Towards the end of my time with SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, my opinion of it had soured so drastically from how I felt when I began it. Being a 3D platformer from 2003, it shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that you’re hopping from level to level, completing challenges and solving puzzles in order to obtain some sort of shiny object, which in this case are golden spatulas. Collecting enough golden spatulas grants you access to more levels, where you’ll do more challenges and so on and so forth. It’s a 3D platformer through and through.
Seeing as the original game released a few years into the show being around, I was able to catch most of the references and jokes and not feel like an outsider to the source material. It was actually kind of nice to revisit this world I hadn’t thought about in nearly twenty years, only to see it realized in this 3D space that I could run around in and explore. I’ve never played the original release so I don’t know how the it looked when it came out, but SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated looks really crisp and colorful. It’s fully voiced as well which makes the whole thing feel like a really long, yet enjoyable episode of the show.
For how well this remaster has done in terms of presentation, I feel like some attention could’ve been paid to the actual gameplay itself. SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated is a decent platformer at best, and a frustrating test of patience at worse. The game is marred by a disastrous camera that will play along with you the most part, but will damn you at the worst possible times.
There is a point later in the game where you learn how to wall jump between two walls. After the first few times of just leaping at the wall and then rhythmically hitting the jump button until you crest the obstacle you’re climbing up, a new version of this challenge appears. This time, instead of going up, the walls you’re jumping between move forward and backward, offering you a way to get to a distant platform. This “simple” task turned into ten minutes of me leaping to my death because the camera felt the need to lock into what can only be described as a “cinematic” angle the moment I took my first jump. That’s what the camera does in SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated, it’s fine most of the time until it decides you’ve been in too much control.
The camera’s ability to screw you over doesn’t just stop with platforming either, because I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve tried to attack something only to find that it’s just out of my reach. This of course leads to me getting counterattacked, stun locked, thrown off of a level, or all three at once. And if you do happen to fall off of a level, know that everything resets because of that. Were you halfway through a particularly tedious puzzle? Great news, now you’re back at square one. Got through all of those enemy encounters? Then you can totally do it again. While you retain all collectables along with the puzzles you’ve already solved, falling off of a level or dying often feels like the game is adding insult to injury by making your climb back to where you were even much more tedious.
While SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated has its share of highs and lows, I found that playing as any character other than SpongeBob isn’t very fun. There are certain points in levels that allow you to swap between either Sandy or Patrick depending on what the level calls for. Patrick can lift heavy things and throw them, while Sandy can glide through the air and swing from certain objects. Playing as either of them isn’t fun, especially when the game calls for precise platforming from Sandy. Her specific challenges usually rely on using a combination of gliding and swinging, both of which are hilariously unresponsive.
There’s a level later on where Sandy is put to the test and must cross a massive chasm of nothingness in order to get to a floating plot of land. There are swing points scattered about which require you getting close enough to them for an indicator to pop up letting you know that you’re locked on and able to initiate a swing. But that window is incredibly small when you’re worrying about plummeting to your death while trying to fumble with the unresponsive controls.
If there was a word to describe SpongeBob Squarepants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated as a product, I guess ‘inconsistent’ would be it. It has all the charm and joy that I remember from the show itself but isn’t particularly fun to play. That being said, I still finished it because it scratched that 3D platformer itch I had, but I have no intentions of going and sweeping up the collectibles I missed or anything. I bought and played through the game because I have fond memories of those early seasons of SpongeBob, and that was enough to push me through. But if you have no connection to the source material, then this is just a decent platformer at best.
BarnFinders is a game that I am deeply conflicted about. It’s the exact sort of mindless, meditative gaming experience that I love so much, most of which involves you finding, repairing and selling various flotsam and jetsam at your own junk shop. It also is a game that is tremendously unfunny and at incredibly problematic in the way it represents various ethnicities and cultures.
Clearly aping the likes of reality television shows like Storage Wars and AmericanPickers, BarnFinders puts you in charge of your very own, rundown junk shop somewhere in the southeast portion of a fictionalized America. Your establishment is pretty miserable at first, boasting nothing more than a dingy storefront and a beat-up truck. Eventually you can upgrade just about everything, but it still retains that unkempt feel.
Just like real life, your computer in BarnFinders is the heart of the operation allowing you to accept various jobs and travel to different locales. Jobs boil down to a borderline incomprehensible email asking you to retrieve a specific item from a location and mail it back to the sender. After accepting the job, you need to front the cash to drive your truck to any new location you wish to go to, but that’s only necessary when you first go to a destination.
You arrive at the location which can range wildly from barns, houses, bunkers and more, and are reminded of what item you’re there for, as well as a progress bar that ticks down as you collect other items you can resell currently in the dwelling. It’s just enough information to let you know there’s something you missed without explicitly telling you what it was, ultimately making it a fun little puzzle that can get pretty tedious after enough meandering through the level.
Chairs, hard hats, traffic cones, laptops and other notable items are usually prime for resale, while the deluge of cardboard boxes and hay bales that litter the area can be broken down into repairing components that you can use to fix certain broken big ticket items like televisions and microwaves. Aside from fixing things, you’ll also find items that can’t be sold, but can be combined with other items to make more rare and expensive products to sell like motorcycles and what definitely is an Atari 2600. Finally there’s just dirty items that need to be hosed off before they can sold which can be anything, but the first one you’ll come across is a blow-up sex doll.
Once you load all of that stuff into your truck, you head back home and prepare your merchandise to put on sale the next day. This includes the aforementioned cleaning, fixing and building of components that you’ll find throughout levels. But you won’t be able to just do those things because you need to buy the various stations that allow you to perform those actions. You also need to buy tools like an ax, a shovel and some lock picks, as well as a price gun that allows you to upgrade the interior of your store.
The store has a few spots for wall shelves, display cases and free standing displays, all of which hold different sized items. A washing machine needs a free standing display, while a guitar is hung on the wall. Where you put things doesn’t matter, because this whole section of the game is incredibly underwhelming but extremely necessary to progressing. You also can change the flooring and wall coverings, but despite how much they cost they’re all varying degrees of filthy.
Once you have your shelves packed with the garbage you rescued from various dumps, you get to open up shop and meet the very small cast of characters in BarnFinders. This is where things go from uninteresting, to aggressively bad. The characters in this game are all different stereotypes, including the co-owner of your store, your uncle. Being set in the southeast, BarnFinders leans into a lot of the stereotypes about the people from those areas, portraying your uncle as an uneducated, scraggly-haired redneck. Also in this cast of characters is an Asian woman named Lady Dragon and an African-American man dressed in Rastafarian garb, constantly smoking a blunt.
It’s all part of that aggressively unfunny “sense of humor” I mentioned up top. In addition to that, the characters all speak in noises and grunts while text bubbles appear near them, some of which are problematic as well. You’ll hear and see a lot of these things during the tremendously mundane retail portion of the game, where customers appear in your shop in front of objects they want to buy. You being the employee of the month, go up to them and can either elect to sell at the default price or haggle with them. Haggling in this case means to play a bad timing based mini-game that sometimes just doesn’t work.
Speaking of bad mini-games and terrible “humor,” the parts of BarnFinders where you have to bid on properties is hilariously thin as well. Some barns or houses will require you to own them before you can actually pick through them, which means you’ll have to enter an auction for it. The only people who ever show up to these auctions are the same characters as I mentioned earlier, but this time their text bubbles will shout various insults at you whenever you outbid them. These too are written in an insanely problematic way that I won’t go into, but you can imagine what they are like.
Outside of having terrible writing being hurled at you, in an auction you’re allowed to raise the price by a modest amount or a large amount, both of which change depending on the item itself. I’m fairly certain that none of this matters however, and the auction ends once you’ve hit a certain price threshold. It feels like the game decided that a certain house was worth ten-thousand dollars, started the bidding at five thousand, and would keep the auction going till you made it past the ten grand price tag. This is evidenced by the fact that no matter how long you wait to put in a bid, the auction timer won’t start to count down nor even reveal itself until you’ve made it to a certain point. It’s this smokescreen that very quickly dissipated and revealed nothing more than another time wasting mini-game in its place.
What I do like about some of the properties you acquire however, is how expansive they can be. Some levels are multi-layered and require some light puzzle-solving and platforming to find mission critical items. There’s also the fact that some of these levels are spookier than others, but BarnFinders is courteous enough to ask you upon starting said level if you’d like to be scared or not. I wish that kind of courtesy extended to other aspects of the game, but this was a pleasant surprise that accounted for my low threshold for fear, or as others might call it, “cowardice.”
There’s also this gigantic alien sub-plot that I can’t even get into because of how absurd it was, but just know that aliens play a large part in BarnFinders. It’s bizarre and ends up becoming a weird focal point of the game, but I don’t think it’s any worse for including these story beats.
It’s hard to feel good about playing BarnFinders when there’s just some really unnecessary bullshit that are just hurtful and tone deaf. Even from a purely gameplay focused standpoint BarnFinders makes it seem like there’s a lot to do and consider, but there really isn’t much new to do as you play for a few hours. Outside of level design and maybe one level specific item, there’s really nothing mechanically engaging to do after the first 3 hours of play and that’s probably for the best.
There is no denying that Among Trees is cut from the same cloth as the countless other survival games that have existed over the years, but leaving it at that would not only be dismissive and reductive, but fairly inaccurate as well. While Among Trees is one of “those” kinds of games, it sands down some of the rough edges of other titles of its ilk that usually lead me to avoid the genre entirely. But there’s something about this particular early access survival game that has me so fascinated and eager to continue playing it.
The first and most striking thing about Among Trees that you’ll notice is just how gorgeous it is. It has this painterly, low-poly graphical style that really adds to this feeling of being in a mysterious place. Everything is drenched in this blue haze that makes seeing into the distance more of a chore than you’d like, but its presence makes everything feel more ethereal and ripe for exploration.
Unfortunately, in my time with Among Trees, I found exploration to be a little laborious at times, from the sparse amount of interactive elements in the world to the dreadfully slow walking speed of your character, it can feel like a real chore at times. While just seeing the world around you is incredibly pleasant, when you first start Among Trees, you have very little in the way of interaction and abilities.
Maybe I came into Among Trees with some preconceived notions about what a survival game should allow me to do from the start, but I posit that having to construct a bespoke crafting room on your house before you can make an axe is wild. I wouldn’t be complaining if crafting the room was easier, but the requirements for it were 12 wood planks, some moss from tree stumps, and some driftwood (I think), all of which were preposterously hard to find, especially when you have no tools.
You can’t punch trees until wood comes out, instead you have to find each thing on the ground as you explore. It took me about 3 in-game days before I finally was able to craft an axe, and that was only because I got very lucky and found this large plot of land with a bunch of boxes, rope, nails and wood planks. If it wasn’t for that boon, I’d probably still be out there eating every mushroom I could find and praying none of them were poisonous.
Poison, in my experience, has been the second most dangerous thing in Among Trees, only falling short of the first spot to the big angry bear that chased me around. In Among Trees, most of the time you’re alone with only the trees and the bees to keep you company. But there are plenty of animals skittering about like rabbits, deer and birds. Also there are bears roaming about. You know they’re a big deal too because it’s the only time I’ve seen Among Trees give me a stealth indicator. From what a helpful loading screen has told me, bears tend to hang around areas where good loot is, so that’s something.
But if you can manage to outrun the bear and make it back to your prefab cottage in the woods with all those materials, you might just be able to expand your home and get yourself a kitchen or something. Base management in Among Trees is odd, but not in an inherently bad way. You start in front of a dilapidated cottage in need of repairs. Getting close to it will reveal its material requirements for becoming a lovely little home in the woods that people will pay crazy amounts of money to Airbnb at.
Once you’ve collected the materials the house is reborn anew, granting you a bed to sleep on and a book to save your progress in. There doesn’t seem to be any customizing how the house is constructed or how it physically looks, trading that for prefabricated rooms that you can unlock as you go that make the home bigger. You can decorate it by crafting little trinkets and such, but as early as I was in the game, I couldn’t imagine wasting the resources on something as frivolous as decorations… not yet at least.
Among Trees is a fascinating survival game that lured me in with its gorgeous visual style, but kept me there because of its mellow and relaxing core loop. There are plenty of weird quirks in the game like not being able to craft multiple things at once as well as the pitiful walk speed, but outside of those gripes, Among Trees is a truly serene and calming experience. It’s currently available in early access exclusively on the Epic Games Store, but if you’re looking for something low key, you could do a lot worse than Among Trees.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a game that might have been made with me and my proclivities in mind. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker, you play as an unnamed “cutter” for a company that dismantles and salvages derelict space crafts for various clients, while making sure to pick through everything in an effort to get a little extra bonus cash. It’s currently in early access which is reassuring considering its various and completely understandable technical issues, that hopefully will be fixed as time goes on.
Booting up Hardspace: Shipbreaker, I was immediately greeted with the telltale signs of a game that didn’t play well with my dual monitor setup, constantly dropping the image in favor of a black screen. This happens sometimes and simply requires me to change some resolution settings and toggle between windowed full-screen and regular full-screen. I only mention this because Hardspace: Shipbreaker has a surprisingly long and potentially interesting introduction sequence in it, but it was lost on me because I could only see it in quick flashes. Which is why you should all sign my petition to make sure that games let you edit your settings instead of throwing you straight into various cut-scenes and gameplay.
Once that was all sorted out however, I made the smartest decision of my life and played through the entire tutorial. Do yourself a favor if you end up picking up Hardspace: Shipbreaker and play the tutorial. It doesn’t explain everything to you, but it gets you on your feet faster than just winging it ever could.
In the tutorial you’re walked through the basics of movement, which even after completing it, I found myself gently floating into space more times than I’d like to admit. In Hardspace: Shipbreaker you need to account for all dimensions of movement including vertically, horizontally, and going forward and backward. You have jet thrusters on your space suit that allow you to roll, accelerate and decelerate, which can help counteract the momentum you’ve built up while you hurdle into the sun.
Once you “master” your movement abilities, it’s time to do some destruction. You get access to a few tools during the course of the tutorial including a grappling laser, two kinds of laser cutters, and tethers. The grappling laser allows you to shoot a beam of energy at something and whip it around if it’s light enough. The two laser cutters allow you to either focus a laser on a fixed point or cut long horizontal or vertical lines into a surface, like if you wanted to make a new window in a ship. The tethers are basically the same thing as the grappling laser, except they’re capable of moving heavier objects and you have a limited amount of them.
Using all of these tools, you have to deconstruct a few ships, take their various components and deposit them into one of three locations. I’m not entirely sure what the delineation between the three areas are, but one of them is burning with fire which I understand to be where sheets of metal and miscellaneous materials go to be refined. The second one is this glowing blue area that accepts other, usually bigger pieces of the ship to be refined, and the third is a barge that sits below you that’s where you deposit the mission critical stuff like the ship’s reactor.
While inside of the tutorial or freeplay mode, you’ve got unlimited time and resources at your disposal, but once you start your career in earnest you have to worry about oxygen, thruster fuel, tether amounts and the condition of your tools. You also have a time limit to complete each job, which means completing the task list. If you’re using a controller like I was, you will not be able to open the task list without using the keyboard. The controller support is mostly there, but that seems like a pretty important function to not have working.
Within the career mode, you have to make sure you’re being mindful of your tools and resources, all of which can be repaired and refilled back at your floating hub platform that’s right by the ship you’re scrapping. You need to make sure you complete the objectives of the job first, whether they be removing the reactor, or collecting a certain amount of a particular metal or material. Secondly you’ll want to scrap and salvage anything you can after the objective is completed, because you’ll earn both money and an upgrade currency that can be used to unlock more features and abilities for your tools.
You can work on a particular ship for more than one shift however, allowing you to truly complete a job if you’re so inclined. Just make sure it’s worth the time investment, because your character is in massive debt to the company they work for, and need to make payments regularly to stay afloat. Hardspace: Shipbreaker captures that capitalistic dystopian nightmare that we’re heading for so well, genuinely making me worry if I’ve worked enough to pay off the company I work for.
Lastly, Hardspace: Shipbreaker is an early access game, which means it’s pretty rough around the edges at the moment. Cut up too many particles or accidentally trigger an explosion in the ship and the frame rate vanishes before your eyes. I don’t begrudge the game for that considering there’s a lot of physics occurring at once and slowdown is to be expected. I also experienced a crash in the brief time I spent with Hardspace: Shipbreaker, but I’m going to chalk that up to it being in early access.
Hardspace: Shipbreaker can feel overwhelming at first, what with the amount of mechanics you need to learn before you can actually feel comfortable doing anything on your own, but once you get the hang of it I found it to be a genuinely enjoyable time. I think the tutorial needs to do a better job at explaining how to properly, safely and efficiently dissect a spaceship instead of leaving it to trial and error, but that’s just my personal preference. Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a truly good time and I recommend checking it out if the idea of being a space scrapper is as enticing to you as it is to me.
As we watch the corpse of E3 gently float down the stream with golden coins placed over its eyes for The Riverman to grant it safe passage, we find ourselves in the midst of constant press events that look to fill vacuum E3 left in its wake. One of these events came in the form of the now concluded Steam Game Festival, where developers could directly market their upcoming games via Steam and allow us to download demos of upcoming games. I played a couple of these demos and wanted to provide a little bit of insight into each of the games I got my hands on.
I want to preface with the fact that most of, if not all of the demos I tried, were of games that were not done and clearly needed more work. I am not judging these demos as full products, nor would I want to imply that was the case. These games are in development and are subject to change, so consider this article as a time capsule that describes what these demos were like.
GRIEFHELM
Griefhelm is a side-scrolling action game that sees you, a knight, sword fighting their way through waves of increasingly deadlier enemies. While it sounds fun on paper, the execution leaves a lot to be desired. The controls feel floaty and unresponsive at times, often resulting in the mistiming of blocks and strikes. Griefhelm uses a similar combat system to Nidhogg in terms of having to correctly angle your sword stance between low, medium and high, in an attempt to parry and hit your opponents. While technically that system works in Griefhelm, it doesn’t feel anywhere as responsive or satisfying as Nidhogg.
There’s also another layer to the game that lives in-between skirmishes, where you select which mission you want to go on. Each mission offers a different kind of objective, although they all boil down to just killing dudes and not dying with the promise of some sort of reward that you can use in other levels being bestowed upon you, as well as new pieces of armor for your knight.
While I don’t think Griefhelm is there just yet, I think with some refinement to the controls and mission variety that it could be a really fun game.
UNTO THE END
Remember everything I said about Griefhelm? Then get ready for Unto the End, a game that is cut from the same cloth as Griefhelm, but does just about everything better. Well, except for showing me anything outside of the combat mechanics of the game, because the demo is literally just the combat tutorial and nothing else as far as I could tell.
Unto the End is a much more visually appealing version of Griefhelm, that’s easier to control and more satisfying to play. It uses a similar combat system that seems to be a little more fine-tuned and responsive than Greifhelm. Outside of those examples however, there isn’t really much else to glean from this demo. I look forward to seeing more of Unto the End despite knowing next to nothing about it though.
WINDJAMMERS 2
Windjammers 2 is a game that I forgot existed at all despite it being the sequel to one of my favorite Neo-Geo games, Windjammers. If you have no idea what Windjammers or its sequel actually is, you could call it a mix between pong, air hockey, and that aggressively 80’s attitude that we all love so much.
Windjammers 2 boasts a new hand drawn art style that I’m actually really into, along with a couple of new offensive and defensive capabilities that allow people who know what they’re doing to completely devastate others. Completely unrelated, the demo only allows for online play at the moment, and I definitely didn’t get obliterated by every opponent I faced.
I will always champion Windjammers as a game everyone should try at least once in their lives, although I don’t know that I am foaming at the mouth in anticipation of a sequel. I’ll see how I feel about it when the full game is released, but for now I’m okay with the first installment that currently lives on my Switch.
RUSTLER
Long before the days of Shark Cards and orbital strikes, the Grand Theft Auto series started as a top-down action game where driving a car in a straight line was borderline impossible. The early GTA games also showed off some of that trademark humor that Rockstar is infamous for, but nowhere near as loudly as they do it now.
With that history lesson out of the way, Rustlers is the fantasy version of those old GTA games, emulating everything from the top-down camera angle to the inability to ride a horse in a straight line along with some really hit and miss attempts at humor.
The combat is sluggish and unresponsive, often times defaulting to you just mashing the attack button in the hopes you land a hit on an enemy that’s also flailing wildly, but somehow better at it than you are. Riding a horse is a laborious process that will almost always end in you crashing into something and falling of said horse, which ultimately became the way I dismounted my horse every single time.
The only somewhat redeeming factor is the sense of humor Rustlers has. There were some moments where I might have softly chuckled to myself, like when I saw a cow on a roof that had the word, “horse” spray painted across its body, or when the medieval cops were after me and had one of those rotating red and blue police lights on their helmets. There were also a lot of not so great jokes that I endured, most of which involved being drunk, excessively cursing or soiling yourself.
I don’t think I like Rustlers at all, but maybe you’ll enjoy it. If that’s the case, more power to you.
THE BLOODLINE
A while ago I wrote about the newest Mount & Blade game, specifically mentioning how I thought it was way too much for me to contend with. I know that it’s a very beloved series, but it just wasn’t for me. I only bring that up because I share a lot of the same feelings with the Mount & Blade series as I do The Bloodline.
The Bloodline does itself a massive disservice by starting you out in a mostly abandoned castle with barely anyone around. You create your low-poly character and head out on an adventure that is mechanically similar to something like Mount & Blade. Just like those games, you’ll split your time between first or third person combat, traveling and exploring the over-world, and recruiting allies to join you in what I’ve heard are fairly massive battles.
One of the first things I encountered on my travels was a massive tower that was devoid of any enemies, but had a big bell hanging at the top of it. The game and I agreed that I was to make it to the top of the tower and ring that bell. Luckily The Bloodline gives you a grappling hook that works about 70% of the time which is all I needed to make it to the tippy-top. That and I don’t think there’s any fall damage, so that helped too. I got to the apex, rang the bell, and got 1500XP for my trouble, and was teleported back to the world map. Then I traveled to a town, looked around for people to recruit, and the game crashed.
I haven’t loaded it up again since, but the demo is so rough and janky that I think I’ll wait for a more polished release to continue on my The Bloodline adventure.
NIGATE TALE
Do you like rogue-like games? Do you also like unnecessarily horny representations of anime characters? Well friend, you might just love Nigate Tale, a game that apparently is both of those things and I had no idea. Not like there’s anything wrong with liking these things, it was just a lot to absorb all at once.
See, I don’t enjoy rogue-likes at all. It all just feels a little too grindy for my tastes, but I get the appeal of them, and for what it’s worth Nigate Tale seems like a pretty competent one of those kinds of games. The controls are responsive, the enemies provide a real challenge, and the game has a pretty good look to it as well. From the perspective of someone who doesn’t know what makes a good rogue-like, this seems like it’s all right.
I don’t want to give the impression that I’m trying to “yuck anybodies yum” or anything, I just was not prepared for the 3 scantily clad anime ladies I would encounter within the first 5 minutes of playing. All of that confusion immediately faded away when I met a large hamster-like creature who gave me some special powers, cause their presence alone was easily the high point of Nigate Tale.
I played a little bit of Nigate Tale, and I genuinely have no idea if it’s good or not. It felt good to play, but I was constantly at a loss because the in-game translation isn’t fully there yet which made it genuinely hard to understand what powers I was picking up or even what the story was. I hope this thing gets properly localized and people can get their hands on it, cause it seems all right for what it is.
SKELLBOY
Skellboy is the kind of game that I can get behind. It’s this action game where you play as a skeleton that acquires new body parts and weapons from their fallen foes, and wears it on themselves. A new head might give you more health or the ability to spit projectiles, while new feet could make you run faster. It seems ripe for a puzzle solving game where you’re swapping parts of yourself out to progress through certain obstacles, but you don’t have an inventory so you just pick up and discard things as you go.
The game also boasts this almost Paper Mario-esque art style, except instead of everything being made of paper they’re just chunky pixels. But the way the perspective shifts as you move through a level gave me some really strong Paper Mario vibes that I very much appreciated.
The only criticisms I really have with Skellboy is that the combat not only feels slow, but there isn’t much impact to anything you’re doing. I found myself losing a lot of health because I just didn’t realize I was getting hit, and the same thing can be said about attacking. Outside of that however, I really dug what I played.
There it is, my not-so-comprehensive coverage of The Steam Game Festival. Overall, I like how Steam has run this event and gave people access to a lot of neat upcoming games that I would have otherwise not known about. Considering E3 would be over by now, it’s been nice to get a constant trickle of announcements and events like this one, and I wouldn’t be surprised if other publishers tried similar things. Everyone has their own launcher these days, so it wouldn’t be outrageous to see someone like Ubisoft announcing a game one day and simultaneously allow people to try a demo or beta of said game on their own platform. We’ll see what happens over the course of this summer I suppose.
Recently my friends and I shuffled our roles, affording me the opportunity to play in a campaign rather than run one. It’s been fantastic both from a gameplay standpoint along with freeing me up creatively to focus on other projects. Simultaneously another group of friends expressed interest in running a starter Dungeons & Dragons campaign, so being the masochist I am I obliged and started running them through The Lost Mines of Phandelver. And honestly, both games have been tremendous learning experiences that I desperately needed.
I don’t want to imply that I didn’t have fun running home-brew campaigns for my friends, but it did get pretty exhausting from a creative standpoint, which is ultimately why I needed to shift focus from running games to playing them. I agreed to run my other friends through The Lost Mines of Phandelver because I didn’t have to really prepare anything on a week to week basis. Everything is accounted for and fairly well explained, leaving little need for drastic improvisation.
Being a player again allowed me to experience how other people run their games, seeing what rules and mechanics they tend to enforce or cast aside. That’s given me a lot of perspective on just how much of my own campaigns I was glossing over in terms of rules and abilities, giving me more insight as to why they exist in the first place. Understanding the various resistances, spell components, move actions and so much more have made it really apparent as to how infuriating my DM style could be at times.
It was never something I did to intentionally upset or undermine my players, but I’m almost certain that my actions directly resulted in a lot of session to session disenfranchisement. Considering I’ve only been a player once or twice back in the very early stages of my relationship with Dungeons & Dragons, I didn’t really have any experience as a player and instead just became a DM when I had no business doing so. But everyone has to start somewhere right?
Being a player wasn’t the only thing that helped me gain some insight into proper Dungeons & Dragons gameplay, running the starter campaign has been infinitely more helpful than anything I was doing before on my own. Being able to see what a module accounts for and doesn’t has been instrumental in my better understanding of how to build worlds, maps and encounters. To see exactly what I should be accounting for when crafting my own adventures has been illuminating to say the least.
At this point I’ve been playing Dungeons & Dragons for about 3 years or so and only now can I say that I’ve really made progress as both a player and a DM. When I first started running games, I was trying to emulate what I’d seen and heard from popular videos and actual-play podcasts, not really understanding that real games don’t work like that. As of now I can safely say that my style of running games has evolved to the point where I am taking the rules of Dungeons & Dragons more seriously, and I am more conscious and aware of so many more facets of the game itself. I believe that this will only lead to a more positive experience for whatever group I end up running games for in the future. And for the first time in a while, I feel really confident about my abilities as both a player and a dungeon master.
For anyone out there that’s aspiring to be a DM, I genuinely and sincerely recommend starting with a preexisting module and really understanding why certain things interact with others and why. Knowing and enforcing effects on moves and spells heightens the tension and importance of every combat encounter because everyone is aware of what can and cannot happen. I look back at my previous blunders and wince at how I behaved and ruled on things, but genuinely hope that one day I can give my friends the satisfying and fun campaign that they deserve.
Back in 2016 the first The House of Da Vinci was released on mobile devices and was received warmly by critics and myself alike. In 2019 a sequel was released, once again on mobile devices, and despite my enjoyment of the first entry I completely missed The House of Da Vinci 2. Now in 2020, The House of Da Vinci 2 has been released on PC and has proven to be another solid entry in the series, mixing both very creative and frustratingly obtuse puzzles with a largely forgettable story.
To be completely candid here, I found the story of The House of Da Vinci 2 to be entirely forgettable and mostly an obstacle that got in the way of solving cool puzzles. I understand that you need some connective tissue to grant some sort of motivating factor or narrative thread, but it never managed to engage me at all. The story seemed fine overall, but it just was so far from the reason I was playing, that for the rest of this review it won’t really be a talking point.
With that said, you start The House of Da Vinci 2 off by escaping a prison cell and the sewers that run beneath it. You learn the basics of interacting with the world along with how to manage your inventory and how to use a special magic orb that you eventually come across.
The orb in question can be twisted open to reveal two lenses inside that both allow you to see hidden things in the environment, and also see through time. The first lens let’s you see hidden mechanisms that are obscured by walls or inside of another object, and it allows you to interact with them. So you might not be able to see the lock on a door, but with this orb you can see the mechanism for it, and mess around with it.
The second lens allows you to see through time and travel to a past version of the level. These are highly scripted events and not something you can just do whenever you like. In certain parts of the level, if you open up the orb you’ll be greeted by a static swirling portal that you can walk through and enter the past. For example, in an early level I was in a Gazebo that only had one entrance in it, but opposite me in the distance was a very large door that seemed like where I had to go. I popped open the orb and was transported to a past version of the gazebo that had two exits, allowing me to progress further and solve other puzzles before returning to the portal and climbing through into the future.
One of the things that jumped out to me immediately was how clearly The House of Da Vinci 2, just like its predecessor, is a mobile game first. From the menus to just navigating and interacting with the world was crafted with a mobile user in mind and ultimately feels clunky in spots on other platforms. That’s not a bad thing if you’re playing on a mobile device, but considering I was playing it on PC I found some of the movement and interaction stuff to be a little tedious.
The entire game is mouse driven, allowing to you look around by clicking and dragging the mouse which works without any issue. The problem is that in order to move around or zoom in on a puzzle so you can interact with it, you have to double click the area or object, and sometimes those things can be a little closer to each other than you’d like. There were plenty of times in levels where I would try to interact with an object, and suddenly find myself gliding across the floor to another section of the level. It’s not game breaking or anything like that, just a minor annoyance that I kept running into.
The puzzles themselves run the entire gamut from really interesting, to straightforward, and to completely obtuse nonsense that doesn’t make any sense and you just so happened to luck your way into solving. There are so many puzzles that are either really cool or just not noteworthy whatsoever, so you just kind of breeze past them thinking you’re the smartest person in the world. Then you get to a puzzle that mentally breaks you, occupies an hour of your time as you start to question how you ever even made it through school, and then eventually realize you didn’t fully move a switch or something. Standard puzzle game stuff.
Luckily there’s a pretty good hint system in place that will give you increasingly more descriptive tips depending on how long you’ve lingered in a section without advancing a little. To better explain it, there will be a room filled with puzzle boxes and panels that all tie into each other in some fashion, but they usually have some chronological order for you to tackle them in. So the hint system starts some timer depending on how long you’ve gone without any progress, and gives you the first and most vague hint before starting the timer again and issuing a more descriptive one. It’s a good system that unfortunately doesn’t offer much for when you’ve exhausted all the hints and still don’t know what to do.
The House of Da Vinci 2 is also a pretty long game for what it is, clocking in around six hours for me which was a welcome surprise for me. The beauty of The House of Da Vinci 2 is that there’s very little to no repetition in the puzzles, and for the few times there was a similar puzzle, it was just different enough to feel fresh. The levels themselves are visually interesting, but usually boil down to little more than a cool new backdrop for you to play with a few objects inside of. The levels do a good job providing something that’s new and visually interesting, without being overly distracting.
Lastly, I should mention that while the game looks and runs well on PC it also comes with an inflated price tag if you choose the non-mobile approach. On phones it’s just five dollars, whereas the price on Steam is twenty. I don’t say that as a value judgement, just something for potential player to consider if they’re interested. Aside from playing on a larger screen with better graphical fidelity, there’s no real difference between the versions.
The House of Da Vinci 2 isn’t going to change your life or the way you think about puzzle games or anything like that. The truth is that it’s a solid puzzler that’s good for a few hours of fun. Maybe you’ll find the story to be engaging and thought provoking, but judging it solely on the strength of its puzzles, The House of Da Vinci 2 is pretty good.
Neversong is a spooky little side-scrolling game that tries to blend so many elements together, but ultimately doesn’t succeed at most of them. The spooky action, adventure and puzzle game has an interesting enough stylistic and plot hook to grab your attention, but many of the gameplay decisions are just dull.
In Neversong, you play as Peet, a young boy who you might traditionally call something of a coward. Peet is juxtaposed by his best friend Wren, a young girl with no fear. The two were inseparable best buds who one day found themselves in an abandoned asylum, where Wren was kidnapped by a horrifying monster, and Peet was put into a coma from what I can only assume is fear. That part wasn’t super clear, but the main thrust of the story seems to be rescuing Wren.
You wake up in your hometown, a place that is suspiciously devoid of any adults and only inhabited by what can only be described as the shittiest children on the planet. Seriously, these kids are horrible, often times reveling in the fact that your best friend is missing and probably dead, or just calling you weak and a coward. I genuinely hated every character in the game that wasn’t Wren. If that was the desired effect, then mission accomplished.
Neversong excels in its tone and presentation, from its usage of music to its art style, everything is cohesive and vaguely terrifying. Then you actually start playing the game, and you’re immediately confronted with the shallowness of the mechanics. Now, to preface, I don’t think that Neversong is a bad game, I’m actually having a pretty alright time with it so far. I just think that of everything I’ve seen so far, the parts where you need to either fight things or be accurate in your platforming are severely under-cooked.
Early on, Peet becomes armed with a baseball bat which does exactly what you think it does. You walk around the world and whack things with it until they explode into XP or health drops. The XP system is pretty simple, offering you an extra pip of max health in return for collecting 100 XP shards. It adds a welcome, albeit shallow form of progression that the game is ultimately better for.
Combat however just sucks. It’s boring and lifeless, ultimately feeling more like an afterthought than anything. Now, that might change as I progress further in the game, but after defeating two bosses by doing nothing more than mashing the X button at them, I feel less confident about that change actually happening.
Enemies up until now haven’t actually been a challenge, instead feeling more like obstacles that impede you as you move from area to area. The same thing goes for bosses, who up till now haven’t been difficult at all, but they take forever to defeat because you need to go through that whole song and dance of hitting them then waiting for them to attack, and repeating that process 5 more times until they actually die.
But after you finally defeat one of these time-consuming bosses, you unlock the notes for a song of theirs. I’m not sure why you get a song from them, but you do. So you head back from where you fought the boss, wading through the now respawned enemies and excessive amounts of loading screens, and head back to the town and into Wren’s house where a piano is. At the piano, you play the song you just learned which unlocks a new tool or ability for you to use. The first is the baseball bat and the second is the ability to latch onto these hanging orbs that you can swing from. It’s a neat little bit of progression that feels laborious at times because you have to trudge your way back to the town, arguably because some story stuff will happen to you while in transit. I get why they make you run back home after each level, but it’s still annoying.
For all the bellyaching that I’ve done at the expense of Neversong, to its credit, it hasn’t made me do the same thing twice. The puzzles are all unique to the areas I’ve seen, they keep layering in new kinds of enemies for you to fight, and the only place I’ve had to revisit has been the main town. Like I said, I’m not saying anything that Neversong is doing is bad, just some of it feels half-baked.
For what it’s worth, I think Neversong is a pretty good package that has its fair share of ups and downs just like any other game. There is a part of me that’s thankful for the bare-bones combat being included, and another part of me that thinks that Neversong would have been a better game if it was just a puzzle focused experience. I’m less conflicted about Neversong, and more just underwhelmed by it. Although, even saying “underwhelmed” is too strong of an emotion for how I feel about the game. Neversong is a game that I genuinely don’t have strong feelings about, whether they’re positive or negative.
Beautiful Desolation is a point and click adventure game that puts you in the shoes of a gloriously mullet-ed man who is investigating the presence of a mysterious triangular object that’s appeared in the sky. Through a combination of puzzle solving, dialogue trees and aimlessly wandering around gorgeously rendered landscapes, you start to peel back the cosmic mystery that’s upended your life.
Beautiful Desolation starts out very dramatically as you and your wife are driving through a thunderstorm to go pick up your brother from an undisclosed location. The dialogue reveals that your brother has a reoccurring problem that’s put a lot of stress on your relationship with him, but before you actually arrive anywhere a mysterious shape in the sky called the penrose appears, and some sort of wave of energy flows out of it that ends up flipping your car and killing your wife.
A decade later your character arrives at a hangar owned by your brother in the hopes of getting him to pilot his helicopter up to the penrose that’s still in the sky. Your character has basically become obsessed with the true nature of this structure, eagerly laying out his intentions of retrieving some sort of data set from the now government (I think?) controlled penrose. Once up there, you collect the data and things immediately go wrong. Suddenly, you’re whisked away to another place in another time where you’re arrested by robots, and in transit to the authorities for questioning are shot down. Thus begins your search for your brother as well as a way home and probably some explanation about what the hell is going on.
Typically, this is where I’d discuss the gameplay side of Beautiful Desolation, but the gameplay really doesn’t seem like the main attraction. You’re basically just clicking on points of interest, interfacing with them using your PDA (which is more or less a handheld PipBoy,) and dragging items around your inventory to combine them. That is until later on when you get control of a spaceship and can head from point of interest to point of interest.
The real star of the show seems to be the story and characters, rightfully so considering this is an adventure game. You’ll talk to several other beings on your travels, picking from a few different options of dialogue in an attempt to further your goals and learn what you can. Since starting the game, I haven’t met a character that wasn’t fun to talk to, although I admit I’m still very early on in the game so that could all change. I also can’t say how much of an impact on the story your choices have, but I’m hoping that in this dialogue driven experience it’s pretty severe.
While I’ve enjoyed what I’ve seen of Beautiful Desolation up until now, one thing that proved to be a nuisance has to do with the beautifully rendered world you traipse around. While it’s a delight to look at, it also has led to several instances of me not knowing what was walk-able terrain and what wasn’t. I must of killed fifteen minutes trying to find a way out of the map I was on, only to accidentally click my way onto a ramp that didn’t immediately read as a ramp. Everything looks so damn good in this game, that I just assumed I couldn’t walk on it. There’s an indicator that’s supposed to tell me if I can traverse an area or not, but clearly it didn’t register for me.
Beautiful Desolation is a game that intrigues me more than it does interest me, at least that’s how I feel about it a few hours in. No element of it has either gripped nor repelled me yet, and I’m hoping that changes soon. Where Beautiful Desolation ends up going is something I can’t answer yet, but I’m definitely going to give it another shot and see if anything changes.
Umurangi Generation is a stylistic and serene game about being a photographer in some weird dystopian, vaguely cyberpunk world where somebody is paying top dollar for your random pictures of birds. It’s actually a really neat concept that fumbles the execution in certain spots, but still retains a certain meditative quality that I appreciate.
When I jumped into the first level of Umurangi Generation, I honestly felt a little overwhelmed by what I was supposed to do. You’re given a list of photo objectives, most of which just want something specific in it like a mountain or a flag, but some will have an additional piece of criteria that asks you to use a specific lens or be at a particular distance from the subject. As I played more however, I started to feel more comfortable with the suite of tools I had and when to use them.
What doesn’t get easier however, is the unnecessary vagueness of some of these objectives. Often times the objectives are straightforward, asking you to get a certain amount of an object in one shot or asking you to recreate a postcard. Then there are objectives that are so purposefully vague that you’ll end up spending several minutes trying to even comprehend what you’re actually supposed to be looking for.
For instance, an early objective was to find a sarcastic version of the phrase, “Property of the United Nations.” This level looked like some military outpost, so literally everything had the phrase, “Property of the United Nations” on it somewhere. But not knowing what I was exactly looking for caused me more frustration than satisfaction when I eventually discovered that one of the soldiers was wearing a helmet that said something cheeky on it. Like, it was a decent joke I suppose, but the punchline didn’t land because I had already wasted twenty minutes trying to find the damn thing.
That nebulous goal was only made more infuriating by the slow and imprecise movement of your character. My main issues are the speed at which you move and how often I found myself getting tangled up on level geometry. I’d get caught on corners and ledges for the most part, which were less than ideal when you have ten minutes to complete all the objectives in a level.
Technically you can go over that time limit, but you’ll take a penalty for it. In Umurangi Generation, you pay for every roll of film you use in your camera, and get paid for the content and accuracy of your shots. I never really felt the financial impact of wasting time or film in the early parts of the game, but I imagine that could change in later levels. You’re also dinged for having any “blue bottles” or man o’ wars in your shots, something I feel I should mention because they’re literally everywhere. It’s this extra obstacle that makes you find more creative ways to get the perfect shot.
Once you take a picture, you get the opportunity to edit it. It starts simple at first, only allowing you to change the exposure and color tint, but by the third level I had unlocked a saturation slider as well. Umurangi Generation has a decent progression system in it too, where you unlock a new tool as you move from level to level. The first unlock I got was a telephoto lens, followed by the aforementioned saturation slider. I don’t know if Umurangi Generation will keep up the pace of unlocks as I progress, but I sure hope it does.
Umurangi Generation is an extremely cool concept for a game that does a really good job with the photography mechanics, but has some rough edges on almost every other aspect of it. That being said, I really like Umurangi Generation. When the weight of the timer or the nebulous goals isn’t pushing down on me, it truly feels like the meditative experience I want from a game.
The Bonus World 