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But a [Fallen Order] sequel could inject some personality into [its characters], and if it focuses up on polishing a smaller feature-set - instead of doing a mediocre job of imitating four different genres - I could absolutely see Respawn delivering a Jedi iteration that's truly exciting from start to finish.
That was my wishful, optimistic hypothesis three years ago. But I guess the simpler and more-likely outcome for Star Wars Jedi: Survivor was always going to be "more of the same" and, yeah, that's what it is.
Just like its predecessor, Survivor crams together Dark Souls map mechanics and stamina-based combat, poorly-interconnected worlds that "can" be revisited but aren't worth the effort, clunkily-controlled Uncharted action sequences, and a story with some well-acted scenes but which lacks an overall compelling (or coherent) plot.
The resulting mess is, well, it's kinda like when a game looks beautiful in a screenshot -- but real-time motion suffers from awful framerates or glitchy visual effects. What I mean is, there are sweet moments in Survivor - wall-running through a canyon, force-pulling a structure down to crush stormtroopers - and when you see intriguing landmarks on the horizon, hear an NPC talk about some side-story, or survey points of interest on the map, it feels like the game is promising a whole lot more exciting content.
But those promises are consistently let down by repetitive and punishing fights; by unclear and inconsistent platforming behavior; by underwhelming puzzle and exploration rewards (yeah, more lightsaber cosmetics!); and by a weirdly-paced story which is only really memorable for how absurd its third-act twist is.
... and by some truly incredible technical issues, even though post-release patches have made some progress, there are still glaring problems. My living room setup's GPU (AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT w/ 8GB VRAM), for example, just wouldn't load most textures (like other reports around the interweb: 1, 2, 3), making many sections of the game literally unplayable due to visual unclarity; I had to stream it from a different PC instead.
(no, this isn't what it's supposed to look like.)
As before, maybe a Souls superfan will get something out of this - particularly the unforgiving combat, which can be downright relentless as the game proceeds, like the Jedha Archive Darth Vader encounter was too tough for me even on "Padawan" difficulty - but otherwise, there's not much here to praise. I'm already struggling to remember those set-piece "sweet moments," days later.
If somehow, despite crippling layoffs, there does end up being a third Cal Kestis game: I don't expect it to be any different.
... what was I doing here again? ... was it building a dark matter factory? No! that's right, I was blogging about video games.
Satisfactory has consumed me over the past couple months, late into the night connecting assembly lines, and early the next morning calculating production requirements for a milestone part. It's got that same "just one more step" addictiveness that Factorio hooked me on -- and while it's easy to summarize Satisfactory as first-person Factorio, there are some differences which help sustain that addiction even longer.
One is its world map, meaning, it has a world map: a deterministic and (at least partially) hand-crafted arrangement of diverse geographic features and landmarks. It's no Hyrule or Toussaint, there's not much "story" to weave into it, but Satisfactory's map is varied and intriguing enough that - while you're searching for more resources or tracking rare collectibles - there's a sense of "new," of freshness that comes from exploring (then exploiting) its nooks and crannies.
The terrain makes great use of verticality, not just for visually-awesome cliffside beaches and towering rock pillars, but as a basis for construction gameplay. Like Factorio, Satisfactory makes you rely heavily on conveyor belts to move materials around; but being able to build them in 3D space, and thread conveyors around hills and through valleys and even caves! adds another fun, well, dimension to the construction game.
(Although I do wish Satisfactory would make it easier to build ultra-long conveyor lines, 'cause having to draw out one segment under the length limit, then another, then another... can be a bit tedious.)
Satisfactory also includes some non-conveyor-belt logistical solutions, but - with the exception of a train line that supplied distant resources to my "main" factory complex - I wasn't very compelled to use them. (I had a cargo truck following a programmed path, for a bit, but that was more trouble than it was worth; and I never even bothered trying the late-game delivery drones.)
One more non-obvious difference between Satisfactory and Factorio is combat: there are hostile alien creeps in this game, including some absolutely hateful and GIANT jumping spiders, but they naturally avoid your buildings. You need weapons to defend yourself while exploring, but your factories don't require any defensive fortification, and you're always safe while hanging out around machinery.
That enables some coziness while you're building out factories and manually assembling parts, which is ... pretty great! It may seem strange that "idling" is a positive feature of the game, since it can detract from "automating" and "optimizing" objectives -- but being able to chill and take it slow is actually kinda nice.
Like I said, first-person Factorio is a straightforward - if reductive - way to sum up Satisfactory; it scratches the same itch, but has more staying power thanks to a well-crafted world and flexible mechanical design. Almost 200 hours later, I sure am satisfied.
I was less-pleasantly surprised by just how shitty its (il)logical puzzles are. I've lamented this before - "sometimes-confounding evidence solutions" (Trials and Tribulations), "leap-of-logic evidence puzzles" (Apollo Justice), "expected connections are a leap too far" (Edgeworth's last game) - but I don't think any Ace Attorney game's been quite this bad. MaybeProfessor Layton vs. Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney was worse; it's hard to remember.
It's worth spoiling one of the first chapter's deduction puzzles to prove my point. While investigating an attempted assassination:
One clue is a photograph of the target, flanked by bodyguards, with a bright red dot on his forehead.
Another clue is a red laser pointer found at the scene.
Can Edgeworth deduce that the red dot was painted by the laser pointer? No; he must first connect that photo to another image, from a newspaper article about the target, to deduce that the red dot is not a birthmark.
...
Investigations 2 is littered with counter-intuitive puzzles like this, deductions that seem unnecessarily obvious or evidence connections that aren't foreshadowed or hinted at all. And then there's Mind Chess, which despite being a thematically-awesome idea...
... uses mechanical rules that are never explained very well (I don't feel like I really "got" it until the game's 4th chapter), and punishes wrong guesses by rewinding - forcing you to re-attempt - multiple dialog-tree choices.
Bring a guide. You'll need some outside help to resolve these investigations.
And they're worth resolving! That's the thing: in spite of its mechanical frustrations, this "Prosecutor's Gambit" absolutely pays off.
In my last post, I called out the previous game's "sincerely confusing" chronology; Investigations 2 tells its story in-order, and also uses flashback scenes in sensible, clever ways -- fleshing out a years-old case with Edgeworth's dad, as it relates to a present-day investigation of similar scenes and characters.
I also griped that protagonist Miles Edgeworth saw "very little character growth" in his first game; Investigations 2 challenges Miles to learn from his reunion with Phoenix, to do more than simply move past his old "perfect prosecutor" ways and really question how he can serve the goal of justice.
(His character development here adds an exciting, satisfying dimension to the more-experienced Edgeworth we see in Dual Destinies and Spirit of Justice.)
I also complained that in the first Investigations, without a regular courtroom or witness stand, supporting characters tended to "feel picked-up and then thrown-away"; Investigations 2 more deliberately and more frequently replicates an Ace Attorney "courtroom feel" when interrogating subjects in the field, developing their stories and stressing-out their personalities over multiple rounds of dialog combat. It even has a traveling judge!
Investigations 2 totally paves over its predecessors' narrative gaps, on top of maintaining this franchise's flair for delightfully absurd characters...
... and for, I can't say this enough, expert localization that positively oozes personality and charm.
This may be my favorite Ace Attorney soundtrack, to boot. Especially when Edgeworth is pushing his cross-examination (and Mind Chess) opponents hardest, this music is some of the pulse-pounding-est that Capcom's ever produced, more thrilling than Apollo Justice or even Mega Man ZX. I've never been so pumped to click dialog choices and watch text appear in a box.
I'm so glad to have finally played Edgeworth's story -- and that's really what Investigations 2 feels like, regardless of recurring guests like Gumshoe and Larry, regardless of references to other games' cases. This is a story about Miles Edgeworth, standing proud and strong on his own.
Edgeworth's side-view investigation scenes work better on a big screen: where hunting for clues on an NDS touchscreen was a fiddly squint-and-poke exercise, now there's plenty of room to walk around and much more detailed art to grab your eye.
Likewise, high-resolution character portraits and backgrounds let this game lean farther than it once did into the Ace Attorney franchise's flair for drama.
As always, Ace Attorney shines when its absurd characters are front and center -- but Edgeworth's cases just don't exploit that as much as Phoenix's and Apollo's. Although investigation scenes do include Cross Examination-like dialog combat, and Edgeworth's opponents react bombastically when their contradictions are pointed out, the game almost never uses these in sequence to continue building tension. Instead, most witnesses or suspects tend to feel picked-up and then thrown-away before their character has had a chance to develop.
Edgeworth himself experiences very little character growth, only showing slight development in the final chapter by begrudgingly acknowledging the "turnabout" logic championed by his blue-suited friend. (Who goes weirdly unnamed, despite other cameo guest appearances.)
Not that a deep-dive into Edgeworth's story would be easy to follow, anyway, as this game's chronology is sincerely confusing: its 2nd and 3rd chapters take place before the 1st, then after a 4th-chapter flashback to years earlier, chapter 5 picks back up where chapter 1 left off. I don't think the order of narrative events needed to be this disjointed; I think the game was just poorly paced.
And so long as I'm being negative, same as I lamented in 2010, the "Logic" mechanic of connecting clues to reach a conclusion is neat when it works but often feels like bullshit. Many of the game's expected connections are a leap too far, or alternatively so obvious that I couldn't believe Edgeworth needed help to reach the conclusion.
So yeah, this is definitely a weaker Ace Attorney game, between mechanical awkwardness and rough story pacing and lack of memorable characterization. But like I said at the top, remaking its character art and its investigation scenes in high definition succeeds in elevating Ace Attorney Investigations to feel more at-home among its courtroom peers.
The rogue-like genre, or more abstractly resetting progress as a game mechanic, isn't generally my thing. But sometimes a die-and-retry game does something cool enough to suck me in, like Middle-earth: Shadow of War - Desolation of Mordor's Batman-like gadgets. In God of War Ragnarök: Valhalla's case, it was story.
It seems light at first: Valhalla's premise, set after the events of God of War Ragnarök, is a thin mystery (who invited Kratos to Valhalla?) and a gradually-revealed post-ending beat (Freya setting Kratos up as the new, uh, God of War).
But as you push farther into Valhalla's labyrinth, a more meaningful narrative's dots start to connect -- referencing Kratos's previous exploits in Greece, his regret and guilt, and his desire to "be better."
It does struggle a bit with, well, the passage of time; I can barely remember what Kratos did 15-20 years ago on PS2. But Valhalla uses its Kratos-and-Mimir banter and some animated flashback scenes to recap the relevant points.
(Valhalla also re-introduces the Blade of Olympus weapon as a Rage ability, which is fucking rad.)
I'm still not a huge fan of re-playing combat gauntlets with randomized upgrades - which is why I only bothered with Valhalla's easiest "Show Me Will" difficulty - but this DLC mode gave me the narrative content I wanted without wearing out its welcome.
After 50 more hours of following Kratos and Atreus across the realms, meeting new mythic figures - including Freya's hard-partying brother Freyr, and an endearingly-sarcastic Odin (bless you Richard Schiff) - defeating more fantastic monsters, fulfilling more dramatic prophecies, and watching father and son (and dwarf friends! and severed-head counsel!) develop more character through emotional conflicts, I wouldn't say that God of War Ragnarök is "better" or "worse" than its 2018 predecessor.
Ragnarok is the same kind of game, but its strengths and weaknesses are a little different.
It's bigger, covering more ground and involving more personalities than the journey to Jotunheim -- and though some of Ragnarok's locations and characters are still minor (see: Helheim, Fey), most of them are really significant and meaningful, with copious amounts of environment traversal and collectible objectives and voice-acted dialog.
This amount of written narrative prevents the story from having a focused, emotional poignancy like Kratos and Atreus's earlier tale. Ragnarok has heartstring-tugging story beats, and it succeeds in showing characters' personal struggles and growth; the ending even provides them with satisfying closure (bittersweet, in some cases). But its cast is just too big, and those character arcs too numerous, for any one of them to be "the" story ultimately tying the game together.
Occasionally those individual arcs also disrupt the game's pacing, by spending too much time stuck in one place. Ragnarok's main story quest has many sequences which "railroad" you into a linear series of objectives, without a free-roam break, while one NPC or another tags along as a temporary companion. And although the new companions are refreshing at first, some of those mission sequences go on way too long and wear out their location's welcome.
On the other hand: the glut of optional content in Ragnarok's wide and varied worlds is a lot of fun to play in. The last game's Lake of Nine was a contained, but rich and enjoyable area to explore -- this time there are more, and they're still great. Vanaheim's jungle and "crater" regions, Alfheim's desert barrens, Svartalfheim's claustrophobic dwarf mines and industrialized bay, plus Midgard's now-frozen-over lake ... are all chock-full of high-quality side-stories and puzzles and collectibles.
On top of which, Ragnarok's post-game quests avoid the extended grindiness of last time, what I recently called"multiple tedious runs through Muspelheim and Niflheim." Well... this Muspelheim is still a little repetitive, but I got all the equipment-upgrade materials I needed much more quickly than before.
(I haven't tried the post-launch Valhalla mode yet, though; maybe that's where the grind is.)
As before, there's probably more combat than a narrative-motivated player like me really wants. And the complexity of this game's equipment customization is no better -- Ragnarok smartly eliminates per-armor enchantments, but foolishly adds more armor slots as well as more customizations for Atreus (and his occasional Freya stand-in). But playing on "Give Me A Story" difficulty saved me from having to worry too much about either of those gripes.
In the end, I may not remember Ragnarok's story as fondly as the previous game's, but it was still a thrilling adventure and the amount and quality of sidequests definitely make up for it. As far as world-ending prophecies go, this was a pretty good one.
That is, it's a metroidvania schmup: you're a little spaceship cruising through an interconnected map with progressively-unblocked obstacles. And it has RPG elements! Shoot enemies and environment elements (like bushes and ... clay pots?) to earn experience, level-up to upgrade shot damage and range and movement speed, delve into dungeons and defeat bosses to unlock new abilities, use those abilities to open new areas and do it all over again.
Its soothing color palette and cozy-feeling starting area belie how bullet-hell-ey some encounters can get, and they're a little more hell than I'd like, even on the easy "Explorer" mode. Especially in the early game, when you're low on max health and ability upgrades, fights with screen-filling bullets can feel unfair. But those frustrations do fade as the game goes on, and you become better able to handle (or avoid) getting hit.
And the open-ish world is a lot of fun to fly around in, full of slightly-hidden secrets to find and power-ups to accumulate. It's a great fix for a map-exploration addict like myself.
It's a new year, and you know what that means: a look back at last year and how my gaming habits have or haven't changed. They haven't. Or ... have they?
Well, I did glog about more games in 2024 (32) than I did in 2023 (20):
Though as the next chart shows, replays accounted for a sizeable chunk of that -- 14 games, 44%! I sampled so many remasters and multi-game collections (of remasters) last year that I felt the need to make glog code changes to better-organize posts about them.
All of them were enthralling adventures, and they all played great on my hardware, Forbidden West in particular happily eating up tons of my playtime. Silly PSN logins aside, Sony is doing pretty great by their PC releases. I'll probably never need a PS5 after all.
I also replayed some less-recent titles last year -- originally from 3DS, NDS, and even GBA.
But! But, revisiting Soma Cruz's castle-dives, 2003's Aria of Sorrow and 2005's Dawn of Sorrow, struck the right mechanical notes and still felt fun to play two decades later. Though they do show their age, in terms of stilted storytelling and missing quality-of-life features -- stoking my desire for the next 'vania that I can only assume IGA is working on.
Those remaster collections accounted for most of my 2024 replays, but for one outlier: Voxelgram, which I re-installed for the sake of some new DLC. And I was pleasantly surprised to find post-release updates added puzzles to the base game, too.
Which is a great segue to the DLCs I played in 2024:
That Voxelgram DLC was a treat, but most notable was surely Horizon Forbidden West: Burning Shores. Even though its story couldn't top Forbidden West's (just like Frozen Wilds and Zero Dawn before it), Burning Shores nevertheless added some worthwhile side-missions and Jurassic Park references to Aloy's SoCal adventure.
Other expansions and DLCs I played in 2024 weren't very remarkable: Chloe and Nadine's Lost Legacy still counts as an expansion to Uncharted 4 (sort-of a technicality), and there were two Meh DLCs to the Meh Saints Row reboot. Let's talk more about that Meh-ness.
Other Meh let-downs of 2024 included NieR: Automata, which I think has an interesting plot, but was a slog to get through; and No Man's Sky, whose post-release redemption arc just couldn't make up for boring, chore-ish gameplay.
There were even more Good bright spots last year, though, like Dave the Diver's amusing series of fish-related diversions; Palworld's impressive (if rough) monster-wrangling-base-building hybrid; Cat Quest III's light-hearted cat and pirate puns; and Logiart Grimoire's hours and hours of soothing puzzle grids.
And though most of my Awesome highlights in 2024 were replays of games that I already loved, there were a couple new stand-outs:
The Talos Principle II expertly expanded on its predecessor's gameplay and storytelling, I mean, I can't commend Croteam enough for taking the risk of populating their post-apocalypse with NPC personalities. And they did it! The madmen, they managed to build some genuinely compelling characters here, characters who take this sequel's philosophy-informed narrative beyond the brilliant original.
And Satisfactory has finally hit its 1.0 release; if it at all resembles my experience with Factorio, that's likely to become an unhealthy obsession for some time.
Here's to another year of getting lost in exotic digital worlds, meeting eccentric characters, and writing flippant blog posts about them.
Logiart Grimoire is a solid nonogram game -- as should be expected, given Jupiter's pedigree. It's loaded with puzzles, 280 just in the main mode!, including some pretty damn big grids, up to 40x30 at their biggest.
But... it's just puzzles.
I'd hoped for more from the game's "story," that its magical mystery tome would set up a narrative adventure like Murder by Numbers, or at least some entertaining characters like Khimera: Puzzle Island. Instead, the titular grimoire is simply a thematic backdrop, and your magic assistant Emil occasionally throws in some trite flavor text.
There's also a "fusion" mechanic which uses riddle-like prompts to unlock new puzzles - like, "Water droplets are dripping steadily from above" is a prompt to select (previously-solved puzzles) Water and Wind to unlock a puzzle for Rain - but these riddles feel more like a chore than a challenge.
I kinda wish that Logiart Grimoire had more mechanical accommodations for its biggest puzzles; without a zoomed view, like Nonogram - The Greatest Painter or Pictopix, navigating huge grids is pretty fiddly and accident-prone.
But while a minimal story and scale-limiting mechanics keep Logiart Grimoire from being a great nonogram game, it's nevertheless a solid genre entry, with enough content to occupy an addict like me for 70+ hours of scanning and clicking.
I really enjoyed Kratos's lake trip the first time around, and returning to it years later has been a delight all over again.
It's just such an epic journey: following Kratos and Atreus through mythic locales and awe-inspiring events, as well as following their personal grief, struggle, and growth. The way this game combines its beautiful environment art, expressive character animations, and powerful voice acting - how all of its storytelling elements complement each other, and build holistically impactful moments - is still remarkable.
I have come down a bit, though, on God of War's combat -- in 2018 I said "... but I'm glad that there wasn't too much of it," and this time it did feel like, well, a bit much. Turning the difficulty down to easy/story mode prevents individual fights from getting frustrating, but I might've rather had fewer fights, instead. Sometimes the majesty of a set-piece felt dulled by the umpteenth wave of draugr.
(Of course it didn't help that in this playthrough, I decided to collect all the collectables and upgrade all the upgradeables, including multiple tedious runs through Muspelheim and Niflheim. That was my own fault.)
I'm also less-than-enthused about the maze of menus and submenus involved in managing Kratos's equipment and abilities; thankfully the easy setting meant I didn't need to worry about them very much.
And anyway, those annoyances are trivialized by the game's incredibly strong narrative direction, and the memorable scenes - and resonant feelings - it produces. This satisfying journey nevertheless leaves me wanting more, more of Atreus discovering his own power, more of Kratos getting angry at jackass demigods, and more of Brok and Sindri and Mimir making wisecracks while begrudgingly coming along for the ride.
I mean, that's the real reason I returned to Midgard: to prepare for Ragnarök.
