Inside: Soulstice, Silksong, OMORI.

Soulstice
Action

A style fighter with the gameplay of Devil May Cry and the aesthetic of Dark Souls. You play as a “Chimera”, but before you get too excited, that’s just a human with a ghost buddy. Chimeras are shock troops deployed to handle demon outbreaks, and a portal to Hell just opened up on top of the capital city, so you’re called to clean up the mess. Style fighters aren’t really my thing — I prefer the more methodical duels of Soulslikes, and I’ve never been terribly motivated to pursue high scores — but I enjoyed this one well enough. It doesn’t do anything terribly innovative; even the ghost buddy is basically just a parry mechanic, and the grimdark aesthetic makes for some very dull and repetitive environments. The protagonist’s outfit is also… surprisingly restrained by video game standards, but still has an absolutely ridiculous exposed thigh that goes right up to her crotch, made even more ridiculous by the fact we’re repeatedly told the environment is freezing cold. But if you like style fighters, you’ll probably like this.

Hollow Knight: Silksong
Metroidvania

Worth the wait. I think everyone complaining about the difficulty forgot how hard Hollow Knight was to play the first time. The challenges the game throws at you are objectively harder than those in Hollow Knight, but Hornet is both stronger and more agile than the Knight, so you have the tools to overcome them; the difficulty is in learning your character’s new moveset and abilities, just like in every video game. The devs in fact explicitly said this is why the game is harder, because they wanted to stay true to Hornet’s established power level instead of dumbing her down. And they succeeded; Hornet retains all of the abilities she had as a boss and then some, and I think it’s worth taking a moment to acknowledge how impressive that is from a design standpoint.

Its flaws are the same as Hollow Knight’s: Corpse running still sucks, boss runbacks still suck, and running blind until you get the map for the area still sucks. In case you didn’t see my Hollow Knight review: The point of a Metroidvania is exploration and choices; if you’re struggling on one section, you can try going somewhere else. Corpse running actively discourages this by forcing you to commit to your current route. What’s particularly baffling is that the devs are aware of the first half, but not the second; the corpse run mechanic actively contradicts the playstyle they said they were trying to encourage. They also managed to add another mechanic I hated from Dark Souls, which is consumable attrition; see, enemies now drop “shell shards” that Hornet consumes to refresh her tool uses, so if you keep using tools against a boss you’ll eventually run out. This meant I never wanted to use tools unless I thought I could win, which combined with the lack of boss health bars often meant I overestimated how much of the fight was left and just never used tools at all. This sucks because experimenting with new tools is one of the most fun and interesting parts of the game, but I never felt comfortable doing so. (There are a lot of tools I just never got around to trying because of this, which is a real shame.) I’d have much preferred if tools were weaker but refreshed for free.

(Weirdly, I didn’t mind the mob arena fights very much, even though the rest of the internet seems to despise them. This isn’t Dark Souls; fighting multiple enemies at once is very doable, especially with how many AoE options you have. I’d even go so far as to say that they genuinely recontextualize normal enemies to provide a different challenge, since you’re locked in and therefore can’t cheese them by running away and breaking their AI like you normally can.)

But otherwise, well, it’s Hollow Knight. The combat is awesome, the environments are awesome, the freedom of exploration is even more awesome than in Hollow Knight. Even the platforming, which was one of the weaker areas of Hollow Knight, is awesome because of Hornet’s new aerial movement abilities; Hornet just feels better to control than the Knight ever did. And once again, double jump is one of the last abilities you get, which I just always think is a great flex in Metroidvania design. I also enjoyed the narrative even more this time; not only do we have a talking protagonist, but the narrative is even more blatant about its themes of valuing the present over the past and rejecting despair. Hornet is a pragmatic yet deeply compassionate protagonist who is constantly talking down the suicidal fatalism of the ruined kingdom’s inhabitants and imploring them to live for the future. (She also provides her own commentaries for the hunter’s journal, and about half of them are evaluating the fauna’s viability as pets, which is adorable.) After trudging through Dark Souls’ “No hope, get the rope,” misery, this was positively a ray of sunshine.

Also, once you’ve finished the game you should watch Jacob Geller’s amazing analysis of its religious themes.

OMORI
RPG

Another one of those cutsey-horror games where the game world is a dream the protagonist is using to repress traumatic memories. The difference is that this is a first-act reveal instead of an ending one; you wake up and are forced to interact with the real world after the prologue. I don’t think I’ve seen any other story in this genre take this approach, and it creates an interesting effect where you can put the puzzle together using both objective evidence from the real world and metaphorical evidence from the dream world simultaneously. Unfortunately, it does make the dream sections drag a bit when it’s obvious the whole time the whole thing is fake and your accomplishments there don’t actually matter. This is made worse by the fact the game uses this to hammer in a very unsubtle anti-escapism message, so it’s another instance of making the player feel bad for playing the game.

Gameplay was fine but mostly unremarkable. Battles were a bit repetitive but generally short enough that it didn’t drag too much. I did think it was way too easy to become overleveled and make battles trivial, which was unfortunate. The main gimmick is that your abilities can induce emotional states (happy, sad, or angry) which provide buffs and debuffs as well as operating in a rock-paper-scissors advantage triangle. It was an interesting idea, but the game is simple enough that I never needed to use it much; regular enemies are usually dead before you can set up emotion effects, and nearly all bosses can be beaten by the same strategy (make the enemy sad and Aubrey angry).

I did enjoy the real-world sections a lot, though. There’s a ton of flavor text to everything, and the RPG mechanics are adapted into amusingly realistic outcomes, such as everyone freaking out and calling off the battle when you bring a knife to a fistfight. It was genuinely heartwarming to do all the sidequests helping all the townspeople, and really poignant to see the friends reminisce about their childhood and how each of them dealt with their trauma.

I do kinda feel like this is a story that would have worked better without the final twist, though. We’re told early on the event that shattered the friend group was Mari dying, and halfway through the game it’s revealed that specifically she killed herself. But ACTUALLY what happened is that Sunny killed her by accident, Basil happened to see, and the two 12-year olds somehow knew how to tie a noose and string up a body to make it look like a suicide. The “good” ending is you ratting out Basil before skipping town to leave everyone reeling from this revelation. I feel like this shifts the narrative from a story about people dealing with something that’s upsettingly common in real life to “If some kids did a messed up thing, would that be messed up or what?” I don’t know how to engage with it morally or emotionally because it’s just so out there, and it leaves a bad taste in my mouth the “good” ending is only good for the main character while ignoring how it will negatively impact everyone else. It kinda feels like it’s there just for the sake of having another twist rather than because it adds anything to the story.