But what you likely don't know, is that I joined it like a week or two too early to get the three months! I only got one month! It's an actual tragedy. (Also I'm not getting paid for all this advertising I'm giving them and that sucks too.)
So this week on Super Adventures I decided to get three months' worth of gameplay out of my one month by playing too many games for not long enough each! I can't do a full post on each of them so I'm going to skip past the part where I try to be funny underneath screenshots and jump straight to the bit at the end where I sum up my first impressions. It's a bit of a change of format, but don't worry it's not going to stick.
I was really rushed last month (and I still am) so a few of these 'reviews' are just going to be me pointing out something funny I saw in the first ten minutes, right before I got bored and quit. You don't have to finish a game to know that it's bad, but giving it a few hours definitely helps and I didn't always do that, so don't take my complaining too seriously. I'm just showing off some of the games I played, because it felt like it'd be wasted opportunity not to.
I signed up for the Ultimate subscription, because they were all the same price, so I got access to the two different game libraries: one for PC and one for Xbox One. There's a lot of overlap but some of the games I've written about for one system might not be available on the other one. Or at all, if you're reading this in the future, seeing as they drop games and add new ones.
This is the PC client you're looking at here, and I'm glad it's apparently just a beta as right now it's a bit crap. A bit of a let-down too after all the Windows 10 updating I had to do just to install the bloody thing! I mean it's functional enough, but you can't even sort your installed games list. Plus it took me ages just to figure out I could get the names to appear; by default it expects you to identify them by their tiny indecipherable icons.
Also the Windows Xbox screenshot tool requires you to press at least two keys at once and if you play games windowed it crops the screenshots wrong! You get the title bar and lose the lower part of the image. I put up with it for way too long out of stubbornness/stupidity before I came to my senses and just used something else for my screenshots.
| Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night | ||
 I'm going through the games I played in alphabetical order, so first up is Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, the kickstarted spiritual successor to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night by the original designer, Koji Igarashi. I love Symphony of the Night so this was also pretty high up on my list of games to play, but I didn't really get into it as much as I hoped I would. I think the graphics put me off a little, weirdly. The entrance hall to Not-Dracula's castle is looking pretty great here, with its cat paintings and curvy ceiling, but I think the 2D visuals had more charm to them. Also the game's first boss was like a middle finger followed by a boot to the face.  Then I came back and got them on the second try (after levelling up a bit), but my point is that this boss is apparently not just a 'you must be this good to ride' barrier, it's also a sign of things to come. It's very discouraging. Otherwise what I was of it was pretty much what I expected: it's a Castlevania game with the 'Castlevania' logo scratched off. You make your way through a castle, demolish the lighting, accumulate an arsenal of weapons with different kinds of attacks, slay a lot of monsters, and then slay them all again on the way back once you've got the means to reach a new area you passed along the way. I can see it winning me over if I ever give it another chance. | ||
| Bridge Constructor: Portal | ||
 I wasn't keen on this one at first, because it's Bridge Constructor again. You make a bridge framework one girder at a time, click 'go', and then watch it all fall into the chasm the moment the second truck in the convoy drives over it. I've always found these kinds of games fun for the first five minutes, but there's only so many ways you can bridge a gap before it gets old. Though somehow adding elements from Portal seems to be the trick to making the game addictive. Instead of just carrying trucks from the left side of the screen to the right, you've got to redirect crates, bounce energy pellets, destroy turrets and fling the trucks all over the place. Though it does have its fair share of annoyances, as levels require a lot of trial and error fine tuning. Plus when you want to move a girder on the PC version you have to hold the mouse button and wait for a second first else you'll drag the level instead. Oh, and it refused to open in a window or use my screen resolution and there's no quit button! And GlaDOS needs some new material. But this is the game I kept coming back to whenever I had ten minutes to wait or a podcast to listen to, and I eventually ended up finishing the whole thing. I got the full convoy to the exit intact on every stage. Well okay, I had to look up a solution to the last level, because I got sick of tearing my whole structure down every time I wanted to try sending trucks down a different route, but it was solid up to that point. | ||
| Creature in the Well | ||
 Creature in a Well made a bad first impression on me as it dropped me in a screenful of yellow and left me to find my own way in the sand. After a while I figured out that I was actually wandering around the game menu and walked over to a save slot to get things started... after which it dropped me in a different screenful of yellow and left me to find my own way in the sand. Wasn't too long before I reached the actual gameplay, which involves hitting balls with sticks. There's one button to gather the balls and another to smack them into pinball targets to earn the power needed to get the door open. The first problem I ran into is that the game really doesn't want to explain much, so it took me forever to do basic things like get the first proper level open or heal my character. Second problem is it demands a level of speed and accuracy with its analogue stick aiming that I just don't have, especially when there's no laser guide to let you know you're pointing the right way. I got frustrated in the end trying to get the ball to ricochet around a set of bumpers in time and turned the game off. On the positive side, I like how you can only tell the graphics are 3D when the camera's moving, plus the creature in the well itself is kind of interesting. Not many main villains throw you back to safety when you die. Though 'safety' is a few loading screens away from the room you were in, so it's not entirely a kindness. The game's also pretty quiet and lonely, if you're into that, which I'm not. I met a frog though. | ||
| Dead Cells | ||
 First thing that jumped out at me about Dead Cells is that it's so slick and intuitive! 20 seconds in I was already double jumping around, rolling behind enemies to slash them in the back, then darting out of danger to put some arrows into their mate. I was making steady progress, with a couple of small detours to collect new weapons and treasures along the way, and everything was going great. Then I made a mistake, my dude was killed in a blink, and I found myself right back at the very start again. The game's a roguelite platformer, more like Rogue Legacy than Spelunky, so you do slowly build up permanent abilities and better gear over your repeated runs, but if you want to see the see credits you've got to eventually do the whole thing with one life. Even the bosses respawn every run! Dead Cells is probably an amazing game if you've got the mindset for it, but I found that I was actually making less progress each time as I got more frustrated and careless. It's so slick though... | ||
| Downwell | ||
 Downwell's gimmick is that you basically have rocket boots that shoot bullets and there's a big hole that needs jumping down. It's another roguelite like Dead Cells with new weapons and abilities to be found along the way, except all progress is downwards and it looks like a ZX Spectrum game. I did have fun landing on squishy enemies with my stomping boots and shooting their more dangerous friends with my stomping boots, but the trouble I had is that I was often falling so fast I couldn't tell whether an enemy was for stomping or shooting before I'd collided with them and lost a hit point. You can't shoot everything as your gunboots don't get a reload until you've landed on a platform. You can slow yourself down, but you do that by shooting, so same problem. Seems like it could be a good podcast game or something to stick on for ten minutes while you're waiting for something, but I'm not dying to play more of it. | ||
| Goat Simulator | ||
 Now I finally know what you get when you cross Tony Hawk's Pro Skater with Postal 2. Goat Simulator's a bit of a glitchy mess of a game, but I'm not sure that's a negative. Plus I like how it just drops you into a sandbox without a timer or a health bar. The trouble with it is that it seems like you really have to go make your own fun with it (ideally while streaming on twitch) and after a while I was struggling to think of anything new to do. I'd beaten my rival goat in combat and claimed his fearsome form as my own, I'd wrecked the newsagent with a Fus Ro Dah, I'd glitched my way into the air to land on the crane, I'd turned into giraffe, I'd jumped from the trampoline to the mattress and back a few times to increase my combo, I'd ruined someone's BBQ, and I was left wondering what was left. My objective said go become the queen of all goats or something, but without an objective marker I didn't know where to go to do that. I like the game, I'm just not sure I really get the game yet. | ||
| Hollow Knight | ||
 People say that this one is good and I think they're probably right. It's a stylish gloomy metroidvania with a beautiful cartoony style, precise controls, and a surprising number of characters to run into along the way. You can usually tell they're around because they're humming; everyone's always humming. I was a bit thrown off by the way you have to buy a map and some character upgrades to even begin automapping a new area, and then you have to find and rest on a save bench to update it with the areas you've visited. I was lucky though as I made a decent amount of progress before dying, so I had the cash to buy it all once it was available. Though I had considerably less cash after dying, as you have to make it all the way back to where you died and kill your ghost to get it back. It's a bit of a Dark Souls system as you either spend it on new abilities or risk losing it all on every trip. You can throw away a lot of hit points very quickly in this, and the game makes sure you know about it when it happens. It's so dramatic about every hit you take that I thought I'd gotten a game over first time I took damage. Fortunately you can recharge your mana fluid by hitting enemies, so healing magic isn't a limited resource. Though you do have to stand still for a moment to use it, which isn't always easy in a boss fight. Plus if you use your magic to heal you're not using it to shoot people! Overall I liked the game, though I probably would've liked it more if I hadn't been continually thrashed by the boss in the Greenpath zone. The most frustrating part is that unlike that boat battle in Bloodstained, this time I could see all their attacks coming and it was all perfectly fair, so I've got nothing to blame but myself! If I ever get this again I really need to master the timing on the downwards stab attack, to make sure there's stabbing going on when I land on them. | ||
| Into the Breach | ||
 I've heard a lot about Into the Breach, about how it kind of plays out like a puzzle game and has a clever UI that clearly indicates the enemy's next move and the outcome of your own. I've also heard that it's a real bastard, which got me curious about whether I'd have any luck with it myself. I'm not much of a turn-based strategy fan, but I like the Disgaea series and I do alright in puzzle games sometimes. Plus I'm always looking for opportunities to be really good at things other people are struggling with! So I started a new game and it absolutely destroyed me in my first proper battle. The worst part is that it came as a surprise; I thought I was doing pretty well! I'd managed to hold onto all my units and most of the buildings were still standing, but it wasn't enough. And it seems like the loss of buildings is something that persists as you progress to other maps, they're basically your health bar, so if you just scrape through on an early map you'll apparently make the rest of the run much harder. The gameplay is pretty unusual, with fights lasting just a handful of turns, and every move you make has to be carefully thought out. You know what the enemy will do next, so if you see them targeting something you have to either destroy them quick or push them out of the way so they're attacking an empty square. Or drop them into a lake, that's cool too. But you also have to be mindful of where this puts you, as you need to be in a position to stop them on the next turn as well. I can see why people like this so much. Trouble is that in the end it just reminded me of how much I hate playing chess. | ||
| Max: The Curse of Brotherhood | ||
 I can't remember why this game made it into my download queue, as I'd never heard of it and it doesn't look like something that'd usually catch my eye. Turns out that it's a puzzle platformer with a little bit of Heart of Darkness and Another World to it, as you play as a kid trapped on an alien world trying to rescue his brother and get home. It's all his fault the guy even needs rescuing him, as he banished him there with a spell he found on the internet for the crime of playing with his toys, but he immediately regrets it and leaps in the portal after him. At first all I was doing was running an obstacle course of ropes, ladders and chasms, plus the occasional chase scene with the level collapsing around me... it's a bit like a 2D Tomb Raider (2013) now that I think about it, complete with countless comically horrible ways to die. But I soon got a magic marker that could draw things onto the screen and I suddenly felt like I was playing a Wii/DS port. Turns out this is actually the sequel to a Wii/DS game I'd also never heard of (Max and the Magic Marker), but I didn't find it awkward to draw with an analogue stick instead. The game generally has you going to the right, but there's often something there stopping you, and you have to figure out how to use the coloured swirls on the floor and walls to solve this problem. The orange swirl means you can use the pen there to raise a pillar of earth to jump on, another swirl lets you draw a magic fireball launcher etc. It actually gets pretty clever with them, as you can draw a box-shaped branch, cut it off, and then push it over to use as a step. Or attach it to a vine, if that helps. There are no lives, the pen never runs out, and you barely have to repeat anything if you mess up, so there's not a huge amount of pressure. I wasn't expecting anything from this game, and it surpassed those expectations! It's actually a pretty good I reckon, and what I've seen so far makes me feel like I can recommend it to people who like linear puzzle platformers. | ||
| Minit | ||
 It's a mini Zelda adventure! No really, this game is tiny, and you can be done with it very quickly, despite it constantly resetting you back to the last house you visited every 60 seconds. You reappear in your room and you have to quickly decide what you want to tick off your 'to-do' list today as the timer is relentless and doesn't tolerate hesitation. It doesn't matter if you want to kill five enemy crabs, hunt for hidden coins, or go on boat ride across the sea, you've got a single minute to get there and get it done. That means you're 54 times more rushed than you are in Majora's Mask! The game's functional enough and has a reasonable amount of charm to it despite its basic graphics and characters (plus I love the heroic Sabasaba Desert theme: YouTube link), but figuring out what to do next can be frustrating when you're continually booted back home in the middle of wandering. You can't permanently die, the time limit's not a huge challenge, and you keep the progress you made, but man the reset got annoying. I felt like yelling "STOP DOING THAT!" at the screen. In fact I ended up following a walkthrough for the second half just so I'd know where it wanted me to go. I don't want to sound like I'm hating on the game, I didn't hate it, I'm just... struggling to find nice things to say about it right now is all. Oh, I just remembered that the animated flipbook trailer is great, you should definitely watch it if you're not bothered by flickering images: YouTube Link. It's probably the most honest and accurate trailer I've seen for a game. | ||
| Opus Magnum | ||
 Man, look at that beautiful interface. It wasn't a huge surprise to me that Opus Magnum is about programming, seeing as it's by Zachtronics. I was a bit surprised by how damn pretty it is though, plus it has a story! Well, it has dialogue anyway. You get a bit of conversation to set up the puzzle and then a little bit more afterwards as your reward for once again coming up with whatever substance is required. There's so much dialogue that when I went to the options screen to adjust some settings I found them chatting in there as well! My main concern about Opus Magnum before I started playing is that I wouldn't have a bloody hell what I was doing in it, but the tutorial's half decent and once it dropped me into the puzzles properly it didn't take me that long for me to figure the other half of the interface out. Basically it gives you a compound to construct, and you have to place and program little arms to pick up the reagents and relocate them to devices that transmute or bond them, before putting the completed structure onto the goal tiles. You do this by dragging pieces around the hex grid and instructions onto each arm's separate timeline. With a bit of experimenting I discovered that you can also drag and duplicate groups of pieces or commands, which saved me a lot of time. The game can even export GIFs! (To your desktop!)  You might want to go back and try editing it yourself though, as your completed machine is given separate scores for speed, size and cost. The only thing that really seems to matter is whether or not it works, but I couldn't help trying to make the smallest machine with the cheapest parts to get a better place on those score graphs. Between this and TIS-100 I'm starting to think that I might actually like Zachtronics games. I guess I shouldn't be that surprised, seeing as they're about solving problems and getting things done, and I love things being done! I wasn't 100% keen on the interface though, as it looks a bit like a video editor timeline, but there's no function I could find that lets you skip forward or rewind the process. If you want to see how your mechanism functions it seems like you've got to watch it from the start every time. Not ideal when you just want to check something quickly, like whether a piece needs to be rotated three times or four times. | ||
| Outer Wilds | ||
 I've seen Outer Wilds mentioned on the internet a lot lately, and not just in a "Wait, are you talking about the Outer Wilds or the Outer Worlds?" context. I didn't want to read too much about why everyone seems to love it though, in case I spoiled something, so the game was all new to me. Turns out it's all about getting into your space shuttle and searching your alien solar system for ancient diary entries written on walls by other aliens in swirly alien text. You presumably do something with all this information at some point but I never got that far. In fact I struggled to get much of anything done before realising I'd made some lethal mistake and being kicked back to my home planet. Death comes pretty regularly in this, whether it's because of the natural hazards of deep space, or because you parked your spaceship in an awkward place and can't get back before your air runs out. In fact half the point of the game seems to be to give you stories to tell about the stupid way you managed to get killed this time. 'I flew into a planet and got eaten by a space fish.'  I love the concepts in the game, like primitive astronauts exploring a solar system just kilometres across, and all the crazy space stuff you can find, but I didn't enjoy playing it all that much. For whatever reason I wasn't engaged enough with the game to fully process what I was reading, so I wasn't piecing things together and I was mostly just confused. It doesn't help that I felt rushed all the time because of the limited oxygen etc. and couldn't explore as thoroughly as I wanted to. Even the planets are in a hurry in this game, with the lighting continually shifting as they spin around the sun; it's kind of off-putting actually. So Outer Wilds is pretty much a miss for me I'm afraid, though maybe I'd get into it if I gave it more time. I was tempted to just follow a walkthrough and get it done in a night but people say that figuring it out is the whole point so I decided not to ruin it for myself. | ||
| Rise of the Tomb Raider | ||
 I can't say I didn't enjoy Rise of the Tomb Raider, but my first impression was that it's just more of the same with some snow on top. You do a linear climbing bit with some stuff collapsing, then you race from danger as everything collapses, then you do a wide open explory bit full of resources and collectables, then you do some stealthy combat, and then you're back to the climbing, just like the last game. Oh plus you spend your skill points at campfires along the way and collect extra equipment to open up new paths in old areas, that hasn't changed either. Though after I finished it I put Tomb Raider 2013 back on to compare and it quickly became very obvious that Crystal Dynamics had been paying attention to the complaints. Their first game loves to surprise you with QTEs or drop you sliding down hills with brutal death cutscenes if you mess up and it's a real pain in the ass. Rise has barely anything like that. In Tomb Raider the only resource you find is 'salvage', making hunting entirely pointless, but Rise gives you a range of resources and more to spend them on. There more weapons, more upgrades, and even some warm clothes for a change. Plus Rise has a sprint button! There's just as many cutscenes though, they're all over the place (and they're pretty good). It's a very story driven game, all about Lara Croft going on a personal crusade for an off-brand Holy Grail to restore her dad's reputation, so her growth in the first story thankfully remains intact and she doesn't have to relearn that she has what it takes. She's still a fair distance from who she is in the 1996 game though. The game's not perfect and there were plenty of moments that I felt like it wasn't entirely my fault that Lara went bouncing down a cliff to her doom, but the constant autosaves and quick restarts meant the consequences were minimal. The worst part of the game for me is probably the fact that it crashed to desktop during the ending! Consistently! It's apparently a common problem, but you can solve it by turning DirectX 12 mode off. Even that was less of a pain than it could've been thanks to the game saving after everything. So yeah, good game, better than the first one. And I loved the first one. | ||
| The Bard's Tale IV | ||
 It took Brian Fargo 30 years to release a sequel to The Bard's Tale III but he finally got there in the end! Well actually there was the 2004 game, but I guess we're not talking about that anymore. I didn't get very far in The Bard's Tale IV to be honest, but I did at least try a few fights. When I started off walking around a town in first person it seemed like the game wanted to be Skyrim, but it's a classic dungeon crawler at heart with a turn-based battle system. The participants are positioned across two tiny grids, one for friends and one for foes, and you get a certain number of moves each turn to be rationed out among your team. Seems like if you've got a character you don't like you can just ignore them entirely and keep giving turns to the others instead. All I know about the puzzles is that they're skippable, I never reached any myself, but I've heard bad things about them. In fact it sounds like the game's got all kinds of issues that I never saw first-hand and can't confirm in any way. I mostly just wanted to talk about the intro to be honest.  This is actually a live action video clip, about a bard introducing the tale he's about to tell while pretending to strum his little harp. It probably would've been more convincing if his finger movements matched the music (and if he hadn't stopped playing before the tune did). Plus if this is supposed to be the corner of a tavern it could've really used a bigger audience. It looks more like a dad trying to impress his kids in their living room. I was fairly sure that the developers hadn't intended for me to laugh so hard I fell off my seat, so I was curious what the hell they were thinking here. Fortunately for me there's actually a short video in the extras explaining why this exists and how they pulled it off, and it's cleverer than it looks. These actors aren't sitting in front of a green screen, they're perched around a forced perspective foreground in a set designed to accurately recreate the box art for the first Bard's Tale game. Even the clothes were painted! Honestly they did a good job, it looks really close to the painting on the cover, but I guess I've learned that some box art was never meant to be seen in live action. Anyway, The Bard's Tale IV... not really into it to be honest. | ||
| The Outer Worlds | ||
 I've seen a lot of talk about The Outer Worlds lately, and not just in a 'No wait, I mean the Outer Worlds sorry, not Outer Wilds' context. This was supposed to be the chosen one, the reincarnation of New Vegas here to save us all from Fallout 76, but it's left a lot of people disappointed. At first it seemed like it was going to have a huge Elder Scrolls-style open world with adventure in every direction, but the locations are fairly small and all you'll find by exploring outside the settlements is loot. Hundreds of consumable items indistinguishable by their indistinct icons that I quickly learned to throw straight into the junk (along with all the actual junk I'd picked up). The quests are nothing special and neither are most of your companions, the combat isn't all that satisfying and becomes way too easy, and you can't nick the pants off everyone you kill. Plus there's no object physics so you can't even knock everything off the tables and put a bin on someone's head. Oh and if you try to play it with a controller on a TV you get another set of annoyances, with the slow-ass map scroll speed and tiny text and etc.
I'm less keen on how you fly around in basically Serenity with actually Kaylee as your engineer, as I'd rather they had come up with their own ideas, but she's probably the best developed companion so I can't complain too much. Even if she did send me all around the damn solar system just to set up a date.  The game is flawed for sure, but I haven't found a first person RPG like this that isn't flawed and honestly it might my favourite game I've played this year. It's a bit strange that a veteran RPG developer like Obsidian would make a game with so many obvious problems with the interface and gameplay, but on the plus side it's given them a lot of room for improvement when they start making the sequel. So they'd better hurry up and do that. | ||
| Timespinner | ||
 Timespinner is another metroidvania platformer that wants to be Symphony of the Night, but this one's got pixel art! Though it looks more Amiga than PlayStation to me somehow, in style rather than limitations. Either way it's got some nice graphics. Nice music as well. It plays pretty good too! The game has one feature that sets it apart from the other metroidvanias I've played, and that's the time stop power that lets you freeze all the enemies for a moment. Handy if you're about to get hit, even handier if you need something to step on to reach a higher platform.  In fact to be honest the game grabbed my attention more than Bloodstained did, which came as a bit of a surprise to me. I haven't played enough of either to say which game's got the better gameplay or how they compare to the Castlevanias that came before them, but I'm fairly certain this is a pretty platformer. Probably worth checking out if you're into the genre. | ||
| Wandersong | ||
 In Wandersong you play as a cheerful little bard on a quest to save the world by singing, because that's how he solves all his problems. There's a dedicated 'dance' button too, but that's only there to shame other video games for not including one. I'm kind of torn on this one. It's a fun fairytale world with a lot of humour, but the weird texture-glitch art style isn't really my thing and I found it awkward when I had to pull directions with the analogue stick to hit the right notes, especially when it had me mimicking my opponent like a game of Simon Says. The electronic toy version I mean, not the playground game. You can tell how bad my aim was by looking at that screenshot up there; any lower and I'd be singing indigo instead of violet! On the other hand the analogue stick control is what let the designers cleverly incorporate the singing into the platforming adventure sections, so I can't complain too much. You can ride a flower or counter the mighty yell of an enraged monster by singing in the right directions. Probably other stuff too! When you're not solving problems and hitting notes, you spend a lot of time walking around and chatting to people, and I haven't been 100% keen on how that's been working out so far either, though I'm sure it'd grow on me if I met a few more likeable characters. Or unlikeable ones that are funny. So yeah I'd give this another try sometime. | ||
| West of Loathing | ||
 I've never played Kingdom of Loathing, I don't even know what it is, but I have seen stick figure web comics before so I had some preconceptions about what I'd be getting out of this western spin-off. I figured it was either going to be a comedy cowboy adventure game or a comedy cowboy RPG. Turns out it's both. Steam says that's similar to Fallout: New Vegas and South Park: The Stick of Truth and I can't even argue with that. I wouldn't put it near the pinnacle of either genre, as the turn-based battles are pretty simple, and the adventuring is about finding things and getting them where they need to be. You're pretty much just keeping track of what items and stats are needed to solve each problem you come across in its expanding map full of newly discovered locations. But the game never wastes an opportunity to put words in front of you, and I was always happy to see those words. Some games I just want to skip the conversations and get to the point, but in this the writing is smart and funny enough to be the point. It's a lot more interesting to find new loot in this than in something like The Outer Worlds, because the item description's the real treasure. Unless it's like a really good gun or something. Okay to be fair The Outer Worlds does funny item descriptions too, but when you get a dozen of the same knife you stop reading.  Another thing it has in common with Monkey Island is the music's great. The graphics look like I drew them when I was eight and there's no voice acting, but the game has a legit Western soundtrack and that really helps the atmosphere. It sounds like a Western, the hero's got a cowboy hat, I can believe this is the Wild West. Plus the game's full of little touches. Like you can shoot up the title screen with your six shooter! It has a colour blind mode! There's a button during character creation to give your hero a cat-themed name like Sylvester or Heathcliff! The video settings are labelled 'Good', 'Bad' and 'Ugly'! You can increase your combat effectiveness by saying hurtful things to a mirror! You can ask your partner for ideas about what to do next and they actually have helpful suggestions! I expected nothing from this one and I got everything. Well, except for multiplayer. Kingdom of Loathing's apparently an MMO but this definitely isn't. Not that I'm complaining. | ||
| Yoku's Island Express | ||
 Last game! Yoku's Island Express is built around a really clever idea, as it's a pinball metroidvania where you get around a giant level and solve people's problems by completing pinball challenges. It looks pretty great as well, with a beautiful painted art style that doesn't entirely come across all that great in this particular screenshot. You play as the island's new postman bug... postbug, who's arrived just in time to save everyone from disaster and deliver some mail. First though you have to go do quests for people, gain new abilities, and unlock flippers by spending fruit to open new paths. It all works surprisingly well. I can't really give the game my full thumbs up though, because half the appeal of pinball is earning points, hearing jingles, watching animations on the scoreboard etc, and you get none of that here. All that happens in this is that fruit appears for you to collect. It's the most dull and lifeless game of pinball I've ever played! Probably worth a look though if you like the look. | ||
CONCLUSION
I think last month worked out really well! I tried out a loads of games I've been curious about, found some obscure gems, and I even managed to beat a few of them.
Writing about them all though, that was maybe a bad idea. I was treating the Game Pass as a challenge to see how many games I could get through in a month, but it's the challenge of how many I could fit in one article that I should've been thinking about. I ended up using about half the 'reviews' I'd written in the end, so I've enough left over to do a full 'Game Pass II: Game Harder' sequel article when the site comes back next year, if I remember. And if I feel like it.
Starting games is easy, I can start all kinds of games when I eventually get around to it, but I hoped to also finish at least one of these before my subscription ran out, and I did. In fact I managed to see the end credits of three of them, which is a result I can live with.
The first one was The Outer Worlds. It was the first one I played too, as it's the game that pushed me into trying the Game Pass out in the first place. I've seen the whole thing from start to finish now so I feel like I'm fully qualified to state that it's pretty good and I liked it. I mean it's got problems, but nothing that could get between me and my enjoyment. That crash at the end that made me backtrack through the entire last level and back again was bloody annoying though.
Rise of the Tomb Raider was a pretty safe bet, seeing as it's more Tomb Raider except less annoying and I loved that game, so it would've been weird if I hadn't finished it. It was a bit of a surprise though when the bloody thing crashed during the last cutscene, consistently. What is it with these games and annoying bugs right at the end?
And I would've never guessed that Bridge Constructor: Portal would turn out to be the third game I finished. It's one of those games you can stick on for a couple of minutes while you're waiting for something, and not have to worry about following a story or remembering what you're supposed to be doing, so I just kept chipping away at it until there was nothing left. I did like it though, even if it got a bit trial and errory.
I didn't win West of Loathing, but that's mostly because I started it at the end of the month and didn't have the time. It's really surprisingly good! I'm going to strongly recommend it... to myself. And I suppose my fifth favourite game would be Opus Magnum, because I apparently like puzzle games now.
The other side of the scale isn't so clear to me, because I didn't stick with games that didn't grab my interest and it's hard for me to properly judge something I didn't properly play. An opinion can change pretty dramatically on a second try. But my least favourite of this batch was Into the Breach, followed by Bard's Tale IV and Downwell. Why? Because I don't like chess basically; it never stood a chance of winning me over. Or maybe I would've loved it after a few more hours practice, who knows?
Anyway, I'm done now. I can finally rest! Though I do still have that free month of EA Access to try...
Coming up next on Super Adventures: The Super AiG Screenshots of the Year 2019!
Wait, before you go off to do whatever it is you're doing next, you should take five minutes to leave me a comment and share your own thoughts, maybe about one of the games, maybe Xbox Game Pass in general. You could also let me know if this page full of first impressions of semi-recent games was interesting or helpful in any way, or if was a waste of all of our time. A failed experiment with no value to humanity.
I look forward to your feedback!
I beat Max 2 a couple of years ago, and yes it's a great game. For another similar game, try PID.
ReplyDeleteHey I've got that in my Steam Library somehow! I should give it a try sometime.
DeleteInto the Breach interests me in the same way Undertale does, in terms of the things it does with the metagame, like save slots and multiple plays. I like that there's clever stuff going on "backstage" and I like that games are at the point now where stuff like that happens -- although you could argue that Metal Gear Solid got there two decades ago -- but I've got little interest in playing the games themselves. Which is a little sad now that I think of it.
ReplyDeleteApparently Minit is being ported to the Commodore 64, which is something of a happy surprise, and shows how compact the game is.
I got two surprises from that article. First, they've got the game looking exactly the same, it doesn't look like a C64 game. Second, that's the Thalamus logo in that photo! It's somehow returned from the grave to make more C64 games.
DeleteOne thing I don't get though, is why the hell they're making Minit 64 for the C64 in the first place. It's stupid. With a name like that they should be making it for the N64!
An excellent point!
Deletethats a lot of ...questionabletastes...games
ReplyDeleteYou shouldn't question my tastes, you'll only get answers you don't like.
DeleteThis article came at the appropriate time, as I got a Gamepass subscription for Christmas. There's also a couple titles in there that I wouldn't have tried if not for these reviews!
ReplyDeleteThank you for this website. It sometimes feels like it's one of the few places left on the internet that are giving good, positive vibes.
Thanks for your comment! It's awesome to know that I'm helping people find new games to enjoy. Well I'm assuming that you enjoyed them. Maybe you tried them and hated them.
DeleteAlso yeah it seems that negativity and drama gets you more clicks, so I don't blame people for going down that road. In fact I thought I was going down that road too with all the bitching I do, but I'm glad I've apparently found a brighter tone. I can definitely live with being positive.
Fabulous post, you have denoted out some fantastic points, I likewise think this s a very wonderful website. I will visit again for more quality contents and also, recommend this site to all. Thanks. 먹튀검증
ReplyDelete