Inside: Control:Override, The Messenger, Sunblaze, Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye, Northgard, In Other Waters
Control:Override
Puzzle Platformer
A puzzle game about a hacker trying to terminate a dangerous AI. Puzzles are fittingly about manipulation of control: You can only move directionally after picking up powerups throughout the level, and you can move blocks by transferring this control to them. There is also a mechanic where you can clip into blocks by squishing them into yourself, which was very fitting. It was an enjoyable brain-teaser with lots of outside-the-box thinking.
There is also a story that unfortunately is not as good as the gameplay. It’s not bad, but kind of trite and also extremely backloaded. Obviously the AI is actually good and the company is actually evil and this is obvious from the start as soon as the protagonist says “Could the AI actually have a point?” The bulk of the story is told entirely through walls of text at the very end of the game, which is extremely awkward pacing. That said, it does say some cogent things about the abuses of AI and neural networks.
The Messenger
Platformer/Metroidvania(ish)
A retro-styled platformer with a lot of twists and turns. The writing is extremely self-aware and tongue-in-cheek, with many jokes about video game tropes, satirical retellings of fairy tales, and general metahumor. To give you an idea of this, traveling to the future changes the graphics from 8-bit to 16-bit. While the humor was good, the rest of the plot left something to be desired, and the ultimate reveal was disappointingly cliched; I was expecting it to provide some recontextualizing twist, but it was a pretty generic fantasy backstory (with bonus fridging). For such otherwise self-aware writing, that stuck out like a sore thumb. The writer also doesn’t seem to understand how to format quotes and has an inordinate love of comma splices, which was unfortunate.
The gameplay is nicely challenging, with both intense platforming gauntlets and complex boss fights. The most notable feature is that attacking anything in midair lets you jump again, and this can be chained indefinitely. This reminds me of Celeste‘s dash recharge gems, and gives the game a high skill ceiling that lets you zip over most levels if you’re skilled. I do think that advertising the game as a Metroidvania is a misnomer, however. The first half of the game is completely linear, and after that progression is gated by key items rather than abilities, with only one exception. I have to admit I think the linear sections worked better; combing through the levels for new stuff is quite tedious, both because they’re very linear and because there are an utter dearth of fast travel points. I really would have liked the ability to warp between shop portals, at the very least.
Sunblaze
Precision Platformer
Celeste has apparently spawned a genre of “red-haired women who can air dash”, and I picked this one out from a list of such games. I enjoyed it, but don’t have much else to say. I liked that, similarly to Celeste, it’s very fast-paced and designed to maintain momentum through failure (respawn time is less than a second); but while it had similar easy mode features to Celeste, I was disappointed it lacked a slowdown option, which I think would have helped on some of the more difficult timing challenges.
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye
Puzzle/Walking Simulator
DLC that adds a huge new location belonging to a third alien species. It feels kind of like challenge DLC: You can’t read the new species’ writing, so hints can only be conveyed visually, demanding a higher level of intuition and deduction from you to solve the puzzles. This is an interesting contrast with the main game’s story, which is told mostly through writing. I also found the “glitches” you had to exploit very clever, as they’re both believable oversights as well as things video game players are likely to have some understanding of already. It’s overall a great example of what DLC should be: iterating on and playing with the game’s core mechanics to create a similar but different experience. It even ties in with the main story by answering a question that was non-critical but still meaningful (why the Vessel’s distress signal was never detected by other Nomai), and adds an extra character to the final chorus which I found very poignant.
One detail in particular that I liked is that the aliens are bigger than you, and this is reflected everywhere. I felt like a child in their homes — everything is just a bit too big, with chairs you have to climb onto and tables where you can only just peek over the edge. Even the gravity is slightly higher than what your suit considers baseline, with the implication that they probably consider that x1 gravity and your home planet’s gravity to be below average. It conveyed the feeling of being in an alien environment even moreso than the Nomai ruins did, which was really cool.
Northgard
Real-Time Strategy
This caught my eye because Steam listed it as similar to Majesty, which I reviewed previously. It’s a strategy game about Vikings colonizing a new continent, featuring supernatural elements from Norse myth. It doesn’t play very similarly to Majesty, unfortunately — there’s a lot more micromanagement and rigidity to the gameplay than I’d like — but it’s a perfectly decent strategy game in its own right. I like how distinct each of the clans’ playstyles feel, especially ones that encourage highly specialized play like the Ravens and the Wolves. However, I do think it tends to drag in the midgame — expansion is very slow and repetitive, and it’s frustrating to have to sit on your thumbs and wait for scouts to reveal new areas. (It’s also very awkward that scouts have nothing to do after exploring the whole map — Majesty solved this by giving rangers utility beyond exploration, but here everyone is hyperspecialized.) So, not exactly what I was looking for, but Majesty was unusual as RTSs go, so if you like more traditional ones you’ll probably like this.
In Other Waters
Survival/Adventure
A game with a similar premise as Subnautica: You are a biologist who has landed alone on an oceanic alien planet, and must explore its life and secrets. The gameplay is much simpler than Subnautica: the interface is an abstract top-down map and you can only move between specific points. There are some light survival mechanics, as you lose oxygen and power as you traverse the seafloor and must restore it with scavenged materials, but you’re never far from a checkpoint and you’re given plenty of items to keep yourself topped up. All in all, it makes me feel like this would have been better as a novel; the gameplay adds little beyond potentially causing you to miss out on lore hidden behind a path you didn’t take. It also auto-advances text despite not having voice acting, which was baffling and frustrating. Give me time to read!
The story itself was good, if a little on the simple side. The speculative biology was fun, and I liked that there was a focus on fungal and sessile organisms, which are often overlooked in media. The lack of defined gameplay probably contributed to this, as there was no need for giant sea monsters as in Subnautica. It also managed to have an anticapitalist environmentalist message that ended on an optimistic note, which was nice.