Inside: Crash Bandicoot: Back In Time, Eldritchvania, Mirrored Soul, Cuphead
Author Archives: St. Elmo's Fire
Cassette Beasts
This is a Pokemon-like I’ve had my eye on since it released in 2023. I was on the fence about buying the full version after playing the demo, but I managed to snap it up for dirt cheap during the summer sale.
I found this game to be very similar to Disc Creatures: Lovely world, presentation, and creature design, but distressingly dull gameplay. The late game is barely any more complex than the battles featured in the demo. The whole thing feels more like a proof of concept than a finished game, which is a shame because it does have a lot of potential.
Quick Reviews
Inside: Astalon: Tears of the Earth, BioGun, Tunic
Backpack Hero
This is a roguelike that makes a game out of inventory Tetris. Not only do you have limited inventory space, but items can affect each other based on their position within the backpack and relative to each other. For instance, helmets boost your defense for every row below them, and arrows gain attack power for every empty space to the right of them. I think this is a very neat idea, but unfortunately the actual game ended up rather half-baked.
Rainbow Billy: The Curse of the Leviathan
This is a cute kids’ game of the “experimenting with nonviolent gameplay” genre. It reminds me a lot of both UnderTale and my own Flawed Crystals. The overall structure is essentially, “What if when you spared enemies in UnderTale they joined your party?” A set of recruited enemies are drawn randomly from a deck in each round, and you can summon a certain number per turn. Outside of battle, you can level up your friendship through the standard video game relationship strategy of bribing them with gifts and food.
The plot is a standard Saturday-morning-cartoon-esque premise: An evil monster has drained all color from the world because he wants to remove the hero’s “rainbow heart” and make everything conform to normalcy. If that sounds like very queer subtext, you may be surprised to learn it is actually queer text; the protagonist is textually nonbinary, and many of the recruitable characters are gay or nonbinary and explicitly struggle with queerphobia. I’m pleased we have gotten to a point where kids’ media can discuss this stuff outright instead of needing to obfuscate everything behind metaphor and allegory.
Together in Battle
Together in Battle is the latest entry in the Telepath RPG series and the followup to Telepath Tactics, which I reviewed… a decade ago, wow it’s been a while. In the intervening time I’ve gotten a lot more experience with tactical RPGs through binging the entire Fire Emblem franchise, so I have broader knowledge to compare it against.
Together in Battle is structured more like a roguelike: Characters, maps, and events are randomly generated except for a few story-related battles. To this end there is now a life sim aspect where you can only do a limited number of things per day, and your characters regularly drain food and money. I can see the reasoning in this — it makes sense to try something qualitatively different rather than just making Telepath Tactics again. Unfortunately, I don’t think it accomplished what it was going for nearly as well this time, and overall left me feeling oddly disappointed.
Quick Reviews
Inside: Evoland, Evoland 2, Anode Heart, Dragon Spirits, Mind Over Magnet
Chistmas Steam Games (2024): Pans
Inside: Recursive Ruin, Suits: A Business RPG, Nier: Automata
Christmas Steam Games (2024): Recs
Inside: Control:Override, The Messenger, Sunblaze, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, Northgard, In Other Waters
Divinity: Original Sin 2
God, western RPGs are exhausting. Every time I try to give them a fair shake I end up with a massive timesink of tedium.
Metaphor: ReFantazio
After Persona 5, the director of the Persona series decided to come up with a new IP: Persona but high fantasy. It’s a lot better on women, but hoo boy is it worse on just about everything else. This is the first thing you see when you start a new game:
Oh yeah, they are deep up their own buttholes.
Quick Reviews
Inside: 9 Years of Shadows, Cookie Cutter, The Captain, Sunless Skies
Pathologic 2
So commercially, Pathologic was a flop that became a cult classic; enough of a cult classic that the developers managed a successful Kickstarter campaign to create a remake, which they called Pathologic 2.
It sucks and I hate it.
Pathologic: The Changeling
The Haruspex’s route was a rough draft. This route is blatantly unfinished. And that’s a shame, because it’s really cool.
Throughout the other routes, Clara has been a major enigma. She claims she has healing hands, but we never see her use them. The townspeople claim she’s the Sand Plague incarnate and her touch actually brings death. She herself claims those are the actions of her evil twin… and while you never see two Claras in the same place, you do often find her moving between locations implausibly fast, as if there really are two of her.
So what’s the truth? What’s her deal?
Pathologic: The Haruspex
Where Dankovsky begins the game well-fed and rested in a fancy house, Artemy arrives in town after walking for multiple days straight, having not slept or eaten in all that time. He is immediately greeted by a bunch of knife murderers, who he kills but not before sustaining wounds himself. He quickly discovers this is because he has been framed for his father’s murder, so his reputation is at rock bottom and everyone in town is ordered to kill him on sight. Fun!