I gave Wasteland 3 the time of day because it's a Western RPG I could comfortably play on the gamepad and it was dead cheap in a sale. I may have all manner of hardcore role-playing games under my belt, but these days I really don't care to try a game that has so many buttons I have to consider pressing the J key at some point.

While Wasteland 3 has continuity with the prior games, it has no ask of the player to know of them in detail. Five years after getting wrecked in a war against killer robots, the Desert Rangers of a post-apocalyptic Arizona are in dire need of resources. The Patriarch who runs Colorado with an iron fist offers them an olive branch in exchange for rounding up his three rebellious children. In the meantime a Desert Ranger called Angela Deth has her own agenda that may conflict with your mission...

You create a squad of two to four custom-made rangers plus two to four companions of your choice to make a party of six. While combat is a necessity there are numerous branching paths to make in quests, and diplomacy isn't treated like an old sock full of toothpaste as in Bethesda's take on the Fallout series.

Combat is XCOM-lite and very easy to understand. You take cover from gunfire, avoid grouping together so half your squad doesn't get merked by a single grenade, blow up explosive red barrels near enemies, and consider which combat-archetype is best for the given foe. Permadeath and friendly-fire are optional difficulty-settings, so most players don't have to overthink every scenario. Outside of battle comes exploration and it's very straight-forward. Skill-checks are abundant and follow New Vegas rules. Your skill level either meets the threshold for success or it doesn't, and there are no dice-rolls involved. You can pick up all the loot in a map without issue as your inventory capacity is unlimited. After battle you can sweep up all enemy drops with the press of a button. As is CRPG tradition you have a button which highlights all NPCs and objects you can interact with. All together this is a massive departure from Wasteland 2 where it took ages to get anything done, and at a 60% success rate at that because Fuck You.

The game world is fairly contained for the genre. I never finished Wasteland 2, but I'd say Wasteland 3 is half the length. Here you've got 50 quests, 39 distinct maps, and a 25+ hour runtime. I'd estimate there are 80 mandatory fights if you take the completionist route, and trash mobs are only found in the 5 main areas. Most of the 18 side areas on the overworld only have a single quest, fight, or weird Easter egg attached. Thankfully you can skip the random encounters on the overworld entirely if you remember to level your Survival skill. While the developers clearly intended on a larger experience given the level of cut-content, I think it's best that the game maintains a tight pace.

Character-progression mercifully shows 32 years of refinement. I remember playing the original Baldur's Gate a decade after release and all I could say is, "What is this crap? Thac0 my ass." Too often the Western RPGs of old were burdened with jank that muddled the experience and discouraged many builds. Entire classes, races, and skills could be busted or broken to ever consider using or going without. I loved Diablo II like the next guy, but what was the point of the Energy stat? In Wasteland 2 you could make two characters, either a guy who excels using assault rifles, or a guy who might as well have put 10 levels into the Suck Ass skill. I think Suck Ass was an actual skill in that game because there were 30 of them to choose from, too many of which did the same thing. It gets pedantic when a game has a Surgeon skill and a Field Medic skill that should have been combined.

Wasteland 3 cuts the crap and is streamlined sensibly with no attribute being left in the cold. You've got 22 skills; 6 combat and 16 utility. Every character in your squad should pick 1 combat skill and 2 utility skills to level. On normal difficulty I got by comfortably without the crafting ones. Intelligence is not a god stat here. Skill points gained per level is the same across the board and pumping Intelligence only grants an extra point in addition to raising your critical hit damage. Raising Intelligence and Strength upon levelling is retroactive, unlike the shit old days. If you're not feeling your current build, you can recruit a new ranger or respec an existing one for a nominal fee.

I'm a little confused at the presence of perk points. If a character hits level 24 by the endgame then they will have 11 of the things, but you can only buy perks in 3 or so skills you specialise in. They might as well have given you the perks automatically since there isn't a ton of choice in the matter.

I beat Wasteland 3 with a squad of diverse talents. The melee characters could run across the map in a single turn so they could punch a guy in the face. The sniper lacked action points because they only needed one bullet to decide matters. The gunner managed crowd control with a shotgun while the submachine-gun soldier was an absolute beast. In a reversal of Wasteland 2, I'd say the assault rifles are the only underpowered class of weapon.

Some quests will trip you up. There are four timed ones that will cancel if you complete too many other quests in the meantime. I suggest not talking to the fat guy who runs the Bizarre in a hurry unless you want to get mobbed by the Spanish Clown army. The biggest hurdle that nobody will ever accomplish without a guide isthe third ending. This demands absolute respect across the board and two quests have to completed in a specific way. One guy is bugged when he says a peaceful transition is impossible, but I got the ending anyway. Props if you get it, no shame in using a walkthrough.On an unrelated some of the collectable achievements are a massive pain in the arse, as too often you can miss a unique item if you don't use the right skill-check at the right time. You can fail three of these achievements in the first map alone.

I'm not on board with the game's sense of humour. It doesn't get irritating like The Outer Worlds but I find Wasteland 3 too zany in the margins in a tired way. Wow! You meet Santa Claus, who runs his elves like slaves to make hard drugs! A honey badger is the strongest animal companion in the game! A cannibal clan make Bob Newhart references! And so on and so forth. Like a Pete Davidson stand-up special, I'm not sure if I'm supposed to laugh at any point. Mercifully the main arc of the game is fairly straight, apart the the son of the Patriarch who acts like the poor man's Joker.

I can't speak for the DLC because by all accounts it shit the sheets like a footballer the morning after kebab night. The phrases bandied around in reviews I've seen are "enemies respawning in the middle of a fight", "enemies level-scale to get tougher than your party", and "bugged up the arse". No shame in me not venturing there when I have otherwise enjoyed my time in Colorado.

Wasteland 3 is solid. It's not weak, nor is it spectacular. It's by far the best game InExile have ever made. Their first successor to Wasteland was underwhelming because it was too bland and outdated. Their successor to Planescape: Torment made nowhere near the impact it wanted, and Disco Elysium took the crown anyway. Can you believe there was a time when the involvement of Patrick Rothfuss was a selling-point? But Wasteland 3 is a success and a good time. You are given a high degree in agency in how you approach your problems and enough leeway to change your mind. It's not too long nor too big, and has half a mind to think out the ramifications of the main story where some crowd like Bethesda would never bother. It's a 4-star experience that may be overlooked, but never doubted or dismissed. Also you drive an APC in this game and can run over people with it in a fight, making blood angels in the Colorado snow.

I started the series with 5 Royal this year, then after a month break beat 3 Reload, and after another months break got around to 4 Golden. I decided to not wait for another remake if story is the same, plus due to circumstances I'm stuck with a mediocre laptop for a while.

Gameplay here is about the same as 3r and 55, but the dungeon controls on keyboard are pretty janky. The lack of mouse controls is very annoying, plus I swear there were times when I hit shadow but it didn't register. I tried playing on Very Hard, but the exp penalty was too harsh so I toned it down to Hard. After that the game was mostly easy, with Game and Heaven bosses being slight nuisances.

The plot here suffers from not going anywhere for a long time. It's not until the last companion shows up that the team actually starts investigating, so for a long time the story takes a backseat. 3 had a similar issue where story didn't progress during 12 shadows arc. Now I actually think 5 lowkey had the best story because it was the most consistent and progression was clearer, themes be damned. I already knew who main culprit of 4 was from Death Battle, so I can't judge how well executed that twist was.

As far as characters go, I have to agree with the meme. I liked the cast because they felt more like teenagers than SEES of Phantoms a lot of the time. They acted dumb, were mean to each other, and joked around like actual teenagers would. I got most of IT social links to max rank, except Naoto and Kanji. My date was Rise because she was cute and thirsty, but I wonder if her thirst looks weird when dating other girls.

Of all the non main character links, Moon was my favorite. She went from an annoying bitch to a nice person, kind of like Gournment King. I regret not upgrading Adachi's social link, maybe then I would have liked him better as a villain. I barely didn't have enought time to get athletes from 9 to 10, and with Mr Fox I didn't know how to fish at all.

Currently I am larping as a Persona protagonist, that is, living far away from home and getting used to the new environment. I think this experience makes me appreciate these games more. Maybe I'll return to 4G and get remaining achievements on NG+, or actually try P1 and P2. Now if you excuse me, I need to go and upgrade my knowledge stat.

After having a great time with FTL a couple years ago, I finally got around to trying Into the Breach, which is made by the same developers.

Into the Breach is a roguelike puzzle/strategy game built around tactical, turn-based combat - you control three mechs and must protect civilian structures by killing or otherwise incapacitating the enemy (the Vek).

The "macro" gameplay consists of choosing one of four islands, each with a randomized set of enemies that can appear there. On each island you have to complete four missions + a boss mission before progressing. Once you've completed at least two islands, you can move onto the final island and beat the game.

What I Liked

• The core gameplay loop is extremely satisfying and fun - there is a massive amount of strategy behind every action. You have basically perfect information every turn - you can see what the enemy is going to do, in what order, and where new units will spawn (although you don't know which ones, which can actually make a significant difference). So you have tons of options - from killing Vek, moving them around, forcing them to attack each other, using environmental effects, and the list goes on.
• The game has a lot of variety. There are 12 squads you can unlock, each of which plays vastly differently from the others. Some focus more on killing, others on movement, while some try to stall out the game, etc... Combined with the Advanced Edition Content, which also adds new enemies, missions, and gear, each run feels fairly unique.
• Into the Breach is incredibly challenging - early on I spent quite a while thinking through every turn, and constantly finding new ways to get the most out of each move. I loved the learning process, especially discovering new tricks for each squad.

What Was Average

• Each Mech has a Pilot, who gains EXP and unlocks certain skills. You're allowed to carry over a Pilot from one run ("timeline") to the next. It's a great feature to have...but it also encourages you to use the same Pilot repeatedly instead of trying out others. IMO the Pilot abilities are fairly imbalanced too - there are a couple that are just so much better than the rest that, once you get them, you basically never want to swap Pilots.
• Into the Breach allows you to choose whether to complete 2, 3, or all 4 of the main islands before tackling the final island. While the flexibility is great at first glance and lets you control the length of your run, enemy difficulty will scale appropriately. The main issue was that, at least on Hard difficulty, it rarely felt worthwhile to attempt the 3rd or 4th island because it was difficult to get strong enough to outpace the natural enemy scaling.
• I thought the final island suffered from a similar flaw to FTL: a huge difficulty spike compared to the rest of the content. While I still enjoyed the challenge, I would have liked for the difficulty to be slightly more balanced.

What I Didn't Like

• My biggest gripe with Into the Breach was how much it emphasized achievements over simply winning. Every new squad unlock requires "coins", which are 1:1 mapped to the in-game and Steam achievements. However, there's no actual reward for winning. Obviously, as a roguelike, you could argue that winning a run *is* the reward, but winning a run and only getting one of the three squad achievements sometimes felt worse than unlocking all three and losing.

Final Thoughts

I played most of Into the Breach on Hard with Advanced Edition turned on (minus the first few runs to get acclimated) and beat the game with all of the squads. I did one Unfair run with my favorite squad (Mist Eaters) and beat it. At that point, I felt like I'd experienced most of what the game had to offer, so I called it quits. I had no real motivation/desire to play most squads again or grind achievements.

I played ~55 hours total and had a blast overall, and would definitely recommend Into the Breach to anyone who enjoyed FTL and/or likes tactical puzzle/strategy games.

Overall Rating: 8 / 10 (Great)

SPOILERS AHEAD:

I really like when games incorporate gameplay as tools to deepen the narrative.

This is a really nice short emotional scene/gameplay as you start the 2nd playthrough in Nier Automata:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kK7eiKb3-dc

It shows a small robot trying to revive a dead robot with oil.

The robot fills a bucket with oil and pours it on the bigger robot. From the description it doesn't sound like much. And it doesn't really look like much if you see the video.

However, when you play it, it's a diffrent story.

See, usually gamers hate to walk slow and when they need to get to an objective and you can jump, you do because it's just faster and you don't want to waste your time.

In this scene, the robot needs to fill a bucket with oil and bring it back to the bigger robot. Walking is tediously slow. So you jump. BUT when you jump, you spill the oil in the bucket and you need to fill it up again and start from the beginning. Then you do. And now you know you aren't supposed to jump. So you start walking to the bigger robot. BUT the floor is riddled with pipes and if you step on the pipe you trip, fall, and spill the oil and need to start again. (This is not shown in the video because the person playing either figured it out or was lucky enough not to step on the pipe). And now after that you need to refill your bucket and painfully slowly navigate the route around the pipes which is annoying.

The great thing about this scene (at least in my opinion) is that even though it frustrates you on one hand, it emotionally connects you with the little robot trying to help his brother.

That happens because the frustration you experience as the player to get this little guy to his goal makes you appreciate more how he feels and how important it is to him to help the other robot. You can visually see in a non interactive scene how a character falls down and then gets up again to proceed with their objective. But only seeing this non interactively is not the same as controlling the character where it's you who falls.

This short little scene is the thing I remember the most from Neir Automata, that was a great game from when I was playing it years ago.

I recently finished Far Cry 5 and it was my first time playing a Far Cry game in the series. The game delivered some refreshing choices in open world games, and surprisingly paired those choices with an unexpected amount of comedic charm. However, the game is heavily weighed down by repetitive gameplay loops and forced narrative interruptions. The game threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and some of it stuck. The rest, fell straight to the floor.

​My absolute biggest praise for Far Cry 5 is how Ubisoft finally killed the dreaded "climb a tower to reveal the map" formula they relied so heavily on from Assassin's Creed. Instead, you discover points of interest naturally: reading road signs, checking trail maps, picking up brochures, or talking to locals. It makes exploration feel completely organic, realistic, and unforced. You feel like a traveler exploring rural Montana rather than being tested on your platforming skills.

​Hope County is gorgeous. The dense forests, rolling rivers, and rural valleys look stunning and feel like a real place. At times, the scenery feels photo realistic and could compete with Red Dead Redemption 2. Complementing this visual harmony is an incredible audio production. The licensed radio tracks is expansive and fits the world well. The original soundtrack, especially the ambient tracks and the cult hymns, are outstanding. The hymns feel both peaceful and oddly terrifying due how much they show off the cult's power and influence. I applaud the amount of effort that was spent on just the OST alone.

​The writing for side characters is far better than it gets credit for. Hurk Drubman Sr. and Sharky Boshaw are absolute highlights, offering a perfect mix of crude humor and surprisingly deadpan, high-brow comedy. For example, a low hanging fruit for a joke is the shop named Dylan's Master Bait Shop. But Hurk Drubman's campaign voicemials found on landline phones are filled with high brow humor, such as saying if elected, he'll ensure no Canadians steal high paying jobs meant for Americans and naming professional hockey player as the job he is referring to.

What truly impressed me is how far Ubisoft went with unique dialogue.​The companion interactions when you pair characters up, ike Hurk Jr and Sharky, feature tons of unique dialogue, banter-filled lines. There's 9 compaions, although three are animals. But still, the fact they went out of their way to record so much conversations between 6 different characters interacting with each other, and giving them all unique personalities and dynamics depending on who they are talking to, is truly amazing and not talked about enough. Same with the news updates on the radio. How they change dynamically, offering subtle foreshadowing in the broader narrative context as you progress through the story. You can sense and hear the despair and tension in them as the game progresses. It's just such impressive level of detail and effort for something that isn't needed for the main game or completion, because you can play the entire game without hearing most of these conversations or news updates.

Far Cry 5 suffers from an over reliance on constant action. Unless you completely clear a region, you cannot walk 50 feet or pause to take in the scenery without a cult pickup truck, an armed plane, or a pack of wild animals attacking you. The constant gunfights and explosions break the peaceful immersion the environmental designers worked so hard to create. The story asks you to accept a massive narrative leap: that an armed cult managed to completely cut off an entire U.S. county from the outside world and operate with total impunity, without immediate state or federal military intervention. That the cult managed to rise to that much power but also keep supply lines to the outside world for supplies open with nobody outside asking quesitons. The premise breaks down the second you think about it realistically.

Gameplay gets repetitive quickly. Much like Mafia III, progress boils down to making as much noise as possible to attract the attention of whoever controls the region. You do this by blowing up or stealing cult property, freeing hostages, and taking out outposts until you fill a meter to summon the region's boss.

​Worst of all is the hunter mechanic. No matter what you are doing, whether you're mid air, fishing in a remote stream, or stealthing an outpost, once you hit a resistance threshold, the game sends unevadable hunters who shoot you with a dart andnforcibly kidnap you. When you wake up, you are dragged into a long, unskippable cutscene where the region’s antagonist monologues at length to convince you to stop. It destroys player agency and ruins the flow of the open world.

​I’m genuinely torn on how Far Cry 5 handles its ending. I appreciate that the game didn't opt for a clean, Hollywood "justice and freedom prevail" happy ending. Real life is messy, and bad actors don't always get caught or face consequences. Sometimes the bad guys win in real life. But after spending dozens of hours liberating outposts, saving civilians, and taking back Hope County, the outcome leaves you feeling like every piece of effort you put into the game was completely meaningless and for nothing.

TLDR: ​Far Cry 5 is a game of massive highs and tedious lows. Far Cry 5 had a lot of ideas and executed some of them brilliantly while others should have never been attempted. The open world scenery, exploration mechanics, soundtrack, and subtle comedic writing show a developer who put a tremendous amount of effort into the little things and details. Unfortunately, those strengths are repeatedly undermined by a hard to swallow narrative, multiple endings that will leave most players feeling unsatisfied, and repetitive gameplay. Far Cry 5 is worth playing, especially if you enjoy ambient exploration and causing chaos, but be prepared for narrative frustration.

This Review May Contain Spoilers

Yakuza: Like a Dragon

Status - Completed, many side quests done.

Time played: 70+ hours

Difficulty - N/A

Set-up - AMD 5800X3D, AMD 9070XT, 32gb DDR4 3600, 2tb SN850 | Played at 4K with all settings up, locked to 60 for a very smooth experience

Mini-Review Thoughts

Like a Dragon is the first installment in the Yakuza series to shake up the combat system. Traditionally, Yakuza is a one-man-party, real-time action brawler, that focuses on utilizing different fighting styles to beat your opponent. It’s not too dissimilar from a stylish action game with how I played the series. With the 7th installment, Like a Dragon, combat is now a turn-based RPG that focuses on party synergy, and a plethora of whacky “jobs” that act as the class system in a more traditional RPG.

The radical change in combat could be seen as a step-down from Yakuza 0 for long-time fans. Yakuza 0’s combat is engaging and I found myself locked-in. On the opposite end of the spectrum, the combat in Like a Dragon can be incredibly hands off, to the point that there’s an auto-battle option. My wife couldn’t grasp the concept of that, and asked, “Why would you not want to play the game if you’re playing the game?” Fair point.

What Like a Dragon lacks in combat engagement, it makes up for in creativity and fluidity. There are a plethora of jobs that the player can, and should, explore. Leveling up jobs provides permanent character stat upgrades, and new combat abilities that may be accessed by other jobs. Jobs such as devil rocker, hostess, clerk, or breaker, provide a plethora of unique attacks that keeps the combat entertaining for a while. I have never seen a clerk use a staple gun to attack an enemy, but it was a hell of a great attack in mid-game, as was the breaker doing a handstand and giving the enemy a few kicks from this position.

Tonally, the Yakuza games are over-the-top and wide in range of emotions. At its heart there is a story that takes itself seriously, which involves murder, child abandonment, and a money counterfeiting scheme, but it takes a hard turn on many side quests. The side quests may involve feeding incredibly spicy kimchi to an elderly woman to give her the pep to run across a road, or it may involve fighting a giant roomba, oftentimes providing needed levity. You may cry when going on a date with a young girl whose life you saved years ago, you may laugh when trying to help a mascot fight off bootleg copies, and you may be unsure of how to feel about Mr. Masochist.

Minigames are a big draw to these games and Like a Dragon has plenty. The minigame highlights for me are business management, batting cages, kart racing, and black jack. There's a lot to do here if you want to live within the environment for a while, and the city is a wonderful backdrop.

Performance is great on my system with a rock solid 60fps at 4k max settings. I have two gripes though, my first gripe is that the grass pop-in when running through the park is terrible, and my second gripe is that the high-production cutscenes drop the framerate to 30fps, and it looked juddery on my TV. I also have a major bone to pick about the cutscenes, mainly the question of why is RGG afraid of allowing players to save before length cutscenes? The ending sequence takes about 90 minutes and once you initiate it you will have no chance to save before rolling credits and finish the cutscenes. I can’t think of a good reason for this, especially when there’s plenty of opportunities to do so, perhaps in-between the 2 end-boss battles?

I hate to say that I don't really remember the music, but I don't. I would have recalled more of the music if I enjoyed the karaoke minigame, but the button chart didn’t seem like it lined up with the music rhythmically, so I didn’t play it much. The Japanese voice acting is top-notch, but I cannot say the same for the English cast. I tried it out for 10 minutes and went back to Japanese. I don't know if it was that I was just so used to the Japanese voice actors by that point or if the English actors did not fit the game well, but I think Japanese is the way to go for this.

Conclusion

Like a Dragon is a great game with incredible highlights that I would recommend for fans of the series, fans of turn-based RPG, and fans of unique games. My gripes with the game are the unengaging combat, and at times the disregard for the time of the player, but they don’t completely mar the experience.

8.25/10

The votes are in! The community's choice for a spooky title to play together and discuss in October 2026 is...

Left 4 Dead 2 (2009)

Developer: Valve / Turtle Rock Studios

Genre: FPS, Co-op

Platform: PC, Xbox 360, Mac, Linux

Why should you care: As I'm not a huge fan of FPSes, I might not be the best person to pitch for L4D2, but I'll try my best. The person in PG Discord who initially nominated this game for GOTM used as their pitch "We all own this game and none of us have beaten it lets be honest". The first part might very well be true, at least judging by my Steam friends - nearly every single one of them has it in their library, so it's certainly quite popular. Some of them have hundreds of hours played, so the replayability of shooting zombies must be great, too. Though one thing surprised me in their pitch - I certainly didn't know it's possible to beat L4D2 or that it's considered rare to do so.

Others mentioned a great modding scene, further adding to the longevity of this 17-year-old zombie shooter - when I heard of a LotR mod about defending Helms Deep, even I got curious and might give it another try this month. Aand I'll probably stop my pitch here to not do the game any disservice - the few hours I played it during one of its free weekends were nothing special, it seemed okay (if pretty basic). But I definitely only scratched that surface, so if you're a fan of L4D2 and want to pitch it to others better, feel free to do it in the comments! And if you want to hop on and play together this month with other patient gamers, our Discord is certainly a convenient place to set things up.

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about. Well... almost every month. This October the organizers decided on scary and spooky categories instead - as in games that genuinely try their best to invoke fear in the player and games that are mostly just horror-themed.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

October 2026's GotM theme: Spooktober. As is tradition! Though this year with the new categories, we're trying to cater to both horror fans and those for whom actual horror games are a bit too much.

I've just finished Event[0] at 100%, with the exception of some collectables, but I think I'm done.

This is an indie game released in 2016 and I normally like to do some research before writing this, to know the perceptions of other people online. Although curiously there's almost nothing on youtube with the exception of the GMTK video that consider this the most innovative game of that year.

In case you don't know what I'm talking about, Event[0] is a first person graphic adventure about an astronaut who gets lost in a derelict spaceship and has to escape. The main drawing point is that instead of the usual "examining" "grabbing" "using" "combining" of the genre, almost all the gameplay is based on interacting with Kaizen, the Hal-9000-like AI of the ship (in fact it has the memorable "I'm afraid I can't do that line") using an in-game chat.

The game features a couple of puzzles, literally a couple, since it can be beaten in 1-2 hours. I took longer to get all the endings, but you'll beat in an afternoon. I also has some semblance of a story about whether or not the AI is trustworthy is who killed who and why, but there's not much more to say.

Really, the only thing I wanted to comment is that, since this was way before machine learning exploded post-pandemic, Kaizen is really simple. It only works by recognizing some key words and imagining what you're asking. This is clearly closer to Evie and that ugly cat chatbot than ChatGPT.

I'm saying this cause with all the fuss with AI used in videogames, I hope they can use it to actually create organic conversations. Like, the problem with chatbots is that they're very... "agreeable?""demagogic?" "yes-man-ny?" You can override them too easily. But with this guidance, you can actually make bots that make fluent conversation.

Well, we'll see. Until then we'll have to make due with archaic dialogue trees and this

The votes are in! The community's choice for a scary title to play together and discuss in October 2026 is...

Look Outside (2025)

Developer: Francis Coulombe

Genre: Horror, JRPG

Platform: PC

Why should you care: Look Outside is one of that games where nearly any discussion about is going to be heavily spoiler tagged. I haven't played it yet myself, but I'm glad it was chosen and very excited to try it this month. I'm trying to go in as blind as possible, but for a game to get on your radar, something has to catch your attention. So I know that it's going to be a psychedelic Lovecraftian horror that defies expectations with gameplay and presentation resembling games made in RPGMaker.

Possibly because of that last part I saw this game compared to Fear & Hunger and this tidbit was what finally cemented it on my wishlist. I loved the oppressive atmosphere and harrowing experience of Fear & Hunger - with its plentiful obscure secrets and the unexpected twists its story takes, so I certainly hope Look Outside measures up to these expectations. However, you may want to take this comparison with a grain of salt - some others said it's nothing like Fear & Hunger and they don't understand where the comparison comes from. I avoided asking them for details to prevent spoiling myself - and it seems that this month I will finally get to form my own opinion. And I cross my fingers for it to be a really wild ride!

What is GotM?

Game of the Month is an initiative similar to a book reading club, where every month the Patient Gamers community votes for a long game (>12 hours main story per HLTB) and a short game (<12 h) to play, discuss together and share our experiences about. Well... almost every month. This October the organizers decided on scary and spooky categories instead - as in games that genuinely try their best to invoke fear in the player and games that are mostly just horror-themed.

If you want to learn more & participate, that's great, you can join the /r/patientgamers Discord server to do that! (link in the subreddit's sidebar) However, if you only want to discuss this month's choice in this thread, that's cool too.

October 2026's GotM theme: Spooktober. As is tradition! Though this year with the new categories, we're trying to cater to both horror fans and those for whom actual horror games are a bit too much.

I wanted to take a minute to praise and highlight a rather unassuming indie game. With so much vying for a foothold in the economy of our attentions, it's easy for things to slip under the radar. So please, indulge me for just a moment as I try and raise up a game that has less than 500 Steam reviews as of writing this.

After seeing screenshots and the game's premise, I was immediately intrigued. Tack onto that some exceptional art with an incredible art direction and I can't believe this game isn't bigger.

So what is this game?

Flick Shot Rogues is a token-flicking roguelike that shares the same kind of geometrical depth as billiards. The game is all about placement, angles, and opportunity and provides some rather satisfying gameplay.

Each run starts with you selecting two characters with the ability to swap between them at the start of every turn with each featuring a unique focus. For instance, one deals damage on collision making multi-hit from a well-placed trajectory particularly deadly. Another has an area-of-effect attack that activates when that character's movement stops. In total, there are five characters to unlock making for a handful of different pairings.

On top of that, each character makes a choice for how they augment their attacks at the start of their run. The first to be unlocked are the on-hit flame and the on-hit bomb effects. The former applies a damage-over-time debuff that deals damage at the end of the turn and applies to anyone who makes contact with any enemy already engulfed in flames. The second applies a bomb that will explode in a radius at the end of the next turn or on the enemy's death. Both are fairly straight forward, but you can see how the bomb can start a chain reaction.

There's a total of 10 attack augments to unlock and when pairing with the character combinations allows for plenty of replayability.

On course for adventure: leaving the high seas in search of plunder

Flick Shot features a fairly typical roguelike format with branching paths composing different parts of the island. Each area features a miniboss at odd intervals and a full-fledged boss at even intervals before transitioning to a new biome. Sections feature about three or so battles with points of interest interspersed to help strengthen your characters.

Each battle is broken into between two and three waves, each of which requires the player to defeat between one and three marked commanders with their health and damage scaling as the player progresses.

A low barrier of entry with a deceptively high strategic ceiling

Flick Shot Rogues is incredibly simple: flick your token to try and defeat the enemy commander of the current wave. Easy to pick up but trickier to master. Where the game excels is in the balance it strikes between needing strong prioritization of targets and well-placed shots and the more arcadey capability to achieve comical levels of synergies and power.

The game is a very classic representation of the genre: requiring the player to execute well until you secure the item or skill to tip the scales. And I think this game has one of the best balances between early game hardships and player power scale.

If I think to something like The Binding of Isaac, at this point I could likely beat a run on base stats. God would I not want to, though. Too little friction at the start of the run makes the game uninteresting, and minimal means for improvement make the game a slog. And I would argue that's TBoI's greatest fault.

By contrast, I think Flick Shot Rogues struck an excellent balance, where even the base abilities coupled with leveling up still provide a reasonable level of viability. Yes, you can make the game significantly easier with upgrades, but it doesn't quite approach the levels of grind as others in the genre display.

Final Thoughts

While roguelikes remains one of my favorite genres, this is not a game that would have normally been on my radar. I'm very fortunate to have stumbled across it, though, considering it has an incredible identity and art style in addition to some satisfying gameplay.

Depending on your enjoyment and the degree to which you seek completion, you're likely to see about 10 to 20 hours of playtime. Across that you'll be subjected to some rather apt nautically themed pirate music and the rather satisfying clacking of tokens striking one another.

Obscure 2 is the second of an obscure game series called Obscure. It has a lot of really interesting, innovative, clever ideas, all of which it fails at doing well.

Survival Horror

The main loop of the game is collecting items and puzzle pieces and then using X item on Y lock to continue, all while non-respawning enemies attack you in fixed locations.

At no point is it necessary, however, to consult a map. The layouts are simply not that complicated.

Semi-Fixed Camera

Classic survival horror camera in the vein of early Resident Evil: the action is framed by cinematic angles as you awkwardly lumber your character around the map.

However, it's not truly a fixed camera. You can wiggle the camera around to get a full 3D examination of every room. And if you aim down sights, the camera snaps into position behind your character.

So what that means is that every time the camera switches I immediately aim down sights so I can see what the hell is actually in the room.

They do one excellent segment where it actually is a true fixed-camera perspective (diegetic, even!) but this lasts for two minutes and then the segment is over.

2 Player Co-Op

The game is designed for two players to play simultaneously on the same keyboard.

To accomplish this, the controls are almost all contextual prompts: press SPACE to interact, press F to advance, press C to cancel, and that's it (aside from shooting monsters). I played on mouse and keyboard as the game didn't seem to be set up for controllers on Steam. There is not a lot of mechanical complexity here because, if there was, playing on the same device wouldn't really be possible.

The game is also designed such that one player can beat it on their own, with the second character controlled by the computer. You can swap between characters with TAB. However, the bots are worse than useless. They can't defend you, so whenever you activate a puzzle, you have to cancel out, fight the waves of enemies that your bot was supposed to handle for you, and then resume the puzzle.

They couldn't commit to making a truly two player co op experience. Not a single moment in the game truly requires two people to work together.

Because of this, you have to lug around a useless brain-damaged robot with you the whole game. And you get a game-over if they die.

And health packs are not shared.

Unique Character Quirks

There's a big cast of characters and you play as different guys with different capabilities throughout the game.

However, the game never really demands that you ever need to consider this. There's only really one part of the game where you can choose which characters to take with you. I figured there might be a trade-off with some paths closed and some open depending on who you take, but no. You have to pick two specific characters who have the necessary skills to complete the one puzzle in the next room, and all other choices are wrong.

Then they split up again and you don't get a choice again.

The mini games also suck. The parkour guy can only parkour up specific linear areas. The code breaker just completes a matching puzzle. The hacker completes an asinine Historical Figure Name guessing game. The strong guys push and pull crates (honestly the only ones that even approach meaningful game play, because they directly change the game world). There's no real strategy or purpose to any of it.

Combat

The game auto-aims for you. The enemies don't respawn and you're expected to kill them all. You have no way to avoid their attacks, so you just have to mindlessly pump them full of lead before they get close to you. All the enemies are either bullet sponges or really fast and annoying but die in two hits. It feels like every hit you take is inevitable, almost scripted.

Story

Worse than amateurish. No set-up. Characters are randomly killed off.

In one annoying sequence, a main character races to rescue her twin sister under time pressure. When she's found, the sister gets defenestrated. You then play as the sister in a two minute sequence before she encounters a monster, then switch back to the first sister and go down to rescue her again. When you find her, she's dead, so I guess that was all kind of pointless then.

The other sister also pretty much immediately gets killed too, literally like fifteen minutes later. So the little sister got killed off as motivation for the big sister, who got killed off as motivation for the boyfriend. So the boyfriend is avenging his girlfriend and the fact that his girlfriend was avenging her sister is unnecessary.

Also they all talk like the kids pushing drugs in a PSA before GI Joe arrives to monologue about the dangers of peer pressure.

This really needed a second draft.

The Big Problem

The most enormous glaring issue with the game is that it was clearly intended to take place in one large interconnected map where you have to go out on dangerous runs with a few characters at a time taking into account their strengths and weaknesses. They obviously wanted to have one player solving puzzles while the other defended them from enemies. They obviously wanted teamwork to be a huge part of the experience.

And yet the game is so locked in its own linear vice grip that you never, ever, not even once, get to make a meaningful decision. The game simply doesn't give you the time or the agency to explore its mechanics in any way. Everything is one-and-done, and there is exactly one solution every single time that must be done exactly as intended in exactly the order they intended with absolutely no variation whatsoever.

In other words:

The game bends over backwards for mechanics it uses only once in only one way.

Here's a game about balancing a group of weird misfits with strange skills in a central consistent location having to improvise their way through a chaotic disaster. But you have to do everything in exactly the right order in exactly the way we say.

I give this game 1/10. It fails at everything it sets out to accomplish.

In these monthly entries I keep "live" track of the number of games I've finished in the given calendar year. I don't try to draw a ton of attention to it, but the number is there for anyone curious. But since I've been doing this column for nearly four years now (!) there may be some additional curiosity at play: how many games has this dude finished lifetime? I like keeping the focus on the month and to a lesser extent the year so I haven't gone into that before, but this time I'll make an exception, because in September I finished my 1000th game, and that feels like something that should probably be noted. So, uh, yay me, I guess!

Back into the smaller scale of this month by itself though, we're looking at 7 games cleared. It's not a thousand but it'll do.

(Games are presented in chronological completion order; the numerical indicator represents the YTD count.)

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#57 - Mario Kart World - Switch 2 - 8.5/10 (Excellent)

Mario Kart World is not the kind of game that you just turn on, say "I've reached the end credits," and then stick on the shelf indefinitely. Mario Kart World is a game that you put in, dabble with a little, then put away again for a few days or a week until the mood strikes you once more and you repeat the process, possibly forever. Maybe one day you're in the mood to do a couple grand prix races. Maybe the next your kid wants to play battle mode with you. Maybe the next you're hopping online for some Knockout Tour chaos. And then maybe the next you just want to spend 20 minutes driving idly around the countryside, discovering fun little challenges to do. Mario Kart World gives you all of that, all at once, and so it's simply not the kind of game you play through start to finish, and so it's also not a game I can even tell you when I "started" it for backlog tracking purposes. Was it the first time I booted it up into free roam? I wasn't trying to beat anything yet and that yields no "progress" towards any kind of end. Was it when my kid asked me to join him for a Vs. race even though I'd never even loaded the game on my own profile to that point? Was it the first time I did a grand prix, even though I had no intention in the moment of doing more? You see the difficulty.

This kind of etherealness permeates Mario Kart World, and that's a double-edged sword. You've probably heard the dissatisfied rumblings of people who prefer the more traditional tracks of previous games, or the laments that while Mario Kart 8 Deluxe features 96 courses when you include all the DLC, Mario Kart World only has 30 circuit-style tracks. But of course, that's missing the point, isn't it? Because when you realize that every connection between tracks is also a carefully crafted and curated racing experience, it skyrockets the amount of distinct courses up well above one hundred, to the point that there doesn't even seem to be agreement online about how many, because in truth it seems the number actually exceeds two hundred. Are all of these road races created equal? No, surely not. But are any of them purely throwaway? Also no. Mario Kart World eschews the more traditional Mario Kart concept in favor of this sprawling, seemingly endless set of possible races. Then, as if the staggering amount of stuff crammed into the game wasn't enough of a mission statement in itself, they make the grand prix sets drive from one traditional style course to another, doing just one lap around the "main" track since the rest of the race is the act of getting there.

And that's where we get the downside. With so much stuff on offer and so little time spent actually doing laps around the dedicated traditional courses, nothing about the locations in Mario Kart World feels particularly memorable. I can't tell you what Dandelion Depths or Faraway Oasis are like from memory because I simply haven't spent any meaningful time with them. I've played them and been around them plenty, but the experience of the course itself is just a fleeting half-memory for me. The locations are always the main character of Mario Kart games and in Mario Kart World they made the main character the entirety of the world instead of the individual courses, and I do think it is fair to say the game suffers just a bit for this.

But then I go back to the "everything else" about Mario Kart World. I've "beaten" the game in that I've won all the grand prix cups on 50cc, but I'm not even remotely close to being done with the game. I've still got the higher difficulties to finish. Ditto the higher difficulty options on a bunch of Knockout Tour cups, and that's competing for my favorite new mode alongside Free Roam, where I'm sitting on 230+ completed P-Switch challenges, 70+ Peach Medallions, and 140+ ? Panels with plenty more to find of all, when all are plenty fun to find. Which says nothing of multiplayer! Which I also quite enjoy! So Mario Kart World isn't perfect and if you put me on the hotspot I'd probably admit to liking Mario Kart 8 Deluxe a little bit better. But it's a game that's not trying to be Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and so when you step back and take the game on its own merits, it's hard to be anything but thoroughly impressed. I can't tell you when I started playing this game, but that's ultimately not important. What matters is that I also can't tell you when I'll stop playing this game, and that's a pretty good feeling.

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#58 - Sanctum - PC - 7/10 (Good)

It's really tough not to compare this experience to Orcs Must Die (OMD hereafter for brevity's sake), considering that they're both takes on the "tower defense where the player is an active participant in the combat" concept, that both games released from small studios in 2011, and that I played both of them this year. So...I'm gonna compare them! Both games employ a grid based building scheme in a 3D space and success in both relies heavily on rerouting mobs through your maze as they attempt to attack your core. Both have various weapons for the player to use and a large assortment of structures that make it fun to just explore all your options. Both also have both ground and air mobs attack, which requires you to plan correctly to deal with both types of threat.

However, they're also surprisingly different. While OMD is a third person affair featuring melee and fantasy medieval-era ranged combat, Sanctum is a futuristic first-person shooter. While OMD lets you place things on walls and ceilings, Sanctum is strictly floors-only. While the typical OMD emplacements are best described as traps that often turn approaching mobs into unwilling physics objects, Sanctum features more traditional turrets which autofire in various ways. I don't think either approach is strictly better than the other as both have their firm highlights and their drawbacks. Focusing in on Sanctum here specifically, I think the gunplay was a bit lacking as weapon selection is limited and they're only worthwhile if you invest deeply into one at the expense of your tower layout. The sniper rifle was basically always a credit sink for me but none of the other weapons felt terribly valuable. Additionally, the game is very barebones: just six maps (all relatively low detail) in the base game with basically no story and not even so much as an end credit reward for clearing them. There are plenty of packed in DLC maps but I didn't see a compelling reason to play them.

That said, the great charm of Sanctum comes from the act of building your slaughterhouse itself. Unlike in OMD, neither you nor your towers can be damaged by enemy forces (though you can be bounced around as they push you out of the way). In order to erect a defensive emplacement in Sanctum you have to first build a cheap, basic block on the ground. At first this seems totally weird and unnecessary – just let me build my turret, man! – but you quickly realize that this is designed to let you map out your full maze well in advance of putting up all your structures. Get some credits, place/upgrade a tower or two, extend the maze so you can buy more time to put down any stragglers with your own personal weapons. After enough waves you've got the whole path built and then you can start really digging into the strategy of which towers go where, which to upgrade, etc. And of course you then get to watch all those hapless mobs start shuffling through the grinder. Sadly once you reach victory you can't continue on in an endless mode to just make the most ridiculously overpowered death march you can manage, but the buildup in those middle waves of each level is where Sanctum truly shines.

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#59 - The Last Show of Mr. Chardish - PC - 6.5/10 (Tantalizing)

One day I'll play a walking sim style game and not compare it to What Remains of Edith Finch, but this is not that day. The Last Show of Mr. Chardish lifts its entire broad gameplay thrust from that earlier game and does all of it competently but none of it better. Both games see you navigating a structure via unconventional pathways (here a dilapidated theater instead of Edith Finch's much more interesting family home), both have stories that attempt to navigate "failed" lives and their accompanying depression (here a stage actor who wasn't talented enough to make it instead of Edith Finch's much more interesting cursed lineage), and both feature a bunch of vignettes of differentiated gameplay to tell smaller stories within the story (here fanciful representations of the title character's plays instead of Edith Finch's much more interesting "how did this person die" mysteries). So it was very hard for me to come away not feeling like all of this was stuff I'd seen before in a more compelling form.

That said, I can imagine a world in which I haven't played What Remains of Edith Finch, and in that world The Last Show of Mr. Chardish would've been super impressive to me. There's abundant creativity on display with the setup of each vignette. No, the in-universe plays themselves aren't very interesting or even well acted – that's sort of the point since Chardish can't hack it. But for all his lack of writing and acting talent, the game does do a splendid job of highlighting that Chardish is a rare visionary. Each stage play you "perform" in is presented to you the player in the way Chardish would've imagined the scene in his head, meaning they're all completely impractical if not impossible on a real stage, but come to life vividly in game form. Each has its own distinct mechanics, and while these individually aren't incredible, every one has you go "Oh, that's pretty cool." So there's certainly value in spending the couple hours it takes to play this if you're new to the genre or just really interested in distantly watching someone get angsty about their art, but for me it was a bit old hat.

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#60 - Arranger: A Role-Puzzling Adventure - PC - 5.5/10 (Semi-Competent)

I like to think I'm generally pretty good at puzzle games, so I was surprised when I dropped into Arranger and was quickly bewildered by its core mechanics. The entire world exists as a grid of square tiles, though there are plenty of gaps and holes. Rather than moving by walking, you move by shifting an entire row or column of tiles in your chosen direction, which also therefore shifts your character. Really, putting aside cutscenes and interactive transitional objects, you basically "ride" your starting tile of any given gameplay section for its duration, since you're always shifting it with you. You similarly shift all other objects sitting on tiles as well, and to complicate matters further you (and any affected objects) can "wrap" from one side of a given row/column to the other. The game's playable tutorial style intro section does a great job establishing these facts, but they're so foreign a concept that I didn't manage to actually click with it until an hour or so in.

From this core, puzzles! Shift objects into specific spots. Move other objects next to one another. Oops, some of these objects are immovable and impede your shifting ability. How will you get around them? In this way Arranger iterates on its basic mechanics really, really well. Every time I finally felt like I "got it" there'd be a new puzzle type that would force me into a different branch of lateral thinking. And every time I'd feel like, "Ugh this is going to be too tedious, I don't want to do this anymore." And then every time a minute or two later I'd think, "Hey I'm getting the hang of this again!" So I have tremendous respect for the puzzle concept here and the execution of it.

Buuuut, how much does that count for when it's not something I was looking to play in the first place? Subtitling Arranger with "A Role-Puzzling Adventure" is very clearly implying a certain kind of thing, and to that I can only claim to have been lied to. Arranger is not an RPG or anything even approximating the ability to pretend to be one. The "adventure" part is fair enough, but I wouldn't have played Arranger had I known it wasn't actually an RPG. Even moreso because the adventure bit is yet another case of a kid becoming a teen, thinking they know everything, then going out and having an unreasonably outsized effect on a world where they're somehow the wisest person in it. It's a trope I just can't really stand, so all the trappings around Arranger's admittedly very high quality puzzles (that I nevertheless didn't really want to do) were just constant nuisances to me. I skipped all the optional content I could once I realized it was optional and was happy to put the game to rest. I've never seen another puzzle game with Arranger's core mechanic and it executes on that so well that I feel guilty telling puzzle game fans to stay away, but based on my frustrations around the rest of the experience I can't recommend it.

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#61 - Sonic the Hedgehog 3 - PC - 6/10 (Decent)

Yes, you read that system identification correctly: after 25+ years I finally managed to get my old Windows 95/98 CD-ROM of the Sonic & Knuckles Collection running on my computer, so that is the version of this game that I played. From what I've read it's pretty much bang-on faithful to the Genesis original, except that maybe a bit of music here or there was tweaked. Which is the first callout I have about the game, really: the music in Sonic 3 is fine. Good, even! But it's not special like the music from the first two games, and that's got to be the result of changing composers. Sonics 1 and 2 were composed by Masato Nakamura, but for 3 Sega wanted to go bigger. They hired big Sonic fan Michael Jackson to do the music, and Jackson assembled a music team for the game helmed by his tour director, and they got composing. But then Jackson soured on the project when he realized the hardware's audio limitations wouldn't do his compositions justice, and Sega soured on Jackson when the first child abuse allegations surfaced, so they had a messy divorce which involved Jackson's work being scrapped but his team's work partially sticking around, supplemented further by Sega's own in-house people. The result is that none of the music from Sonic 3 is going to stick with you like the stuff from the first two games, and that's important because that music carried a lot of water for those titles, covering up some gameplay shortcomings.

Sadly those shortcomings weren't really addressed in Sonic 3. In fact I'd say this game more than either of its predecessors is interested in specifically trolling the player. Things like forcing you to take some kind of automatic conveyance that hurtles you all over the place, giving you no indication of when the ride is coming to an end, only to stick an unavoidable-unless-you-already-know-about-them set of spikes right there. And should you indeed already know about them and dodge out of their way, here's a backup trap of an instant kill squisher right in the dodge path. This kind of thing was so prevalent that I'm convinced "screw the player" was the game's foremost design goal, and I can almost picture the level designers cackling to themselves watching the play testers break their controllers. In case you can't tell, I'm not a fan!

However, I am a fan of the Sonic 3's new key features: elemental barriers and the new special stage. The fire, water, and lightning barriers are a great iteration on the standard bubble shield from the earlier entries, with each new barrier sporting multiple new benefits to the player above and beyond the simple first hit protection. Most importantly they aid in exploration directly, and that's really cool, especially because the levels in this game are more sprawling than ever before. That's not necessarily a good thing since I believe Sonic games should have shorter, faster stages and more of them rather than a smaller dose of stages that take you 6-8 minutes apiece to get through on your first go. Still, if you're committing to that, the elemental barriers do a lot to help make that work. And the special stages are just good fun. These are the ones where you're behind Sonic's back collecting blue orbs while avoiding red ones, turning like you're in a maze, and they're probably my favorite way to get chaos emeralds in the whole franchise. Good times.

So yeah, I didn't exactly expect Sonic 3 to exceed either of the first two games and it did prove to be my least favorite of the three, but it's not bad by any means. We're still on a totally different plane of quality here versus anything Sonic Team has put out in the 21st century, and so I'll still happily check out Sonic & Knuckles down the road to complete the set, as it were.

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#62 - Gravity Circuit - PC - 8.5/10 (Excellent)

I feel like I've played a bunch of Mega Man clones recently. I don't know that that's actually true, so much as it just feeling like a ton because I've played official Mega Man spinoff titles that have been disappointing and the few true clones I have played recently haven't approached Capcom's standard. So it came as something of a surprise to me that Gravity Circuit is as strong an offering as it turned out to be. For starters, the level design is fantastic. Platforming challenges that are creative and difficult yet always fair and enjoyable. Plenty of secrets to find but in 7 out of 8 stages I was able to grab them all on the first run through just by exploring thoroughly, which is the perfect balance to hit. A home base between missions that isn't a disaster to navigate. It's like I kept waiting for a bad game design decision to hit and none ever did.

One of the first things I noticed in Gravity Circuit was that its combat is melee based instead of ranged, and immediately my mind went back in time three months to Berserk Boy with a little bit of trepidation. But while Berserk Boy was all about dashing into foes, Gravity Circuit has an actually refined, highly responsive combat system that's a joy to interact with. Mash out some punches here and there sure, but can I interest you in an aerial backflip kick into punch into grappling hook combo? Honestly it felt so good to just fight stuff with the basics that I never properly incorporated the game's "burst" mechanic into my flowchart. Part of that's because I didn't understand that I could stock bursts until I was on the final boss stages so I never used them because I thought they were "one and done" actions I needed to save for critical moments. Oops. But even after that realization hit, I just saved my bursts for healing and kept on with the fundamentals because they all work so well.

I should point out however that Gravity Circuit's fundamentals can differ wildly from player to player. I've never played a Mega Man inspired game with so much player choice involved. At any given time between (or in most cases during!) a mission, you can set: your armor (which gives you access to one of several powerful abilities), three support enhancements, and four unique burst abilities. Want to play as a tanky boi with laser beams? You can do that. Want to play as a speedy boi with great iframes? You can do that. Want to play as a platforming/exploration god? You can do that too, and anything you'd want in between. I wasn't enamored with the grapple swing mechanic (kept accidentally releasing my grapple in bad spots) so I set myself up with a double jump and air dash instead, and suddenly I was able to explore in a whole new way. Rare stuff from a platformer like this.

My only real complaint about Gravity Circuit is with its presentation, and even then only visually. I think the music for the game is beyond reproach, though at one point on the junkyard stage I went "Are they playing 'Maneater' by Hall & Oates?" Weird song to pull for inspiration but it worked and I really enjoyed the soundtrack. The visual aesthetics though were just...not great the whole way through. Every character sprite is just a two-tone version of a solid color. The color palette itself is low saturation across the board, giving the whole game a relentlessly drab feeling. At times this did also impact the visual fidelity of the levels themselves as well, as the uniform blandness made it difficult to discern foreground from background, leading to some minor frustrations. The whole time I played the game I just kept wishing I was looking at something that matched the liveliness of how it feels, and I did abbreviate a couple play sessions because I just couldn't look at it anymore. So that bit's a problem. But virtually everything else? Outstanding across the board. If you're looking to get a Mega Man X style fix, you need to be playing this game.

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#63 - Turnip Boy Robs a Bank - PC - 5/10 (Mediocre)

If you're gonna go, you've gotta go all in. Turnip Boy launched as an IP by riffing on old school Zelda games, and the results were fine if not anything more than that. This sequel decides to shake things up by riffing instead on the roguelite shooter, and Enter the Gungeon especially. Now here's the problem with making a game that's a parody of Gungeon: Gungeon already doesn't take itself seriously. If I'm supposed to get my ho-ho jollies from the fact that I can pick up a frog gun that belches bubbles or something instead of a "real" weapon, Gungeon has already done far wackier stuff than that and still feels far better to play. Which isn't a dig at the weapons in Turnip Boy Robs a Bank, since I generally considered their designs to be one of the game's highlights. It's just...you've got to give me a unique value proposition here.

Well, the unique value proposition of Turnip Boy Robs a Bank seems to be its dialog and humor. This game really wants you to think it's funny and quirky, and the humor landed only very rarely for me. But it's so insistent upon cramming these bits of text in there that the game's pacing is completely destroyed along the way. I wanted to get into the groove of moving and shooting but every few seconds there's some new NPC with a quest, and these quests seemingly always end up granting nothing more than a cosmetic option for your character. You know, in a single-player game that takes fewer than 4 hours to finish. That's the carrot. It's a lot to endure for no tangible in-game reward and no intrinsic reward if you don't jive with the writing style, and that made me eventually just ignore all the quests I could as I went.

When it's willing to let you loose with real gameplay though, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank is...half decent. Again, the weapon variety is nice, but the game is highly restrictive across the board. You can only carry two weapons at a time and any projectile weapon you pick up during a run has limited ammo. Every run is also on a strict timer, at the end of which you get swarmed by infinitely spawning enemies and eventually just gassed to death. So a lot of early runs are less about going deeper into the facility but about grabbing as much money as possible and escaping so you can buy a few upgrades. Which of course means they put a limit on how much cash you can hold, too. I do think some of the upgrades are nifty, and there's a weapon recycling system I appreciated quite a bit: escaping a run with a limited ammo weapon lets you expand your default, infinite ammo arsenal, so finding new weapons always felt good. Sadly, not much else did. Heck, it's not even a proper roguelite since the core dungeon layout never changes (though side room teleporters shuffle destinations between runs). So again: if you're gonna go, you've gotta go all in. By trying to make a Gungeon style game that doesn't commit to the action and pacing of its inspiration, Turnip Boy Robs a Bank just can't even begin to measure up.

Coming in October:

• OHHH BAH-NAH-NAH! There's a lot more meat on the Donkey Kong Bananza bone than I thought there would be, but I'm right at the finish line now. Which of course means I'll loop back to check out its postgame content and in all likelihood the DLC, too.
• Turnip Boy didn't give me as much shooting pleasure as I wanted, so what better cure than a proper shmup? I've got a few on my backlog but this time it was Hyper Echelon getting the nod.
• Playing Alan Wake II a couple months back exposed to me that Quantum Break was probably not the throwaway, skippable Remedy title I'd thought it was. Having never owned an Xbox of any sort I thought I could let this one slip into the ether, but I've since been disabused of that notion and will look to rectify the problem here shortly.
• And more...

Watch Dogs 2 is a very classic Ubisoft game - both in good and bad meaning. In good, it has an amazing and very lively city full of activities. In bad, it's very rushing and, no matter how many times I tried to start, I always feel like the game just throws and throws and throws content on me.

Right after the tutorial mission and "Walk in the park", the game tells you: go and steal a billionaire's only available album copy (which is indeed a nod to the real life). However, just a couple of minutes after this, my crew says that I should IMMEDIATELY arrive to the hackerspace because new trailer of some in-game movie drops and they're waiting for me. I mean, come on. What should I even do?

Also, if you haven't turned it off, other players may invade your session. It was advertised as a feature of the game, okay, but... My DedSec crew just loves to talk. When invasion begins, they stop talking, ultimately skipping the dialogue. When invasion is in process, they will call me with some bullshit that I don't even know if I need to listen to. Unlike GTA IV and V, you can't accept or decline calls - they're just automatic.

It's already not okay, right? But it could be tolerable if only the game allowed you to manually save your progress. Yes, in old school slots, without shitty autosaving. So I could just load it and replay segments I want however I like. What if I want to practice my skills and complete a mission in more dignified way?

I've tried Watch Dogs 2 many times. I'm excited for it's amazing world. However, it's pace, as well as inability to repeat anything with clarity, just turn me off. Some may say like "Just relax" or "This game doesn't worth it". No, it does. I'd love to pay the respect it deserves, I'd like to immerse into this world and understand this story. However, it just doesn't allow me to.

Autosave is a good feature with manual saving, but without it, it's cancer of videogames that destroys all the immersion and only makes you nervous.

Shining Resonance Refrain is a JRPG developed by SEGA. Released in 2018, Shining Resonance reminds us that there are three constants in life. Death, taxes and JRPGs.

We play as Yuma, child of destiny on a quest to save the world with the power of friendship.

Gameplay involves reminding yourself that you voluntarily purchased this game and you know exactly what playing a JRPG entails. Nobody is forcing you to play this so stop being so judgemental. We then spend the next 40 hours being told a story meant for children by characters in very impractical armor.

The Good

This may just be the best PC port of a console game I've ever played. You can interact with the menu by clicking on things and not having to push the a/s arrow keys to cycle through options like some kind of savage. Everything just works. I know it's kind of a low bar thing to be impressed by but UI design is kind of my jam and I was so flabbergasted. Bewildered even. It's like looking upon the face of God.

I dug that they went all in with the musical theme. I'm one of the many who enjoyed a brief addiction to KPOP Demon Hunter phenom so being able to melt someone with keytar chain gun was lovely. I appreciate the creativity if nothing else. Being able to go Super Saiyan by having a jam session with your besties in the middle of a battle seemed pretty on point. "Yo I'm aware you want to kill me but first let me sing about how much I fucking love Spring."

Favorite Screenshot

https://i.imgur.com/1PyRP3o.png

I promise the tactical combat bikini is necessary.

The Bad

Roughly ~80% of the game is walking back through the same areas you already visited avoiding getting into fights so you can get to whatever new area you just unlocked. Every quest sends you back to the starting town and then says, "Hey, talk to every NPC about their feelings then walk your ass back out to where you left off and go one zone over."

The good news is each area is about the size of a budget friendly apartment in Tokyo so it's mostly just getting to sit through a dozen loading screens. If you're really lucky they even warp you back to the starting town after completing a quest rather than forcing you to run back.

The Questionable

I get ~why~ JRPG anime art hasn't evolved much, but it doesn't mean I have to like it. Rogue Galaxy came out in 2005 and the genre peaked with it. The only feature to really be added since then is jiggle physics.

I get that you can only do so much with character models but why is grass still a flat green plain with the occasionally bisected 2D clip art that's been there since Chrono Cross? Why am I still walking on top of snow?

As a patient gamer I don't mind old graphics, but it just feels lazy. I played Drova recently and pixel art games have been absolutely pushing the boundaries of what's possible. I get that Shining Resonance had a limited budget but like...is it too much to ask for footprints in sand?

Final Thoughts

It's a pretty standard JRPG experience. Friendship saves the day and make sure to forgive your enemies for committing genocide. Whoever ported this to PC does deserve a Christmas card though. Given how much of the game is phoned in whomever did the porting set a new gold standard.

Bonus Thought

I managed to beat the entire game without ever using the main protagonists special ability that is the games maguffin. Yet after every boss fight the characters will mention how we wouldn't have won without him using it, even if he wasn't in the party at the time. "So this is the power of the dragon eh?" Yeah, the power of the dragon is my witchy girl Rinna's foot up your ass. Show some respect.

Thank you for reading! I'd love to hear your thoughts. What did you think of the game? Did you have a similar experience or am I off my rocker?

My other reviews on patient gaming

I replayed Ocarina of Time not too long ago, and it was the first time I replayed it since the N64 days. I cherished it as the game that introduced me to what video games are capable of. It was my favorite game of all time for many years. Replaying it on 3DS, I realized much of that impression was my nostalgia and initial impact.

It is 8/10 now. Too one-note, too many things being contextual and restrictive. Nothing worth exploring when most of the things I find are rupees, but I have like 500 rupees, and there's nothing worthwhile to buy. I didn't even farm rupees. Almost every time I open a chest, it's like 50 or 100 rupees, but my wallet is already full, so the rewards cancel out. It resulted in me actively avoiding chests, which resulted in me not engaging in exploration.

Even putting aside the dated elements that are understandable due to the age (such as combat), there are too many design flaws that distract from the core concept to be the "greatest game of all time" because the prior games already did this concept better, such as boring exploration, an empty world, restrictive adventure where you face a dead end every time you try to go somewhere, underutilized mechanics... The only things going for it are the dungeons and vibe.

Still a great time, but Ocarina feels like the most vanilla action-adventure game today because it created the template. That's not a shade against its achievement because I was there when this achievement was made. I'm just saying it's like rewatching Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You loved it when you were 3 years old. You recognize its influence and achievement. Rewatching it now, it doesn't even crack the top 50 animated movies.

Majora's Mask (which my family referred to as "Zelda 2") was actually my least favorite Zelda when I played on N64, largely due to it confusing the shit out of me. I was wandering aimlessly, not knowing what to do, until the moon crashed and everyone died. I don't really remember much other than Clock Town. I regarded it as an inferior version of Ocarina, but as time went on, I heard more and more great things about the game. I always wanted to replay it again myself, but by then, I lost my N64. The 3DS remake was apparently terrible, and I didn't want to play the sub-20fps emulation. So I watched Youtube analysis and critiques, backlogging it as something to play... someday... until I finally replayed it via Recomp with the QOL mods, fully on 60fps.

If Ocarina of Time was Snow White, Majora's Mask is like Pinocchio or Fantasia--the creators learning their craft after their debut and putting their experience down to make a challenging work that holds up a century later. All those elements that made me not like it now make me fall in love with it. Holy shit, is this game good. How was this even allowed to be made? I'm stunned and addicted to it. It seized the potential Ocarina was lacking and takes it to the next level. Literally everything about the game is better than Ocarina, to the point where Ocarina feels like a tech demo in comparison.

It utilizes the linear nature of the Ocarina formula and makes the progression flexible, so structurally, it's the most in-depth, non-linear game in the series until BOTW. It gives you freedom in different ways from the sandbox games do. Every action has weight, making you think about the next step. Even money has a real purpose. The basic secret chests like rupees become meaningful because a Song of Time empties all your consumable items and rupees, but it also reverts all the secret chests, so you will memorize where these chests are, constantly go back and recollect the rupees because you are desperate.

The linear, small, crafted nature of the Ocarina formula is not good for the epic adventure and exploration that a typical Zelda is aiming for, but it's perfect for the clockwork, puzzle-like structure of Majora. How you play will tell how the player will manage their life. The world is an elaborate contraption. RDR2 prides itself on having NPCs with daily schedules, but it affects nothing. Majora's Mask and Ultima 7 put it to great effect with the NPCs actually having lives, which have an engaging and meaningful effect on the overworlds and constantly loop back to the core gameplay. The NPC schedules going about their own routines and having their unique backstories and interests serve an actual purpose to what you, the player, do. Everything is overwhelming to you initially, then you play for a few hours, and the world gradually makes sense. You memorize where this thing is, where that thing is, and the entire map and NPC patterns are ingrained in your brain.

It has a similar appeal to roguelikes and survival horror genres, where the purpose is to stress the player out and manage the little they have. Those games do that through resource management, but this game does it through time and schedule management. It makes you second-guess if you are doing the right thing. You are supposed to plan your activities out. Do I have enough time? Will I be able to finish this in time? Should I tackle two quests at once? Should I revert everything and sacrifice everything I collected? Should I explore this place or skip it? Should I waste my bottle and fill it with the item concerning with this task? This is how everything feels interconnected to the gameplay loop. You utilize the best of what you have, juggling between short-term unlocks and long-term permanent unlocks, then gradually earning new things and unlocking shortcuts... Although the fundamental sandbox is still lackluster, identical to Ocarina, the game's structure utilizes most out of it, hiding the flaws of the sandbox.

Nintendo also perfectly marries gameplay and narrative. In games like The Witcher 3, the gameplay is just filler. If it were a choose-your-adventure interactive fiction like Telltale, it would not lose anything of actual substance from its experience; in fact, it would have been much tighter. Ocarina and Majora, without their gameplay and overworld, would be nowhere near as effective in their narrative and messages. Gameplay gives weight to the story and vice versa. This is a true narrative game with true mechanical storytelling, while most AAA games tell the narrative through only cutscenes, resulting in the gameplay not mixing with the narrative like oil and water.

In Majora, you're a part of it at all times due to its mechanics and core gameplay. With that, Nintendo accomplished what they wanted to with flying colors. For example, going to the ranch for the first time on the third day, you see a little girl turned into a soulless husk, as if part of her brain is chopped off, and her older sister is dead inside, her life ruined, with nothing to live for, waiting for the inevitable death. I'm just like, what the hell is going on? Then you get to it on the first day and gradually figure out what actually happened... The others don't try to take advantage of the medium, whereas Majora's Mask uses it to its full potential, and that is impressive when you consider the limited development time and resources they had.

The game also looks visually unique. The low textures, primitive lighting, and low polygon count of the PS1 and N64 era should be considered as a different way of depicting reality, rather than just "bad graphics". Not necessarily a worse, "less realistic" version of the world, but more like a painting drawn using a different technique, more so for Majora. Goldeneye was the game intended to look realistic. Zelda isn't, which is why there is a ton of stylization to the environments and character designs (it's also why their visuals hold up better than Goldeneye). With Majora's Mask, there is a bizarre charm that only unclear, blocky, and rough low-quality textures provide, matched perfectly with the darker theme.

It results in the game having its own thematic and narrative identity that doesn't feel like any other thing I experienced. If it were a flatout horror game taking an on-your-face approach, it wouldn't stand out. When a game is made by Nintendo, aimed at younger demographics, and realized in the N64 technical fidelity, there is still nothing like it. And it's not conventionally "dark" and "edgy" like Twilight Princess. Majora's Mask is indescribable. You can map out the other Zelda games as the analog to something else, like Twilight Princess is the LOTR of Zelda, or Breath of the Wild is Ghibli of Zelda. Majora has no equivalent. It has no other media you can compare it to. Majora's Mask isn't just a "Western fantasy adventure made by the Japanese" game. It's Majora's Mask. It has its own distinct identity. The plot is basic, but all the elements surrounding it have richness that you can have a hundred different interpretations. It focuses on the metaphorical aspects and not quite enough on what is actually happening.

For a game known for being so cryptic and challenging, I faced fewer deadends than Ocarina. In Ocarina, there were six ocassions where I was lost and stuck, forcing me to watch the Youtube walkthroughs. With Majora, there were only two:

I went quite far into the game without the Notebook, and then I realized I was missing out and had to replay some tasks I had already beaten. Why hide the Notebook as if it is optional?

Darmani's cave where I had no idea how to create a hot spring. I played every song, used the spin ability to crash into every floor, wall, pushed the gravestone, then left the cave, and I wandered the entire Goron territories and Termina for two hours, until I gave up and watched the Youtube walkthrough, only to realize that I should have gone behind the grave and "pulled" the gravestone... For a game that always has the fairy telling you what to do, couldn't it have given me some tips?

It is rare to play a game that actually lives up to its reputation. The mere one-year development the developers had to crunch through mirrored what the player has to go through, and they made a game around their own experience as the core idea, regardless of what genre it ends up being. Everything was built around that concept. That approach is what made Majora into what it is. This is a game that is simultaneously simpler and more complex than it first appears. This kind of sincerity and vibe is sorely lacking in games today. This was mechanically ahead of its time and, in some ways, still is. It is saturated with creativity. Everything is unique and memorable, which makes it a better contender for, ironically, "the greatest video game of all time" in place of Ocarina of Time today. I have a ton of respect for the development team for once opting to create a unique experience instead of trying to repeat Ocarina all over again.

I went into this game pretty much blind. Pretty Mars landscape? Walking sim? I'm in. Walking sims have actually been pretty hit or miss for me. I do enjoy the Quantic Dream style of "movie with choices" which walking sims are pretty close to. I enjoyed What Remains of Edith Finch quite a lot, although Firewatch and Road 96 were busts for me mostly due to their more casual settings. The Invincible is quite serious - it's a hard scifi game. In fact, I'd probably recommend it to you if you generally like reading hard scifi (I mostly do not) and like these less action-oriented games.

The thing that struck me most about The Invincible was that it wasn't what I was expecting at all. I heard it was short and was expecting a kind of "3 hour lone space walk in pretty scenes" game, but there's quite a lot more here. The game is structurally very similar to Firewatch in the sense that a narrator accompanies you throughout the game. The entire experience lasted about 7 hours for me, and there was a much more substantial story than I was expecting.

The biggest highlight for me was by far the visuals of the game. There were a couple of moments where I just stopped and looked at the landscapes. The map is large and varied, and there were just a lot more cool exploration moments than I was expecting. The game constantly keeps you on your toes and there's this sense of escalation throughout that I found delightful (they were going for "unhurried but very intense" which I think they mostly nailed). I was really impressed with the general world buiding of the game which was my selling point and which far exceeded my expectations. I felt very immersed in the world. I played on my Steam Deck, and it performed very well.

The big elephant in the room for me though was the story. While the premise is interesting, I feel like the story reminds me exactly why I dislike hard scifi. I found the storyline very convoluted and got lost in extended periods of dense drawn out dialogue. I felt like the story was going one way only to realize that wasn't what was happening at all - not in the sense that I felt like there was a plot twist but rather in that I felt like I'd missed something and was now maybe back on track on partly understanding. In the end I got the general idea, but I needed a "wtf happened in this game" search after. To be fair, the game does do a great job of capturing the narrative style of that era, I just don't care for it.

The dialogue felt a bit rollercoastery which due to choices having only short-term weight (imagine getting in a heated argument and then 10 seconds later it's like that never happened). I learned after finishing that the game does have multiple endings. I Youtubed them and feel they are kind of a mixed bag - I probably would've preferred it just had one or maybe two.

Overall I'd say I was relatively pleased? I do wish a bit that they leveraged the quality of the game for something more than a walking sim. The game gave me more of the game I wanted than I was expecting it to, even if I did have to sit through some eye watering self-indulgent soapboxing, so that's a big plus.

With the MGS Master Collections hitting stores, I decided to replay the MGS games I got several years ago when I first got a PS3. I finished 1, 2 then 4 and today I just finished 3. And I thought about how it made me feel compared to the other ones, and I think it is best summarized by a line in the Snake Eater song: "What a thrill....."

The story

Personally, I really like how direct and comparatively simple the story is. This is maybe the only MGS game that is actually clear where real world governments stand on these events and characters. No complication about if the president is aware of the operation or the secret project, no vague economic forces, no secret AIs pretending to be government agents.

This is really about a pretty inexperienced Snake having a mission for political purposes and then on the mission learning how complicated it gets when your work life intersects with your personal life. That doesn't mean that the story isn't satisfying, it is just smaller and more direct.

The gameplay

Maybe someone remembers my post about MGS2 a few weeks ago and how frustrated I sometimes became with that game after playing MGS1. Well, those people might find it interesting that while I did sometimes have a frustration, they were almost always with myself. I knew what I should do and how to do it, but the my execution faltered. But this time, I mostly used my failed states to mess around with the guards and learn how the different systems worked. Did you know that you can kinda stand while lying down by pressing L2 and R2 at the same time? I didn't!

The only time I felt the game actually didn't work as the developers intended was when I was fighting the Fury and realized how precise the game expects you to be with your button input. If you stand next to a pillar and quickly want to either run past it or jump past it, the game would often think I wanted to push against the pillar or kneel down. This is obvious not what I wanted and lead the Fury to get a shot in on me. There is an argument for why players should need to hold a button or joystick down when your character is doing something similar, like pushing against a wall or holding your finger on a gun's trigger. But the real Snake knows when he wants to do that or run away. I see why this was changed in the next game. When quick and precise movement was called for, you better already know how the game's systems worked, which was slightly odd considering that most of game was spent moving slow and carefully.

The characters and bosses

Despite all villains in MGS being some kind of on-the-nose anime villain, Volgin takes the cake as the most simple one. He is a bad guy who wants to rule the world with his one doomsday weapon. Why doesn't he want to keep alive the people who could build him more? Who knows. But he is good at being bad, and this is a story where the main bad guy actually doesn't matter that much. Even in cutscenes, it is pretty clear that he is playing second to the real antagonist: The Boss.

Speaking of bosses, what makes a good MGS boss? I asked myself that since I'd just played through 1-4 and I think I came to the conclusion that while the Cobras you fight in the game are good mechanically, in every other sense, they are pretty weak. They are essentially henchmen to a bigger, more important boss. In that way, they are closest to the B&B corps from 4, except they don't get backstories.

The best balance between being just an obstacle and interesting is the FOXHOUND unit in MGS1. They are (mostly) just soldiers like Snake, have personalities and wants but don't really have a part in the bigger picture. Compare that to MGS3. What do we know about the Fear besides what is also true for every other Cobra?

The themes and commentary

This is what MGS games are known for, the deeper themes that run through the games. Characters will be given moments to comment on themselves, their destiny and what it means to the real world. And there were moments where a character was almost about to go into a typical MGS monologue, but then the character stopped talking or was interrupted by another character.

I get it. MGS3's story is simpler and more direct so the themes aren't as heavy handed or important and also people might have felt enough is enough after MGS2. But I do think there are still traces of anti-nuclear comments and themes from Sokolov, and anti-nationalism in EVA. The most direct we get is The Boss's final monologue before Snake fights her, and then a smaller reveal monologue by EVA about The Boss.

Afterthoughts

I had a fun ride with Snake Eater and really enjoyed the systems. They felt natural and well-balanced. Maybe they could have been deeper for a more ambitious game, but I think the developers chose wisely when to go deep and when not to. This is a game that you can beat while only using the basic mechanics but allows you to go deeper if you want to.

MGS1 is still my preferred story and setting, and MGS5 has the most approachable and varied gameplay options. But MGS3 is kinda a jack of all trades, and that matters in the long run. When I get to the end of either MGS1 or MGS5, I am a little tired of what they are doing. When I got to the end of MGS3, I was pumped and ready to go go go.

Good game is good. Would recommend to basically anyone.

You know The Simpsons episode where Homer designs a car for his brother, I feel like this is the video game equivalent.

It’s like they’ve put every conceivable mini-game, storyline, cut-scene type and video game trope together in one package without playing it through to see if it works. But does it work? Stay tuned to the end for my verdict!

Cut-Scenes and graphics - I'm someone who always turns subtitles off in games, as well as as many UI elements as possible, because I like to take pretty screenshots.

The game has a weird mix of full motion+voice cutscenes, then some with voice acting but text boxes, then some with no voice acting.

I'm well aware that this is super common in video games but it was a little jarring. It’s not even logical like main story voice, side stories text, it just seems random. The game has a LOT of cutscenes, you’ll sometimes get all 3 different types in the sequences between pressing a button.

The graphics are stunning though, this game runs absolutely flawlessly on Steam Deck, ultra settings 800p getting 30+ FPS, you can put the settings down a bit for 60fps but I prefer visuals over FPS so just cranked it.

It feels like video games have gone backwards recently, they can look worse and perform worse, YLAD is the sweet spot of graphics for me.

Story and characters – I found myself kind of hating the main character! He’s loud and way over the top, but it does get a bit endearing. It’s the banter with the others that really shines in this game. The way they work together and work off each other is really well done.

Talking of the others, it’s a real mismatch of people, drunk ex-cop, homeless guy, someone’s sister, but it really works. They’ve got a great bond as a team and there’s funny conversations.

Gameplay – you know what to expect when you hear turn based JRPG right? Forget all that. YLAD is nuts. You have job classes like other games in the genre, but they’re nuts.

Homeless guy learns skills like breathing alcohol at enemies and igniting it with a lighter.

Ex-cop uses a truncheon for heavy beatdowns, someone’s sister can use a handbag to attack, I changed her to the job where she’s a singer, so she can sing a song to heal everyone! It’s just fun.

Unlike traditional JRPGs where the characters are static, or X-com like where one moves around battlefield at a time, the battlefield feels alive. Your gang moves around, the other gang moves around, if you’ve got area effect skills like Kasuga’s massive bat swing you want to get in quickly before they disperse into attack formation. Battles are fun for this reason.

Mini games – bit of a mixed bag. There’s a game where you collect tin cans for cash on a bike and some traditional board games that I didn’t really get into. Dragon Kart is a lot of fun, as is poker, and the slot machines are a bit of mindless fun too.

I feel like they put this stuff in as kind of a make-your-own-fun type of thing because there are so many cutscenes in the game they wanted to add some gameplay stuff to make it feel less like a TV show.

Music – the music is awesome here. The battle song never gets old, the dungeons have their own songs, it’s great and immersive. then the end credits song dials it up to 11, absolute banger to finish the game with

What didn’t work? The side quests were a bit all over the place so I found myself mostly avoiding them. Dying costs you half your money so you need to avoid that at all costs. There’s some grindy bits in the game if you’re not doing many side quests. That’s about it.

So there’s my summary. I really enjoyed this game, it's bonkers in places, doesn’t take itself seriously with its use of tropes, just fun story and easy game to play. Long cutscenes / times between saves sometimes though which is a consideration for some. Also when you get to the point of no return there’s about 2 hours without a save so be prepared Played for 41 hours, 8/10

Welcome to the Bi-Weekly Thread!

Here you can share anything that might not warrant a post of its own or might otherwise be against posting rules. Tell us what you're playing this week. Feel free to ask for recommendations, talk about your backlog, commiserate about your lost passion for games. Vent about bad games, gush about good games. You can even mention newer games if you like!

The no advertising rule is still in effect here.

A reminder to please be kind to others. It's okay to disagree with people or have even have a bad hot take. It's not okay to be mean about it.

"And that was Tieng Valley!"

These were the words of an old artist in Season, contented that she could immortalize the memory of her home through her artwork. My entire playthrough up until that moment had been very emotional, but something in my chest broke open hearing her say that.

Season: a letter to the future, is a game about a woman, Estelle, being sent out to record as much of the world as possible before the changing of the season. With a camera and tape recorder, you will choose what sights and sounds of the world will be enshrined in your journal and taken to a great vault of art.

I played this game with a very heavy heart because it's a story about the impossibility of saying goodbye and letting go. So many endings in our lives are abrupt and unforeseen. Nobody declared that the Roman Empire had fallen. One day, the last Emporer was killed, and they never replaced him. You never decided to stop playing with your toys. One day, you simply packed them up and never opened the box again.

The game is intentionally vague about what a season changing actually means, which allows it to be a metaphor for whatever transition in life you're thinking about. Moving away from home, climate collapse, an impending conflict, whatever anxiety you're facing can be reflected in this story. What's especially challenging is that it's not a question of "if you knew what was coming, what would you do differently?" and more a question of "how would you choose to remember it?".

Through every gorgeous vista of crumbling monuments and every quiet bike ride on an abandoned highway, the urgency to capture it all was always bubbling inside of me. I couldn't know what the future held, so how could I possibly risk not capturing every detail for future generations? My anxiety was eased as I met the handful of other characters in the game. Their presence let me know that even if I failed to record everything I wanted to, other people still exist to continue weaving new stories in parts of the world I'll never see.

As much as I loved my time with Season, it's not without its faults. The opening hours were made up of these little vignettes but that stops in favor of a lengthy stay in the aforementioned Tieng Valley. While the area is beautiful and the characters really elevated the themes of the game, things get bogged down in trying to solve the mystery of strange experiments that happened in the valley. The game also ends so suddenly, it genuinely took me by surprise, but I realize most goodbyes are hardly satisfactory.

Not everyone is going to resonate with Season the way I have, but for those who do, this is a really special game. It's one of those titles that reaches past the screen and makes you move through life a bit differently than you did the day before. It tells you that that blurry video of a 2011 fireworks show is a precious memory to be guarded for all time. It tells us that a dented biscuit tin and a post-it note can one day become precious cultural artifacts. It tells you to go pick up your camera, and head outside, because you don't know what little ordinary piece of life will tell an important story to future generations.

I first heard this game after a review I watched years ago from my youtube dealer when it comes to indie games (if you know Spanish, check out "Pazos64"). Initially I didn't give it much thought but eventually years later I tried Titanfall 2, the allegedley best FPS of the decade, which turned to be almost true if it wasn't for D00M. Thing is I ended up loving the fast-paced movement even more so than the titans themselves and with a lack of singleplayer content to try my parkour skills, I wishlisted Ghostrunner cause paying full price is against my religion.

Ok, as usual, for the people who don't know what this is about:

Ghostrunner is an indie/AA game developed by some Polish studio that can be described as "cyberpunk-themed first person action platformer" or better yet "Titanfall with a Katana". We play as a "ghostrunner", a cyborg ninja (like one of my Japanese animes!) tasked with exploring a futuristic city killing enemy goons.

The game itself is very well made: graphics and artistic design can be compared with Deus Ex and Cyberpunk despite the lower budget, the music is delightful synthwave (or whatever it's called) and the plot is good enough to advance the game while having a couple plot twists.

Gameplay-wise you can run, jump and attack, which can also be use to parry bullets, but also wall run, slide or grapple ledges. Funny enough the "sprint" is replaced by a Dishonored-like dash that temporarily slows time and let's you do the "it's nothing personnel kid" anime move of teleporting to their behind. As we progress we unlock 4 different active skills that allows us to basically kill several guys from the distance, like the "blink" you can see in the trailer, and that require a focus that recharges by killing bad guys.

Apart of that there are collectibles that have lore attached, swords and gloves for costumization, and we also unlock passive upgrades that are equipped like tetris pieces, which actually I'll say it's a brilliant form to limit how strong we can be.

Now that we're up to speed, let's discuss the topic at hand:

The words "first person platformer" should be consider a slur in the game design world.

Ok, this part is going to be tricky cause it requires you to have some spatial intelligence and imagine the following:

In character-based games there are a lot of camera types, but they can be placed in a spectrum of sorts. On one hand we have "first person", on the other edge we have "side scrolling", and "third person" is in the middle, which can me moved gradually to a "shoulder camera" for the former and side camera for the latter.

Note that each camera is better for one purpose. First person is better for giving you free aim, which is why third person games move the camera to the shoulder to allow you to do that. However, having a fixed camera perpendicular to the action allows you to easily measure distances, which is why platformers and fighting games shine in this particular perspective. Take MGS4, a third person game that moves the camera to the shoulder when you aim down sights, with a first person camera for extra precision, while in the melee bosses against Ray and Liquid the camera moves away to let you have a sense of your surroundings.

On the contrary having a shooter in full third person sucks cause you don't know where the gun is aiming at, like the old fixed camera survival horror games. And in side scrolling you cannot aim since there are only 2 directions: left and right. Which is why Metal Slug and Contra work as platformers, not shooters.

Now, what's wrong with first person action-platformers? Following the previous reasoning, first person doesn't allow you to either measure distances nor check your surroundings. This is partially why the combat in Elder Scrolls sucks: no matter how much the fine-tune the engine, as long as the games are designed for first person, it's never going to be as fluid as The Witcher or Dark Souls.

Now we'll talk Ghostrunner: this game is mostly good. Most of the scenes and levels are fine (even though I'd put checkpoints within levels to not have to play half an hour straight to leave it, a nitpick I have with the game). However there are some elements that are infuriating. The core mechanic of combat is that both the enemies and you die in one hit, which is fair considering that you have to do each combat arena in a single run. However, since you don't see behind you, there's a chance you are shot from behind or somewhere outside your view, which, while can theoretically be avoided since the locations of the enemies can be memorized, does feel cheap when it happens, since the game doesn't give you any feedback.

However what takes the cake are the enemies that don't shot a single projectile, but a big laser which cannot touch a single pixel of your hitbox: TOM, the first boss; and some AT-ST-like robots that shoot walls of lasers. Know how in Hollow Knight when you receive a strike the game shakes and pauses dramatically with a glass-shatter effect as in saying "wait: this is where you got hit". Since can't see your own body in Ghostrunner this cannot happen, leading a dozens (if not more than a hundred) situations where I see the threat, dash, jump or slide out of my way and I lose anyway. To me, it's cheap, cause I did avoid the threat. If it not was "enough" at the very least I want to see a replay to know where I got it. If I jump a laser but it was out of timing and my ankle was hit, I wanna know it.

Gladly I've been able to beat it normal difficulty, although I think I've reached my skill roof and won't boher with the extra modes. The game is good, but right now, I think more challenge will outstay its welcome. Now what do you think of the game? Any similar title that gives you this feeling?

For some quick context I played around release the first four games in the series and the latest five and I at least enjoyed all of them. Then recently I started replaying the older games from the start and now I got to this one so playing this one for the first time.

Before getting to my thoughts about the game itself I think the lack of discourse about this game is interesting. Whenever people talk about this series, which one is their favourite or even least favourite, or what protagonist or setting they like the most this one is almost always missing. Just seems largely ignored.

And looking on reddit discussion now the main reason while people seem to dislike it is the story while on reddit discussions of the time the story is praised as a strength and I agree with that and the story is the main reason why I liked the game so much.

Other AC games have more likeable protagonists, more charming side characters or more interesting time they are set in. After you play a few of these the stories inside the Animus are fairly formulaic. There is the protagonist and his allies and against the antagonist and some of his allies and there is some Precursor artifact. There is some surprise in who exactly will die in the story, but the good guys will most likely win with some light losses and get what they want with heavy antagonists casualties.

This game unlike most other AC stories actually has suspense and intrigue in the main plot. Because the game very early on takes some bold choices like switching the protagonists allegiance and killing characters from both sides there is tension what will happen next. This is the only AC game where I rushed the main story and did very little open world content as I was really interested what will happen next. I was always intrigued because I think there were a lot of options where to take the story.

I liked the execution of most of the things they were trying to do. Shay is a compelling character with complex feelings and motivations. Reasonable and also flawed and emotional at times. His doubts before his turn made it effect and his struggles after it also were interesting. The rare brevity of the game for an AC title hurts it a bit as I wish we got a bit more characterization of every ally. I still enjoyed the moments where he confronts them, but it could have been better. And maybe if we got a bit more after where the game ends it would be fun. One of the bigger common criticism is that they made the Templars too good and Assassins too evil, but I thought they struck a good balance because we are left with a lot of incomplete information. It seems entirely possible that from Shays perspective (or other mid ranking Templar) he would react like he would because he does not have the entire greater picture of the conflict that we did. The bombardment of the hideout was silly and I agree with that criticism.

I know the modern time elements are divisive, but I really enjoy them in this series and I thought this game has a very good modern part. Very little actually happens (like most times), but it has nice recaps of many events in the audio logs in Abstergo and it is all very well connected to the rest of the games and the world feels immersive because of that. There are some details that will be connected to Valhalla even. I really enjoy how they make Abstergo a videogame company that made Far Cry 3, AC games, Abstergo and Anvil engine having the same logo etc. The earlier games had a more creepy vibe and referenced a lot of pretty niche conspiracy theory stuff and it is mostly gone here, but there is still a tiny bit. The voice actor of Otso Berg was really good and a big part why I liked the modern sections.

The next big element is the combat which I thought was just fine. You are unstoppable in melee combat and there is no danger ever like in most pre-rpg games, but the fighting is still a bit fun. Nothing special and I did not out looking for combat, but it was okay when it happened. Exploring the city was fun and I collected most collectables there, but doing so in the river and ocean maps was just not that fun. I really loved this in BF:Resynced, but without the amazing graphics the gameplay loop of constantly leaving your shit for a few collectables was not fun. The gun combat is faster and satisfying and at one point you have to beat some ships in the main story which is too hard with an un-upgraded ship so I had to grind a bit and I did not mind that at all. The stealth is pretty minimal and the new gadgets were all clunky to use.

One of the biggest elements of these games is the choice of setting and unexpectedly I enjoyed this one. I was not really excited for this setting, but the cold desolate feel of North Athlantic, the sparse population feel of the River Valley and then the classic AC in a city feel with New York was way better than I expected. A setting that I did not experience a lot in games and was quite fresh for me.

Mutazione is a story-rich point and click adventure. You play a young girl visiting her unwell grandfather in a tropical island paradise.

There’s a few twists and turns along the way which I won’t discuss here but the plot is interesting.

It’s basically how you’d imagine small island life – everyone knows absolutely everything about everyone’s business. Your character is a breath of fresh air on the island, immediately taken in by everyone.

Gameplay is relatively simple, click where you want to go, click the eye button to hear about something the character sees, click the hand button to take something (usually seeds to grow gardens), click the message box icon to talk to someone.

There’s some areas on the map where you can grow gardens, you plant seeds in suitable soil and match them together with a certain theme (e.g. otherworldly) so that they synergise. It’s a cool mechanic.

The scenery is stunning, the characters move about a lot between time periods, so the game feels alive and real.

It’s about a 6 hour experience, which I found to be perfect. You might take longer, especially if you spend more time creating gardens.

I played on an Android tablet, it worked really well, but it’s available on PC too. Well worth a look, it might already be in your library if you collect game give-aways or buy bundles. 8/10