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Jun 25th, 2025 at 14:10:58 - Mullet Madjack (PC) |
This one is reminiscent of Post Void, but with a subversive '90s anime aesthetic rather than a psychedelic horror one. You are an angry man (a "strong silent type") with a mullet who contracts with a company through an app to kill robots and rescue an influencer. The big boss robot makes you climb a building to get to her for the final showdown.
On the way, you go through 70 or 80 stories of the building, in sets of 10. After every 10 floors, you fight a boss, or hit a story sequence, and get a checkpoint. If you die before doing that, you go back to the beginning of that set of 10 floors and lose any upgrades you acquired (except the ones that persist across runs). I spent quite a while on floors 60-69, but didn't have to redo any of the others more than two or three times. I'm not sure why 60-69 was so much harder! It is the only boss I died on, and there was a part of the level layout I kept getting (floors are randomized or procedurally generated or something) that stumped me for a while. There was a laser grid with an enemy that kills you if you touch it. To pass the laser grid, you have to jump through it, but that makes it easy to land on the enemy and die. I eventually figured out how to jump through that grid configuration, then quickly back up and kick the enemy. Or, if you have enough time left, you can run through the lasers.
After every floor, you get a choice between three or four upgrades--new/upgraded weapons, speed bonuses, critical hit bonuses, invincibility to hazards, etc. Those upgrades stay with you for the duration of the 10-floor set, then they reset for the next 10 floors, with the exception of your weapon, which you get to keep, even if it's upgraded. The only weapon I upgraded to level 3 was the pistol, so I beat the game with the pistol! And if you die, all your upgrades go away and you reset that 10-floor set. So, you get like 9 upgrades before you get to each boss, and the upgrades are pretty important both to get through the floors before the boss and to fight the boss itself.
Upgrades are also important because you only have 10 seconds to live, and you need to extend that as much as possible. You carry a phone that constantly counts down in the app. Kill an enemy, get time back. Kill enemies in creative ways (kick them into lava or lasers, launch them off a ledge, etc.), kill enemies quickly back-to-back, and get more time back. Get hit though and lose time. The game emphasizes that it's not about speed, but flow. In that, it's Hotline Miami-ish, where you are quickly reacting to where enemies are and what type they are so you can dispose of them efficiently without getting hit much. There are enough enemies that you don't need to fly as fast as you can, but I generally did. You have guns and you have a boot, so you alternate between blasting enemies and kicking them into things. It's fast-paced and fun.
The story is fun too, like a silly dystopian sci-fi anime thing that has a lot to say about consumerism and how people are like robots. It's a short game, with an endless mode and more difficulty settings for replayability. Not essential to play, but worth a couple hours for some high-energy FPS action and creative style!
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Jun 24th, 2025 at 10:15:10 - Crash Bandicoot 4: It's About Time (PC) |
One and done! I don't think I ever played a Crash Bandicoot game on PlayStation and I don't think I ever need to play another one. It feels like an old-school platformer and is surprisingly retro. You run, jump, and spin your way through various levels. Your goal is to destroy all the crates, get all the fruits, find all the hidden gems, and, in time trial mode, do it quickly. That's it, straightforward.
There are "masks" you pick up that give Crash some special powers, such as reversing gravity or slowing time. These change up the platforming. In the last set of levels, where there is a serious difficulty spike, you do these sequences where there are multiple masks. So for example, you pick up the super spin mask, jump, super spin, jump, remove the mask, land on the TNT (because if you super spin on the TNT it blows up immediately), jump, pick up the reverse gravity mask in midair, reverse gravity, float up to the time stop mask, stop time, crawl through the dynamite, jump, pick up the reverse gravity mask, reverse gravity, float up, pick up the phase mask, phase out and go past a laser, phase in and land on a platform, phase out and go past a laser (this is all while falling, by the way), land successfully on the final platform and end the level.
Levels are littered with all manner of death traps, from enemies, to exploding boxes, to bandicoot-eating plants, and the platforming is not easy! Part of the difficulty is due to all the things going on on screen, and that's great. It reminded me of something like Super Meat Boy (one of my hard platformers to compare) where you need to learn some muscle memory to get through harder sections. Like, you'll be running and die because a box of dynamite is around the corner, so you die, restart from checkpoint, and remember not to hug the corner. And do that a lot, because in later levels, you will die a lot.
I don't have too much else to say, really. There's a story but it's silly. There's fan service with recurring characters from previous games, even some you get to play as, which also changes up the platforming a bit. There is a lot of replayability as you can strive to find all the boxes and gems every level, do all the bonus levels, collect skins, and so on. I had a pretty good time playing, but will probably never play another one. There are better platformers that don't channel the gnarly 1990s so hard.
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Jun 24th, 2025 at 06:53:53 - Nine Sols (PC) |
Retiring this one (and Sekiro). I was really into Nine Sols for a while, but, like Sekiro, it's like beating my head against a wall, agonizing for hours to make inches of progress. Nine Sols is a Sekiro-like metroidvania, Sekiro-like because it features incredibly difficult parry-based combat. I am learning that this may not be my cup of tea. It's too bad because I enjoyed the metroidvania aspects and think this is a much better game than the last metroidvania I played, Ender Lilies (which I thought was solid). Nine Sols is more like Hollow Knight, but with that Sekiro influence.
The story immediately hooked me. It feels like slow-burn sci-fi. Your character gets pushed off a cliff, wakes up when a village boy finds him, and lives for a time in this village. The village does periodic ritual sacrifices, but when the boy who finds your character is ready to be sacrificed, your character pulls a plot twist and, short version, the village is not what you think it is. Off you go on a quest to defeat the "nine sols" and...do whatever it is that does.
I killed two of them and I feel like I was close to finding one or two more. The two sols I killed were HARD, but such good, unique fights. In the second one, you fight this cat-harpy (all the sols are cats) and her two enslaved humans. One human is quick and the other is slow, but both are strong, and you fight them at the same time. When you empty one of their HP bars, the sol descends to heal them, at which point you can attack her. But while you're taking advantage of your window to attack her, the other human is still coming at you. Rinse and repeat this until she is dead. The strategy lies in how you choose to deactivate the humans. Do you focus on taking out the big one or the small one? Which one is less dangerous when you are attacking the sol? Or, do you try to deactivate them both at the same time, thus giving you free time to attack the sol? Or, what I finally got good at was staggering them, so I'd try to take down both their HP, then deactivate one, attack the sol, then when she was done healing it, immediately deactivate the other so she came right back. When I finally killed her, I thought the fight would go into a second phase because that's what happened with the first boss, I spent a long time killing it, but when I thought it was over, it just went into phase 2!
I loved the hard-as-nails boss fights, but the regular enemies were brutal as well! I died countless times to archers, dogs, swordsmen, spearmen, little guys, big guys, everything. Nine Sols does the Dark Souls / Hollow Knight thing where when you die, you drop your money, or if an enemy kills you, then they have your money. Then you have to make your way back there WITHOUT DYING to retrieve it. But the enemies are so vicious, and the platforming is challenging too, that it's quite the feat to make the (sometimes long) trek back to your corpse. So, you lose your hard-earned cash all the time. And you need that to purchase upgrades. And if you are avoiding enemies too much, then you're not getting experience points, so no skills improve either. I wanted to learn enemy attack patterns so that I could effectively parry and kill them, but it was such a slow death-filled process for every enemy type (of which there are many), including the various elites you encounter.
Nine Sols does have some cool innovations. For one, you have a "talisman" that lets you do this attack where you sprint past an enemy, attach a bomb, and detonate it. This converts all internal damage to permanent damage. What is internal damage, you say? Well, that's like temporary damage. Your character takes internal damage when you parry but miss the perfect timing, which is nice. Internal damage refills over time. So, you can miss a perfect parry, take internal damage, and recover it. Of course, if you take too much internal damage, you'll still die, and if you get hit while you have internal damage, then it converts to permanent damage. Enemies do the same thing, so using your talisman when they have internal damage can really deplete their HP. Another thing I liked was this butterfly drone thing you have. If you press LT, you take control of the drone and can fly it around. This is really useful for scouting ahead so you can see what enemies there are, what platforming obstacles there are, etc. The drone can also fly into special spaces and hack electronics to open doors and whatnot. On the one hand, stopping to use a drone to scout ahead of you all the time slows the pace down a lot, but on the other hand, caution is really important.
In the end, I don't have the time or patience to dedicate to mastering Nine Sols (or Sekiro), as much as I like it. Therefore, it is retired (as is Sekiro)! Although I did read that if you change the difficulty to story mode, you can manually adjust damage dealt and received (to the tune of +/- %1,000!), so maybe one day I'll god mode my way through just to see more of the game.
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Jun 24th, 2025 at 06:15:43 - South of Midnight (PC) |
I've got several of these to update, burning through Game Pass games before the end of the month as I am.
I enjoyed South of Midnight, especially for the creative writing, the neat animation, and the stellar music. The combat, while fine, gets repetitive, and the game starts to drag toward the end because of this and the way that most of the 13 or 14 chapters unfold in the same formulaic way.
What's cool about the writing? The game takes place in the Deep South (something like New Orleans or Mississippi or the bayou). It features Southern folklore. The main character is Black and the game deals with slavery and racial trauma. It also deals with child abuse, social work, interracial relationships, grief and loss, and more. As someone who teaches social work students, it was really cool to have the main character's mother be a social worker, and to have all these themes be important parts of the story!
The game is divided into chapters, and each chapter or two covers a particular story of some tragedy or trauma happening and the victim turning into a monster. The main plot is that Hazel's (main character) house with her mother in it gets swept away in hurricane waters and she goes to find and save her. On the way, she meets a big catfish (the narrator) and various other characters, some related to her family and others related to the traumas she heals. And that's basically how the chapters play out. Hazel enters a new area and finds out there's a sad story there that explains whatever monster is around. Then she has to find the three or four memories that tell the story of the trauma, fighting in arena battles to get each one. Then, she has to go to the monster and cleanse it. Then, there is a platforming chase sequence. Repeat.
All combat takes place in arenas. You walk into an area, it becomes gated off, enemies spawn, and you kill them. There are several different enemy types that behave quite differently, and a bunch of them will spawn together (especially later on). So, you'll have like two aggressive melee enemies, one "healer" that protects an enemy, one that stands back and fires homing missiles, and another giant one that spreads rot on the ground. And they're all flitting around the arena attacking you. It can feel a bit chaotic, but you have some neat tools to handle them. You have a push and a pull, a stun that makes enemies take extra damage, a strong area attack, and you can send your little doll companion to mind control one. You can also like purge an enemy after you kill it, which deals some AoE damage and slightly heals you. It all feels good and can be challenging, but like I said, there is just too much of it. The combat starts to feel like padding.
Another thing that got old by the end was searching for skill points to upgrade attacks. These are collectibles hidden all over the place that require you to search in every nook and cranny if you want them. You don't have to find them all, but I think the upgrades helped me in combat. They are often obtained by the lightest of platforming and puzzle solving, "going the wrong way" on purpose. These give you either 5, 10, or 20 skill points. Upgrades require around 100 points on average to unlock, so you have to find a lot of these pickups to get rewarded. I didn't mind this too much because the environments are pretty and the movement and platforming feel good. So, I did enjoy the combat and exploration for a while, but searching high and low for skill points became tedious.
One thing that consistently made me want to keep going despite knowing that I was going to keep having to fight and do an end-of-chapter chase sequence was the music. As you get closer to the monster in each chapter, there is like a special song that starts playing. So, when you're searching for Two-Toed Tom, a giant alligator (yes, he is a victim!), a song starts playing about Two-Toed Tom, ramping up in intensity through a boss battle, almost seeming to narrate what you're doing. I LOVED the music because it was related to the story and what was going on in the game.
I'm glad I played South of Midnight. I'd recommend if you want something narratively unique.
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