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Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:22:09 - Thank Goodness You're Here! (PS5) |
This is a quirky, surreal game with British humor. Certainly one of the funnier games I’ve ever played. I laughed and chuckled throughout. And that’s good, because the gameplay is minimal! You play as a little salesman who gets sent to this Northern English town to meet with the mayor. Turns out the mayor is in a meeting for a few hours, so off you go to explore the town. All the weird townspeople need help. There’s a guy with his arm stuck in a sewer grate because he reached in to try and grab some change. You help him by getting butter from a bakery. There’s a guy who needs you to cut some grass. While doing this, you’re treated to some flowers declaring their love for one another…and whom you promptly mow down. The tasks are often funny and surreal. One of my favorite later ones involved helping a sick, bedridden man get his breakfast. You follow his arm, which snakes out of the bedroom, out of his apartment, through the entire town, ultimately grabbing the food from the store. The more elaborate tasks, like this one, have multiple parts (e.g., doing other things to clear the way for the man’s arm) and span across time as the townspeople move around, do different activities, and the town changes. For example, the game keeps you on the right track in clever ways, by blocking your path with other characters. There’s a guy teaching his daughter how to drive and there is an ice cream truck. These two cars will be “stuck” in various places (alleyways, roads, etc.), blocking your path. There is another character in a garden (I think the same guy whose arm you liberate from the sewer grate) who is constantly being bullied by two mean kids. Sometimes, they have him against the bushes (preventing you from going that way); other times, against the hole in the fence (no fence path this time); other times they’re paddling him or trying to push him into the well (can’t go down the well now). This kept me from getting lost wandering through town, and did so in a way that makes narrative sense. It wasn’t just an invisible wall preventing me from going in a direction.
So that’s the game. I said that gameplay was minimal. True. You can jump and you can slap. Slapping things is your universal interaction. Want to talk to a character? Slap. Pick something up? Slap. Etc. You’re treated to funny dialogue, animations, and noises from the things you slap. Definitely would recommend. It’s short and sweet.
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Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:18:17 - Skate Story (PS5) |
The story, music, art, and general vibe were immediately cool as hell (ha…because the game takes place in hell). The story becomes less “cool” and more absurd and surreal over time, but I liked it. I read somewhere that Skate Story is mostly a vehicle for having an audiovisual experience. I agree with that. I typically don’t care for skateboarding games. They have to do something besides “just” skateboarding (or BMXing or snowboarding, etc.). More than just tricks and racking up combos.
And so here we have a skater (named “the Skater”) who is made of glass and pain, who signs a contract with the devil to get his soul back. To do so, the Skater must eat the moon. He does that, then finds out there are many moons leading through the depths of hell, whereupon reaching the bottom with a full stomach, the devil will prepare a banquet and discuss the terms of the contract. So, you progress through the game’s chapters as you eat one moon after another. Eating a moon involves waking up in a new part of hell, talking with your rabbit friend and meeting other strange characters, learning of the moon’s location, skating around an “open” part of the level, usually solving some little puzzles to open paths or move the story forward, doing some “portal” sections that are almost like races (sometimes timed), and then one or two “battles”, the final one usually against some moon guardian or area denizen.
My favorite of these activities at first were the portals because you get to skate fast, avoid obstacles, and sometimes race against the clock. As the tracks become more complex though, these became less fun. Since you are made of glass, you can imagine how many obstacles you can run into before you shatter. As the open parts of the levels became more creative and complex, though, they became more fun, so I ended up really enjoying skating around the levels, talking to characters, doing tricks on the environment, finding little things to do, solving the little puzzles, seeing the bizarre scenery, and so on.
The battles, though, are the shining stars. How do you fight in a skateboarding game? You build combos and then land a “finisher” to “hit” the enemy with your combo. This is cleverly handled by visualizing the enemy’s hitbox with light. For example, usually what happens is the enemy is floating/flying around. Beneath the enemy is a field of light. This is where you have to do a combo finisher to damage it. So, you can skate around racking up combo points, but you need to be near, or get near, the light before your combo expires or you crash or whatever (and lose your points) so that you can do a finisher in the light. This was challenging and fun.
The whole time you are fighting these bosses, there is blood-pumping electronic music playing. The soundtrack is excellent and fits the surreal visuals. So, when you’re fighting a giant centipede, the visuals are pulsing and neon and glass, the bass is thumping, it’s mesmerizing. The soundtrack picks up at other times, too, but the boss battles are where it really shines.
So, this was a nice surprise. I thought I would like it, but it was cooler than I thought, weirder than I thought, and it certainly was an audiovisual treat.
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Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:12:26 - SEASON: A letter to the future (PS5) |
I tried to get into this. You play as a teen girl going on a journey to document the world as the “season” is changing. “Season” doesn’t refer to fall, spring, etc., but to some sort of impending cataclysm. The game is about change and memory. It’s pretty for sure, melancholic. You start in your home town in the mountains and ride your bike down, down into a valley, where you explore another town (and try to figure out what happened to all the people) for most of the game. You’ll learn about their politics, their religion, and other aspects of their culture. You do this by cycling through various marked areas (the fruit farm, the cow farm, the dig site, etc.), reading signs and documents, taking pictures of things, and recording audio of things. The idea is that you’re documenting the world, preserving its beauty (for the future, as the title suggests). You have a notebook, in which you can organize pictures, text, and insights that the character has. All this is neat in theory. I liked the mystery and generally enjoyed exploring around learning about this other town and its culture. I did not, however, enjoy cycling (except for the open road), taking pictures and audio, and especially did not enjoy having to manually place items in the notebook. I see how players could like this, giving them control over building the notebook, over what they “remember”, but to me it was tedious and helped make the game feel dull.
The main thing I disliked about the bicycle is that it cannot go over many obstacles! This is unfortunate in a game where a bicycle is your means of transportation. I was constantly getting stopped by things in the environment (a rock, a low fence, a small curb), and when you stop, the character gets off the bike. Then you have to figure out what blocked you, go around, get back on the bike, start pedaling again. Then you’ll hit another rock and get off the bike. Walk it around the rock, get back on the bike, pedal. It’s annoying. Why can’t you just bunnyhop over low things? To demonstrate how common (and annoying) this is—and I am not making this up—one of the few menu options is “unstuck.” Yes, that is how often you get stuck on the environment—not just knocked off your bike, but actually stuck. So frequently that there is “new game, continue, settings, credits, UNSTUCK”. The game is certainly rough around the edges. The camera is also janky. I got bored and picked up something else.
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Aug 14th, 2026 at 17:07:04 - Deliver Us the Moon (PC) |
This was nice! It reminded me of Observation and other such space station mysteries. Perhaps the more recent The Invincible as well. I haven’t found a perfect example of such games. I liked those other two, but they had problems. This was similar. It’s an indie for sure and was rough around the edges. Notably, it refused to save my graphics settings. Every time I booted it, it cranked itself up to ultra and turned on ultra ray tracing. Like, please, my laptop is about 5 years old and has one of the earlier ray tracing video cards. It’s never been able to really use the feature; the fan cranks to the sound of a jet engine, the laptop heats to the temperature of the sun.
The puzzles were basic (started to get a little more interesting toward the end), it used your standard audio logs / video logs / read papers to convey the story, and it was totally predictable in its linearity. Go here. Oh no, things are broken. Fix them. Oh no, something else is broken. Fix it. Go there. Oh no, another thing is broken. Fix it. Luckily, I found the story compelling, the gameplay was smooth, the pacing was good, and it was able to inject some manufactured urgency into a handful of gameplay segments.
In the story, you play as [spoiler], who goes on a solo mission to the moon to find out what happened to the work colony that maintained the facilities that sent power back to the Earth, which was facing environmental catastrophe. With the work colony missing, the power was off, which was causing an obvious problem for Earth. So, you learn about the people there, what they were doing, why the facility went silent, and you have to get the power back on to save Earth. There’s some good human drama.
Some of my favorite parts were the manufactured urgency ones. The game does a really good job of having you juuuuuust make things in time. You juuuust make it to the airlock before you run out of air; you juuuust align the transmitters before the old, creaky one falls over; the QTE on the monorail activates juuuust as it’s about to go off the track; etc. A player who is slower to react might have to play these segments a few times because there is little room for error (you’re usually doing something in a straight line, but still, it’s possible to go too slow or try to explore at the wrong time, or whatever).
Oh yeah, one funny design decision was how constantly the game reminds you of your objective. But it does so in the game world, not just through your “mission” menu. So, as you run around the facilities, there are always screens displaying that the power is off here, the bay doors are locked there, the generator is on here. You’ll never be at a loss as to what to do. It’s so unrealistic though, the amount of monitors displaying the statuses of things. They also added a few “slice of life” things around the facilities. One is a poster that you keep seeing for an upcoming movie night. The posters tell people to vote on the movie. Like the monitors, such posters are reused a hundred times. I noticed, at the end of the game, the climax, in the elevator to the reactor core, there is…a poster about voting on movie night. I laughed out loud. There are probably two engineers who ever ride that elevator, and if one knows about the movie night, then the other one does too. And who put that poster in there?
Overall, I certainly enjoyed this one. I’d give it a solid C+.
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