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For a one-person indie game (ignoring the "+" for the moment), Cave Story+ is pretty impressive. It's got a healthy amount of content, its environments and abilities show some well-tuned variety, even the story feels unique, albeit simple. But - even with a studio's worth of "+" polish on top - it is still a one-person indie game.
Platforming is challenging, and not always for good reasons (slippery movement). Save points are often too far apart, which makes surprise sudden deaths (like hidden spikes!) too punishing. Some "quests" lazily ask you to go re-tread the same ground and re-fight the same enemies you just dispatched a moment ago. The game's first half sets up a hub area and interconnected routes, but the second half is a non-stop train ride that you can't really get off of.
That "surprise sudden deaths" issue comes to a head with the game's final boss, which is a phase-after-phase gauntlet of boss fights that I didn't see coming, and had no interest in re-trying when I died on (what I think is) the last part.
There were things I liked about Cave Story, punctuated by things I didn't like. The ability upgrades are pretty cool, and the shooting action is mostly fun, despite how confounding it can be to lose weapon experience. But those positives are canceled out by how poorly-connected the world map is, and by how disrespectful to my time the surprise sudden deaths are.
Its awkward screen size and poorly-written story are both off-putting, though not deal-breakers. Input-handling feels a little loose, but Valdis Story's bigger problem is that the controls don't make sense, due to both poor tutorialization (I had to read the online manual to figure out what Focus is) and counter-intuitive button mapping.
In the air, pressing Down performs a stomp move. On the ground, Down is an animation cancel and also a necessary precursor to dodging -- like, to dodge left, you press Down and then Left. There are so many unused buttons, and so many other games have the sense to implement a dodge button; why, why would you do it this way?
The game's also got a style ranking system, which might be a "plus" to action/fighting folks, but to me is just a punishment for not adapting to those bizarre controls.
What little of Valdis Story I saw was somewhat promising re: other 'vania qualities, like a sprawling world map with just-out-of-reach alternate routes, and character progression through level-ups and equipment crafting. But learning how to play the game looks like more work than I'm willing to put into it.
Aside from the ... everything, 2020 was actually a great year for the Glog. In January I resolved to aggressively tackle my backlog, and I ended up doing a damned good job of it; a couple more years like this might actually clear it out!
Last year saw the second-highest number of games Glogged since I started counting -- and that's only the number of games I "bothered" to write about.
I don't have a firm count of how many I gave up on without a post, but I will say ... the scroll bar on my Steam library is getting pretty confident in itself.
The dark side of backlog-busting is that many of those games sat unplayed for a reason - more on that in a bit - and, for palate-cleansing purposes, my 2020 gaming also included a significant amount of replaying old favorites.
Plus some brief trips back to VVVVVV for its tenth anniversary; Prince of Persia (2008) which has been officially demoted out of "old favorite" status; and Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance which was really more of a "re-attempt" (though not much of one).
But I also found time for a fair number of demos last year, and some of them were even good! Don't be surprised to read more about the full versions of Voxelgram, Batbarian, Raji: An Ancient Epic, and Midnight Protocol in the future.
On that note, it was very satisfying to see Steam evangelizing demos in its Spring, Summer, and Autumn Game Festival events. I really hope that this trend continues after in-person game conventions have resumed.
As for DLC and expansion activity, those replays ended up feeding a big chunk of it...
... between the aforementioned Ballad of Gay Tony, Harley Quinn's Revenge, and Lost Legacy replays. Last year also saw my first playthroughs of some Batman DLCs, specifically the better-than-expected Cold, Cold Heart, the worse-than-expected A Matter of Family, and the pretty-much-just-as-expected Season of Infamy: Most Wanted Expansion.
The remainder of my DLCs last year were Fallout 4's, namely Automatron, Vault-Tec Workshop, Far Harbor, and Nuka World ... that last one thoroughly wearing out the game's welcome. Bethesda's proliferation of DLC packs is a case study in what happens when you don't "leave them wanting more."
Around now is where I would normally chart my cross-platform game activity, excluding the always-unfairly-advantaged PC -- normally, that is, but last year I only played on one other platform (PS4) and most of that was replaying Uncharted.
My one non-PC, non-replay game of 2020 was the Final Fantasy VII Remake demo, which I was side-eyeing even before full-game reviews started to explain how weird it gets.
Now, a few paragraphs ago, I said that the "dark side" of spelunking into my backlog was that many games were there "for a reason." If I was being generous, I could say the reason was that they didn't quite stand out from their competitors; but if I was being real, I'd say that many just weren't good.
My game ratings for 2020 were significantly biased toward "No Rating" (which sometimes just means I'm being polite) and Meh, with a record-low proportion of Good or Awesome ratings.
Excluding replays, the only games I counted as Awesome were Pictopix (so many puzzles!) and Factorio (so many conveyor belts!).
I'll even admit - yes, admit - that Fallout 4 was good, and enjoyable, and sometimes captivating, despite how much I've ranted (and will surely rant in the future) about its various transgressions.
That said, many of the games that disappointed me in 2020 have no one to blame but themselves. Dishonored 2 and (especially) Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus failed to live up to the expectations set by their predecessors. 3030 Deathwar Redux, Cosmic Star Heroine, and Dex were all victims of out-sized ambitions, and under-delivered on their core loops. Undertale had some great ideas, like, I get it, but the game itself was clunky and boring.
Furi definitely wasn't for me. I think it might be for people who really hate themselves.
And I feel I have to make a note, for the record, on Baldur's Gate, Planescape: Torment, and Divinity: Original Sin. Between these three heavy-hitters of the classically-styled CRPG, 2020 was the year I finally realized that I'm not into this sub-genre.
Which has helped shape my gaming plans for the year ahead, vis-a-vis what portions of my backlog to focus on. As did Cyberpunk 2077's wet fart of a launch, such that I know my inevitable trip to Night City is still several months away.
Some Borderlands 3 DLCs might be part of my 2021 plan, too. And I've still got to get around to Red Dead Redemption 2, and so, so many others in that backlog. But I think I'm catching up...!
One last footnote: with Factorio 1.0 launched, and A.N.N.E. being about as complete as it's likely to get, I think I'm finally, finally done waiting on crowdfunded games. That's kind of a milestone, right?
"Moonface" is a not-in-polite-company term, right? Like, I could've sworn it was an outright slur. At any rate, it doesn't sound quite right.
PictoQuest doesn't seem like it's trying to offend, though; its translation just has a few rough spots. And other than that, the game is well-polished and mechanically solid: input handling works great (so much better than Puppy Cross's), puzzles get up to a reasonable size (20x20), and it doesn't screw around with nonsense like making you re-play a puzzle if you make a mistake.
Unfortunately the interesting parts of PictoQuest, the "quest" parts, are underwhelming. There's no story other than the establishment of ... the aforementioned villain. There's a world map with distinct regions, but your path through it is a line; one puzzle is available at a time, with the exception of a few optional side-puzzles.
Some puzzles are made up like combat encounters with stereotypical enemies, such as bats or blobs -- they'll "attack" you if you make a mistake or let their attack meter fill up, and you'll "attack" them each time you solve a row or column. Attacking the monster also pushes its attack meter back. ... in other words, you win combat by solving the puzzle with a soft time limit.
There are a small handful of combat items which can reveal parts of the puzzle (i.e. cheating the game) or slow down enemies, and you'll pick these items up gradually or can buy them using money (which also accumulates from solving puzzles). But if you're able to solve nonograms in general, these items are entirely unnecessary.
The "combat" side of a puzzle only becomes even remotely challenging when some of the biggest, 20-by-20 puzzles take a while to fill enough blocks for an entire row or column. And it would still be a stretch to call those puzzles difficult.
When you ignore its thin adventure-like elements, PictoQuest ends up being a relatively short nonogram game. Not, like, disastrously short; I just mean it's a far cry from Pictopix in terms of content.
PictoQuest isn't a bad nonogram game, but there are plenty of better ones. And its attempted integration of RPG/adventure aspects doesn't really pay off.
Borderlands 3 is a technological step forward, and it succeeds in reiterating the franchise's manic-weapons-and-zany-scenarios formula. But it barely attempts to meaningfully distinguish itself from its predecessors, and those attempts don't generally work in the threequel's favor.
I want to be clear that the core "Borderlands" gameplay - running around and shooting bandits and exploding their dumb faces - is surviving and thriving in Borderlands 3. Its character classes are powerfully distinctive. Its combat is more beautifully chaotic than ever, with what feels like a record number of enemies in every encounter. Its new environments and their corresponding enemy designs are diverse and creative, as are the random weapon drops; upgrading from one crazy weapon to another, differently-crazy one is still a blast.
But given that we're nearly a decade on from Borderlands 2 (and 5+ years from the Pre-Sequel side-story), it seems reasonable to expect Borderlands 3 to stand out from its forebears. It doesn't -- instead, it's more like a remaster of the second game, with an upgraded engine and re-skinned content. Everything it does well was also done well in Borderlands 2.
That "remaster" sensation includes some surprising failures to meet contemporary game expectations. You can't track multiple quests at a time, finding fast-travel destinations is a pain, even clicking on menu buttons with a mouse just doesn't work as well as it should. (Which is especially confounding since the game has been released on PC for over a year, now.)
And, while there are a few stand-out moments in Borderlands 3's narrative - here I'm thinking particularly of Ice-T's and Penn and Teller's amazing guest spots - it overall falls short of the bar set by Handsome Jack's tale. Troy and Tyreen are lackluster villains (more annoying than anything else), cutscenes distractingly railroad the story away from you, late-game plot revelations fall flat, and even cameos from series favorites like Tiny Tina (who's less tiny, now) are disappointingly short-lived.
Also, what the hell happened to the "effervescent" items showed off in Borderlands 2: Commander Lilith and the Fight for Sanctuary? I thought that teasing those super-shiny guns for the third game was, like, the whole point of that DLC.
... but I digress.
The problem isn't that Borderlands 3 is un-fun -- it is fun. In terms of moment-to-moment gameplay, it's as fun as the series has ever been. It just seems like it's still lingering in the shadow of Borderlands 2.
I know that I've impulse-purchased somequestionablegames, but this year - as I've made a concerted effort to clean up my backlog - it's struck me just how many poor purchasing decisions are in there.
Enter Onikira: Demon Killer. Why did I buy this? Maybe because its screenshots look shiny and colorful, like Muramasa: The Demon Blade? Evidently I didn't pay enough attention to the Steam reviews, or I would have considered that Onikira might have quality control issues.
The context in the previous screen doesn't turn that subtitle into a question. That's just a typo.
Only a few minutes with Onikira was enough to convince me to uninstall. It's a sloppy implementation of a game I've played and gotten tired of many times before. (Shaq Fu being a recent and poignant example.)
It's somewhat fulfilling to clear the trash out of my backlog, but as I'll describe in my upcoming year-end review, games like this are why I frequently return to known quantities like Batman and GTA.
Progress: Didn't even make it through the tutorial.
Recursed is a pretty great brain-twister, with a strong central theme - resembling the idea of stack-based scope, plus occasional recursion into that stack, hence the game's title - and a surprising variety of mechanics layered on top.
Jumping into a treasure chest enters a new room, and entering a room resets its state. For example: There are two locked doors in front of you, and a chest leading to a room with a key; you go into the chest, pick up the key, jump back out, use the key on the first lock, go into the chest again, pick up the key again, jump out again, and use the second key on the second lock. Make sense?
You can also pick up the treasure chest, and carry it into a new room -- changing the path to that chest, and hence the path to resetting its state. Imagine if the chest leading to the key was "before" the room with the locked doors; that would mean each time you grab a key and bring it to the lock-room, the locks have been reset. So you'd need to pick up the chest with the key-room, and move it into the lock-room, so that the lock-room's state can be retained while you're retrieving each key.
And that's just the beginning, before rooms start having variable water levels and stateful objects. Recursed isn't afraid of throwing some pretty tough puzzles at you; but I wouldn't say that they're intimidating or obtuse, like Dyo could be. Recursed's puzzles are generally good at making their solutions appear within reach, given a few minutes of staring at each room and poking around.
But they're mentally exhausting, and I can only do a handful in one sitting before I need to take a break. Keeping track of all the state involved in a given puzzle, and plotting a route through its myriad permutations, is work.
That's why I've kept hesitating to dive back into Recursed since ... June, and why I'm now deciding to move on with my life.
Maybe a more-substantial story could have helped string me along, but it's not like Recursed is "bad," or lacking in good puzzle ideas. It just takes more effort than I'd like.
(I will throw a little shade at the game's "restart crow," which is supposed to tell you when the level has become unsolvable and you need to reset. I don't think it shows up as often as it should. ... or maybe I'm not as smart as I thought? No, that can't be it.)
That's why it's been sitting in my "Playing" section for the last 11 months.
The good news is that, when I finally did jump back into Hallownest, it didn't feel like I'd missed much. For all its ability unlocks and upgrades and technical nuance... for all the progression in Hollow Knight, its fundamentals stay pretty simple. Attack, jump, dodge. I fully expected my return trip to end in a quick death -- but I actually made progress, uncovered some new territory, and it wasn't long before I'd knocked off the Dreamers that'd been haunting my world map since last year.
Hollow Knight's literally-dark aesthetics and eldritch lore can make the thought of delving its depths intimidating. (Especially in Deepnest. With the low visibility and the crawling noises and the surprise spiders.) Hell, last time I said that I "lacked the courage" to keep going. So it was really ... comforting, I guess, that a little bravery was enough to get me back in the game.
And "when it works," which is most of the time, Hollow Knight delivers a sharply-focused take on the Metroidvania subgenre. The joy of discovering a new room, or of finally unlocking a door you've passed by, is even more poignant in the face of Hallownest's dark and mysterious hostility.
After I gathered some more upgrades, I even went back to the Hive to get revenge on those motherfuckin' bees! That felt pretty great.
But there is a, er, "dark" side to Hollow Knight that goes beyond its pitch-black environments and sometimes-evil challenges. Its sense of mystery is a double-edged sword: many of its opportunities for advancement or improvement are hidden so well that I'd never have found them without internet guidance. Even a significant chunk of late-game content is devilishly concealed.
It doesn't help that traversing the game's massive map, to scour it for missed secrets, is fairly inconvenient. While Hallownest does offer some fast travel options in its Stagways and Tram, big sections of it are still several lengthy rooms - and several annoying fights - removed from travel points.
Also, the sometimes-evil challenges are ... evil, sometimes. Many hazards or encounters seem to hit you out of nowhere. Most bosses are, just, complete assholes. The White Palace is some Super Meat Boy kinda shit. Checkpoint and save-bench placements aren't brutally unfair, but still feel more punishing than they need to be.
Ultimately I would say that my successes in Hollow Knight had less to do with my timing or reflexes, and more to do with my studious investments in health and damage upgrades.
Which isn't a bad thing, is it? I mean, I wanna be clear, that while I can complain about some frustrating encounters and not enough fast-travel nodes -- I had a lot of fun poking around the map, unlocking new abilities, and increasing the Knight's mastery over this dark fantasy world.
Its expertly-crafted content misses the mark just a bit for its hostility toward my desire for exploration, and the amount of back-tracking involved in routine travel.
Also, the story just didn't make sense. Even after reading a synopsis online, I've got no investment in the Pale King or the dreamscape or whatever the hell this plot was supposed to be about.
Its got a deep world-mythos, for one. Not unlike your Espers or your Mako, the setting of Masquerada is steeped in an original mythology which shapes the game's characters and events; and the protagonists discover dramatic truths about that mythology as the story proceeds.
The game has an introductory problem, with an overload of mytho-babble about mascherines and Contadani and The Registry and other buzzwords that haven't been explained yet. But the pieces come together after the first hour or so, and as the plot's central mystery takes off, that initial sense of confusion turns into a hunger to learn more about this magical world.
Through a handy Mass Effect-style in-game codex, lore-nerds like myself can spend a large chunk of playtime reading background exposition and well-written, in-character anecdotes.
Something Masquerada does really well - and which I'd call hit-or-miss in Square Enix's games - is humanizing its characters, creating compelling bridges between the player and this unfamiliar world. It doesn't just use class struggle as a narrative theme, it moulds character personalities around their troubled upbringings; while there are political events that drive the story, those events and their consequences are rooted in personal motives and emotions.
It helps that the game's writing and voice acting are stellar. A lot of "gameplay" time (maybe even most of it) is spent in conversation, and little of that time feels wasted, but it's also not overly pragmatic or rushed. Masquerada's spoken dialog delivers pathos without being melodramatic, which is impressive for any game production.
That being said, I'd stop short of calling the story itself a masterpiece -- while it's told well, the greater mythology plot can be somewhat dry, and some points remain conspicuously unexplained (or at least unfinished) in the end. The game's resolution fulfilled my interest in its characters, but not so much in its fantasy world.
Another way in which Masquerada reminds me of Final Fantasy is its combat: not because of mechanical similarities, but because while Masqerada's tactical action is somewhat deep and intricate, it is so easy that it's handily overshadowed by the game's other elements.
In fact, more-so than in most other RPGs, Masquerada's combat gameplay ultimately feels inconsequential to its entertainment value. I actually really like the mechanical designs of no-experience-points skill upgrades and low-impact equipment options, while I simultaneously disliked how chaotic the battlefield could get (causing problems when trying to click on a specific target); but in the end, it hardly mattered how well or how poorly I did in combat.
Of the small number of times I party-wiped, they were all due to bad positioning and getting flanked by the enemy. So long as I kept my party together and kept clicking my ability buttons, there was never anything to worry about.
When you disregard combat, there isn't much left to Masquerada other than walking through the map toward the next story beat (and optionally collecting lore to read in the pause menu). Which makes it sound like an isometric-3/4-view visual novel ... which isn't entirely off-base.
What else? Well, the music is a mixed bag, with some tracks greatly evocative of "mystery" or "action" but others that are tediously operatic and hymn-like. And animated character portraits do an excellent job of helping characters emote, while the field graphics are just fine, nothing particularly good or bad to note.
Considering that Masquerada's writing and story presentation are far and away the stars of this show, it's remarkable how much work clearly went into other aspects of the game. The map is filled with colorful NPCs and even dynamic physics objects, but NPCs' idle chatter is totally meaningless, and those physics objects have no impact on how you play the game. And though the combat mechanics are super-detailed, those details are practically irrelevant to the outcome.
It makes me feel a little bad for the people who worked on those parts of the game; their admirable design considerations and attention to detail didn't really pay off. But Masquerada was nevertheless a satisfying experience, due to its well-grounded, and well-told, fantasy story.
I've done quite a bit of LEGO gaming in the past, to say nothing of real-life LEGO-ing, and I'm well-aware that the "LEGO" part of these games' appeal is fairly shallow.
I have no attachment to Ninjago, so The LEGO Ninjago Movie Video Game had an uphill battle for my attention to start with. And this game's addition of broad combat "techniques" failed to distract me from its rote beat-em-up formula, environments which are as visually-noisy as they are boring, and a story which is clearly doing a lazy job of following a movie script.
Also, the game crashed to my desktop twice, in the ~60 minutes I played it. Fortunately its checkpoints weren't far behind, but... that's statistically worrying.
I do have to give the game credit for getting me interested in The Lego Ninjago Movie. Many of the game's cutscenes appear to have been lifted directly from the film, and their silly, fast-paced quips were definitely my favorite parts of my brief playing time.
It's rather telling that Steam achievement records show a sharp drop-off between players who finished the tutorial/prologue (Training Dojo) and those who made it through the first major story beat (completing Chapter 3 / Location 1).
