Animal Well (PS5): Even after having played it I have to say the first thing I think of when I think of Animal Well is Dunkey, which is just as well I supposed given that he is the only reason I played the game in the first place. The first big game from Video Game Donkey’s Bigmode publishing operation landed on PS Plus on day one, and since the man couldn’t stop memeing about it (on top of it getting rave reviews elsewhere) I decided to pick it up. This game would be my first encounter with the so-called “Metroidbrainia” sub-genre of two-dimensional side-scrolling adventures, but, dear reader, I regret to inform you that I am a dum-dum. I really like the idea of these games, but ultimately I am also too stupid and more than that, too impatient to actually work through them like you’re supposed to. So while I did play through this with a guide open most of the time, I did still enjoy my time with it. The visual style is really unique and combined with the eerie sound design somehow manages to create a game that is genuinely unsettling. So while I didn’t get as many of the eureka moments that you’re intended to, there was still plenty to get out of this—the moment-to-moment platforming can also be pretty fun. Plus you play as a cute circle, and you can’t go wrong with circle.
Sora no Kiseki the 3rd (PSP)
After finishing SC last year I was fully hooked into the Kiseki series, so it didn’t take me very long to find a spot in my RPG schedule to slot in the last entry in the Sora trilogy. Although the 3rd was enjoyable, I would say it was my least favorite entry in the series. Leave it to Kiseki to make the trilogy’s epilogue an entire forty hour game. I really love Kevin as a protagonist, and there is some really good lore and worldbuilding in the various vignettes you can unlock, but the 3rd is primarily one gigantic dungeon-crawling experience in a series where the dungeon-crawling is absolutely the worst thing about it. It does have the most refined version of the Sora combat at the third try, but by the time I was on this game I was tired of said combat system and just blasted through the game on easy mode. While I think it’s necessary to play if you’re committed to the entire series (especially for Star Door 15) it’s the one game that doesn’t do anything to blow me away.
Okami (Switch)
I’m one of those extremely boring people who says the Zelda 64 duology are the greatest games of all time. I won’t lie and say it’s not nostalgia, but that classic 3D Zelda formula is an evergreen game design in my opinion. Kamiya Hideki’s Okami was a game that was on my list for an absurdly long time. I can’t even remember how many times I had the PS3 release of Zekkeiban in my cart on Play-Asia, and its constant 1,000 yen sales on the Switch eShop made me consider it many times, but I never pulled the trigger until this year. I had heard that the game was inspired by Kamiya’s love of Zelda, but I wasn’t prepared for just how extremely Zelda the game feels. While there are some similarities with the overworld-and-dungeon design, I think it’s really the story and NPCs that seal it. The world is filled with memorable, goofy characters in a way that really takes me back to Zelda 64 and are what carried the game for me. You can definitely feel the age in the actual gameplay mechanics: some of the platforming is extremely jank, the combat isn’t great (I particularly don’t like how every fight outside of boss encounters takes place in a walled-off arena) and the calligraphy gimmick gets to be tiresome, but the game had more than enough charm to pull me over the finish line.
Momodora II & III (PC)
As I mentioned before, one of my big goals for this year was to play more indie games, so when the latest entry in the Momodora series caught my eye on storefronts, I decided to go back and play the series. There’s not a lot to say here because Momodora II & III are very small, decidedly indie games that play more like proofs-of-concept (especially in the case of II) than actual full games, but they have some personality. The creator clearly likes Touhou and it’s got a bit of that kind of vibe. They aren’t terrible ways to kill a couple hours, at least, but I mostly played them because they set up the later, full-featured games that are apparently sleeper hits in some corners of the indie Metroidvania scene.
Caligula Overdose (PS4)
This is one of those games the Internet talked me into. My first experience with Caligula was the anime that aired some years ago, which was terrible from the off, so I never intended to play the game. Some time removed from that, though, I started to hear praise for the sequel, Caligula 2, from people whose opinions I respected. I already had some experience with the FuRyu-published Crystar, which was actually the game that got me back into gaming a couple years ago, so was familiar with (and knew I enjoyed) that particular brand of passionate jank—and “passionate jank” is exactly how I would describe Caligula. It’s a work with a ton of great ideas, none of which it really pulls off. The social web system, where there are hundreds of uniquely-named NPCs in the school, each with their own sidequest, is frankly insane and only a crazy person would actually be able to engage deeply with it. The combat system is also highly unique, but at least for me the difficulty of battles was rarely tuned right to make it actually compelling. In 99% of encounters you’d just spam your strongest attack and auto-win, but more difficult boss encounters were frustrating to deal with. What the game really nails is its characters, particularly the diverse cast of antagonists that you cleverly get to infiltrate as a double-agent in content that is new to the “Overdose” version of the game. As someone who puts a lot of priority on waifus in games I was especially surprised by how much I enjoyed the male characters in this game: they are so well-written and truly likeable. This also makes the “bad ending” you can achieve by ultimately siding with the villain so wild: it is one of the most shocking bad ends in a game I’ve ever seen. It’s a mediocre game in the end but there are flashes of brilliance here that make me excited to play the second one.
Wander to Kyozou (PS4)
Yet another game that I have a history with that I didn’t get around to playing until this year. Ico, the predecessor to this game, is one of my favorite games of all time, probably in the top ten. It was a hugely pleasant surprise as I was only playing it because it was the forebear to Shadow of the Colossus, which obviously game extremely highly recommended in the PS2 era. I had both games on the PS3 HD collection, but bounced right off Shadow in that collection because I just couldn’t grapple with the controls. I learned later that the game has some issues with framerate-locked game logic going wonky in the transition to a consistent higher framerate on the PS3 (the originally game somewhat infamously runs at around 15-20 FPS during colossus fights) that made it harder to play than the original. While I often have reservations around remasters, I put aside my concerns here to pick up Bluepoint Games’s remake of the original game. For the first two or three hours, I was convinced this was one of the best games I had ever played. The sheer spectacle of the early colossus fights, peaking with a frantic battle aboard giant flying fuckoff monster, was thrilling and really feels ahead of its time for a PS2 game. We often easily fight off giant monsters so much in games that our sense of scale gets warped, but Wander does an amazing job of making these creatures feel truly massive and imposing. The poignant, mostly wordless storytelling around Wander trying to save his cute waifu, the eerie emptiness of the game’s world, the nagging sense that we’re doing something bad by fucking up these big dudes for our own selfish reason… Man, it was so good. Unfortunately Wander to Kyozou gets a little high on its own supply and starts being too cute for its own good. A lot of the later bosses are not epic encounters with hulking beasts but just really annoying puzzle boxes, and for some the greatest enemy is not the monster itself but its poorly-programmed AI pathing. It doesn’t happen suddenly, but after three or so brilliant opening hours, the air is slowly let out of the balloon for the remaining five, culminating in a final boss “fight” that has you doing a bunch of janky jumps fighting against the fixed camera angles that make you restart the whole danged thing if you fail. I still think Wander to Kyozou is a good game, even a great one, but I can hardly think of a worse case of failing to stick the landing among other games I’ve played.
Leave a Reply