It’s that time several months past that time of the year again!
Inside: Ittle Dew, Mini Ghost, Papers Please, Pyre, Out There Somewhere, Toki Tori 2, Antichamber.
Category: Recommendations
Yahtzee Croshaw’s Dev Diary
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.
Unworthy
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.
Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga
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!
Paper Mario
I just finished the first Paper Mario. It was good, and surprisingly different from Superstar Saga! The action commands were much less difficult and complex, but that helped the game regain that tactical element I mentioned. I can definitely see how it started as a sequel to Super Mario RPG.
Axiom Verge
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.
Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door
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.
Super Paper Mario
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.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser’s Inside Story
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.
Supraland
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.
Mario & Luigi: Dream Team
This is the fourth and final Mario & Luigi game. It might be my favorite in the entire series; the creators clearly listened to criticisms of the previous games and went all-out in their ambitions.
Mario & co. are invited to a relaxing vacation on a resort island; obviously, things do not go as planned. The theme of this game is the power of dreams: Luigi has the ability to open a portal to the dream world when he sleeps, which allows Mario to revive the original inhabitants of the islands, who are… pillow people. Yes, they lean into the aesthetic pretty hard. This dual-world gameplay works similarly to Bowser’s Inside Story, where the real world is in 3D while the dream world is 2D with a greater emphasis on platforming challenges.
Games for Racial Justice and Equality (Part 4)
Sorry it’s been a while! I’ve been distracted by all the other games that have come out recently. Only three games on review this time, but I had a lot to say about each.
Monster Sanctuary
Monster Sanctuary is a cross between a monster catcher RPG and a Metroidvania. I am interested in both of those things, so I decided to check it out.
This game is better than Pokemon in every conceivable way except for the most important one: Monster designs. As you can see in the banner above, monster designs are incredibly basic, usually consisting of real plants, animals, or mythical creatures with only minor twists. And those tiny overworld sprites are all you’re getting; you don’t get to see detailed closeups in battle like you do in Pokemon. This is highly unfortunate, because the game is otherwise very enjoyable and has a number of features I wish Pokemon would include.
Disco Elysium
This is everything I wanted Torment: Tides of Numenera to be.
Disco Elysium is an RPG with no combat system. It has every other part of an RPG: levels, skills, equipment, and items. But instead of combat, all your skills are based around investigation and conversation; and you will need them, because you play as an insane, dysfunctional detective who nevertheless has to solve a very important murder.
The game is bizarre and wonderful, and a model for how nonviolent RPGs can work.
Quick Reviews 2
Reviewing a few games I picked up recently. Mostly disappointments, but there was one good Metroidvania.
Inside: START AGAIN: a prologue, reigns, The Treehouse Man, Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom.