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Ace Attorney 4 was bold enough to propose a new lead character, with his own engaging personality, while still including Phoenix Wright in the main plot. Apollo deserves considerable credit for stepping into Phoenix's wingtips as comfortably as he does.
It's a shame that his Perceive ability gets so little use, and new assistant Trucy doesn't bring any new gameplay into the courtroom either. At least Ema is back with some forensic science minigames, I guess.
What Trucy does contribute, if not gameplay twists, is ... precociousness.
That's this game's saving grace, that despite its awkwardly-paced story and missed mechanical opportunities - and an annoying number of leap-of-logic evidence puzzles in the final case - it does pull off enough of that Ace Attorney humor, and style, to stay charming all the way through.
This may be a relatively weak entry in the Ace Attorney franchise, but clicking through its narrative is still satisfying and worthwhile.
It's not too surprising that Uncharted 4 holds up great -- it was a "shining jewel in the franchise" at launch, and not many Indiana Jones-styled adventure games have bothered trying to unseat it since.
(The PC implementation is just fine, although I did crash once or twice over its dozen-plus hours, and some complex scenes - like the jungley and oceany and rainy islands - had pretty inconsistent framerates.)
And Lost Legacy, despite being a smaller outing with a less-epic story, has held up great as well. Sure, it still left me wanting more free-roaming activities, and wanting more narrative stakes for its characters; but Chloe and Nadine's adventure is satisfying enough on its own.
Of course, I continue playing these games on the "Explorer" - easiest - difficulty, because I'm so incredibly uninterested in dying and retrying a gunfight with wave after wave of disposable goons. But I appreciate that there are gunfights, and not just instant-fail pure-stealth sneak sequences, even if that's more what a "real" archaeologist might do.
More than anything, replaying these games (especially Uncharted 4's nostalgia-heavy intro) makes me yearn for remakes of Drake's El Dorado, Shambhala, and Iram adventures. But those legacy entries are likely in need of thorough redevelopment, by now.
Dave the Diver is like like a teppanyaki chain restaurant: it can appear hackneyed and silly, and it's not the best-tasting meal you'll ever have, but the energetic showmanship and variety of food sure keep it interesting.
Dave gets a lot of nautical mileage out of introducing new features, environments, and even gameplay at a pretty high frequency. I don't just mean its WarioWare-like microgames for harpooning fish and preparing dishes, either -- there are entire upgrade trees, resource management systems, stealth-action interludes, and other novel mechanics suddenly appearing every couple hours.
Most of these ideas would be pretty mediocre on their own - whether because the UI for managing fish hatcheries isn't very intuitive, or because a bullet-hell boss fight is kinda frustrating - but they never outstay their welcome, because Dave the Diver's always got something new just around the corner. (Plus, boss battle checkpoints are mercifully generous.)
And it continuously delivers those ideas with such enthusiasm, with such consistently fun charm, that it's hard not to crack a smile at this goofy fuckin' game.
That promise of delightful novelty is what kept me going for one more round one more dive, despite various rough edges in one system or another, through Dave the Diver's impressively lengthy story -- easily 20 or 30 hours of fishing and sushi-preparing and mystery-solving and world-saving. I can't stress this enough: mermaids are one of the less surprising parts of Dave's story.
Unfortunately, once the main narrative is over, it's hard to stay motivated for any secondary objectives Dave might have left. Collecting more MarinCa and sourcing more picky customers' ingredients does start to feel samey after the story-driven gimmicks have dried up.
Up 'til then, though, Dave does a commendable job of keeping it fresh.
Today the Glog turns 20 years old. Or really, my first posted review turns 20, that post having lived through multiple iterations of web-based complaints about videogames. The precise birthdate of "Glog" may be lost to time.
My writing style has certainly changed since 2004, as has my taste in games; heck, games themselves are pretty different these days. Back in my day, every Final Fantasy installment was a huge event, and you'd spend years looking forward to the next, new epic adventure--
Compared to the preceding 20 years - starting in the mid-80s with a great crash and somehow ending with consoles on the internet - recent game industry history seems much less volatile. Games sure are bigger than they were, in your web browser and on your mobile phone, reaching so many people and costing so much to make, it'd make those 20th-century game devs' eyes water.
I think I've been reading those "AAA Unsustainability" headlines for about 20 years, too.
Well, here's to another several decades of this silly little hundred-billion-dollar commercial art form, and of me continuing to complain about it.
Data may suggest that I've neglected the Glog over this past year:
... but that suggestion is only mostly correct. Unlike my excuse about backlog-culling in 2022, I must admit that in 2023, I simply didn't play very many games.
... Witcher 3 didn't need an update to make it worth replaying. And nowhere is this more evident than Toussaint, where the Blood and Wine expansion doesn't just paint a beautiful rural-urban-hybrid landscape with the same kind of deeply enthralling content as the main game.
[...] [Blood and Wine] encapsulates all the best that Witcher 3 has to offer, in an irresistably beautiful virtual France.
Later in the year, I returned to Middle-earth in Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War. The former always felt a bit like a proof-of-concept, a prototype, for the game Monolith really had in mind -- and the new-to-me Bright Lord DLC, with its territory and army features, kinda confirmed that.
... thanks to Desolation of Mordor's other design ambition: Batman tech.
Baranor may not have elf magic, but he does have gadgets - okay, "Numenorean artifacts" - which let him grapple up walls, glide through the air, and lob explosives from afar, plus a few tricks for controlling crowds and stunning captains.
So, my replayed games in 2023 were already pretty DLC-heavy, but wait: there's more! (More DLC, I mean.)
... I've been reluctant to return because this DLC is chock-full of the exact "obtuse points" that only occasionally marred my Outer Wilds playthrough.
The confusingly-named, also-first-person, also-in-space, but wholly-unrelated The Outer Worlds came with a couple DLCs of its own: Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos. These ended up feeling like "more of the same" of the base game, for better and for worse:
Like the main game, Gorgon and Eridanos are stuffed with a large amount of content, but it's thoroughly one-note and unimaginative. [...]
Peril on Gorgon and Murder on Eridanos aren't bad, but they are bland; and if you already felt that way about the base game, then these expansions won't change your mind.
I played my share of underwhelming titles in 2023 -- particularly, cool ideas with flawed execution, like Return of the Obra Dinn being skewered by its unhelpful notebook; Midnight Protocol ruining its hacking strategy with random dice-rolls; A Way Out struggling to balance co-op gimmicks with storytelling; and Eternal Threads moving way too slowly as it unraveled its narrative.
The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.
[...] Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.
Points of interest in Martinaise, and its population's personalities, are all rich with fine, meticulous, artisinal details to unravel. There's so much fascinating history, and colorful commentary!, to read through. It's like Mass Effect's Codex but with dialog choices.
[...] Sometimes, actually quite often, Disco Elysium's side-stories are so intriguing and enthralling that you'll forget all about its primary thread. Which makes the murder-mystery plot's twists and turns extra surprising.
The Depths recapture the same feelings that made Breath of the Wild so memorable: being overwhelmed by a huge new world, and terrified by its angry inhabitants; getting taunted by its dangers as you carefully work on quests in its margins; gradually powering up and becoming more comfortable in it; and eventually overpowering it by eating its big, weird baddies for breakfast.
[...] Like last time, [quality-of-life] issues melt away in light of Tears of the Kingdom's awe-inspiring new environments, its refreshing twists on the old, and the incredible amount of stuff you can do in its even-more-massive world.
I called it Good, I enjoyed it in parts, but ultimately I couldn't ignore that it felt "very unfinished":
There are good parts: mechanics that're functional and fun, missions that tell memorable stories, character interactions that feel real and engaging. But there are also plenty of lulls, and misses, and outright mistakes. [...]
It's a shame that Cyberpunk 2077's impossible ambition prevented it from telling a complete story.
But just a couple months after that post, CD Projekt announced their "Update 2.0" patch alongside the Phantom Liberty expansion. So, yeah, we will see.
At the moment, I'm quite enjoying some deep-sea fishing and sushi-ing with Dave the Diver. But Dave had better solve the "Sea People's" problems soon, 'cause my backlog is starting to grow again.
So, remember how Gone Home overcame "walking simulator" bullshit by focusing on a single, tightly-crafted story, even at the cost of its running-length? And remember how Fullbright's next game, Tacoma, delivered more interactivity and additional character development but still kept it brisk and brief?
Eternal Threads had an idea similar to Tacoma's - scrub through a timeline to learn characters' stories and uncover key secrets - plus, branching decisions like a choose-your-own-adventure; but it fumbles by spending entirely too much time on un-critical, un-interesting content.
Foremost, there's the "experiments in time travel" sci-fi meta-narrative, which forces you to sit and stare at a prologue filled with boring, inconsequential technobabble. But even in its core narrative, made up of nearly 200 individual scenes, Eternal Threads can't help but waste time in many scenes that just aren't meaningful to the plot nor to its cast. There's considerable "filler" that, even when it's well-written, didn't need to be here.
The mechanical gameplay is a bit of a slog, too. Credit where it's due: Eternal Threads has a pretty damned convenient timeline navigation interface, like a streamlined view of Elsinore's schedule notebook -- plus, here, you can seek to any event at random. But to watch a scene, after selecting it in that interface, you then need to walk your character to the scene's location. Following the timeline's order of events means you'll do lots of going upstairs, watching a bit, going downstairs, watching another bit, going back upstairs...
This is where I wish Eternal Threads had copied Tacoma's homework, and let me walk along with characters as they moved from one event to the next. With this game's scene design, even if I'm only following one character's scenes, I still need to pull up the Time Map and select the next one every time.
Okay, the game is annoyingly slow and a little clunky, so why did I keep playing it? Well, the upside is that this story is actually, legitimately good. I put the hours into Eternal Threads because I wanted to unravel the mysteries of its house, to investigate each character's personal mysteries, and to observe all of their possible outcomes.
And although the characters' presentations are imperfect - rough models, primitive lip-sync, mediocre voice acting - their writing is really well-done. The emotive exposition each has, and the way they interact with one another, really made me feel like I understood these people and their individual plights.
Though I hestitate to recommend the game, due to its pacing struggles, Eternal Threads does have a strong-enough narrative to be noteworthy. (Maybe it would've been more fun as a co-op activity, choosing branches and watching them play out with a partner.)
Better than: Dear Esther, Shadow of Destiny, Until Dawn Not as good as: Elsinore, The Forgotten City, Gone Home, Tacoma ... one more caveat: getting the "good ending," making the branch decisions that the game wants you to make, isn't always what I would call logical or reasonable. The destination isn't as satisfying as the journey.
Where its successor uses surreal magic as a basis for fantastical levels, puzzles, and action sequences, A Way Out leans on ideas from crime-thriller cinema. You and your partner will more-or-less re-enact movie and TV scenes about prison breaks and life on the lam - helping them survive a yard beating, distracting guards while they smuggle an escape tool, giving them a boost to the air vent - inbetween trite minigames like "mash X to bench-press weights."
A Way Out's storytelling also feels heavily influenced by (what I assume are) Josef Fares's favorite films, although that narrative doesn't really warm up until the game is mostly over. Its first half or so over-emphasizes purely mechanical scenarios for the sake of gimmicky co-opportunities, neglecting plot and character development; It Takes Two's story may have been far from perfect, but it was certainly paced better than this.
(This game also suffers from a bit more not-quite-right English than its follow-up -- totally understandable, for a Swedish developer, but very noticable in settings like "American prison" and "American trailer park.")
And it should be - unfortunately - unsurprising that A Way Out also suffers from occasional-to-frequent confusing button prompts, missing button prompts, and frustrating controls. I don't think that the game ever explicitly tells you that you need to "move" away from cover to detach from it; you've just got to figure that out by accident or luck.
Co-op games that don't suck are few and far between, so, I appreciate that A Way Out put in the effort. But I appreciate even more that Hazelight continued banging this drum with It Takes Two, and I hope they continue refining these ideas with whatever they do next.
Better than: Biped Not as good as: It Takes Two It's hard to call out some of the clearest film references without spoiling anything: but in general, if you've watched a movie about organized crime, you'll probably find this story pretty familiar.
Last Call BBS does knock one thing out of the park: retrocomputing nostalgia. Its low-res fictional desktop environment, curiously clicking around to explore settings and files, the false tones of its modem dialing in, waiting forever for a game to download, being baffled by that game's total lack of instructions...
The holistic experience feels like a warmly authentic celebration of the era when personal computers were fascinating toys, and not quite yet indispensable tools. But - and here's the disappointing bit - it doesn't meaningfully celebrate Zachtronics' back catalog of programming puzzle games.
Last Call BBS is a virtual desktop that functions as a minigame collection; instead of working through progressive stages of one overarching game concept, you'll install and play eight different games from the titular BBS. You might suspect that this unfocused design could result in multiple only-partially-baked experiences, and well, you wouldn't be wrong.
Of its eight minigames, there are three that resemble typical Zachtronics fare, but all of them are unambitious in scope and frustrating to play:
"20th Century Food Court" sees you architecting assembly lines and chaining logic elements to craft and deliver food orders. It's a promising idea - as proven by othersimilargames - but with frustrating mechanical controls and no narrative integration, early puzzles don't suggest any payoff except more fiddly tedium. (Just look at some of these spaghetti solutions.)
"ChipWizard Professional" goes all the way down to the metal, as in, etching silicon to fabricate transistors and implement logical operators. Laying out elements the right way is needlessly meticulous, manipulating PCB layers is glitchy, and the non-game theme is overwhelmingly dull; this felt way too much like a fake version of an electrical engineering course.
"X'PBGH: The Forbidden Path" is about cellular automation. I think. Between its deliberately arcane interface and its discomforting Giger-esque presentation, I just couldn't tolerate this one for very long.
There are more, non-programming minigames, too:
"Dungeons & Diagrams" is a neat grid-solving puzzle game, which I did enjoy for a bit, but started feeling pretty samey after a dozen or so screens (of ... 64!?).
"HACK*MATCH" is an arcade falling-block-swapper clone, with the impenetrable difficulty you might expect from a schmup-themed action puzzler.
"Kabufuda Solitaire" and "Sawayama Solitaire" each evoke a different take on solitaire card games -- just like the tiresome solitaires from previous Zachtronics titles.
And finally there's "STEED FORCE Hobby Studio," a cozy and pleasant - but extremely brief - clicking game where you assemble mecha models out of digitized part sheets.
Some of these games are short, and some are too long and repetitive, but they're all -- well, not "simple" exactly, but shallow. Even the implementation details of the three programming games don't feel like "depth" so much as overcomplications of small ideas.
It certainly doesn't help that, much like real-world pre-Y2K software, many of the minigames are an absolute chore to control -- even after reading and re-reading their (authentically) terse instructional guides.
As I think back on 10+ years of Zachtronics game experience - from my first taste of SpaceChem's delightful sci-fi concurrency puzzles; through their experiments with 3D space in Infinifactory, with smaller scale in TIS-100, with high-level abstractions in Shenzhen I/O, and with stronger storytelling in Opus Magnum; to a grand culmination of these works in Exapunks, and then Eliza (2019)'s promising foray into a new genre - man, these games were so strongly, fondly memorable.
Molek-Syntez may have been a step back from some of its predecessors, but at least it was mechanically substantial.
In someinterviews about shutting down, Zachtronics folks express feeling bored of making their traditional games -- which is fair, they've been doing it for a while. I'd say Last Call BBS shows just how bored they got.
Just as with Blade of Galadriel, I'd previously dismissed Desolation of Mordor for neglecting some of Shadow of War's fundamentals -- in particular, Talion's "gravewalking" through death with minimal penalty. Baranor, unfortunately, is a mere mortal and his life uh ... resets, upon death.
This DLC's rogue-like approach, where you can lose hired mercenaries and looted gear upgrades if a captain gets the better of you, made me put my gamepad down in annoyed frustration a couple times. But I was lured back, and ultimately finished Baranor's story, thanks to Desolation of Mordor's other design ambition: Batman tech.
Baranor may not have elf magic, but he does have gadgets - okay, "Numenorean artifacts" - which let him grapple up walls, glide through the air, and lob explosives from afar, plus a few tricks for controlling crowds and stunning captains.
Although the process of unlocking those abilties is needlessly obtuse (the game's hints about their locations are garbage -- seriously, just find a map online), they don't reset when Baranor dies, so prioritizing them is a no-brainer. And with a full utility belt, Baranor is a pretty unstoppable force, even without looted weapons or hired mercs.
Heck, after I'd collected all the Numenor tech, using it to plow through orc captains and outposts and the Shindram fortress was fairly trivial. Not that I'm complaining; I love mowing down orcs. With upgrades, Baranor can feel even more overpowered than Talion did, so long as he stops to refill his health kits every now and then.
It's a shame that Desolation of Mordor didn't aim higher with its narrative: aside from a few fun bits of banter with Baranor's brother Serka, and brief interactions with Torvin (yeah, the dwarf from Lord of the Hunt!), there just isn't much to it. But I guess a threadbare story makes sense for this DLC's focus on replaying and speedrunning through Lithlad.
Which isn't really my cup of tea. But! I'm still glad that I gave Desolation of Mordor enough chances to enjoy deploying a deadly gadget arsenal on a hapless fortess of orcs.
Back in 2018, I dismissed the Blade of Galadriel add-on as presumably diminished by the absence of Shadow of War's excellent Nemesis System. But despite that, Blade of Galadriel does have merits of its own, separate from Talion's big orc-conquering adventure.
Eltariel's light-element powers make for a couple interesting changes to combat: shining her elven flashlight into orcs' faces is a neat crowd-control trick, and wonderfully effective when bum-rushing an enemy party. Stunning a group then disintegrating them one by one is a fun, satisfying time.
(Though it is annoying that so many captains are conveniently immune to light.)
Oh, and though Eltarial doesn't "dominate" them like Talion, she does still meet plenty of orc captains with colorful personalities -- sometimes even on friendly terms. Her quest includes scripted missions to recruit helpful champions, and these weirdos - like an architecturally-minded Olog with a huge hammer and a pair of burn-damaged bomb enthusiasts - channel the same quirky energies that made Ratbag and Bruz such fun to work with.
Yeah, it's a relatively short story, not as engrossing as Shadow of War in mechanics nor in narrative ambition. (The DLC's ending cinematic, which reveals the origin of the "Rogue Nazgul", is even more bizarre than Shelob wearing a dress.) But, much like Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor - Lord of the Hunt, it has enough new gameplay and enough entertaining writing to justify its running-length.
