Category: 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     

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      ,

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     

Mario & Luigi: Dream Team

  11/27/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

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.

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   Mario & Luigi Series, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Inscryption

  12/01/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      3 Comments

Inscryption is a game by the makers of Pony Island, a game our esteemed illhousen previously reviewed. While I haven’t played Pony Island myself, Inscryption makes the exact blunders illhousen details in his review: the metatextual elements fall completely flat because it’s clear you’re playing a person playing a haunted video game, not actually playing a haunted video game yourself. In general, I found them tedious and uninteresting interruptions to the actual game. This is a shame, because the gameplay is actually very good.

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   Deckbuilding, Horror, Roguelike, Video Games     

La-Mulana

  12/12/2021       St. Elmo's Fire      29 Comments

La-Mulana is a Metroidvania both famous and infamous for its difficulty. After seeing a review that praised its puzzles and claimed it uniquely required you to think on how to proceed, I picked it up the Steam version while it was on sale to try it myself. I beat Hollow Knight, after all, surely I can handle the difficulty, I thought.

This is a troll game. I quit about 10 hours in after I beat a difficult boss at the end of a long area with no save points, only to investigate a suspicious alcove in the next area, which turned out to be a trap that instantly killed me, undoing all my progress. I’d genuinely like to get a refund.

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   Metroidvania, Platformers, Video Games     

Dark Souls

  02/01/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      21 Comments

Yes, after playing several of its imitators, I finally got around to the original, only 10 years late!

After all the hype, I found it… underwhelming. My biggest takeaway is that the Soulslike imitators vastly improved upon and streamlined the formula, which isn’t terribly surprising. Dark Souls itself feels like it has a lot of design principles pulling in opposite directions, as well as a lot of tedious cruft that its imitators wisely trim.

Update: I returned 3 years later to try the sequels too. They are not much better.

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   Action, Video Games      ,

Monster Sanctuary

  03/12/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

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.

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   Metroidvania, Monster Collector, Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Paper Mario: Sticker Star and Mario & Luigi: Paper Jam

  03/20/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      Add Comment

Paper Mario: Sticker Star

It is as terrible as the prophets foretold.

Sticker Star feels like it belongs to a completely different series than its predecessors. The gameplay and writing have both been gutted: There are no friendly NPCs except Toads, Bowser doesn’t get a single line of dialogue, and you can’t level up. Yes, that’s right, they removed the RPG from their RPG. I was willing to go into this with an open mind, because the idea of redefining RPG battles to specific set pieces rather than copy-and-paste encounters fueled only by extrinsic motivation is intriguing to me; it’s the guiding principle behind Wine & Roses, also known as the best game ever. But no, encounters are still just as samey as in the previous games, you just no longer get any XP from them.

And this feels minor next to everything else, but the set design is godawful. Everything is literally made out of cardboard. We are also repeatedly informed that all the characters are literally paper, unlike in the previous games where it was clearly just an art style. I don’t know why anyone involved thought this was a good idea. We experience art for the immersion, not to be reminded of the artifice.

Apparently this was all due to executive meddling, so make of that what you will. The more I hear about Shigeru Miyamoto, the more I feel like he is the Elon Musk of Nintendo.

Onto greener pastures.

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

Disco Elysium

  04/01/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      13 Comments

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.

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   Recommendations, RPGs, Video Games     

Spiritfarer

  04/16/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      6 Comments

Yet another seemingly cute game that’s actually grimdark depressing. Maybe we should be concerned that’s become so common? This one is at least up-front about it: You play as someone who guides dying spirits to the afterlife, fulfilling their last requests before you do so. But even knowing what to expect, it was so much more depressing than I was prepared for.

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   Sim, Video Games     

Monster Rancher 2

  04/24/2022       St. Elmo's Fire      4 Comments

Monster Rancher 2 is an old game Farla and I played when we were kids. I decided to pick it up again to examine it with fresh eyes as part of my mons exploration. (I skipped the first game because sources tell me it was basically the same, except grindier.)

In theory, this game is everything I want out of Pokemon. In execution it’s very half-baked, and I got bored of it pretty quickly, but it has a lot of potential worth examining.

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   Monster Collector, Sim, Video Games      ,