So, itch.io ran a bundle to fundraise for Black Lives Matter, offering over a thousand games for only $5. As a fundraiser, I found the ethos… questionable (“Give us money so we can do actual activism while you play video games”), but it was a good deal, so I got it.
A good chunk of the items included aren’t actual games; they are either assets or tabletop RPGs. There are still a ton, though. Here are my thoughts on the games I’ve gotten through in the first half of the year:
Another big Nintendo game I’m getting to fashionably late. I’m very much of two minds about this one.
Aesthetically, the game is an absolute delight. The premise of making the different worlds feel genuinely alien in a way that even the planets of Galaxy didn’t by giving them all radically different aesthetics and art styles was wonderful, and a fantastic way to make even this old franchise feel fresh. I loved all the kingdoms and all the inhabitants, especially the steam gardeners — despite being robots they actually seemed like the most emotional of all the characters, and the duality of their earnest joy at their work and snarky pettiness was so adorable. (I particularly love the one that is very obviously the robot equivalent of drunk hollering that the Steam Gardens are objectively the best kingdom.) I loved the possession mechanic. I loved the 8-bit segments and the callbacks to earlier games, especially the New Donk City festival, which felt like a reflection on how far the franchise has come. I loved that we got to explore Bowser’s kingdom and that it was a completely different flavor of medieval palace than the Mushroom Kingdom. I loved getting to fight a giant frickin’ dragon that looks like it wandered in from Dark Souls. I loved that we got to revisit Peach’s castle as it was in Super Mario 64. I loved that the designers put in the detail that Bowser didn’t just dress up for the occasion, he also delicately coiffed his hair. I loved following up the final boss fight with getting to possess Bowser for a super awesome Metroid-esque escape sequence. I loved all the outfits, and I took a particular delight in dancing around Bowser’s kingdom in a clown suit.
But I feel they really dropped the ball on actually putting a compelling game on top of this phenomenal backdrop. It was clearly trying to experiment with the same open-world approach as Breath of the Wild, but that doesn’t work nearly as well for a platformer than it does for an action adventure. The actual platforming challenges feel tiny, empty, and unsatisfying, and the game as a whole feels like it’s pulling in too many directions.
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.
Inside: Rogue Legacy, Reventure, Chronicles of Teddy, Path of Giants.
Inside: Control:Override, The Messenger, Sunblaze, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, Northgard, In Other Waters
Inside: Evoland, Evoland 2, Anode Heart, Dragon Spirits, Mind Over Magnet
Inside: Crash Bandicoot: Back In Time, Eldritchvania, Mirrored Soul, Cuphead
I had the fortune to have to undergo a bilateral masectomy in June, so I’ve spent months barely able to do anything at all. I’ve played a lot of video games. Enjoy the forthcoming waves of game recs. Not a lot of pans though — the bad ones I played were mostly just boring and bland, not really bad in a way that was interesting (with one notable exception, which I may get to later). I may put up blurbs on the curator page later just to remind myself what they were. Anyway.
Also these got long and aren’t really “quick” anymore but whatever I’m not splitting them now.
Inside: Unholy Heights, Deiland, Wavetale, A Monster’s Expedition
Inside: Lil Gator Game, Koa and the Five Pirates of Mara, Dredge, Dadish
go play lil gator game
I play so many bad games, but the sins of the bad games I’ve played over the past 6 months are largely of the boring and bland variety and don’t seem any more interesting to review than they were to play. Nonetheless, here they are with a sentence or two about why I disliked them.
I originally thought this post would be far longer but it turns out there’s a good deal of games I marked as disliked that I just straight up don’t remember.
Inside: Little Wings Deliveries, Newt One, Planet of Lana, Bugtopia, Grapple Dog, Spells and Secrets, Flooded, Jusant, Astrea: Six-Sided Oracles, One Lonely Outpost, Kamaeru: Frog Refuge
Inside: Rue Valley demo, Blue Prince, LOVE, Infinifactory, Mewgenics.
A few games that weren’t terrible but left me underwhelmed. Inside: The Bridge, F.I.S.T.: Forged In Shadow Torch, TetherGeist demo, Threadbound demo
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