, the puzzles were becoming a devious mix of creating clones, warping between them, and finding ways to either recombine with or kill clones in order to keep up completion of the puzzles.

The puzzles are backed by a really strong visual style.  One of the things that brought this game so much acclaim was that they quite literally created clay models for their source art, and that’s very apparent while playing.  The lighting they used was typically extremely dark, allowing for a great use of a flashlight to lead the path in hallways, then the strong colored lighting for puzzle mechanics.  I’ve thrown just a few screenshots I took below to give an idea of what the game looked like, though it certainly looks even better in motion.

It’s also worth noting that this has one of the more hilariously fucked up story endings I’ve ever played.

Story Spoiler

Given the core gameplay concept, it’s not too big of a surprise that there’s the possibility of swapping with other people, and there were some hints throughout that it had already happened. The end of the game takes full advantage of that. After crash landing on the planet below, a rescue ship finally finds you, but cannot rescue you due to lack of quarantine facilities. The game presents you with two options, die on the planet alone, or swap with the rescuer without anyone knowing what happened. The second option then takes this a step further, and gives you control of the rescuer you swapped with, causing him to fall off of a cliff to his death. Because of the rescue ship’s lack of knowledge of the swapping device, they simply saw it as the player character jumping off a cliff as a suicide.

In the end, hilariously unexpected, and a pretty fantastic way to wrap up the core mystery behind how you were going to actually get home.

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In general, I was somewhat caught by surprise by how much I enjoyed this game.  I’m generally a fan of Metroidvania-style games anyway, but without combat I wasn’t sure where this would fall fgor me.  However, the game had a really smart difficulty curve, introducing one or two mechanics, then doing a series of puzzles to reinforce the new mechanics. Ultimately, there were probably 30 or so puzzles to complete, interspersed with general traversal where story elements were introduced, and it felt pretty appropriate in length.  As far as puzzle-based games go, I can’t think of another I’ve played lately that I’d recommend as much as this unless I go back to Box Boy 3, and I think that says all that I need to say about it.

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Shelved It #3 – Yooka-Laylee

More Info from Playtonic

  • Genre: 3D Platformer
  • Platform: PS4
  • Also Available On: Steam (Linux, Mac, Windows), Xbox One, Switch

Hit or miss is the best way I can describe Yooka-Laylee.  The team of ex-Rare developers clearly recognizes what made Banjo-Kazooie a good game, but at the same time it feels like they never did anything to pass that mark, and in trying to aim at nostalgia, they also didn’t fix many of the original flaws.  I got through the bulk of the first two worlds, as well as their expanded forms, and while there was definitely some fun to be had, the amount of boring fluff content, and somewhat subpar writing never really gave me a drive to plow through the slower areas of the game to see the better parts. The unfortunate thing is that there is some flashes of good here, but they tend to be balanced out by negatives at the same time.

While the various jump mechanics feel good and have a nice weight to them, the camera’s inability to not get in your way means a lot of missed jumps.  Even in areas where the camera is fixed, the sometimes strange angles and FOV selection ended up causing severe depth perception issues.  The most unfortunate thing is that the game is drop dead gorgeous, but I spent so much time fighting the camera that I never could really be at a point where I could fully enjoy it.

While the boss fights I did tended to be a lot of fun when I was doing them correctly, odd design choices on how damage occurs often frustrated me.  As an example, the World 1 boss involved leaping over rolling logs on a slope, where hitting a log would have you slide back down to the bottom.  All that was fine, but hitting a log at the top would still leave all the logs I had passed, and I could receive damage on my way back down while being significantly less controllable while sliding.

Individually some of the pages were in areas where puzzle or combat segments could be fun, but an equal amount simply involved using the duo’s powers to very slowly get up a path with little to no resistance.  The fact that the worlds are leveled up, rather than simply doing a larger spread of smaller worlds means that there’s a significant amount of retread through the environments.  Worst of all were the arcade games, which while curious, did not need to be given multiple pages to force replays.

I think if there’s anything that I found the most surprising, it’s that the writing was just not that good.  Banjo-Kazooie, Donkey Kong 64, or Conker’s Bad Fur Day were all examples of games out of Rare that, while goofy, had entertaining and solid writing.  The writing in this game seems to just lean on puns and self-referential one liners, a lot of which are not going to stand up 5-10 years from now.  It feels like they turned the humor knob of Conker too far, giving a story that even in the section I played never coalesced into something worth pushing me forward.

I’ve seen a lot of people saying that this game proves that 3D platformers are dead, but I’m not convinced.  I think this game just missed the mark.  Even if we just look at core 3D platformers since Rare’s heyday, we have games like Jak & Daxter, the Sly Cooper series, Mario Galaxy, or the Skylanders titles.  We can even stretch from there and go into the heavy weapon action of the Ratchet & Clank games bringing new twists on the genre.  I suspect there’s a lot of life left in this stlye of platformer, but sitting on nostalgia just isn’t doing it, particularly if the problems of the original games are just going to be ignored.