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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.
It's not an alternate perspective of the genre, like Massive Chalice. It doesn't re-theme the Civ formula like Warlock or Age of Wonders, or even twist it like Beyond Earth. This is Kirkland Signature Sid Meier's.
Military management is a little underwhelming, compared to building infrastructure and expanding your empire -- just like Civ V. The nuances of city micromanagement are fiddly and confusing -- just like Civ V. Diplomacy is mercurial, leaders rejecting simple trade proposals for no apparent reason -- just like Civ V.
And once you've got a campaign started, it's hard to put down; there's an addictive urge to play "just one more turn" -- just like Civ V.
I do think that it needs a better interface for late-game management of your over-long checklist of city details (or maybe ... fewer details to manage in the first place), so it's cool to see post-launch support like the National Economy Screen making progress in that direction.
All that said, I don't know if I've got it in me to sink more evenings and weekends into the same kind of 4X empire-building I've clicked through before.
But, I am a big fan of the online multiplayer as a "light" social experience. It's easy to process the game's prompts-to-action while shooting the breeze in voice chat (and talking shit about Queen Elizabeth).
Concluding the Dominus Collection, Order of Ecclesia thankfully brings back collectible enemy souls - as "glyphs" - and ups the sidequest ante with a village's worth of NPCs to run errands for.
But it's surprisingly hard, especially in terms of survivability; and the fragmented world map is...
... there are too many statistics. [...] Each enemy has its own weaknesses and strengths, ... the fact that some aren't [obvious] is a real stumbling block.
The pinnacle of this game's frustration is, in a late stage of a boss fight, or deep in a level trying to find the next save point, being blind-sided by something that instantly takes half your health away. [...] it's clear that OoE is a stalwart of the old-school Die And Retry game design mantra.
... most of Ecclesia is instead filled with comparatively boring micro-stages.
Seriously, look at these trivially tiny map areas:
Portrait of Ruin's sub-maps were, I assume, an attempt to build more geography than could fit in one screen-sized map. But all the miniscule maps that Ecclesia carves out, some for insignificant locations (like that pointless forest), just feel like boring filler in the way of the castle I really want to explore.
Well, at least this game (especially its NPC village) was a clear learning opportunity for IGA on his way to Bloodstained.
Portrait of Ruin's got a lot of content, in terms of geography and running length; this castle and its portraits' sub-maps include plenty of ground to cover. The disconnected-ness of those sub-maps, though, highlights how linear the game really is: a section of the castle is followed by a portrait, then another section of castle, then another portrait, then another section of castle...
An interconnected Metroidvania map can give players a feeling of freedom, of self-directed agency, when it lets you get lost in one of multiple branching routes; it can at least give the illusion of agency when it teases out-of-reach paths for you to revisit with later abilities. But the straight-line path through Portrait of Ruin's world has so little freedom, and so few of those future-ability teases, that the map hardly feels interconnected at all.
Portrait of Ruin also eschews SomaCruz's soul-collection mechanic, playing more like his games' character-swapping "Julius Mode" -- one character (Jonathan) handles whips and swords and hammers, another (Charlotte) can summon fire and lightning and ice shards. Which works, but isn't quite as exciting as mixing-and-matching your own wacky combination of soul abilities.
What's "cool," or at least was cool a couple decades ago, is that while controlling one character you can let the game fight automatically as the other. The benefits of that computer-controlled partnership are very limited though: they don't position themselves very well, and they become incapacitated fairly easily. Outside of combat they're in the way more often than they're helpful; a "jump on your partner's shoulders" move is pretty sweet, but there aren't any other team-up mobility moves like it.
And although Portrait of Ruin's equipment-collection grind is comparable to Soma's souls, it doesn't feel as satisfying because... item drops and skill-point counters aren't all that related to the monsters you're killing. Or to put it another way, in the Sorrow games each monster felt like an opportunity to get some specific power, while Portrait of Ruin's monsters feel like meaningless fodder.
Portrait of Ruin is a perfectly serviceable hack-and-slash action RPG, and there's an impressive amount of stuff to do in it. But the quality of that stuff is a bit lacking; the map isn't interesting to explore, your ability customization options are limited, and without monster-specific souls to collect, the enemies all kind-of blend together.
Aria and Dawn of Sorrow held up surprisingly well in their remakes, but revisiting this game has unfortunately spoiled my fond memories of it.
In Cat Quest III, you're not just a cat adventurer, you're a cat pirate. Why? Because the world map is split into islands, and you need a ship to traverse its ocean. Hence, pirates!
(And pi-rats, the sword-wielding rodents you'll be battling and plundering in this quest.)
Like earlier Cat Quests, this a basic action RPG: beat up enemies for experience points, find new weapons and armor to equip, follow quest markers to progress a surreal, pun-filled story. The world and its tail tale may be a little weird, but it's thoroughly light-hearted and fun to play through.
And like in Cat Quest II, you can bring a co-op partner along for this quest (though there's no AI buddy, this time). Aside from a small handful of two-player-hostile level designs - like a spike-filled maze where if your partner gets stuck, the fixed camera won't let you proceed - it's a slick and straightforward co-op experience.
Encounters are pretty un-complicated, so you don't need to coordinate or strategize much, beyond making sure that someone has the "Furry Shield" spell ready. And if a fight does get too hard, there're plenty of sidequests available to grind more experience and upgrades; bounties to hunt and hidden treasures to find.
There does seem to be less content overall than the second game had, but Cat Quest III is still getting updates -- like just this week! And everything in this game feels highly polished, finely-tuned and delightful.
(Yeah, Dratcula's Castle is a real treat for Castlevania aficionados.)
Cat Quest is a simple and fun time. I'm really looking forward to more updates; maybe there'll be some kind of Xmas update next month.
