Recent reviews by icosix

A lot of the fun in metroidvania games relies on the exploration and discovery of things on the map. If it's not fun to backtrack, a metroidvania is a bad experience, but Blasphemous 2 managed to keep me interested in continually going around the map to see what I would find next.

The baroque atmosphere, music, and item descriptions continue to make Blasphemous 2 a unique journey from beginning to end. I don't generally like note-based story telling, but The Game Kitchen, like FromSoftware, manage to keep my attention with style and flavour.

For 95% of the game, the difficulty curve is relatively flat. Most players will encounter 1-3 bumps in difficulty depending on play-style with some of the end bosses. My issue with these challenge increases are not so much that they exist, but that the game does not go out of its way to teach the player how to overcome them gently. You will likely hit a wall at some point, and you should know that going in, but all the bosses are less difficult than they appear once you start using everything the game offers.

This wall may also hit you at a time where you will need to watch some cut-scenes repeatedly. They're not terribly long, but they do interrupt the learning process.

At just over 28 hours of play time and 42/46 achievements, I feel my experience with Blasphemous 2 has been great.

Blasphemous 2 captures enough of the magic of the first to be worth a play, even if you bounce off the last 5%.

On the surface Outer Wilds is a game that I should love, but I don't. I think there are 3 things that will cause people to bounce off this game:

1. the unstructured time loop;
   
2. the note-driven reward system;
   
3. and the 6DOF ship controls.

I really like the 6DOF implementation in the game, so I have no problems with the controls. My issues come from the other two points.

Firstly, the note-driven reward system doesn't work for me. I don't feel it's a good primary mechanism for delivering story in any genre. Discovering a new location only to find more text to scan which ranges from chatter to new highlighted Important Noun doesn't feel rewarding to me. Since I don't feel like these bite-sized ancient civilization tweets are rewarding, having to individually scan each piece of text that flows off the previous one becomes busy-work to me.

Second, the unstructured time loop wastes my time, and I have low tolerance for games that waste my time. I've been interrupted 3 times in 2 hours while exploring and have had to wait for the time loop to progress to continue. This wouldn't be so bad if the game had some mechanism to tell me how much time is remaining, like Majora's Mask, or provided any kind of structural mechanism to interact with the time loop (e.g. creating something that tells you how much time you have left). Instead I'm left staring at the colour and size of the sun, from difference places in the solar system, trying to guess if I have enough time to do something, without knowing how long the next piece of exploration will take.

Perhaps this is due to the way I chose to explore, but if a game allows me to fall into a pit like this early on in the feedback loop, it's poor information design. A sizeable portion of my play time has been waiting to complete a section for more notes as I don't know the timings and have no way of learning them other than spending time in an area to learn them. I'm not going to spend 15+ minutes waiting around to see when an area becomes accessible or inaccessible, especially if all I'm getting rewarded with is notes.

If you like unstructured time loops and find observation of environmental changes to obtain notes compelling as exploration, you'll probably like Outer Wilds. I don't.

I was skeptical of this game at first: single-player co-op; controlling two characters simultaneously. My fears were dispelled within 20 minutes of play time, as the controls are simple and fluid enough that there is never any real problem controlling separate characters.

The gameplay is casual; nothing is terribly difficult to figure out. Some would say it is too easy, but I think it lends well to the progression and design of the game. This game is about the story, and should place higher priority on forward progress than challenging puzzles.

This is not to say that the flow of progression is too quick: it is right where it needs to be. When combined with the artistic style, story and atmosphere of the game the whole thing comes together as a relaxing, heartfelt and thoroughly enjoyable experience.

This game is worth every dollar you pay for it. You might even have a laugh at yourself when you try to control one character and move the other.