Author Archives: St. Elmo's Fire

Supraland

  11/21/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Supraland is a game I’ve been eyeing for a while, and only recently got the hardware for. (It’s one of those “all games must be computer-meltingly photorealistic” affairs.) It is billed as a “First-Person Metroidvania”, like Metroid Prime, and has a cutely weird premise of taking place in a child’s extremely elaborate sandbox, with every character and object being a toy of some kind.

I liked it a lot more than Metroid Prime, chiefly because it had a mouse-based control scheme that meant basic actions weren’t like pulling teeth. I found it fun overall, but also a bit shallow, with not enough complexity to really carry the full game.

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   Metroidvania, Puzzle, Recommendations, Video Games     

Into the Breach and Star Renegades

  10/22/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      8 Comments

Into the Breach and Star Renegades are two very different games from two completely different developers, but they have a number of things in common I thought worth analyzing.

The premise of both games is identical: Alien invaders are attacking, and you must defend humanity by traveling across timelines and passing on your knowledge and technology every time. Both games have no true ending: After the end of every run, win or lose, there is always another timeline under threat that you must jump to.

What’s interesting is that despite this similarity, their execution of story elements is diametrically opposite, and both left me unsatisfied in different ways.

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   On Writing, Roguelike, RPGs, Video Games      ,

FEZ

  09/17/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

FEZ is a game I got years ago, but was unable to play until now because it used a really specific graphics renderer that wasn’t supported by my crappy hardware. Now that I finally have a proper graphics card, I decided to try it out.

The premise of FEZ is that it’s a puzzle platformer where you move in 2D but can rotate the environment in 3D. This allows you to use perspective tricks like bridging platforms that are far apart at one angle but close together at another.

Unfortunately, this is not the actual gameplay of FEZ.

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   Platformers, Puzzle, Puzzle Platformer, Video Games     

Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story

  08/31/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      1 Comment

The third game in the Mario & Luigi series. I played the original DS version a long time ago as a kid, so I picked up the 3DS remake for this one to see what was different.

The big selling point of this entry is that Bowser is a playable character, and in fact the main protagonist. At the start of the game he is tricked by Fawful (the understudy of the villain from Superstar Saga) into eating everyone in the Mushroom Kingdom, forcing Mario and Luigi to work with him from within his body to fix things.

This was a really great game, much improved from Partners in Time. As I’ve said previously, I love Bowser, and getting to play as him was a wonderful power trip. He and the brothers had distinct playstyles, including in the overworld, and I loved all the bizarre levels inside Bowser’s body. It still lacks some of the things I liked about Superstar Saga (no magic :( ), but manages to be good in a different way rather than feeling like a downgrade as Partners in Time did.

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   Mario & Luigi Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      ,

Mario & Luigi: Partners in Time

  08/18/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      2 Comments

This is the sequel to Superstar Saga, and represented a jump from GBA to DS. The main gimmick is that the brothers go back in time to team up with their baby selves, who are controlled with the DS’ X and Y buttons. The babies can also contribute to attacks in battle, making the action commands more complicated.

The game was decent but nothing outstanding. I think I liked Superstar Saga better overall.

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   Mario & Luigi Series, RPGs, Video Games     

Super Paper Mario

  08/09/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      3 Comments

Super Paper Mario is the third entry in the Paper Mario series, and markedly different from its predecessors. It’s now a platformer with RPG elements rather than a turn-based RPG, and the playable characters are entirely comprised of established Mario characters rather than new ones. Overall, I liked these changes, and I think the game is a much better experience than The Thousand-Year Door overall. The plot was also much more complex and compelling this time around, though it does unfortunately suffer from the kiddie-game problem of needing to signpost all its twists with sledgehammer levels of subtlety.

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   Paper Mario Series, Platformers, Precision Platformer, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door

  08/02/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

The sequel to Paper Mario. It features many improvements to battles and core gameplay that I greatly appreciated, but everything else was a bit of a letdown. The writers tried to do something different with the plot by using an all-new setting and villain this time, but I felt they lacked the charm of Paper Mario‘s. There was also a disconcerting rise in Anime Horniness.

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   Paper Mario Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Wandersong

  07/14/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

jegus why are there so many innocuous-looking fantasy titles that are actually incredibly depressing

Wandersong is an adventure game where, instead of an action hero, you play as a bard whose only ability is singing. You’re told that the world is ending and the only way to save it is to sing the Earthsong, which can only be taught by the spiritual overseers of the spirit world, so you have to go on a quest, solving all your problems along the way with singing.

The story takes a big swerve about halfway in and is actually incredibly dark and bleak, with later segments even borrowing elements from horror. This isn’t one of those fantasy stories where the apocalypse is an all-or-nothing abstract threat; the world and the overseers are slowly dying and you see them deteriorate in real time, all while the protagonists and NPCs contemplate the end of existence. It got to the point where I was genuinely expecting the ending to be “LOL j/k, world ends everyone dies.”

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   Platformers, Puzzle Platformer, Video Games, Walking Sims     

Axiom Verge

  07/05/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

A Metroidvania that’s further to the Metroid end of the scale than the Castlevania one; I haven’t played many of those, so this was interesting. This game had a really great plot and aesthetic: You play as a physicist who, after a lab accident, wakes up in a creepy machine on an alien planet. A voice in his head tells him he needs to grab a gun to defend himself, and then he’s off to explore a bizarre world that’s equal parts biological and mechanical. Compounding the weirdness is that you are quickly told the world’s present state is the result of a deadly pathogen that mutated all life into monsters; you are suffering from the pathogen as well, and this occasionally manifests in bizarre hallucinations that force you to doubt your senses. The gameplay mechanics are diegetic as well, with the main character explicitly remembering every time he dies and returns to a checkpoint, further blurring the lines of reality.

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   Metroidvania, Recommendations, Video Games      ,

Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga

  07/01/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      3 Comments

I really enjoyed this! It reminded me a lot of UnderTale with how personalized (and delightfully silly) every enemy was, and I’m impressed by how much strategy they got out of pretty simple mechanics with the three regular attacks. I also loved the Metroidvania-like feel of getting new exploration abilities along with your battle abilities and just, it was really cool!

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   Mario & Luigi Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games      , ,

Unworthy

  06/22/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Unworthy is a Soulslike Metroidvania I found in a recommendations list somewhere. Its main defining feature is that you can’t jump. It accomplishes this much better than Mable and the Wood, mainly by not trying to be a platformer anyway. There are no bottomless pits and shockingly few spike traps. There is rather severe falling damage, but this is mainly to prevent you from bypassing levels and not as a way to create a disaster cascade from getting hit. There’s no knockback from enemy attacks at all, actually, which is both a blessing and a curse because there’s no mercy invincibility either, so enemies will quickly combo you to death if you don’t get out of the way on your own. There is a midgame upgrade that gives you the ability to move vertically, but it works very differently than a jump ability and I overall found it delightfully fun and inventive, plus it made moving around areas a breeze.

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   Action, Metroidvania, Recommendations, Video Games      ,

Yahtzee Croshaw’s Dev Diary

  06/21/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

In 2019, Yahtzee Croshaw (the game reviewer who does Zero Punctuation) challenged himself to make 12 games in 12 months and document his progress every fortnight. As someone interested in game design myself, I checked them out and I recommend you do too. They’re all short, free, and incredibly varied.

In this post I’ll give my own ranking, and short thoughts on each one.

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   Action, Horror, On Writing, Platformers, Puzzle, Recommendations, Sim, Video Games      ,

The Witness

  06/17/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      5 Comments

I’ve wanted to check out this game ever since it was billed to me as a “Metroidvania of knowledge”. It’s a first-person puzzler where you explore a mysterious island covered in computer terminals with puzzles to solve. You can access nearly the entire island from the start, but some areas build on puzzle rules taught in other areas, so you need to learn and understand new mechanics in order to progress.

It left me with very mixed feelings.

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   Puzzle, Video Games