Iron Crypticle

March 29, 2019 by 1 Comment

The guys at Tikipod clearly know what they’re doing when it comes to freshening-up moldy oldies. Hot off the heels of my infuriating time with ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove, my next game in my Backlog from Hell was another revival of a long-lost game. Here, Iron Cryticle is a tribute to Smash TV, which isn’t exactly a classic that withstands the test of time. I got it for Xbox Live Arcade in the late 2000s and was not a fan at all. The game show theme was inspired, but the actual gameplay was overly long and very bland. During my #IGCRetroBlitz (the # is part of the name) for Midway Arcade Origins back in January, Smash TV was part of the lineup and I was reminded just how awful it was. Rooms that seemed to last forever. Uninteresting weapons. Bosses so spongy that players might be better off just hanging out and waiting to see if they’ll die of natural causes. It’s a terrible game, and if not for the game show gimmick, nobody would remember it today. Want proof? Ever play Total Carnage? No? Well it’s the sequel to Smash TV and it doesn’t have the game show theme. Told you.

Crypticle’s got spongy bosses, but only “barely to the point of annoying” spongy. Not “we soak-up firepower to such a degree that you have to wonder if the developers really just had contempt for you” spongy.

But, people do remember Smash TV, and twin-stick shooters are a perfectly fine genre. The failure of Smash TV to hold up is based around the fact that it was designed specifically to rob quarters from bored teenagers in the early 90s. But the idea of a twin-stick shooter with a series of single-screen rooms, branching paths, waves of enemies, bonus rooms, and tons of pick-ups is solid. Tikipod and co-developer Confused Pelican (who is presumably not Alvin Gentry) had a perfectly good road map to make the ultimate Smash TV tribute. Actually, the means to improve the formula are self-evident. Just remove the quarter-thievery objective and focus on a great experience for players. And they’ve done it.

The biggest hurdle Confused Pelitiki had was keeping the experience fresh. In Smash TV, even the first room overstays its welcome. For Iron Crypticle, gameplay is sped up and rooms are shorter and offer a lot more variety than just relying on enemies and landmines for the challenge. Rooms have different themes with pros and cons depending on if you want to rack up points or stockpile weapons. There are online leaderboards, so points might matter to you. There’s a lot more going on than just moving towards bonus rooms like there is in Smash TV.

By the power of Grayskull!

It helps that the enemies are more varied and that you can unlock more guns and more power-ups with each play-through. There are magic spells you can save up to clear out enemies. There’s a dash move to aid in escaping tight jams. There’s a satisfying variety of guns that spawn with relative frequency. Hell, they even threw in a Bubble Bobble-style letter-collecting thingy where if you spell B-O-N-U-S you clear a room automatically and get tons of goodies. They even went the extra mile and made collecting points more fun by having them stack for bonus multipliers. It’s like Tiki-elican did forensic analysis on the carcass of Smash TV and said “why is part boring and what can we do to unboringfy it?” Smash TV had two players. Iron Crypticle has four. Smash TV lacked in variety. Crypticle breaks up the levels with shops or arcades where you can earn bonus points playing a very decent side-scrolling platformer called Castle Crushers. If Iron Crypticle had a game show theme, it’d been exactly the Smash TV update that people have wanted for thirty-years now.

It’s not perfect. I really hate that, even on easy mode, you’re limited to five continues and once they’re gone, it’s back to the beginning with you. Shouldn’t that type of game-over condition be reserved for higher difficulty levels and people who are looking to challenge themselves? I think so. Even on easy, Iron Crypticle isn’t a slouch, especially when playing by yourself. You can buy extra credits in the stores but they’re relatively expensive and you’ll probably have to skip on upgrading your stats to be able to afford them. Crypticle gets teeth late in the game and I wasn’t able to finish the primary quest. Usually this is a deal breaker for me. I mean, I lost my shit when Cuphead gated me out of the final bosses even though I accomplished more than over 90% of other Cuphead players. Surely that should apply here? Especially when Tikipod whispered to me what happens after the final boss and I ended up giving them a black eye just for THINKING of doing what they apparently did.

Okay, I wish the game wasn’t so darkly lit, and I wish some traps stood out a bit more. I lost track of how many times I took damage because I just didn’t notice I was moving next to something deadly.

Well, it probably would have killed the game. Maybe even should have killed the game. But once you play Iron Crypticle once, you unlock a “bonus mode” that’s just one single “endless” room. Kill waves of enemies, reach the second wave, etc, etc. It basically turns Medieval Smash TV into Medieval Robotron 2084. But here’s the nutty part: I actually like this mode more than the normal mode. It’s pure, scoring-driven, white-knuckle action. All the cool weapons and upgrades from the normal mode thrown into a single-roomed non-stop killathon. I loved it. And, even better, you can still unlock new items and weapons in this mode that become available in all modes. That is such an inspired decision, and it changes the dynamic of the game completely since Endless mode is no longer just a tacked-on time waster. And that, my friends, is what puts Iron Crypticle over-the-top and makes it one of the best action indie games I’ve ever played.

What I like best about Iron Crypticle is what it represents. It reminded me that many developers fundamentally get it. Pay tribute to the *spirit* of the original while revamping and modernizing everything you know it did wrong. It might not carry the same theme, but Crypticle feels like Smash TV, only a version of it fully-realized, fleshed-out, polished, and modern. It’s a throwback that nobody my age can possibly get bored with. One that even the most stuffy, hardliner retro fan has to concede does right by original. It succeeds as a tribute, and soars on its own merit. There is no better way to show how much the classic meant to your life than making a better game inspired by it. It sure beats getting a tattoo!

Iron Crypticle was developed by Tikipod & Confused Pelican
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam

$3.99 (normally $9.99) recommended against using Joycons because they SUCK for twin-stick shooters in the making of this review.

Iron Crypticle is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

 

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , ,

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove

March 24, 2019 by 7 Comments

I consider Greg Johnson to be a friend. We’ve got a good rapport with each-other and I was one of the few who was positively gaga over Doki Doki Universe. Nobody bought Doki Doki. Hell, most fans of ToeJam & Earl don’t even know about it. It’s a lot like TJ&E, but it’s not exactly the same game the developmentally stunted among us played as children in 1991, and thus they had no interest in it. But, I like Greg and I like his team. So this wasn’t the most fun review for me to do. Consider this a trigger warning for all you old people who have ventured to my blog: the following review will, in no way, harm the memories of your childhood spent being a latchkey kid raised by a Sega Genesis. It’s perfectly reasonable and logical that I, an individual who was two-years-old when the original ToeJam & Earl came out, would not be swayed by nostalgia for a game that meant nothing to my childhood. And trust me, in the case of Back in the Groove, that nostalgia is absolutely necessary. You know how sometimes I wonder out-loud “who exactly was this game made for?” Not here. I know exactly who TJ&E: Back in the Groove was made for: fans of the original. And only fans of the original. I really feel like an uninvited party-crasher here.

I do like the idea of Back in the Groove and what it represents. Here’s a game from a franchise that failed over and over again to maintain or cultivate a substantial audience and claw its way out of cult-status. One where the fan base is rabid enough and starved enough that they can raise half-a-million via crowd-funding, but not on big enough to justify a revival on its own merit. There is a sect of snobs out there who believe Kickstarter should be reserved only for new developers bringing new ideas. Nuts to that, says I. In fact, I would say that Kickstarter is tailored specifically for these sort of comebacks, where the angry and demanding fan-bases can step up to the plate, pony-up their dosh in advance, and assume all the risk that a publisher would have to be off their rocker to take. ToeJam & Earl, dare I say, is quintessentially a crowd-funding project. Fans can buy the creators a truckload of shovels to dig up the corpse, tie electrodes to it, blast it with lightning, and then admire the unholy abomination they brought back from the dead together.

Back in the Groove feels like a game that’s been in a coma since 1991, and consequently is oblivious to the whole concept of being “woke.” Tons of fat-shaming present. I’m not outraged or anything. It’s just sort of jarring to see a new game in 2019 not give a shit about political correctness. Earl can eat anything, even toxic food. Why? Because he’s the fat one. And, as we all know, conventional wisdom tells us fat people can and will eat anything. That’s how they got fat in the first place, right? It’s almost refreshing how out-of-fucks to give it is.

Credit where it’s due: Back in the Groove feels just like the Genesis original. For fans of series, that’s probably all they need. It’s best to think of Groove as a remake. You walk around sprawling randomly-generated maps looking for parts of your ship. Along the way you run away from enemies, engage in lots of item-hunting, and, if you’re me, ask yourself what all the fuss is about. ToeJam & Earl was certainly ahead of its time. It was released in 1991, years before games like Mario 64 or Banjo-Kazooie popularized adventurous collect-a-thons. But, besides a misguided Xbox release in 2002 that honestly wasn’t that bad, the series has been dormant ever since a 2D platform sequel that I personally liked more when I played both games as part of Sega Genesis Classics. Panic on Funkotron had a weird Dr. Seuss quality about it and felt like a polished product. 1991’s ToeJam & Earl felt like a proof of concept that hopefully someday would see its potential fully realized.

That’s not what Back in the Groove does. Combat, for instance. Back in the Groove, especially in later levels, spams the screen with enemies that move faster than you and take a LOT of health off (or steal the goodies you’ve collected). You get things like tomatoes or slingshots that you throw at enemies to fight back with. But, in order to call them up, you have to bring up a menu of all the “presents” you’ve collected. And the game doesn’t tell you what the presents you collected are. They’re labeled with question marks, and the only way to find out what they are is to either open them, thus using them, or find a character to pay a relatively large amount of resources to tell you what they are. You’re basically reliant on luck to be able to get the right present that allows you to fight back. Oh, and while you’re fumbling through menus hoping to find something defensive to use, the game doesn’t pause. The enemies are still coming at you. The ones that already moved faster than you and were at a major advantage to begin with. You can skip that and run, but in many levels the only means of escape is jumping into water. Water which will, itself, start to drain your health. Yeah. Combine this with the fact that the mystery presents might not help but themselves spawn even more enemies or bullshit to deal with, and you suddenly have a game that is just outright fucking with you.

Why is it like this? Because that’s what the original was like.

The fact that half the items will absolutely fuck you over is infuriating. Games are supposed to be fun, right? But at one point I opened three straight presents which, in order: spawned more enemies, put a giant neon sign above my head that drew the enemies to me, and then put a rain cloud above me that caused lightning to strike down upon me and warned me I couldn’t go back into the water to hide. Fucking really? I know the running gag with me is I have bad luck with RNG, but COME ON! How is this shit supposed to be fun?

When I complained about this, fans of the series were aghast. “How dare you complain that this unfair, clunky shit is unfair and clunky? That’s what we wanted! It’s what we paid to make!” And you know what? They’re right! This is exactly what they asked for. They wanted all the cheesy, crappy mechanics that made most people abandon the series decades ago to return intact and unaltered. They got their wish. Consequently, ToeJam & Earl is the perfect remake. It was shitty and borderline unplayable in 1991 and it’s shitty and borderline unplayable in 2019. Bravo.

And that makes it hard for me to discuss it. Sometimes I say a game wasn’t made for me, but this time it’s specifically true. I can’t remember a Kickstarter project that has been made just for one core set of gamers to this degree. Even Shenmue III looks like it aspires to evolve past its deeply-flawed origins (Update 2021: Well, was I ever wrong about that!). ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove rejects progress and advancement. It plays and feels like an early 90s project that was too ambitious to work as desired, but hey, at least it’s ambitious. And if this were 1991, that would be fine. But it’s 2019, and it’s not. Bringing all the problems back, deliberately this time, would be like a family bragging about how webbed toes are passed through the generations like they were a priceless heirloom.

Take the levels. They’re randomly generated, so we shouldn’t expect too much. But there’s a very limited amount of set pieces. A normal grassland, a desert, a snowfield, and levels that are dark where you use a flashlight to see. I played through 19 levels and that was the extent of the variety. The themes repeated over and over again. Because the levels are randomly generated, they all feel samey and very, very bland no matter what the theme is. Sometimes the elevator would spawn in a screen that was absolutely saturated with enemies, like the men in black that zap you with a cattle-prod and steal all your presents. Or sometimes a level would begin with a screenful of enemies AND a hula-dancer that stun-locks you, because apparently you can’t resist doing the hula with her even if there are enemies chasing you and eating you right at that moment. I’d go so far as to say ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove has the worst randomly generated levels for this kind of game I’ve ever seen. They’re never interesting, which completely undermines the whole “never the same game twice” shit that random levels are supposed to assure. Who cares if it’s never the same twice when it’s dull at best to begin with?

Greg Johnson is a cool dude. One of the classiest acts in gaming. I was, and still am, a huge fan of Doki Doki Universe, his unsung magnum opus that never got is due. The weird thing for me is that ToeJam & Earl is one of the more remembered duos in gaming. Not Mario & Luigi level, but not obscure either. Yet, unless you play co-op, there’s no interplay with them at all. Meanwhile, Doki Doki Universe turned even the most stonehearted of owners into mush with the genuine and moving relationship between a robot and a sentient balloon. Because of that game, I know this one phoned it in. Over the course of Doki Doki, its stories are fleshed out, its characters get development and arcs, and we, the players, form a personal connection to them.

ToeJam and Earl, on the other hand, get no development at all. Besides an opening cinematic that shows them to be so stupid that they’re practically mentally handicapped, they are defined entirely by their character models, not any writing or story or interaction with other characters. They’re aliens. They like music. They fart. But the thing is, after Doki Doki I know Mr. Johnson is capable of better than this. These aren’t characters. They’re cynical, lazy brand mascots designed to appeal specifically to children from 1991, at the height of Nickelodeon and Ninja Turtles. Again, I can’t help but wonder if the reason this game forgoes character development and an actual story is because the original didn’t have it. The only reason this bothers me above all else is I fucking know Greg is better. This shit is beneath him.

When I was whining about how the enemies are faster than me, the solution given to me by fans was “don’t pick Earl.” Yea, what was I thinking? Picking one of the main characters in a game that bears his name? Well, I’ll have you know I picked Earl because it seems like half the food you find is spoiled, which makes all the characters but Earl take damage and throw up. In my last run, I counted the rotten food v non-rotten food. It was 12 for fresh, and 14 for rotten. That’s just how this shit works. It seemed like most of the bushes I shook led to either spawning more enemies or dropping bowling balls on me.

So why isn’t Back in the Groove better? There’s so many buttons on game consoles today. Each of the major three platforms has two rows of shoulder buttons. Why not let players shuffle through the presents with the triggers while they’re trying to run from enemies? Because the original didn’t have that. Why does seemingly most of the shit you can uncover while searching the world turn out to be a trap? Because that’s how it was in the original. Why was almost no effort made to tighten the controls and make the exploration and combat more comfortable and responsive? So it would feel more like the original.

You know what? Why didn’t you fucking people just keep playing the original one? If you wanted to pretend that thirty years of design innovation or gameplay conventions didn’t spring into existence since ToeJam & Earl came out, why even bother asking for a remake, let alone raise $500,000 for one? So you can play the same game with fancier graphics? Wait, aren’t you the same generation that completely lost their shit when Lucasfilm added CG clutter to the original Star Wars movies? Will you make up your mind on what you want? Same old shit with a fresh coat of paint or a real sequel that fully realizes the potential of the game that was important to your childhood? The best remakes are ones that pay tribute to the spirit of the original while righting all the wrongs that were a result of technological limitations. Look at the Resident Evil 2 remake. Part of the reason for the fixed camera angles was to “direct” players and create more effective jump-scares, but the bigger reason was the technology wasn’t there to give players full control without too many compromises being made. By 2019, the tech was there and had been perfected for over a decade. Now imagine if fans said “that’s cool, but you better bring back the horrible fixed cameras, or else.”

I didn’t even realize that you had to talk to a guy in a carrot suit to level-up. That’s another issue: you can’t tell good things from bad things. Dude in a carrot suit = good. Hula dancer = bad. Update: you can tell because good characters have a very subtle sparkly effect. I double checked and yea, it’s there.

So, while I’m genuinely happy that ToeJam & Earl fans had their successful campaign and got exactly what they asked for (that’s not a joke, for all the bitching I’m doing, I’m always happy to see long-suffering gamers get their day in the sun), I question whether this is really what they should have asked for. If I had been a fan, I’d wanted to see the series catch on with gamers of all stripes, sell a ton of copies, and finally be here to stay. Isn’t that the best way to show your love for something? To want it to be successful? Not that I think ToeJam & Earl fans want it to fail. They clearly love the series. But they only want it to do well on their own terms. I’m sorry, but that’s not reasonable at all. Those are not the type of fans who should be catered to, Kickstarter or not. It’s no different from music fans who discover a band, fall in love with them, and brag about them to everyone. It’s their band. Until they get successful, have their albums go gold, and get big gigs. At that point, they’re sellouts, and you spend the rest of your days telling people how they used to be cool. No, you used to be cool. They’re still cool, mostly because they’re making more than just a small group of disloyal people happy. ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove could have been a good game, but “fans” didn’t challenge Greg Johnson and the development team to bring the concept to its fullest potential. They wanted a remake. They got a remake. They’re happy with it.

And it assures ToeJam & Earl will always be just their thing, and theirs alone.

Well, they can have it.

ToeJam & Earl: Back in the Groove was developed by HumaNature Studios
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Steam

$19.99 challenged Greg and crew to do DLC with *hand-designed* levels in the making of this review.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition

December 3, 2018 by 9 Comments

During my Cuphead re-review, I noted that nobody wants to be the one person not having fun at a party.

Taking that a step further, you especially don’t want to be that person because some assholes will swear you’re only not having fun for the sake of being contrarian. But that happens a lot. If you’re a moderately popular and influential critic and you’re not enjoying an overwhelmingly popular indie darling, fans of the game will believe the only rational explanation is you’re intentionally not liking it for the sake of being different. Trust me when I say, it’s not worth it. And besides, I bought Hollow Knight three times: twice for me (first on Steam, then on Xbox One), and once for my friend William. This wasn’t Press X to Not Die, which cost a couple of bucks and I could send it to friends as a sadistic joke. I wanted to like it. I wanted to love it. I didn’t want to be that person at the party.

But I am yet again. I actually sort of hate Hollow Knight. And not just in a “not for me” type of way. I don’t think it’s a well made game.

I laughed far more at making this than anyone in their right mind should have. What can I say? When you sit on the bench to save, it kept making me think of that Klay Thompson meme. I love that meme. When we eventually build a Klay Thompson statue outside the Chase Center, I want him to be posed like he is in that meme.

Let’s strip out all the (insanely gorgeous) art and (not really all that clever) writing and talk about the thing that should matter most in a game: the gameplay. The thing I take issue with for Hollow Knight is how it seems to be made specifically to be less fun than it can be.. nay.. SHOULD be. As if the developer was given an option for every aspect: the fun way and the not fun way. And then chose the not fun way because that would be bold and dark. See though, I’ve always felt the graphics and character design should be the primary thing that sets the mood. If you need to make the gameplay less fun to make things feel bleak, you’re doing it wrong.

I’m curious if they mistook “bleak” for “slow”. Upgrades take so long to unlock that by time you get them, it’s no longer an exciting development. It feels like it’s overdue. I didn’t get the ability to wall-jump until over ten hours into the game, and I didn’t get my first upgrade to my standard weapon until eleven hours in. In that time I also added only one single hit point to the initial five you start with, and one “notch” (giving me four total) to apply “badges” which provide things like showing where the fuck you are on the map. Oh, and you can only switch between the badges at the save points. Why? How is that in keeping true to the atmosphere? What about applying a badge to your armor requires the specific act of sitting on a park bench? Maybe I’m spoiled by games that thrive on making the player feel like they’re getting stronger as the adventure unfolds, but I just felt like Hollow Knight deliberately kept me in purgatory.

Fans built this up acquiring this to me so much. I was like “what is this super magical item they keep hyping that will completely change how I feel about this pretentious piece of shit?” A wall jump? A FUCKING WALL JUMP!? You mean that thing that’s been in games for thirty fucking years?

Every aspect of the design is focused on maintaining the slow pace. The map is sprawling, but you don’t get it all at once. You have to locate this person in each different section of the game who will sell it to you and then separately buy from his wife the ability to see the things on the map that you’ve already passed by. In theory that means the guy making the map is better at adventuring than the hero is, since he’s ahead of you and apparently making progress without a hitch. That stuff always breaks my immersion. It’d be like if Sean Bean was giving his “one doesn’t simply walk into Mordor” speech when suddenly a traveling salesman walks by and says “oh actually, you do. Here, I made a map of it. Let me offer you travel tips..”

Thankfully you only have to buy the map icons once for each type of thing, but like everything else in Hollow Knight, it grounds the proceedings into a monotonous slog that feels more like a series of busy-work for the sake of busy-work chores rather than some kind of epic quest. “Slog” really is the perfect word for Hollow Knight. Save-stations are kept to a minimum and spread really far apart, but you’re forced to constantly dash back and forth to them in order to change your badge loadout. Items are relatively expensive while enemies drop relatively few coins to shop with, forcing you to grind if you want to get the stuff that should be for free anyway. Most of the other items offer no descriptions as to what exactly they do and players were reporting to me they were actually finishing Hollow Knight without ever using them or figuring out what exactly they did. There’s really not a lot of games where you can play for an hour and feel like you’ve accomplished nothing in them. Hollow Knight is uniquely like that. It’s the anti-exhilaration Metroidvania.

On the positive side of things, combat was kind of nice. I’m big on swinging a sword feeling like there’s a weight behind it and combat being more than just an animation of a stick moving out and an enemy blinking to indicate damage or vanishing to indicate death. It’s really cool that the dead husks of your vanquished foes remain (until you walk far enough away at least). But there’s not a whole lot of variety to the action. There’s only one weapon, a “nail” that is functionally a sword. When you upgrade it, you don’t get new moves or anything, at least at the point where I was too bored to press-on. There’s no secondary weapons for you to equip, and all the upgrade does is add one extra point of damage. When you’re playing a long game that feels even longer and you only get one real weapon to use with the only moves being swing it horizontally or swing it vertically if you’re attacking upward, it gets redundant no matter how meaty the hits feel. I did get a Ryu and Ken style fireball, but that takes magic points to use and can’t be aimed upward, making it less useful in general than the starting weapon. Variety is the spice of life. For Hollow Knight, all I was left with was lots and lots of salt.

All credit to Hollow Knight: it’s pretty. But it’s 2018. These days it’s more notable if a game is ugly.

Honestly, that was my whole problem with Hollow Knight: it’s boring. There’s just not enough stuff to do in it. It feels like it has all the ingredients to not bore, but then those were spread so thin for the sake of padding the length that all the fun was pushed out. It doesn’t help that the level design is overly basic, like something out of a first-generation Metroidvania. “Wait a second, didn’t you just like Chasm?” Yes I did. What’s the difference? In the time it took me to upgrade my weapon for the first time, add a single point of health, and a single notch for my badges, I had beaten Chasm. Plus, you know, it had a variety of weapons and items and stuff. It wasn’t just the same shit over and over again. It’s not just what a game is, but how that game plays out. Hollow Knight forces a ton of backtracking and grinding, but doesn’t make those things fun or easier. You mostly have the same stuff you started the game with. It gets old. And sorry if I keep harping on this, but it genuinely feels like the developers were more concerned with being emo or dark than they were with making a fun game. Would it really have ruined the bleakness if they gave the protagonist a slingshot or boomerang or something to make it so you’re not just doing the same sword strikes against the same enemies for 30 to 60 fucking hours? Or given more special moves that required less magic. Or let you get more magic. In 12 hours I got one piece of the “vase” or whatever that gives you more magic. That meant I still had to find two more before I got more magic. I got one-third of that upgrade in twelve hours. And the one I did get I bought in the shop. Part of the fun in Metroidvanias is finding stuff. The world of Hollow Knight feels like I did after 12 hours with it: empty inside.

I didn’t finish Hollow Knight. I probably didn’t come close. I did put twenty-hours combined into it with the best hopes and intentions. The first time was back in 2017 on Steam. I bought a copy for Will too, and with my best friend playing alongside me, we set out to see what the hype was all about. We were both excited to get on the Hollow Knight bandwagon. After a few hours, I felt weird. Because I wasn’t having fun at all. When I found out Will wasn’t either, I just found something else to play. I occasionally booted it up again thinking “maybe I was just having an off-day”, before finding myself quickly bored again by the same sword and same enemies and the same dull levels, eventually putting eight hours into the thing. Clearly it wasn’t an off-day thing. I figured maybe it was because a computer isn’t a good home for a Metroidvania, so when I saw Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition discounted on Xbox One, I thought “okay, maybe I’ll finally see what all the fans see in it.”

Maybe the oh-so-subtle symbolism is why this game has so many people blown away who can’t exactly articulate what it is that has them sucked in to the experience. I’m just saying, there’s a LOT of it in Swallow Knight.. I mean Hollow Knight.

Nope, I didn’t. I still don’t. I tweeted basically the entire time, showing my progress. For the first hour or two, it was fine. It was almost fun in a tutorial type of way. But then I started to wonder out loud when the game would start to, you know, wow me. The entire time, fans of Hollow Knight were assuring me “you’re about to get to the good stuff” or “you’re about to open up the game.” And then it didn’t happen. They kept promising, I’d get to the spot they were talking about or get the upgrade that they swore would change how I felt about the game, and then it didn’t, and then they promised me the really good stuff was “still coming.” Finally I caught on that I’d never get to the “good stuff” because there is no good stuff. Hollow Knight is a very basic Metroidvania with its only remarkable hook being that if you die you lose all your money, but if you go back to where you died you can get the money back. You know, that thing other games have been doing all decade.

Otherwise, Hollow Knight is stuck in early 90s 2D adventure mentality, but people will give it a pass because it’s “deep”. And you know it’s “deep” because it has a pretty art-house decor. Who cares? The first time a stage made me sit up in my chair, I was ten hours in. And even that didn’t last. Maybe I quit right before I got to “the good stuff.” I don’t know. I don’t really care. It shouldn’t take that long to get to the part that’s entertaining in the entertainment product. And if someone still thinks I sought out to find things to dislike about Hollow Knight for the sake of being different, do you really think I needed over $30 and twenty-combined hours to do that? Because I didn’t.

I wanted to have fun at the party. It turns out the party kind of sucked. Like one of those ones where you find out it’s not really a party and they’re going to try to get you to buy a timeshare. They already fed you, so it seems rude to get up and walk out right away. You start checking your watch to make like you have something better to do later. But really, you’re trying to figure out if you should leave before he hands out the brochures or wait until afterwards so you can show it to your family and laugh with them. That’s what the Hollow Knight experience was for me: being trapped at a timeshare party. Hell, come to think of it, I think I’d like that party more anyway. At least I’d get fed.

Hollow Knight: Voidheart Edition was developed by Team Cherry
Point of Sale: Steam, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4

$9.89 (Steam) and $11.99 (Xbox One) (Normally $14.99) thinks Voidheart sounds like a Care Bears villain in the making of this review.

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Three Fourths Home Extended Edition (Short Subject Saturdays)

December 1, 2018 by Leave a comment

I’m not really a text-based adventure type of chick. It’s one of those things I just don’t get. It doesn’t seem to take advantage of the medium. But I was really, really surprised to see one on the Switch marketplace that actually straight-up says it’s a short-subject game. I have a feature called Short Subject Saturdays.. cue the graphic..
And and the game was on sale so I figured “why not?”

Then I played it. Well, “play” is a generous term here. You’re a girl in a car driving home in a blinding rainstorm while talking on the phone to your family. That’s the entire game. And, presumably for the sake of immersion, you have to hold the right trigger down the entire.. fucking.. time. If you do not, the car stops and the dialog will not advance forward. Apparently Kelly’s cellphone is being powered directly by the gas pedal of the car. It has to be on the list of the dumbest ideas for a gameplay mechanic I’ve seen in my entire life. My amigo Brad Gallaway of GameCritics.com suggested I use the same rubber-band trick I used with Cuphead, but it’s harder to do so on the Nintendo Switch. So my right index finger (which is still sore, I’m not even exaggerating) and I are currently not on speaking terms, and that’s a shame because there’s a Parks & Rec marathon on and plump Chris Pratt gets me wet.

The main game is around 20 – 30 minutes long. The extra stuff is another 15 minutes or so. It feels longer.

A text-based game has to have sharp writing and something intriguing about it to make the experience worth your while. The point-of-view character is Kelly, a mid-20-something who just moved back home after some sort of falling out with her boyfriend. Her Mom is an overbearing bitch. Her Dad is an off-his-nut alcoholic who apparently had a leg amputated following some sort of farming accident. Her brother is a self-indulgent twat who writes sloggy fan-fiction (clearly this was the author insertion character). Unfortunately, the game is framed as being a casual phone call with your family. The one and only positive thing I can say about Three Fourths Home (I refuse to enable to their bad grammar by not capitalizing the title) is that the dialog often does feel like real inane banter between a daughter and her cunt mother, stumblefuck father, and douchebag brother. But, that’s kind of the problem: they’re fucking boring. The stuff that IS interesting, like why Kelly moved back home and what caused her family to leave the farm she was visiting for old time’s sake, is kept somewhere in the background. Instead, topics center around a swear jar and your brother reading his shitty short story to you (how meta). There’s a ton of filler that doesn’t seem to go anywhere. You don’t really get any closure on the family situation because, as you make your way home from a drive out in the boonies, a tornado warning hits. There’s also an epilogue that feels more like a prologue, but it doesn’t really help either.

Apparently the story unfolds differently depending on how you answer the questions, but the thing is I’m not really willing to go back and sit through this literally-physically-painful-to-play text adventure because (1) it was boring the first time and (2) I’d be afraid I’d answer the stuff wrong and get the same exact ending I already got which sucked and offers no closure. There’s no obvious spot where the story could branch, or why it would branch. It reminds me of #Wargames, where the challenge is entirely based around not nodding off and you have no clue where to press what to change the story you already snored through before. Really, Three Fourths Home would have made a better short film. As a video game, because of the R button requirement, it might be the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s that boring and that badly designed.

The extended stuff pushes the envelope by letting you walk left OR right. Thankfully moving is optional.

It’s also an epilepsy risk because the game takes place in a lightning storm (though I’ll defend the developer’s decision on this one since it’s sort of is necessary for some of the symbolism and disabling it would go against their creative vision). It’s not badly written. Again, it feels kind of real. But real-schmeal. Three Fourths Home is a fucking bore. I literally can’t believe in 2015 people were throwing this piece of shit Game of the Year nominations and 10 out of 10s. How? Why? Is this one of those “I better pretend I liked this or people will think I’m not indie enough” things like with Proteus? Lately people have accused me of being too wishy-washy with some of the games I haven’t liked. How’s this for wishy-washy: Three Fourths Home Extended Edition is overwrought pretentious tripe with all the depth of an evaporated puddle of piss.

Three Fourths Home was developed by Bracket Games
Point of Sale: Switch, Steam, Xbox One, PS4, Vita

$2.24 (normally $8.99.. FUCKING OUTRAGEOUS! I feel sorry for anyone who bought this thinking it would be something else) sent this game to the cornfield in the making of this review.

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Chime Sharp

November 25, 2018 by Leave a comment

It’s nuts to think Chime is nearly a decade old. It came out so long ago that I can safely use the term “back in the day” to describe when I first purchased it on Xbox Live Arcade. At the time it had one of those feel-good “X amount of the purchase price will be donated to charity” attachments. Later, I somehow ended up with a copy on my PlayStation 3 as well, though for the life of me I’m not sure how it got there. Possibly it was a PlayStation Plus freebie or discount. It’s also on my iPhone. And iPad. And PlayStation 4. And my Xbox One. And now, with Chime Sharp, it’s on my Steam account as well. Seriously, where the fuck did I get all these? I’ve caught fewer colds over the last decade than I’ve acquired copies of Chime.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, the formula is basically Tetris + Luminies – tension = Chime. You get a grid to place various shapes of blocks on that you have to arrange in 3×3 or larger “quads”. When a quad is formed, a meter starts to fill up inside it. You can keep adding blocks around it to make it bigger. Once the meter is all filled up, the size is locked in and the blocks are deleted the next time the pace ticker scrolls by. It aims to be a kinder, gentler action-puzzler that’s more relaxing than its sweaty-palms forefathers. And it succeeds. Mostly.

In 2018, I must have made over a hundred attempts at beating the “Strike” mode for Steve Reich’s stage. I don’t think I could complete it if I had a thousand years.

For the sake of fairness, I went back and played the PS3 port, Chime Mega Super Deluxe 5000 HD Turbo Special Edition or some such shit. I would have tried the XBLA original, but I mean, come on. It’s 2018. My last Xbox 360 (I went through four of the fucking things) Red Ring of Deathed about two years ago. Possibly from old age, or possibly from an oscillating fan blowing mildly cooled air in its general direction. We may never know. Anyway, having already put a few hours into Chime Sharp, I was pretty impressed at how far along its come. The presentation for Sharp is so much sleeker and modern. Chime on PS3 isn’t that old, but it looks positively ancient compared to what the game is now. If you care about that sort of thing, and you really shouldn’t because it’s a block-puzzler for cripe’s sake, Chime Sharp is positively dazzling to watch.

Except when it’s not. Did you buy those special sunglasses to view last year’s eclipse? Well, I hope you didn’t throw them out. Go grab them, put them on, and take a look at this level.

I’m not sure what the fuck they were thinking with the color scheme here. I honestly can’t remember playing any game at IGC that literally made my eyes hurt until now. On my first play through of it, I didn’t get enough coverage to make it to the next stage and I might as well of cried because my eyes were already pouring tears. That’s not an exaggeration. By time I completed the second, thankfully more successful attempt, my eyes hurt. Badly. And the pain lingered quite a while afterwards. It felt like I had looked into the sun. Hey Chime developers, I like your game. But for fuck’s sake, change the color scheme of this stage. The next level was gaudy too, though that might have been my fault since I only waited an hour after finishing the nuclear explosion pictured above.

Take my word for it, turn on color blind mode, where all the blocks are orange and blue regardless of the level you’re on. It’s a really useful mode to have, because after playing it without it turned on, you might end up color-blind. And possibly blind-blind as well. But, even that’s not perfect, because the wrap-ups after each stage ignore the option and revert back to digitally pepper-spraying your retinas. Like so.

On the plus side, it makes it hard to see how badly I did. So, uh, I guess thanks Chime devs for sparing my ego?

I should probably point out that Chime is technically supposed to be a music-based game, where each block you put down somehow alters the soundtrack. The thing is, a quirk of my autism is a condition called Amusia. Which, despite what it sounds like, doesn’t mean I find stuff amusing that I shouldn’t. I don’t, for example, laugh at Big Bang Theory. Because Big Bang Theory is not funny. If you do laugh at it, consult your own doctor, because something is wrong with your brain. I’m not sure what it’s called, but it’s not Amusia. Amusia is clinical tone deafness, and in my case, music can even make me physically ill sometimes (though that usually only applies to pop music and not symphonic stuff). That’s why I rarely talk about it here at Indie Gamer Chick. Maybe that makes Chime an odd choice to review. But, maybe it speaks volumes to the core gameplay’s quality that I’m not a music person and was perfectly satisfied. Come to think of it, I was the same way with Lumines too. You people get too worked up over music anyway. Like when idiots refuse to watch Married with Children on syndication because it doesn’t have the Frank Sinatra theme during the opening credits. Even though literally nothing else about the show is different. I don’t get it.

I don’t have a ton to say about Chime Sharp. I appreciate the additional modes and challenges, all of which are just different scoring variations of the same core gameplay. I really only wanted to do this review to get Chime on the Leaderboard. It’s been one of my go-to “I desperately need to calm down” games for years. While I joke about not being sure how I came upon so many different versions of it, the truth is Chime is the closest any “action-puzzler” has come to reaching that Tetris-level “sure-fire bet” when you simply need to get your game on and need something that will draw you in. Chime is a peanut butter & jelly sandwich. It gets the job done, fills you up, and lets you go about your life. I’m not good enough at it to chase records. I’m not bad enough at it to have my blood pressure spike. It’s a spa-treatment of a game. Granted, one that might occasionally mace your eyeballs.

Chime Sharp was developed by Zoë Mode
Point of Sale: Steam, PlayStation 4, Xbox One (No Vita version? Really?)

$9.99 actually started writing this review back in February and never finished it but wants to get content up daily so here we are in the making of this review.

Chime Sharp is Chick Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. You can safely consider all ports of Chime to be covered by this review, but if possible, get Chime Sharp.

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Bleed 2

November 21, 2018 by Leave a comment

So, there’s this game that came out in 2017. It’s an old-school shooter where the developer, recognizing that most people remember boss battles and not stages, based the majority of the game around such encounters. It features a throw-back art style, clever boss designs and battles, and exhilarating white-knuckle bullet-spraying action.

Oh, and it has multiple difficulty options and is accessible to gamers of all skill levels. That’s how you know I’m not talking about Cuphead.

Back in February of 2017, the sequel to one of my favorite XBLIGs arrived on Steam. I got it. I played it. And then I apparently had writer’s block when I sat down to do the review.. and promptly forgot about it. Awesome. So here we are twenty-something months later and I just replayed Bleed 2, this time on my Xbox One. Now, I really, really loved playing Bleed 2 the first time around, so how on Earth I could let this one slip by? Well, not being dedicated to my game critic duties played a part. Another part might be that Bleed 2 is shorter than your average bout with hiccups.

Fan theory: Wryn is the daughter of Chintai, one of the bosses from Double Dragon. That explains the thirst for homicide.

In Bleed 2 you continue the adventures of Wryn, the girl who dreamed of becoming the biggest gaming icon in the world, and achieved that dream by violently murdering all the other stars in cold blood. Well, if it still counts as cold-blooded if done in the most upbeat, cheerful, “holy crap, I can’t believe how totally violent and deadly I am and that’s fucking awesome” type of way. I loved Wryn. She’s a go-getter. And I love her character design. Bleed 2 even has a taunt button so you can see her joyously raise a single arm triumphantly in celebration of her growing body count, and it makes her look like a Charlie Brown supporting character. Like Peppermint Patty if she completely lost her mind and started gunning down all the other Peanuts for fun.

Bleed 2, like the best sequels, is the evolutionary version of its XBLIG original. The run-and-spray twin-stick gameplay has been refined, along with the responsiveness of Wryn’s awesome triple-jump that feels like it belongs in a superhero game. The main hook this time around is you have a samurai sword that you can use to reflect any pink-colored projectiles or attacks. The sword is automatically used when you’re using the standard duel-pistols and press in a direction to shoot. While it works and offers remarkable precision, it also makes me worry about the health of my controller as proper usage requires a lot of stick-flicking. By time I finished a round of Bleed 2, a ring of white powder that hadn’t been there before (I always check with twin-stick games) had formed around my XB1 pad’s right stick. While it’s not Mario Party 1 levels of warranty-voiding abuse, by the half-way point of Bleed 2 I was questioning whether Ian Campbell was in league with the Mexican Controller Cartels. We’ve all been there. Hell, I used to make a enough money selling the powdered remains of my Nintendo 64 analog sticks post-Mario Party to teenagers as “cocaine” to fund my actual cocaine habit.

The reflect-the-bullets stuff is awesome and combines beautifully with the Max Payne like bullet-time effect. It makes Bleed 2 such a joy to experience. There’s no pretension on display here. This is just a stupid, mindless, white-knuckle action game. No bullshit. No sense of self-importance. With the indie scene trending more towards games that try to tell important “messages”, Bleed 2 is a breath of fresh air. Like Cuphead, it forgoes the notion that people want to play through levels and focuses on multiple boss encounters, each unique from the other and requiring different tactics to beat. They hit one after another, never giving you a moment to breathe. Even games that aspire to be balls-to-the-wall miss the mark with frequent breaks in the proceedings. Not Bleed 2. Often you beat one boss only to have another spawn within seconds. It never lets up, and it never gets boring.

Bleed 2 is such a strange game. You can unlock more weapons, but none of them are as fun or satisfying as the standard loadout. When does that ever happen in games anymore? Not since Painkiller that I can think of.

But, it’s not perfect. The basic enemies are total cannon-fodder, offering less challenge than your average pickle jar. And most of the levels are so uninspired that I wonder why they even bothered putting them in. Perhaps, like Cuphead, they felt like they had to. To all you indie devs out there: you don’t have to do shit. Funny enough, as much as I hated Cuphead, at least some of the actual levels were entertaining. Not with Bleed 2. They’re dull as dirt tofu-based appetizers and serve as distractions to the delicious, meaty main course of the boss battles. I’d love to see a third game in the series that fully transitions to just those parts. Everything about the stages, with the exception of one that removes gravity, feel uninspired, phoned in, and arbitrary. And if that’s not enough mean things to say, give me a few minutes and I’ll come up with more.

The main quest is short. A good player can probably knock it out comfortably in under two hours. Bleed 2 offers a ton of extras, but this is where the game stumbles. The main quest features hand-crafted levels, while the more attractive bonus mode, Endless, uses randomly generated stages in what I can only assume was an attempt to offer some justification for not removing the basic enemies entirely. Also, this is what all procedural generation in games like this should be: a throw-away extra. Unfortunately, while there’s still adjustable difficulty toggles, the endless mode gives you one life and one life only to complete all five stages. This is far out of reach for my ability as a gamer. Why not offer to have endless lives and count how many you need? Not for everyone. Just make it an option? I mean, the random levels are dull and you take on bosses you already fought and I can’t imagine anyone would actually voluntarily want to play this stuff, but gating it off so it’s only playable by the uber-talented seems odd.

This is “Challenge Mode” where you can take on three of the game’s bosses at the same time. Not a boss rush. THE SAME TIME. Even the on-screen menu admits this mode is unbalanced and just for lulz.

But I loved Bleed 2. I don’t really have too much to say about it. Stripping out the majority of useless stuff will do that. I like the way weapon pick-ups (or lack-thereof) work. I honestly had more fun just using the default loadout than I did during a second play-through with rocket launchers and laser beams. Maybe I wish the “main” bosses weren’t just other people the same size as my character, which was done in service to the story instead of the pace and atmosphere. The final boss fight against “the Rival” (who you then unlock as a playable character, only he can reflect yellow stuff instead of pink, essentially making him Sinestro) is so insanely anti-climatic that I didn’t realize he was the final boss until “GAME CLEAR” popped-up on-screen. It was a bit of a let-down, even though it was a pretty fun fight. You know what? Give me rock-solid controls and an hour or two of exhilarating action that leaves me sweating, cursing, in a bit of pain, and still wanting more over a ten-hour experience where I eventually reach the point that I just want it to be over. I’m talking about Bleed 2, by the way, not my sex life.

Bleed 2 was developed by BootDisk Revolution
Point of Sale: Steam, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch

$7.99 (Steam version, normally $9.99 or $14.99 on consoles) think the series isn’t as popular because the name is fucking lazy in the making of this review. Then again this review is like twenty months late.

Bleed 2 is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard

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Chasm

November 19, 2018 by 3 Comments

So, in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve been friends with James Petruzzi (developer of Chasm) and Dan Adelman (producer of Chasm) for years. Not hangout friends or anything, but I’m quite fond of both. Also, I quite like Metroidvanias, as my Leaderboard rankings have established. The friendship stuff never factors into my reviews. The genre favoritism probably does. Because, you know, unavoidable human nature. For what it’s worth, I met James when we got into a digital screaming match on Twitter, and although the hatchet has long since been buried, I’ve always suspected he secretly doesn’t like me very much (and if that’s the case, just wait until he reads this, which is probably my most scathing positive review ever). That’s fine. Neither does my new dog. Like her, you’re stuck with me James.

But, there’s one other factor that my fans should probably consider when reading my review of Chasm: this is the final new release I’ll ever review that started life as an Xbox Live Indie Game. Now granted, by 2012 (yea, 2012! This bun has been in the oven for a while), it was no-longer slated for XBLIG, but still, if you’re a life-begins-at-conception type, Chasm is the “last XBLIG.” For most people, that wouldn’t mean anything. For me? To say XBLIGs were an important part of my life is an understatement. Without them, I wouldn’t be Indie Gamer Chick today. I probably wouldn’t be doing game reviews at all. I truly in my heart-of-hearts feel that if I had started a blog that covered games from any community but XBLIG, I’d never caught on, and I’d probably have quit after a month or two. That was my track record with me and hobbies up to that point in my life. The one-and-a-half model airplanes hanging from my bedroom ceiling, the incomplete collection of 1999-2000 NBA cards, or my unfinished K’Nex Roller Coaster that I just knew I had to have are a testament to that.

So, I fully admit that my play session with Chasm had an air of sentimentality that nobody else will experience. My eyes welled-up and tears began flowing down my cheeks as the end credits rolled, because this was the end of an era specific only to me. This didn’t happen to me when XBLIG shut down last year. Maybe that was because I was so focused on trying to get XBLIG devs to preserve our community’s legacy and port their games to other platforms. For me, this had more of a feel of finality to it. Chasm was essentially the epilogue to the most important chapter of my gaming life. I believe after seven years and 575 indie games reviewed that I can evaluate Chasm without that perspective, but it seems like something my readers should know happened. It’s be like if it turned out Roger Ebert had at one point forced Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken to play Russian Roulette at gunpoint, then sometime later saw the Deer Hunter. Sure, it got four stars because it was great, but deep down maybe he really liked it because it reminded him of the good old days.

The character design is insanely clever because it’s completely gender neutral. It could be a dude, or maybe it could be a chick. It’s whatever you want it to be. It’s like a gaming hero Rorschach test.

Chasm is a Metroidvania with an ambitious hook: the entire interconnected world is randomly generated all at once upon starting your quest. In fact, players are given a seed code so that they can share their maps with everyone else (mine was 61OEC765). Doing this allows Chasm to be one of those games that claims to “never being the same game twice.” A claim that is, and always has been, complete and total bullshit. Randomly generated games are always the same game. No matter how many times you play Chasm, you’ll be interacting with the same NPCs, getting the same weapons, and completing the same worlds in the same order. Rearranging the ordering of the rooms will never change that fact. Claiming otherwise is like claiming Solitaire is never the same game twice. That might be factually true (there’s more combinations in a deck of 52 playing cards than there are atoms on Earth), but it’s still just Solitaire. And Chasm is going to be Chasm no matter how many seeds you experience.

While it’s commendable that Chasm can assemble the rooms in a way that always makes a playable map with all the quirks you would expect in a Metroidvania, the problem is this required some overly-bland design for it to work. Rooms are mostly very basic, no-frills rectangular hallways that you walk in a straight line to traverse. Maybe they’ll occasionally get bold and throw a hill in for variety’s sake, but really, it’s mostly rectangular rooms that you walk across. If not hallways, they’re vertical shafts with platforms that have enemies crawling around them, straight out of 1986’s Metroid. A few times these sections don’t even have enemies at all. While a small handful of areas are more involved, around 2/3rds of the rooms amount to the basic rectangles with slight variations. Although the level design is rarely bad (though it does happen, especially sections that rely on edge-of-ledge platform jumping), it never rises above being just really bland until one section late in the game that features an electric platforming maze. It’s heartbreaking because Chasm, like so many games before it, sacrifices creativity and inspiration for what is, when you get down to it, a marketing gimmick. This is as tragic as Space Jam, which I swear started out as something profound and moving until it became an extended ad for Nike and Big Macs.

Notice most of the pictures feature flat or semi-flat hallways. That’s no coincidence. It’s just what most of the game looks like.

And frankly, building around “endless replayability” is so misguided, because the type of people who replay games that much will do so whether stages are random or not. I meet gamers all the time who brag about how they play stuff like Super Metroid or Chrono Trigger every month and have since they came out. Twenty-plus years and hundreds of replays later and they STILL do it today. As someone who almost never replays most games, this shit baffles me, but it’s fairly common. These type of gamers don’t need procedural generation (actually what they need is to be sectioned). For everyone else, nobody reasonably expects a $20 game to be a permanent investment that never gets old and never runs out of steam. Honestly, I think Nintendo got it right with the original Legend of Zelda: beat the game once, get a second quest where everything is rearranged. After finishing that, anyone should be ready to move on to the next new gaming experience.

So who benefits from those randomly generated levels? I’d argue nobody does. Yes, I did just fall in love with Dead Cells, which also features randomly generated stages. But, unlike Chasm, Dead Cells never has to build one continuous map that all interconnects. Since nothing has to make sense, they could allow for some wacky level design. Spelunky does this too, for better and for worse. Chasm, being a full-blown Metroidvania, couldn’t risk something so off-the-wall that it could make an experience more frustrating, so it had to make levels overly conservative. It does work, and after generating a few new worlds and exploring the starting levels, it’s remarkable how normal these maps are. Bland, but normal. It’s neck-and-neck with SteamWorld Heist in the race for most intelligent procedural level algorithm in gaming history. Probably the best thing I can say about Chasm is if I didn’t know the stages were randomly generated, I’d guessed they were hand designed and cutting edge.. at least for a game from 1993.

Do you know why that sucks most of all? Chasm is really good. For all the whining I just did, it turned out to be one of the most satisfying Metroidvanias of 2018. One of the rare times where I actively sought-out filling-out the entire world map, collecting all the items, finishing all the side-quests, and completing the catalog of monsters. I have a lot of games to cover before 2018 is up, and if Chasm wasn’t such a joy to play, I would have tried to have finished it faster. I have shit to do. Stop snickering. Okay, fine, I don’t. But I still would have tried to finish this as quickly as possible. Instead, I ended up putting extra time into it before finishing the final boss just because I was enjoying it that much. That to me is the mark of a good game: stalling for time before beginning the end-sequence.

I have to admit: I didn’t see fighting a sentient cube of lethal jello coming.

I was totally dazzled by the settings and the variety of enemies. More specifically, murdering those enemies. I almost never pay attention to the actual artistic design of basic baddies anymore. Chasm commands that you take notice. The models stand out more than any 2D game I can remember in recent times. However, take my word for it and play Chasm on normal difficulty. For easy mode, you’re essentially an unkillable tank. Hell, in normal mode, you’re still likely to end up with so many health refills that it’s conceivable you could retire from adventuring and set up a lucrative Whole Foods next to the mine that the entire game takes place in. Who cares if this helps evil win? Bad guys still got to get their groceries from somewhere, right?

Actually, the items are a problem in general, and it probably goes back to the random nature of the game. After around the three-hour mark, I never once got a weapon or piece of armor out of a treasure chest that a defeated bad guy or the stores in the town hadn’t provided a better version of already. Even late in the game, I pulled a Silver Helm from a chest, when I was really four or five levels above its stats with the shit I already had. Hardly a deal breaker, but I have to admit that the sense of discovery was severely compromised by how many items I got from chests that were obsolete. Hell, the game builds up acquiring this mythical Sword of Light or something along those lines. You have to do a series of fetch-quests to get the magic orbs needed to open the gate that has the chest for it. When I finally did, I was so jazzed.. and then my brain let out one final, deafening “WOMP WOMP” as I looked at its attributes and saw that it did a lot less damage than the Gilded Hammer I had already forged several hours earlier. There was a reliable pattern of feeling brief excitement upon seeing a new thing for the first time, followed by disappointment when I saw the new thing’s stats. Which is also the same dilemma gamers experience every time a new Nintendo console is announced.

Behold, the worst part in the game. At one point you have to wall jump in the dark with saw blades moving up and down the walls that you can’t see. Yeah. James, I know you’re reading this. You owe me fifty push-ups for that one. I don’t have the authority to order any such thing but.. well.. seriously, fuck it. Drop and give me 50, maggot.

And I’m guessing the algorithm isn’t perfect, because twice I found a room where the enemies paid off so much XP that I was able to screw-grind myself up three or more levels in under five minutes. I was never in danger in dying in these rooms (or at any point, really. I don’t think I ever dipped under 20 health), but I also suspected I wasn’t supposed to be that far along yet. Even worse was when those XP-bleeding monsters would also drop weapons far-and-away more powerful than anything I had access to. Item drops seem to go in binges, and at one point I went a three-minute stretch where every-other enemy dropped a pricey sword that I could hock at the shop. Leveling-up was just icing on the cake. Hell, that one three-minute period where the enemies were essentially piñatas left me with so much swag I could sell in the stores that I was able to clear out entire shop inventories (by this point, probably half the items they initially had) AND upgrade them in roughly the time it takes to cook a pizza. The strange thing is I never felt noticeably more powerful whenever I would gain a level. It makes the RPG elements feel so inconsequential that I can’t help but wonder if Chasm would have benefited from cutting them entirely and relying fully on items and weapons for the basis of gaining strength.

Thankfully, the combat is properly satisfactory. Most weapons feel weighty, and combined with the excellent sound design serve to make strikes feel authentic and cathartic. Chasm is never boring. Which is not to say it doesn’t have a bit of sloginess to it. Given how much backtracking factors into progress and completing side-quests, I wish enemies leveled-up alongside the character. The random design once again stymies the overall design, because you often have to venture back to out-of-the-way sections of levels just to grab a chest or a hidden area that you previously couldn’t access. In a hand-designed world, a developer could make sure to place these things along the backtracking paths, so as to make replaying them close to as exciting as it was the first time. Axiom Verge sets the high-marks for this. In that game, whenever you’re forced to go backwards, you’re almost certain to cross paths with an item you saw just out of reach before. For Chasm, the placement is in the hands of the game’s level-lottery, and the level-lottery doesn’t give a flying fuck if you’re having fun or not. But no matter where items are, you’re required to constantly go back to the earlier levels, where enemies no longer pose any risk. If the baddies got badder, perhaps Chasm’s pace wouldn’t feel so stop-and-go. Then again, if the stages didn’t feel so repetitive and samey, perhaps I wouldn’t have gotten lost as many times as I did trying to remember which corner of the map had which ledge I couldn’t get to before.

I looked all over trying to spot a cameo of myself or my mascot, as is tradition with former XBLIGers turned tentpole indie devs. It’s like paying tribute to the Gods by sacrificing a goat. Forget to do it and you end up struck by lightning or something. James presumably values his house and knows I’m nutty enough to burn it down, so there’s NO WAY he could forget. Well, he either forgot or this is supposed to be me. I mean.. it could be me. Not a very good likeness. My tail is green, among other things.

Really, everything wrong with Chasm will come back to the level design. Because in literally every other aspect, Chasm hits the mark. Above average or better in combat, graphic design (it could be the best looking 16bit-inspired game ever), enemy design, control design, weapon design, story design, (well, relative to the era of gaming it aims to invoke).. really, the thing that I’m most grateful for with Chasm is it’s now fated to be my go-to example of what a shitty idea procedural generation is. Chasm is a very good game that is never great, just because of one mechanic that was included with the best of intentions. They spent seven years making the perfect randomly generated Metroidvania and I feel they probably accomplished it. And it’s awesome, but not as much as it would have been if that time had been spent putting these same mechanics in a game with clever puzzles or innovative platforming. There’s nothing imaginative about Chasm’s gameplay. Really, it’s so conventional that I can’t blame those who feel it’s as forgettable as its level design. It is one of the best indies I’ve ever played. It’s in the top 98 percentile of all indies I’ve ever reviewed. And I’ll probably forget about most of it as soon as I finish this review. Levels are what stick with players more than any other part of a game. I know I’ll forget a lot of about Chasm because I couldn’t tell one room apart from another when I was actively playing the dang thing.

I really do hate to rag on Chasm, because it’s so much fun. It’s a blast to play. Really and truly. But, it feels like it doesn’t live up to its potential. It’s rare for me to play a game so mechanically right that it’s almost uninteresting to talk about. Hell, these mechanics deserved a better game. Maybe they should have tried more high-concept level designs and seen if they could make them work with the randomness. Sure, it could have failed, but with these gameplay mechanics, it’s still near-certain Chasm would have been just as fun. Think about it like this: in bowling, it’s way cooler to see someone pick up a split than throw a strike. Chasm scores strikes. One after another. It frustrates me so much because the people who made that have to be capable of making better levels than this.

This is the one spot I almost gave up on. The samey rooms and somewhat illogical map design had me running in circles while I searched all over looking for the solution to this puzzle. You can’t go to GameFAQs either because the solution is random too. It makes me wonder if the entire point of Chasm’s procedural generation is to prevent strategy guides from being useful. That would be the worst reason for doing anything in the history of humanity. Remember, as a species, we used to collectively agree that the best way to help sick people was to open up their veins and drain them of their blood. Even considering that, trolling guide users by having bland random stages is the worst idea ever. But presumably that’s not true and the levels are random for the “never the same game twice” bullcrap. God I hope that’s the reason.

Nah, actually they should have dropped the randomness altogether. The amazing thing is they spent so long trying to get the system for it working and stainless, when they’d been way better off critically if they’d made one single, hand-crafted map and went all out on cleverness. I’d love to get DLC for this that’s an entirely hand-designed area with the most outlandish adventure-platforming-puzzling they could come up with. That’s why Chasm is so strange. The thing that holds it back is the thing the entire game was developed around. A thing that raised nearly $200,000 on Kickstarter. And it sure seems like Chasm turned out as good as James could have dreamed of. I often joke about minimum indie badness. For Chasm, the germ of the idea was that badness. Everything that grew from that turned into a very good game. And yet I’m left frustrated and wanting the developer to aim higher. I suppose it’s a fitting conclusion to the legacy of Xbox Live Indie Games, where not all ambition was well-founded, but dreamers still managed to overachieve and leave me in awe. I’m just happy the final chapter of XBLIG had a happy ending. One that didn’t end with developers tarring-and-feathering me. At least not yet. Don’t even think about it James.

The name is every bit as bland and unmemorable as the levels are. I was going to accuse it of completely failing the Google Rule but then I punched in the word “Chasm” and the first several results were all tied to it. I’ll shut up now.

Chasm was developed by Bit Kid Games
Point of Sale: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Vita, Nintendo Switch, Steam

$19.99 tearfully turned out the lights on this chapter of her life in the making of this review.

Chasm is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Review copies of Chasm were provided to members of Indie Gamer Team. The copy played by Indie Gamer Chick was paid for by Cathy.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , ,

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon

November 9, 2018 by 5 Comments

This is almost not fair. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon probably shouldn’t be listed alongside stuff like Escape Goat 2 or Axiom Verge or even Fez. I mean, Fez had close to an entire movie devoted to its development, something most indies could only dream of. And yet, it still feels more on the same level as its peers than Curse of the Moon. It seems somehow wrong that today’s game competes head-to-head with it for a spot on the IGC Leaderboard, along with Dead Cells or SteamWorld Dig 2 or Sportsfriends. In case you didn’t know, Bloodstained is produced by Koji Igarashi. As in “the guy who made Castlevania: Symphony of the Night.” To say doors would open to him that wouldn’t open to your average indie developer is a bit of an understatement.

To put it in perspective, Curse of the Moon is the result of a $5,545,991 Kickstarter campaign. But, Curse of the Moon wasn’t even the focus of that campaign. This is the game that got made because the campaign made so much money. This is a stretch goal. The game that people actually backed is coming out next year. That’s fucking insane.

The moon is visible in every stage and slowly develops into a full moon that frames the final level. This doesn’t make Curse of the Moon better, but it shows a wonderful attention to detail that demonstrates how much care and consideration was given during the design. Meanwhile, Link is like “the moon.. gets full? That’s adorable. For me, the moon tried to crash into the planet, obliterating all life as we know it. Enjoy your Castlevania cosplay. It’s precious.”

Curse of the Moon was promised to be a “retro mini-game prequel” or something along those lines. But it ain’t mini. This is a full-fledged NES-style game so convincing that you would swear this is the missing link between Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse and Super Castlevania IV. And it truly is an NES Castlevania in everything but name. Enemies are almost all reskinned versions of Castlevania staples. The four characters are very similar to Dracula’s Curse. There’s no Grant Danasty, and the main character doesn’t feel like a Belmont, but the first ally you gain certainly does, whip and everything. The second character is a close approximation to Sypha Belnades. Finally, they just pretty much said “fuck it” and stuck Alucard in as the third ally, bat-transformation fully intact. It’s the moment where you feel the team said “we’re either going to get sued or we’re not. Might as well go big or go home.”

If you think of Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon as Castlevania 3.5, that tells you everything you need to know about the game. It controls slightly better than the NES series, and it’s especially nice that the stairs aren’t a complete nightmare to use anymore. But otherwise, it feels like a really great ROM hack. Everything has this creepy familiarity, but that doesn’t mean some inspired bits of originality don’t seep through. In fact, not being married to the Castlevania mythos allows for some of the most creative boss designs in the series. The series that Curse of the Moon isn’t part of, but kind of is anyway. Sorta. It’s complex.

“Excuse me, have you by any chance seen my wife? Last time I heard from her, she said she had to go fight bears. Bears that ‘care’ whatever that means. Kinda sexy in a bald, creepy, evil spirit kind of way?”

Another way to look at it is someone shot Castlevania with the same modernization ray Shovel Knight used on classic NES Capcom games. 2010s 2D gameplay conventions are here. Optional difficulty? Check. A save system besides a password? Check. Tons of extras and multiple endings? Check. It’s actually an impressive, fully-realized package and it’s strange that people still think it’s some sort of throwaway Kickstarter bonus. Let’s say Ritual of the Night never sees the light of day and Curse of the Moon is as far as the franchise makes it out of the crib. As much as that would suck, the one thing we wound up getting is very, very good on its own merit.

Having said that, the big issue is the difficulty and the lack of flexibility. Curse of the Moon has two difficulty options: Casual and Veteran. There’s no toggles to adjust how hard the game is between these, and that’s sort of a problem. “Veteran” is Castlevania exactly as you grew up on. A lives system and that infamous Castlevania “getting hit by a bat somehow causes your character to dramatically curl up and fly six feet backwards, more than likely into a god-damned fucking pit” recoil that resulted in many a hurled controller. It also nerfs the value of item-pickups. Casual eliminates both the lives and the recoil. Consequently, the normal mode is too hard and the casual mode is too easy. But there’s also a chance that the normal mode is too easy for most Castlevania veterans. Despite the fact that I’ve beaten Castlevania I & III (fuck Simon’s Quest, it sucks, it’s  boring, and it has too much downtime), I wasn’t really looking to challenge myself here and so I opted for casual mode. But when I dipped my toes in the putrid water that is Veteran mode, I actually did clear the first few levels with almost no effort. I’m getting reports from Castlevania fans that this would be the easiest of the NES Castlevanias if it was legitimately part of the series. Take that for what it’s worth.

This was my favorite boss fight. And yet, as cool as it was, I couldn’t stomp out the earworm that kept humming the theme to DuckTales in my head.

But, I kind of wish I could have played the unlimited lives version of the game with the option to turn the recoil on and off. Just to give a whirl. Oh, I wouldn’t have left it on. I actually kept a running count of how many times I would have almost certainly died as a result of that recoil: 57 times. That’s 57 times I didn’t scream myself hoarse in anger. But what if I wanted at least that much challenge without having to deal with starting full levels over because I ran out of lives? That’s not possible with Bloodstained, and maybe it should have been. The lack of Goldilocks options means everything is too hot or too cold, and we never get a chance at making things “just right” before the bears show up to eat her face off.

You can actually make your own challenges, though the game doesn’t remotely advertise this. I didn’t even know about this stuff until well after I had beaten the game and was replaying it for the sake of grabbing extra screenshots for this review, but you can murder the allies you acquire over the game’s first three levels by attacking them instead of talking to them. If you do this, you gain an extra ability for the main character. Killing the Belmont wannabe gains you a wider-ranged jumping-slash maneuver. Killing the Sypha clone gains you a double-jump. Killing not-Alucard allows you to dash. Mind you, the main character is easily the most boring to use, so it’s actually not-desirable to kill the allies to gain these moves. It would make more sense if killing them gained you something the ally did. Kill the not-Belmont, gain her higher jumping. Kill not-Alucard, get the ability to fly. Something, ANYTHING other than the way they did it. You also unlock different endings, depending on which allies you kill and which ones you don’t. By the end of the game, I was using all of them except the Sypha clone, who would be almost worthless. Except for the fact that I killed the last boss by, you guessed it, using the Sypha clone. That dude became the friend you drag around with you on a night on the town because he’ll pick up the check at the end of the night.

I giggled when I reached this scene. Yes, it’s a character based on Elizabeth Báthory, the infamous “Blood Countess” accused of killing over 600 girls and bathing in their blood to maintain her youth. But this is also a wonderful satire of the final room of the original Castlevania. Instead of coming across Dracula’s coffin, you come across a bathtub. And yes, I’ve confirmed this was deliberate. Now THAT is how you do an in-joke.

Otherwise, I really liked Curse of the Moon. It’s probably not as good as Castlevania III, where I feel the level design is stronger and more inspired. Curse of the Moon brings a lot of great ideas to the table, but the levels themselves feel more like direct homages that didn’t stray far enough from tradition to feel like the “lost sequel” that it aspires to be. Given the fact that the bosses stand out for their creativity, it’s a crying shame that the levels almost never do. There are multiple branching paths in each stage, but they’ll all bring you from one level to the next in linear fashion and only give you a couple new areas to explore, though those few extra rooms have the same look and feel to them that the other paths do anyway. Don’t get me wrong: the levels are never boring, and actually it’s a treat that not one of them sucks the fun out of the game. But while the themes can be fun and the reskins of existing Castlevania enemies are nifty, the levels all feel like stages we’ve already played from previous games. Well, besides the last stage where an army of bugs destroys the walls, but that feels more like Heat Man’s stage in Mega Man 2, so the familiarity is still there.

And also, it’s worth noting that the fifth boss is so absurdly flashy that I’m honestly lucky I didn’t have a seizure. All the bosses do a final “last hurrah” attack once defeated, and that one was probably the most flashy, dangerous-for-my-epilepsy moment I’ve had in seven years as IGC. It made people without epilepsy sick too. I normally defend these types of artistic decisions, but this one I feel crosses the line where it’s unnecessary. But don’t let that discourage you. The bosses are creative and cool. Just exercise caution.

What makes Curse of the Moon truly unique is I don’t have to say “it’s an NES Castlevania, and if you didn’t enjoy those, you won’t enjoy this.” Because that might not be entirely true. The casual mode might make it so players who liked the concept but not the prohibitive difficulty of the originals can actually take-in this game from start to finish and not give up in frustration. And they’ll probably have more fun with doing so than they ever did with the 80s/90s originals. Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is an accessible NES Castlevania that gives players broken by Dracula’s Curse a pair of crutches. Isn’t that the best way to pay tribute to a classic? And it goes so much further than that. Teenagers who grew up with the NES are now adults in their 40s with all the fun that can come with that. Slower reaction times. Waning skills. Maybe those who ate through the originals once upon a time but can barely get past the Mummies/Cyclopes/Gargoyle combination now that they’re decrepit can feel like they’ve come home again. Curse of the Moon can tickle the nostalgia of that crowd, but also be something they share with their kids. This, my friends, is how you do a classic franchise tribute. Polish the spirit of the game and plaster-over the unsightly holes. You know, the holes you made when you threw your controller through a wall after being knocked backwards into a pit.

The real question is whether or not Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon and next year’s Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night are indies at all. It’s not as if Igarashi was some nameless, faceless coder working at Konami who finally worked up the courage to go off on his own. He’s a legend of game development. Oddly enough, even after seven years of running a moderately popular indie game review blog, I still couldn’t tell you exactly where you draw the line between “indie” and “not indie.” For Bloodstained, it just seems off to me that the guy who went from making real Castlevania games leaves Konami to make games that are still Castlevania games in every way a game can be except the name and characters, and that counts as an indie. This isn’t someone taking a huge risk trying to mimic a game designed by his hero. He’s already the hero, making exactly the kind of game we would expect from him if had never gone off on his own and Konami mandated a direct sequel to Castlevania III with NES-style graphics. I put Curse of the Moon to a vote among my fans. 88% said this should count as an indie, but I was going to go against this and make a judgement call that this isn’t right.

Real super quick: see that whip? It sort of implies that you’ll have full eight-way attack options, just like in Super Castlevania IV. I think that’s why this picture is literally the first picture shown on the Steam page. But actually, this is a special attack that uses the game’s weapon-juice that you might not even be carrying because the game’s version of the holy water could fill its spot. This character’s default weapon is a short-range sword that fucking sucks. When myself and others bought this, we thought there’d be eight-way attack options based on these screens, so it’s kinda skeezy on their part. Also, this is the best sub-weapon for most bosses besides the Sypha clone’s magic homing missiles, which completely make bosses a cakewalk.

And then something unexpected happened: developers started contacting me, some I had never previously interacted with, saying they wanted the game ranked on the Leaderboard. Why? So they could aim to beat it. It was universal. They wanted Bloodstained: Cursed of the Moon to be declared by me an indie game and placed where I felt it should be (in this case, as the eighth-best indie I’ve ever reviewed as of this writing) so they had something to aim at. I like that. And, if this could serve to bring out the best in a new generation of game development heroes, hell, why not? So Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is an indie. And now I’ll remind those who pushed for this that next year, the real Bloodstained will arrive. A game in my favorite genre (Metroidvania) by one of my favorite producers (Igarashi) that will presumably take all the best parts from those classic games, clear up the warts inherit to those, and combine what’s leftover with modern game design principles. You want to be compete with that? Hey, your funeral.

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon was developed by Inti Creates
Point of Sale: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Vita, Nintendo Switch, Steam

$6.99 (normally $9.99) sang ♪ this isn’t the greatest game in the world, this is just a stretch goal ♪ in the making of this review. Thanks @luvcraft

Bloodstained: Curse of the Moon is Chick-Approved and Ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Sonic Mania (Review)

October 28, 2018 by 3 Comments

I don’t like Sonic. That’s kind of obvious at this point. Five months into my tenure as Indie Gamer Chick, in December 2011, I wrote a review of Sonic CD. Now, it was quite stupid of me to review a non-indie that I was fairly certain I wouldn’t like (though I swear I went into it with an open mind, just like I do with every game I review) that would certainly get me hate mail for the rest of my existence. This is one of those things you have to learn growing up. I was 22-years-old when I wrote that, and I wouldn’t do something like that today. It’s a “look at me” review and a bush league move, even if I stand by my opinion that it’s not a very good game. The funny thing is, at the time of its resurrection on XBLA, everyone knew FOR SURE that Sonic CD was the legendary “really good one” of the series. They never actually played it back in the day, because their parents didn’t fork over $300 for a Sega CD. And let’s be real here: if their parents could have afforded that, they’d been a Super Nintendo house anyway. You know it’s true.

Okay, maybe I didn’t completely grow up.

Then Sonic CD came out on Xbox Live for the astonishing price of 400 Microsoft Points (that’s $5 for you kids that didn’t have to suffer through Microsoft Points). What a steal, right? Finally a chance to get your hands on the holy grail of Sonic. I mean, it was also already released on GameCube/PlayStation 2 in a compilation called Sonic Gems Collection, but that would have required owning Sonic R and Sonic Fighters (AKA Virtua Fighter with Sonic) and even the most slobbering Sonic fans aren’t willing to go that far so nobody bought it. $5 for Sonic CD though? Sold. And then consensus from the Sonic super-fans was “it was alright. Seemed like it probably should have been better given the hype and vaunted status. Actually, it wasn’t really that good. In fact, it’s toothless and kind of sucks.” I’m guessing no game has ever failed to live up to its own towering reputation quite like Sonic CD did. It does have some fans, but for the most part people had the same reaction they did to any Sonic game for the last two decades: incredible hype, a dopamine-fueled ecstatic honeymoon period, and then the realization that what they just experienced really wasn’t what they were hoping it would be.

Well, that didn’t happen with Sonic Mania. It released a year ago, and those who liked it in 2017 aren’t struggling to convince themselves in 2018 that it actually had merit and didn’t suck as much as their brain is trying desperately to tell them it did. That’s probably a good sign that they might have actually made a decent game for once. In fact, I’ve heard people accuse me of deliberating ignoring it because I was afraid to admit there was finally a good Sonic game. Two things: (1) I’m guessing they don’t realize what they’re saying when they say that. It’s kind of hilarious when you think about it. (2) They actually made a good point that I should have reviewed it, if I fancy myself as an indie enthusiast.

Mutliplayer is done in Squish-O-Visionâ„¢ and isn’t really all that entertaining. I hated it, and can’t imagine anyone enjoying it unless all players are equally familiar with most of the levels available. Someone who played through the game will have a significant and unavoidable advantage over someone who hasn’t. What’s fun about that? It’s like beating someone with Osteoporosis at Twister. The odds were kinda stacked in your favor.

So, in case you didn’t know, after Generations face-planted, Sega sort of threw up their hands and had a guy named Christian Whitehead, an up-jumped fangame creator who they hired previously to do porting work, round-up a posse to make the ultimate fan-service Sonic game in time for the little blue shit’s 25th anniversary. Which was a smart move. If a franchise is struggling and recent installments of it feel like cynical hatchet jobs that totally miss the mark because the people in charge have zero passion or attachment to the IP, the logical thing to do is find people who will bring that passion and desire to do right by fans to the table. Christian Whitehead (I love that name, it makes me think of a pimple on its knees in prayer) and his crew were like “we have a lot of ideas, and can make you a whole new Sonic game!”

And then Takashi Iizuka (who I picture being the type of guy that has to be jabbed in the ribs with a pen during meetings by his assistant because he keeps nodding off) was like “uh.. that sounds like a lot of work. Can’t you guys just do half that? And, like, cut and paste the rest from old games? Maybe tweak them a bit. Not too much though. Just enough that we can legally get away with calling them remixes? That cool? Cool, I’m going back to my nap now.”

Okay he probably didn’t say that, but really, this guy claims with a straight face that Sonic fans are “hard to please.” Dear reader, have you played a recent Sonic game? Yes? And have you ever had a digital mob show up with pitchforks and torches to explain to you that the physics you just complained about are supposed to be bad? Yea, he claims those people are hard to please. I know, right?

Besides stuff like beating the game or getting all the Chaos Emeralds, most achievements in Sonic Mania are based around mundane tasks, such as burning one of those twisty spiked bridges. This is either more laziness or a scathing commentary on achievement hunting culture.

For Sonic Mania, there’s twelve zones (plus another that you unlock by getting all the Chaos Emeralds, which I didn’t, but I hear it’s brand new). Two of them are completely original and one of them is a deleted zone from Sonic 2. For returning zones, one act is a very Iizukaized remix of an old Sonic stage while the other act let the actual development team (that required Iizuka’s supervision so that THEY didn’t “take the series off the rails.” He’s the guy that made Sonic Lost World and they’re worried about someone else taking the series off-the-rails?) show off what someone who actually gives a shit about the subject matter can do.

Right from the first act of Sonic Mania, you should have a relatively good feel for what to expect. The first level is a nearly beat-for-beat remake of Green Hill 1 from the original Sonic. Because by God, Sega is fucking proud of that stage and will keep throwing it back into everyone’s face until the end of time. If you’re not a really big Sonic fan, or especially if you didn’t grow up with the series, you might not be able to tell what exactly about the first stage was remixed. I couldn’t, and I have played Sonic 1 a few times. The boss at the end is different (and better, but we’ll get to that), but otherwise it has the same loops and same springs that send you up in the air into the same cluster of rings. Yawn.

And then in the second stage, the new team took over. I must have said “hey, wait” four or five times playing it. It wasn’t that new, but it certainly felt like a fresh approach to Green Hill and made me optimistic about Sonic for the first time in this decade. That optimism was paid off in the second area of the Chemical Plant Zone, which introduced ideas like injecting Flubber into water to make it bouncy, all while keeping the focus squarely on high-speed platforming. These stages tend to be clever and sometimes even original, but pay proper homage to Sonic at his most idealized: fast-paced, white-knuckle platforming action.

The game literally ends with you going to the Church of Sonic or something like that. Which makes sense. If your fans are going to behave like a cult, you might as well go all the way with it and then file for tax-exempt status.

Unfortunately, the decision was made to bring all the warts of the original series along for the ride. The primary way to keep players from doing too good is by placing enemies in a way that nobody could reasonably be expected to dodge on their first play-through. This sort of “gotcha” level design displays a lack of talent and vision. It’s creating a challenge not through ingenious use of traps or precision-jumps but by putting up a brick wall for players to crash into, then implying this somehow adds replay value by forcing players to memorize where the enemies are. Great games notable for difficulty don’t need to do this. Dead Cells didn’t, and I don’t think anyone can accuse that of holding hands. For how Sonic creates difficulty, they might as well put gateways throughout levels that automatically take all the rings you’ve accumulated up to that point. I mean, why not? That’s essentially what it does anyway.

And here “gotcha” really can be insanely unreasonable, like enemies that burrow up from the ground with no animation warning, or rocks that fall from the ceiling with no warning. That is NOT challenging. That’s just stopping the action and making a player start-over. That doesn’t mean the player sucks. It means the game sucks. If I walk up behind someone and shoot them with a signal-flare, I can’t tell them they suck at not catching fire. Or so my probation officer says. And Sonic diehards defend this shit. It’s baffling to me. They use terms like “it doesn’t hold your hands” or “it’s what Sonic is supposed to be about.” I want them to put their money where their mouth is and pay someone $19.99 to periodically jump them from behind and steal their wallet.

Because when Sonic doesn’t do this stuff, it can be quite breathtaking. But it constantly wants to unfairly fuck players over, to the point that you have to wonder if the developers want to make a good game or if they just want to troll players. You’ll notice that the Super-Speed Shoes or Invincibility power-ups are usually located in places designed for players to get as little quality use of them as possible, placing rocks or spikes or gotcha-enemies in the path directly in front of them. It’d be like offering someone to let you take their Porsche out for a test drive, and letting them go through all the motions of getting in the driver’s seat, turning on the ignition, offering you a high-five, and then right as you’re pulling out of the driveway they slash the tires to their own car. Why go through all that effort of making people think they’re about to go through a level at blazing speed just to be a dick? And how can anyone defend this type of design? I don’t get it.

That’s what I don’t understand about Sonic’s level design in most of the 2D games, especially this one. Sonic is at his best when he gets to run really fast and do all sorts of unexpected momentum-based progress. Corkscrews, loops, being shot out of a revolver, etc. That shit is crazy fun. But then they want to rope players back and remind them that life is shit by putting up wall after wall, and the stop-and-go gameplay starts to wear thin. Sonic doesn’t do exploration or basic-platforming all that well. The mechanics aren’t suited for it. He’s wired for adrenaline, and that’s what people are here for. If fans are saying they like it when the game just shits in their face, ask yourself if that fan is someone you value over the people who are giggling with delight while running at warp speed through your levels. And while I’m tempted to say that NASCAR would be a lot more entertaining if they made the tracks spring-up brick walls on the drivers at random, Sonic isn’t NASCAR. People come for the speed, not the crashes.

This is not a bonus game included with the package (though you can apparently unlock it if you do well enough in the special stages). This is a boss fight. And that’d be neat, but it’s like playing Mean Bean Machine against the computer with the difficulty set to “very easy.” And actually, inconsistent boss difficulty is a major issue with Sonic Mania. Hell, during the Robo-Sonic battle’s first phase, my NPC Tails kept killing the enemy that I needed to knock-back at the boss, making the fight roughly a million times more frustrating than it should have been. But then, during the final phase of the same boss, the NPC Tails got stuck in his ball-bouncy motion up against the wall while doing all the damage against the boss. So, while I was completely shitting the bed and doing terrible in the fight, Tails was accidentally beating it for me. It was so weird to watch.

Being married to Sonic when he was relevant (IE twenty-years-ago) was probably more of a curse than a blessing here. There’s a lives system, which gets annoying as all fuck. If you run out of lives on the second section of a zone, you have to go back to the first section. Again, this doesn’t really increase replay value or difficulty. It just creates busy work. Quality developers figured this out a while back. Lives were created so that players couldn’t park themselves on an arcade machine all day (but also so they didn’t spend a quarter only to game-over in five seconds). If developers great and small want penalize dying, how about instead incentivizing surviving? Remove the lives from Sonic Mania and instead reward players who ace stages with achievements or access to bonus stages. If you’re going to force replaying stages, those stages better be amazing. And for Sonic Mania, about half of them are. The other half? Well..

Even those who’ve turned their love of Sonic into a fetish tend to hate the underwater stages, and why wouldn’t they? They turn a fast, twitchy-reflex platformer into a slog. It feels less like water and more like you’re moving through invisible jelly, controls lose their responsiveness, and deaths become even cheaper and more agonizing. Insisting these type of stages be included in a game that’s supposed to be Sonic at it’s best is fucking absurd, but yet again, the diehards say that it wouldn’t be Sonic without them. Are you fucking kidding me? That’d be like telling someone who barely squeaked into college with a 2.0 GPA “you better not make the honor roll there, or I’m cutting you out of my will. I expect consistency, even when you fucking suck.”

Mostly, I was just left with a lot of questions. Like “why do they still have large sections of the game that can be cleared by not pressing anything?” Or “why can’t I change which character I’m using between levels? You know, that thing that Super Mario 2 did in 1988, three years before Sonic even came out?” Or “did anyone play-test this fucking thing?” One time I died a crushing death when the platform wasn’t anywhere near me, or sometimes I would just straight-up not blink when taking damage. Or “why are the Chaos Emerald bonus stages based around a shitty Mario Kart clone (Sonic R for the Sega Saturn, which really did suck) with horrible control and uglier graphics? I thought this was supposed to be a 2D platformer?” Speaking of the bonus stages, what were they thinking using the awful “special” stages from Sonic 3/Sonic & Knuckles where you navigate a sphere trying to collect blue balls? Maybe it’s a metaphor for Sonic fans being blue-balled by one disappointing Sonic release after another. Why not let the development team do something truly inspired with them? I know Iizuka wants to earn that lifetime achievement award from AT&T for unwavering devotion towards phoning it in, but why force that upon people who actually do give a shit? Oh, because he’s horrible and should have been fired a long time ago. I forgot.

Sonic Mania is brought to you by the good people at BALCO!

Oh, and there’s DLC, which costs $5, further “remixes” the stages and gives you two more characters. One of them does a butt-stomp (you know, that thing Mario does in every game without having to pay extra to do it) and one can glide using the same mechanics Mario does when he has a cape in Mario World (which again, doesn’t cost extra money to do). The Encore mode does have a nifty idea of letting you accumulate all five characters and switching between them, but really, that should have been an option from the start. Also it turns the horrible 3D special stage from Sonic 3 into one of the worst video-pinball games in recent memory. This is supposed to be a bonus, mind you. It makes me think Sega is one of those households that gives trick-or-treaters Tootsie Rolls. I beat the normal mode with Sonic & Tails and really felt happy and satisfied (and to all those that say my hatred of Sonic is based around sucking at it, hey, I beat the final boss on my first try. Did you?) and really had no desire to go back and get all the Chaos Emeralds. Maybe if the method of getting them had been fun, I’d been all for it. It wasn’t, so I wasn’t.

Having said all that (and trust, I could go on), I’m nothing short of floored by the fact that I enjoyed Sonic Mania more than I disliked it. The good parts are really good. I especially loved most of the boss fights, which is shocking because I never liked any in previous Sonic games. Here, they can be pretty fricken awesome. There’s one where you take on a giant capsule-toy-dispenser that unleashes mini-versions of original Sonic bosses that made me smile so hard it caused the corners of my mouth to hurt. And, once again, the worst ones are stuff lifted from the original games. Like the first boss of Titanic Monarch Zone, which has nearly invisible spikes that are so hard to see that I honestly thought Sonic had suffered massive heart failure. I was livid. Why copy anything at all, especially when the new stuff is so damn entertaining? It’s astonishing that at no point during the production of Sonic Mania, someone in charge didn’t say “these boys sure seem to know what they’re doing. Maybe we should step back and let them make their full Sonic dream game like they originally wanted.” Because Sonic Mania ain’t that, and that’s a fucking shame because it should have been.

For all the snark I’ve said in this review, I do want to say completely sincerely that I’m so happy for long-suffering Sonic fans. Sonic Mania is fun game, and you don’t even need to quality that statement. It’s just true. Period.

Ultimately, it just feels like the new team prioritized fun above all else. Playing Sonic Mania is like being part of a sports team that snaps a losing streak. You feel relief that something good finally happened, but then you remember that winning was what you were supposed to be doing this whole time. There’s no reason Sonic should have taken this long to put out a game that even a hater like me must concede is good. And to think, all it took was having the guy who has no passion for the character or the franchise hand over the reins to a team of programmers who do. Funny how that works. It should be no surprise that Sonic Mania is as good as it is. It’s a product of love. And it’ll keep getting better, unless Sega keeps caving into fan demands that all the bad shit be kept intact, or else. That’d be like the Warriors fans insisting we shitcan everyone who can shoot 3s, because it was better back in the old days of Nellie-Ball, when we never won anything. If your fans demand you not reach your fullest potential, you need to go out and find new fans. And just keep appeasing the ones who will never grow up by re-releasing the same old shit that’s slightly tweaked so it can be sold as “new”, and just hope Nintendo doesn’t sue you for stealing their shtick.

Sonic Mania was developed by a lot of very talented people. Kudos, gang.
Point of Sale: Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, Steam

$19.99 + $4.99 (DLC) suggests for the sequel that the development team consider a viewing of the barely watchable 1980 “comedy” 9 to 5 and take notes on how to deal with Iizuka’s “supervision” in the making of this review.

And I looked as the lamb opened seventh seal, and there was silence in Heaven for half an hour, and Indie Gamer Chick awarded her seal of approval to a Sonic The Hedgehog game.
Revelations 8:1

Sonic Mania, despite being half-made by indies, is not a true indie and not ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard. It’d be in the top 100 or so, probably.

Filed under Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , ,

Jack N’ Jill DX

October 17, 2018 by 2 Comments

Auto-runners aren’t exactly my thing. Once upon a time, it was cool when developers figured out the solution to getting platformers on buttonless mobile phones without the use of a fake controller on the screen. “Why don’t we just have the game move for you, and the player can tap the screen to do all the jumping?” And this worked well enough. But then everyone was getting in on the auto-runner fad. Even Mario did, though that should be a surprise to nobody. Mario being the most insecure of all gaming heroes, OF COURSE he would do an auto-runner if that’s what’s popular. He has no shame. He’s golfed, he’s go-karted, he’s raced Sonic The Hedgehog at the actual Olympic games, he became a drug pusher, a baseball player, a street fighter, a typing tutor, etc, etc. If games where you performed back-alley abortions became a popular genre, I promise you within twelve months you’d see Nintendo fans lining up to play Super Mario Coat Hanger and talking about how Nintendo would finally show these newbs how to do a proper unlicensed pregnancy termination game.

What point was I trying to make again?

Oh, that I’m over auto-runners. Well that sort of went off the rails a bit.

It’s my policy to know as little about a game as possible when I go to play it. That rule has bit me in the ass more times than bed bugs and it struck again here. When I bought Jack N’ Jill DX, I didn’t know it was an auto-runner. I didn’t know anything about it besides the fact that it was black-and-white and the screenshots gave off a Game Boy Kirbyish vibe. Then I fired it up and discovered it was an auto-runner with one AND ONLY ONE action button that was almost certainly going to be another lazy console port of a mobile game. Then I went through the level-select screen to see how many stages there were, counted 140, wept for the next twenty minutes, then bit my lip and sat down to play.

Probably the best thing I can say about the graphics is that if I had to guess who made this, without any prior knowledge, I’d guess Nintendo. Isn’t it strange how so many people hate me for assuming I hate Nintendo when the best compliment I can give a game is that it could be mistaken for a Nintendo-developed title? But hey, I occasionally notice when Nintendo does something sucky or lazy and actually say that out-loud instead of doing logic-yoga to bend my way of thinking so much that shit like naming their 3DS follow-up “NEW 3DS” seems like a good idea. Clearly I must hate Nintendo, right? Anyway, Jack N’ Jill DX is Nintendoish, and that’s a good thing.

And honestly, I don’t know what I was worried about. Jack N’ Jill DX ain’t bad at all. I’m prepared to go so far as saying it’s the best auto-runner to make its way to consoles ever. And why wouldn’t it be? It’s like a “best-of” compilation of the genre, all wrapped up in one package and then polished to a mirror-shine. Responsive controls. Forgiving collision-detection. Very forgiving. There were times I should have died when jumping onto clouds but didn’t because the game gave me a pity hug and said “that’s okay, you really should have stuck that landing like a champ, so look, there you are. You made it! You’re a winner!” when really I shorted it by a good foot or two. And Jack N’ Jill DX keeps adding new mechanics from start to finish to keep things fresh even after 100 levels have come and gone. Actual effort was put into this one. It’s a keeper.

Especially the level design, which often left me saying “well that was clever.” Jack N’ Jill is really fond of making a player hit a wall to reverse their direction, and often utilizes the entire length of a map to go back-and-forth as you make your way to the goal. Of course, when you get down to it, you’re really only pressing the A button and doing nothing else, which means you’re playing a game that’s barely more interactive than a Sega CD FMV game with command prompts of when to press the button to make the actors do something replaced with the appearance of being a platformer but HEY SHUT UP it’s better than one of those. A lot less Corey Haim among other things.

Oh, it’s not perfect. And actually, this is one of the strangest complaints I’ve had to say about any game, but Jack N’ Jill DX has too many levels, and most of them just repeat the same concepts. It gets to the point where sections of it feel cut-and-pasted to the point of skimming the line of being dull. Ideas repeat themselves so much and players get so much practice at perfecting them that Jack N’ Jill’s first 110 levels are far too easy. I never once needed more than three tries to beat any of those stages. Hell, the tension was removed entirely when, about halfway through the game, I said “you know what? I wish this game had checkpoints just because I wouldn’t have to sweat every jump that way.”

And then suddenly the game had checkpoints starting the very next level after I said that. I’m not even kidding. This is not a joke I came up with for comic effect. I wished for checkpoints and suddenly there were checkpoints. Then I realized the Golden State Warriors have become a championship dynasty and Brian’s penis miraculous grew four inches overnight and I realized that I probably had acquired three wishes at some point over the last five years without knowing it and had just used up the last one. Damn. I swear everyone, if I had known, I would have used that third wish on ending world hunger. But hey, for those of you starving out there, take comfort in knowing that halfway through Jack N’ Jill DX you won’t have to start from the beginning of levels if you mistime a jump.

The mini-games all feel like they were mechanics that were considered for inclusion in the main game but didn’t make it past the drawing board. All of them suck, but thankfully they’re optional. And I didn’t even realize you could unlock new costumes or colors playing them. The game doesn’t call attention to the presence of a shop. You access it through the mini-game menu, with a teeny-tiny little icon in the bottom right corner that looks like a shopping bag that has “X” next to it being the only thing to alert you of its existence. It’s weird.

The biggest issue with Jack N’ Jill DX is the sameness starts to wear thin and by time I was five worlds into the game, I was sort of ready for it to be over with. And then, with thirty levels left to go, something weird happened. The level design, which was already more than acceptable (if insanely repetitive), dialed up a few more notches and was suddenly an enthralling experience. Some stages even took on a puzzle-game feel, where you had to figure out a way to hit buttons to change the position of cannons (functionally the same as barrels in Donkey Kong Country) in order to reach the next area of a stage. Funny enough, Jack N’ Jill DX started life as a mobile game (hence the DX part) and these longer levels would not be suitable for the type of “knock a level or two out while in-line at the supermarket” style that the best mobile action games tend to have. But that’s fine, because Jack suddenly grew teeth, required concentration, and went from an acceptable time waster to a genuinely good game. Of course, this consequently made every level that came before it feel like a glorified tutorial. 110 levels of tutorial. Yeesh.

That’s what makes it so hard to quantify the value of Jack N’ Jill DX. Its biggest problem is poor pacing, but never in a way that’s a deal breaker. The first twenty levels are a bit of a bore, but not painfully so. The final thirty levels were my favorites in any auto-runner ever, easily. Everything in-between is decent, but never great. And when the game finally goes for the throat, it still has to take the time to point out every single button you have to press, as if it has no faith in players to be able to figure out that if there’s a button on stage, it’s probably a good idea to figure out how to press it. And then it tucks you in at night and reads you a bedtime story. It’s really condescending like that.

Jack N’ Jill DX doesn’t really do anything original. Instead, it’s like it took every notable platform game mechanic, retooled it to work in a single-button game, and then polished it to make it play near flawlessly. It’s impressive. Really and truly.

There’s seven optional minigames that you can unlock by beating each world, though they cost 100 coins to play and range from terrible (the first minigame, where you must control the baddies as they jump, has unresponsive controls and was just awful) to bleh (like one that’s a near-copy of the bonus levels from Balloon Fight). Playing minigames earns tickets which let you customize Jack & Jill’s appearance or change the black-and-white graphics to some other pallet, similar to Super Game Boy. Hell, beating the game even unlocks a mirror mode, were you can play all 140 stages in reverse. $5 gets you a LOT of game. That’s why I had to sock it to VideoKid, which costs the same but has only one level and doesn’t work half the time. You’ll speed through the first 100 or so stages of Jack with minimum effort, then spend the same amount of time finishing the final two worlds. It paces like a marathon runner with narcolepsy.

Still, I have to give developer Rohan Narang credit. Jack N’ Jill DX is the best auto-runner ever made. Which is like saying Wonder Woman was the best DCEU movie, but still. It’s never fully boring, and when it finally starts to come to life, it’s actually a very fun game. Does it belong on platforms like Xbox One? Probably not. I’d recommend the Switch or Vita versions. I played on the Switch and spent about a week knocking it out. Even then, I probably played it wrong. Jack N’ Jill is meant to be played a couple of levels at a time. Maybe the sloginess would have been muted if I had played through the 140 stages over the course of a few months instead of just under one week. But hey, Indie Gamer Chick played a game wrong. Not exactly something you stop the presses over. And yea, I’m known for complaining that people shouldn’t have to tread water waiting for a game to “get to the really good stuff”, which Jack N’ Jill unquestionably does. But, at least everything here that comes before the really good stuff is still enjoyable. Maybe someone should buy a copy of this for David Cage so he can take notes.

Jack & Jill DX was developed by Rohan Narang
Point of Sale: Nintendo Switch, Vita, Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Steam

$4.99 rhymed:

Jack and Jill
Is hardly swill
To quench a fail spotter
Some levels let down
But I can’t go to town
Great ones follow thereafter

In the making of this review.

Jack N’ Jill DX is Chick-Approved and ranked on the Indie Gamer Chick Leaderboard.

Filed under Android Reviews, iPhone and iPad Reviews, Nintendo Switch Reviews, PC Reviews, PlayStation Reviews, Xbox One Reviews, Xbox Reviews Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

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