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What are you playing?
broodwars:
Last on the list, I'm currently playing my way through Yoshi & the Mysterious Book, a game that ended up being absolutely not what I expecting. I thought it was another Yoshi platformer and I was eager to play another Yoshi platformer, but what we got was...an adventure puzzle game about unlocking achievements. Yeah, I enjoy trophy hunting, but I really wasn't expecting an entire game based on that and I still think I would have preferred something like a Woolly World port over this.
It took me a while to start vibing with the game for what it is, but I'm enjoying the game in short sessions. It feels like Yoshi-meets-Winnie the Pooh. Like the modern Zelda games, though, it feels like this is meant to more be a collection of mechanics to just poke at and see what happens than an actual coherent game experience with goals and stakes.
I'm working my way through the Chapter 2 creatures right now, and I'm not sure what the actual point of this game is going to end up being. It really doesn't help that some of the hints towards Discoveries are very badly written, particularly the ones based on music. There were a few I had to look up online because even the Level 2 hints you pay 100 tokens to unlock can be extremely vague about what the game expects you to do.
Evan_B:
I suppose I should also add some new content to my ranting.
I completed 9 Years of Shadows in short order. It’s a brisk, beautiful pixel art Metroidvania that seems to have pissed some online community off because of some of its design choices and odd performance quirks. I spawned into a dark room once and experienced a few sound issues but a soft reset and even returning to the main menu often fixed things. Anyway, I thought it had some cool ideas and movement options and didn’t have incredibly high expectations, and so wound up pleasantly surprised.
Continuing the theme, I’ve sunk a single playthrough into Marfusha, a indie tower defense roguelike about being an expendable foot soldier for a corrupt nationalist regime. You know, escapism. Anyway, it was fine, I seemed to get the mechanics rather quickly, in which the game balances currency accumulation with intensifying taxes to maintain a “skin of your teeth” mentality. Despite its predictable gameplay loop, part of the meta progression and challenge comes from deliberately handicapping yourself with lame-duck assists in order to learn about the larger cast of the game. It’s not a masterpiece, but it does what it sets out to do competently.
And lastly, Decline’s Drops is another game touting platform-fighter (i.e. Smash Bros.) style movement in a traditional platforming level design and progression. It delivers on that, though the enemies are hardly complex or challenging enough to warrant the attack moveset you possess. The game features hand drawn character art which is very lovingly animated, as well as a very chill soundtrack that does a lot of heavy lifting in evoking a Smash-style adventure mode.
broodwars:
Might as well add some cents of my own...
Pragmata - Not too much to add to what's already been discussed about this game, but I 100%ed it and found it a perfectly charming little game. It does a good job of keeping things fresh between the game's hacking gimmick and a determination to throw a variety of different enemy encounters at the player. That final boss can seriously **** off, though, on Lunatic Difficulty. As much as I enjoyed it, though, I kinda hope it doesn't get a sequel. This feels like a perfectly great one and done.
Yoshi & the Mysterious Book - Finished the game with all flowers collected and all but one discovery obtained, and that's the discovery related to completely the absolutely infuriating final bonus level of Chapter 12. Overall, I quite enjoyed the game outside of some really annoying auto-scrolling stages or ones with annoying movement gimmicks. Incidentally, that last level is one of those. It has a very strong "pick up and play" portable design sense that makes it easy to plug in 5 minutes here or there between doing other things. REALLY could have done without the game being as long as it is, though, complete with a fake-out ending; a true ending; and a pretty substantial post-game.
broodwars:
Alright, how about a trio of Racing games?
Mario Kart World - Well this game is just utter trash. I'm not here for the online, just for the Grand Prix experience and boy is that lacking here between the lack of multiple laps on all but the 1st track and the general underwhelming nature of the tracks in general. It really doesn't help that the tracks are as wide as they are to accommodate the expanded roster count. I was just kind of bored racing through the Grand Prix races, though not nearly as bored as when I dabbled in the extremely empty open world full of nothing of value to do.
This game is the very embodiment of that "I don't know what I expected" meme.
Sonic Racing Crossworlds - Been holding onto this one for a while now, basically waiting for Sega to finish making the game, but now they've announced an entire 2nd season of DLC content so that'll be a while. Played through the first 3 or so Grand Prix tracks, and I have to say I really dig this one. Compared to something like Sonic Racing Transformed, the roster is pretty bad since it's largely Sonic & his terrible friends. But roster gripes aside, the tracks I've experienced so far have been pretty stellar...aside from this one Crossworld track I've seen a few times that's really hard to read beyond just being an explosion of neon color. The rubberband AI is pretty damn tenacious, too, even on the lowest difficulty. Been a while since I picked that one up, but I'd definitely recommend it. And the DLC tracks are surprisingly excellent so far.
broodwars:
Kirby Air Riders - Traded in a bunch of games I was never going to play again (little did I know at the time Mario Kart World should have been one of them), and grabbed this one on a whim for basically free.
Let's get the bad out of the way first: this game makes an extremely poor first impression with how it basically gives the player homework right at the start with a lengthy serious of generally pretty terrible tutorials that somehow break the game's mechanics down on an incredibly granular level while teaching the player next to nothing useful about the actual process of playing the game. I did all the tutorials in a row, and then went right into the SP Air Ride mode and proceeded to get my ass handed to me by the CPU over and over again despite doing what the tutorials drilled into me to do. Time after time, though, I'm still getting at best 2nd place.
And that's really the part of the game that frustrates me: I really enjoy this game's sense of speed when I CAN get boosts of speed, but I feel like I'm really bad at this game and I don't understand what I'm doing wrong. I'm boosting on turns; I'm drafting behind opponents; and I'm attacking where I can. And yet I can never seem to get the consistent blasts of speed I KNOW the game wants me to do. It certainly doesn't help that attacking is relegated to either holding the Boost button (which also slows you down) or wiggling the stick. Why couldn't this have been an optional button press? I wish that acceleration was the feature mapped to the one button instead of what's basically the brake doubling as a boost. When I'm not boosting the game feels very slow, but when I hit the brake to boost it feels like I'm not making meaningful speed. Again, I feel like the game could make it a lot more clear what I'm doing wrong here. It really doesn't help when some challenges and entire courses feel like they were designed for only 1 vehicle to be viable, and it's never the one I'm using.
However, where I somewhat turned a corner on this game is when I started dabbling in the other modes, particularly Top Ride; the Stadium challenges; and now Road Trip. I'm surprised at how much I'm really digging the Road Trip mode, though I wish I could tweak the AI just a little bit more. After how the AI was routinely kicking my ass on the default settings in Air Ride, I kinda wish there was an middle ground setting between "Casual" and "Normal" in Road Trip. "Casual" just feels like the game's giving you a pat on the head and an automatic win, but I'm wary about dialing up to Normal until I'm remotely better at the actual racing. But with the constant cycling of modes and challenges, this is definitely the part of Air Riders that appeals to me and I'm glad I gave the game a chance.
Currently also making my way through Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth, but I'll save my thoughts on that...mess...for another time.
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