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Jan 23rd, 2025 at 20:23:33 - Sayonara Wild Hearts (PS5) |
I had no clue what to expect going in. I always thought it was some kind of motorcycle/sword fighting/action game from the cover art. Turns out this is a short rhythm game. Okay! It's stylish, that's for sure. You play through five or six clusters of levels, each of which culminates in a "boss fight" of sorts. In each level, you're basically auto-running/motorcycling a la Rez Infinite. Each cluster of levels has a different style or mechanic. For example, (like Rez Infinite) one of them mounts guns on your bike and you target and shoot enemies. Another (the most unique) has you playing through the level as if you are on/in a VR headset.
You do have to steer somewhat to pick up hearts, but you're usually going forward, except with the perspective shifts. Often, the perspective will shift when you have to do some timed button presses that make your character perform an action. The timings are easy because the music is all thumping pop music. I don't think I missed a single one. This is a game that doesn't want you to fail. I wrecked a bunch on one part, and it actually asked me if I'd like to skip that part. Nice accessibility feature.
That's pretty much it, really. It's a rhythm game. I was expecting...not this. If you've played Audiosurf or Rez Infinite or something, then this will feel familiar. Enjoy the brief, slick ride.
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Jan 23rd, 2025 at 20:04:53 - Rogue Legacy 2 (PS5) |
I got sucked into Rogue Legacy 2 hard. This is a grindy roguelike that's a lot of fun to play. It's got a strong Spelunky vibe. Everything feels good, it's nice and polished, and there is great variety in the levels, layouts, character classes, weapons, spells, and so on. The upgrade tree (a castle that you build by spending gold) is massive. I don't even know if it's possible to purchase all the upgrades. There are even upgrades that add more levels of upgrades, and those upgrades have upgrades. All unlocks and upgrades are persistent; you are constantly putting points in stats and unlocking stuff.
The main feature that sets Rogue Legacy apart is that when you die, you are basically transferred into another character, and you pick from three random ones. So, every run, you have a new character. There are like two dozen classes, each with its own weapon and talent. There are also spells (each character gets one randomly), relics (which are sometimes inherited and which you can find in your runs), and equipment (find blueprints and runes to craft, purchase, and upgrade). And later, you unlock altered versions of each class, which often have different weapons still. The combinations are endless. Since this is a "genealogical roguelike," your "heirs" also sometimes have traits. This is where the real randomness comes in (because classes are fairly consistent). I was 30 hours into the game and STILL seeing new traits; there are tons of them.
Here are some of my favorites, like if I got these, I would usually go with that character:
Cartographer: Map is revealed but you have no position marker. (It's great to know where the chests, special rooms, and boss are.)
Combative: +50% weapon damage, -25% HP. (Some of the best classes for me are the ones that stand and swing sharp objects.)
Compulsive Gambling: Only chests drop gold and chest values swing wildly. +50% gold. (If this is coupled with being able to see the map, you can earn a ton of gold by going straight for chests.)
Exploding Casket Syndrome: Enemies drop an exploding potion when they die. +50% gold. (The gold bonus is great for how easy the explosions are to avoid.)
Hero Complex: 100% more health, but you can't heal, ever. (Great for boss attempts because you aren't healing during boss fights anyway. I almost beat one of the last bosses on one of my first tries by just having a huge health pool.)
One-hit Wonder: You die in one hit. +200% gold. (Okay, this is one that I kept picking because it is usually a couple upgrade points even though you'll die fast.
Pacifist: -60% HP and you can't deal damage. +150% gold. (Same as One-hit Wonder.)
Many of them are tricky. They will seem tempting! But over time, these are some I learned to avoid:
Algesia: No immunity window after taking damage. +50% gold. (This one is brutal. Enemies will just bounce you back and forth hitting you. Normally, you have like a 1.5-second window or something after getting hit before you can get hit again, so you can dodge away or whatever.)
Clumsy: Objects break on touch. (Dangerous. Depending on the level, you'll break platforms that you need to stand on.)
Synesthesia: Everything leaves behind color. +25% gold. (Seems like easy gold, but when every enemy and object leaves behind a rainbow of color, you can't see anything!)
Puritan: Enemies are censored. +25% gold. (Like Synesthesia and several others [e.g., Spotlight], traits that limit visibility or distort what you can see are death, especially once you get to levels with lots of hazards.)
You need to earn gold in runs to purchase skill points, equipment, and so on. Traits are always tradeoffs, risk for gold!
So anyway, that's the loop. Choose a character, enter an area, explore the area. Kill enemies, find treasure chests, win trials, and eventually unlock the area boss by killing minibosses or doing whatever other pre-reqs. Die, choose another character, spend your gold, delve into the dungeons again. The dungeon areas randomize each time, and they always look different, though play long enough and you'll start to see the same rooms repeating. This means that you have to find the boss of the area you're in every single time. But, you can take a gold penalty to "lock" the world so that the map that you just revealed in your last run remains revealed. This lets you go straight to the boss, and is really useful when you are either tired of grinding, want to practice, or actually think you have a shot at killing it.
Bosses are no joke. I think there are six main bosses in the dungeons, plus two more final bosses, plus a bunch of minibosses. Most of the main bosses took numerous tries. At the end of the game, it tells you how many attempts, deaths, and victories you had for each enemy type. So, I saw that two of the bosses took me a dozen tries. It felt like longer because often I was going through the entire dungeon over and over. It would routinely take me an entire afternoon of playing to kill a boss. Learn their move sets and/or farm enough gold to brute force your way through. I think that I generally did the latter, but wish I had realized that's what I was doing earlier, because learning the bosses was a lot of fun.
At some point in the game, you are forced to improve your skills and really learn how to move and attack, using a variety of weapons, talents, spells, and classes. It gets pretty difficult, and you will die over and over and over and over. It didn't tell me how many heirs I had, but it was probably like 100. Maybe 200!
My main complaint is such a small thing. The game keeps track of your heirs--their portraits hang on your castle wall--but it doesn't keep track of any of their accomplishments. For example, I want to know who I killed each boss with! Who did I do the highest critical hit with? Who killed the most enemies? Which one died the fastest? Etc. I do know that it was a chef who killed the first two bosses. I think I used a regular knight for two of the later ones, and a mage for one of them. I almost got one of the last bosses with the bard. It was often surprising which classes I would do well with. Several of my boss kills were like, "oh my gosh, I'm actually winning...I'm going to do it...I won!! With...a chef?!"
There is tons and tons of replay value. Once you beat the game, you can NG+ I read as many times as you want to, adding modifiers, and making the game harder and harder and harder. Apparently there are some more bosses and lore and stuff too. It's a big game. But I think I am done, very satisfied that I beat it! Be warned that the game is grindy. If you're okay with that, and you like a roguelike with devious enemies and traps that requires you to get really good at it, then you should find a lot to enjoy here.
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Jan 22nd, 2025 at 19:47:48 - Animal Well (PS5) |
This one grew on me. In my first longish session (a few hours), I was getting sort of bored and frustrated. I didn't know what to do. There's not much of a story in Animal Well (you're in a...well...with animals). Animal Well is a metroidvania with no combat. It's full of puzzles. I'd compare it to Tunic and The Witness. All are games where you are not given much guidance. You can go in whichever direction you want, and you can go in that direction until you don't have the item required to move further (Tunic, Animal Well) or until you come to a puzzle that stumps you (all three). Once I realized that this was by design, and that there wasn't going to be any story, and that the puzzles are devious and clever, and that the well is connected in such a cool, labyrinthine way, I got immersed and couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to see every corner of that well. This sense of puzzle challenge and discovery kept me glued to Tunic, which I loved, but didn't keep me engaged for too long with The Witness. However, I had reservations about all three. I think that I anticipate disliking these types of games, but usually get sucked in.
In Animal Well, you discover a variety of toys (a frisbee, a slinky, a thing that makes bubbles, a spinning top, etc.) that are necessary for navigation and puzzle solving. They all have multiple uses, and since the game doesn't tell you what they are for, you have to figure it out through experimentation. This led to a bunch of "oh awesome!" moments when you stumble upon a new use for a toy. These moments felt really, really surprising and satisfying. They reminded me of Tunic when I would decode a manual page or The Witness when I would figure out a new rule, or when I realized how much perspective played a part.
The art style is compelling, too. It's got a retro vibe, and it's dark in the well, but it's also got a "bioluminescent" aesthetic. The animals range from cute to scary. There are a lot of animals down there. Some are background scenery, some are obstacles, some are bosses, some help you out, etc. Most can be interacted with in various ways. For example, the moles follow your yo-yo and you can "walk the dog" with them. Dogs will eat you, but they like frisbees. Similarly, weasels are distracted by the spinning top. You'll have to figure this stuff out because manipulating animals is often crucial to solving puzzles or exploring the well.
One final thing that I initially disliked, but that grew on me, is the map. It's very low-res and initially was hard to read. But, you eventually get a stamp, with which you can mark locations, and a pencil, with which you can write notes. You also learn to read the map better. Every pixel is meaningful. See a white dot? That's a teleporter. See pink dots? Those are locks. See a black space, no matter how small? That's unexplored and there's probably a way to get there. I knew I was into the game when I started annotating the map. If I got stuck, I stamped a "?" and made a note. If there was something that looked like it might be useful later, I made a note. I marked bosses, items, chests I couldn't get to, places where I thought I would need to return to with as-yet-undiscovered items, and so on. For example, I kept seeing all these staircases with buttons on the bottom, and another button elsewhere in the room. It looked like I'd need to use an item to press one while I stood on the other. And it was always steps. Almost like a slinky would be required. I started writing "slinky" on the map in those areas. And do you know what I eventually found? A SLINKY! Then I methodically revisited everywhere I'd marked. I felt like a genius.
There are a TON of secrets in Animal Well. I rolled the credits, but there are eggs to find, squirrels to find, more items to find, all sorts of puzzles and statues and stuff that I don't know what they're for. You find a totally new location after the credits that raises a lot of questions. I read up on some of this and learned that there is an ARG and like 3 layers of puzzle, which reminds me of Inscryption. (And Animal Well does have a similar horror-adjacent vibe!). I won't go back and spend time trying to figure more stuff out, but definitely recommend if you like metroidvanias, puzzle games, and exploring dungeons. It seemed a bit uninspired at first, but this game is deep. Like a well. An animal well.
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Jan 17th, 2025 at 12:26:21 - Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (PS5) |
This is the nth Ratchet & Clank game and the third one I’ve played. I don’t really remember the other two, but they were like 10-15 years ago. I honestly don’t have a whole lot to say about it. It’s fun. It’s cartoony and arcadey. It’s pretty easy. It’s colorful and loud and has creative art. My favorite part is using all the different guns and trying to level them all up. There’s a mushroom bomb that spawns mushrooms that attack enemies, another bomb that spawns little robot dudes that attack enemies, a “topiary grenade” that spawns a sprinkler that turns enemies into shrubbery (funny), which freezes them in place and makes them vulnerable. There is a ricochet gun that you fire, then press R1 a bunch to bounce the bullet at the enemy. There’s a gun that freezes enemies in blocks of ice, which you can smash with your wrench. There are all the standard guns you expect (pistol, shotgun, rocket launcher, sniper, etc.). There is a gun that shoots dogs at your enemies. It's wild.
The coolest thing aside from the guns is the rifts. You find these purple crystals that will switch dimensions so that you can explore two versions of many areas. There are other rifts that you can use to traverse larger distances quickly, and others you can open to find secrets in hidden sections of the world. It’s neat to find areas within areas and to see the contrast between wherever you are and some ruined version of it. After not too long though I quit exploring these so that I could get on with the story. Whatever collectibles you find in the rifts (or anywhere else for that matter) aren’t that useful because, as I said, it’s an easy game. There are golden screws (no purpose as far as I can tell except to find them), armor pieces that do give stacking bonuses, spybots that are like encyclopedia entries for lore, and so on. The most useful thing you’ll find when poking around is definitely the crystals that let you upgrade weapons.
Those purple crystals and rifts are related to the story, which is good enough to drive the action along. The big bad guy is upset that his plans are always being ruined, so he travels to an alternate dimension where another version of him rules the galaxy (and then you follow him there and ruin both of their plans, of course). There are the Clank puzzles again, and they are neat, but simple, and reminded me of the game Humanity because he has to route clones of himself to an exit. There are also little action shooter areas for a new character (because Ratchet has an alternate dimension person too). So yeah, fun, but probably will not remember!
Oh yeah, the PS5 controller has a super cool feature (aside from tons of varied pulsing, vibrating, audio effects, etc.) where you can, depending on the context, pull a trigger halfway for an effect and pull it the whole way down for a different effect. For example, hold L2 to aim and hold R1 halfway to shoot a gun in its slow and accurate mode, or hold R2 all the way down to change to machine gun fire. Returnal was doing this too, but I haven’t played much of it. Ratchet & Clank used it all the time for a lot of guns. This controller is awesome!
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