2024

This year was pretty rough, ngl. Talking strictly in terms of gaming, I started out ok, but then was in hospital mid-March, and that wrecked my wrists so badly that I couldn’t hold a controller to play properly for months afterwards. Then… when my wrists were finally getting their strength back after a lot of physio work, MY TV SCREEN BROKE!!!

I had planned to try and go outside of my comfort zones this year, trying new stuff in genres I like, and new things in genres I’ve never tried before. I prepared a nice handful of games to try, mainly on my PS4 this year, but… without a functioning TV screen, I’m fucked lol. I had to shift focus towards stuff I can play on my handhelds and computer; which, I still had stuff to play for the year... But. Man. I wanted to play Sekiro so bad - the night I installed it I ended up in hospital, and then a few days into playing after I recovered enough to hold the controller, the tv broke! Made me a bit sad ngl!

Anyway, I have a very strange variety of games played this year. I’ve made the decision to skip writing about some of the games I played, as I either dropped them due to health issues OR simply didn’t enjoy them enough to keep slogging through. I generally don't want to write about games like this unless I've finished the main story, or gotten roughly 70%-85% through as the minumum to give it a fair go. Maybe I’ll come back to a few that I dropped, but I really don’t think I can write about my little stints that I played while utterly depressed and struggling with health issues, haha.

Regardless of dropping a few, I think I’ve got more than enough to write about this year. I have also made this site where it’s easier to read everything (on mobile and web!), and spoilers are hidden if you don’t want to see them. I’ve made the decision that the full reviews will be hosted here from now on, as they’re like… the ultimate way to read these. They’re getting too long to comfortably put in a Tumblr post, but I’ll still make posts with each game’s intro and you can decide if you wanna read like usual hehe. If you're here, enjoy da full thang!

Usual warning for mild-moderate game spoilers and abrasive opinions ahead.

Games Directory

• Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns
• Moonlighter
• The Sims 3 (3DS)
• The Sims 3: Pets (3DS)
• Donut County
• Katamari Darmacy: Reroll
• Hitman: Blood Money
• Power Wash Simulator
• JoJo's Bizzare Adventure: Eyes of Heaven
• Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story (DS)
• Fear and Hunger

Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns, 3DS

Source: gulava on Tumblr

After playing Story of Seasons last year (and loving it!), I was exited to give Story of Seasons: Trio of Towns a go and see what improvements and changes they’d make. However, it was apparent very early on that this was going to be a frustrating play through. And that sucks, cause I love farming games! I gave it a fair go, getting halfway into the second year, and then I lost a save due to not getting my 3DS to the charger in time, and I really didn’t want to redo the previous couple of days...

So, what happened!?
I was very confused; the game still looked decent, clearly using the same engine and model bases as the previous game, it had a nice little story to it that helped contextualise why you move to the country and start farming, it had pretty much all the basic farming gameplay you’d expect… and yet, this felt really crap. I looked up when this game out, and it came out less than half a year after the previous Story of Seasons 3DS game.
So, yeah, that kinda answers a lot for me. Now, I am just assuming that it was a rushed production based on how I felt while playing it, paired with those release dates being so close together- but this was not that fun for me!

You begin by wistfully daydreaming about becoming a farmer, and have a little spat with your father when you share that dream with him. He’s not keen on you becoming a farmer, despite coming from the farm life himself! Eventually, he concedes, and makes sure your uncle is there to greet you and help you set up everything you need on your farm.
As you start to get acquainted with your new life, you’ll quickly notice that there are two blocked areas you can’t get to, and that you can only access one of the titular trio of towns. To unlock the other towns- and earn your father’s approval -you’ll have to complete certain tasks, upgrade various things, and work hard to thrive on your farm. This is a simple but sweet premise; and on it’s own, I have no issues with it- in fact, I really like that it gives a bit of motivation to do well!
Who doesn’t love a bit of spite-fuelled success?

What ended up sucking about this, was that there felt like a lot of wasted opportunity here, which caused so much of the game to fall flat for me.
A great example of what I mean here: your father will send you a list of tasks to complete, and each time you complete them you’ll gain a little more respect from him until you have his full blessing to live out your farm life. On it’s own, that’s a fantastic way to encourage players to explore their surroundings, and work towards learning and understanding all of the things they can do on their farm while tying it all together with the narrative of impressing your father.
However… The entirety of the first spring was pretty aimless, as this ‘dad’s approval’ list hadn’t kicked in yet. This made spring feel bloated, boring and aimless for me, which sucked!
Having a bit more direction with simplified tasks to complete would’ve been helpful here, especially as a tutorial section; but you’re left to just faff around for a whole season – which lowkey led me to believe there wasn’t much more to aim for other than opening up the two towns I couldn’t access yet. If daddy dearest is going to be such a disproving snob, why not start up right away with a list of things he wants us to prove to him from the beginning?

The actual meat and potatoes of the game is very similar to the previous SoS game; you have a bunch of land on your plot, its divided up into a grid based layout where you can put tilled soil, livestock farms, or special things like seed-makers and dairy-makers. You have the standard tools to till, sow, water and reap crops, along with mining and fishing in the towns that let you do that. The three towns that you’ll gain access to are;
Westown, a wild-west themed country town,
Tsuyukusa, a traditional Japanese themed rural town,
and Lulukoko, a Hawai’i themed beachfront town.
Each town has two areas, an upper and a lower area. All three have a common entry point in an area right in front of your farm, and eventually you will unlock routes to travel from town to town that are joined in each town’s upper area. There is also a fast travel thing unlocked, but generally the layout was simple and nice enough to traverse, with plenty of area to forage and shop once everything is unlocked. There are also a selection of seasonal events, like food and beverage festivals to compete for making the best recipe, crop judging festivals, animal festivals, dress up competitions and various cultural festivals local to each town. Each town also has a unique way to gesture to each other, which was a bit funny to me.
When you first move to your farm, you’re greeted by your uncle and can only visit Westown, where everyone hugs you. They made a very big deal over the fact that everyone hugs, which I felt was very Japanese of the game, haha. The other towns had bowing and what looked to be a fist bump, so thats a nice enough visual difference, but I wish they went a little further with the variations in culture here.

To earn some money while you wait for crops to grow, you can partake in various part-time jobs in each town. These fall either into the category of chore, delivery or shipping particular things from your farm. It’s generally worth it to go through and complete any part-time jobs you think you can finish in time, as you’ll be rewarded with money upon completion, a bit of friendship points raised for the person requesting the job, and raising the general points towards each town. There are also the occasional special jobs that pop up, which grant you a Super Mario themed outfit to wear when completed, and these themed outfits grant a bonus ability to you for a few hours each morning – things like speed or fishing boosts, or bonus friendship points when doing actions that would give you friendship points to begin with.
When you’ve raised a certain amount of friendship points with characters, if you talk to them while they’re eating, they may invite you to join! This takes an hour out of your day, but it’s a free stamina refill- and if they’re eating a particular dish, you may get certain bonus effects from eating it, the same way you can get certain effects from dishes you cook yourself at home.

The crops you grow and animals you raise have multiple facets to encourage while growing this time as well, and this was a very interesting point for me to figure out and play with. These were called star ranks and animal attributes respectively, and you could buy various kinds of fertiliser and animal treats to grow certain aspects. The crops have colour, aroma, juiciness, size and yield; while animals have size, affection, coat, and their byproduct level and amount. If you win a festival with a certain produce or animal, you’ll get a level up in the rank of that particular thing, resulting in more money your way when you ship it.
I enjoyed this aspect, as once I understood it, it was good to work towards getting the most out of my crops and animals! Once the seed maker was unlocked and built, I was glad to see that turning a crop into seeds will retain the levels of each category, and I could build them up until they were maxing out all their stats. There are also giant crops and golden crops to aim for, which were nice, but I didn’t go out of my way to get them. There was a decent rage of crops and flowers to grow, giving a nice variety by the time you’ve unlocked everything. There are a few new types of animals introduced here too, meaning that all livestock had at least two variations, and some with three. Take the chickens for instance, theres the basic white chicken with normal eggs, the silkie chicken that gives black eggs, and now also a quail with quail eggs. You definitely won't be short on choice!

To unlock the various types of animals and crops, you needed to raise your points for each town, which brings me to the two main motivators for this game. Town Link Ranks, which are the points previously mentioned, and Farming Tips, which is your father’s list of achievements he wants you to complete.
I already touched on father’s list, but it’s very simple in what it expects of you. There were three sets of lists from him to complete here, and they all comprised of things like ‘raise x amount of crops,’ ‘own x amount of cows,’ ‘build a dairy shed,’ - all things that will help you to grow your farm and get the most out of it. Upon completing these lists, you’ll shortly be visited by a family member; your sister, your mum, and eventually your dad. These feel generally rewarding, and its nice to have a visit from a family member and have little cutscenes hanging out with them and showing off your success. However, as I mentioned with the pacing of these earlier, you don’t get your first list until the first of summer, and although these ramp up in amounts of things to complete, they’re not too difficult and are things you’re likely to be doing regardless of the list. I also found it a little frustrating that despite technically achieving certain criteria before getting the list, I had to redo them upon receiving the list or it wouldn’t count.
Like, one of the first goals was to raise three crops, and even though I had definitely done that in spring, I needed to do so very deliberately in summer or it wouldn’t count…
IF there were maybe more phases, but still having them divided into thirds so that each milestone ended with a visit from a family member, that might solve my issues with it. As it is, they just didn’t have the kind of momentum to keep gameplay engaging and provide a general goal for me. I appreciate having some time to muck around and get used to the layouts of my farm and abilities I have, but with most things closed or off limits at the beginning, having a whole season of barely anything wasn’t very fun. Maybe a few days, or a week, max, would be nice to faff about, but 30 days!?

Nuh uh!!

The other thing, Town Link Ranks, were good to keep you motivated and doing various things around each town. These felt a bit more intrinsically rewarding, as you get points towards your relationship with that town by doing various things, like shipping crops to that town, doing part time jobs, and just generally building your friendship with the townsfolk. There are ranks E->D->C->B->A to work your way through; when you fill the gauge up to each letter’s respective rank, it’ll lock you from adding anymore until you complete a special set of tasks in order to continue progressing. I actually liked these as a nice way to show your progress with each town, as each level up would expand the inventory of local shops- giving you new crops, livestock and items to buy. You’ll slowly work towards levelling up by just playing, but with targeted effort, you’ll rise through the ranks in no time.

One of the easiest ways I found to raise the rank, and a way to unlock the next level, is to change the destination of your shipping box to a particular town. Yes, the shipping box is back! We’re not dealing with the vendor market of the previous game anymore, and while I loved the return to something tried and true… Again, the implementation of it’s mechanics felt superficial and really underutilised. Because a major focus is on the three towns, I understand why they had the shipping box work the way it did, but I just think it could’ve been refined to become something a bit better!
When you go to ship goods, there will be a little logo showing which town you’ll be shipping to. At the end of the day, a representative from that town will come by and empty the shipping box, and only that town will get the goods. I feel like this was adding a lot of specific details to something that didn’t need to be this detailed- it’s not like you see the townsfolk using or talking about the particular goods you’ve shipped. I think it would’ve worked better if there were dedicated shipping bins in each town that you have to travel to and fill instead. These could be in the outskirt areas next to the entrance to each town, so that it’s not that far out of your way, similar to how Tale of Two Towns had a shipping box for each town. In ToTT, both shipping boxes were effectively the same, as you’d get your money regardless of where you shipped, but that concept could’ve been furthered here.
As it is, you can only ship the contents of your box to the town you’ve set – meaning if you want to split your goods up and ship to different towns, you’ll need to change the shipping destination and wait until the next day for it to take effect. This is basic, and sucks if you take on a part time job, or have two towns at a locked stage that require certain goods to be shipped, as you’ll have to hold onto inventory and wait until you can split it across the towns you want to send it to. As strange as the vendor marketplace in the previous game was, I think a few elements from it could’ve been reused in a simplified fashion to make it a bit more interesting here. As it is, it just feels like it’s stripped away that interactive complexity in favour of making the system needlessly complex. I’ll talk more about this and provide a suggestion I think could help fix my issues with it in the spoiler section, but I like to put those at the end, so let’s move on for now…

As far as the controls go, everything handled fine. It was what I’d expect of a farming game, but I noticed that the start button still doesn’t do anything, why isn’t that linked to pausing the game!? There were certain other things I noticed that were strange, too.
First, about the part-time jobs… While these are cool in concept, they’re basically the request boards from previous games, but trying to be different and cool. For the tasks that are doing delivery quests or shipping certain things from your farm, they’re how you’d expect them to work. You make sure you have your shipping bin set to the right town and ship stuff, or go to particular people to pick up and deliver what they ask. When you start the delivery quests, one nice thing is that the relevant people to that quest will have a little icon bubble above their head, which helps you keep track of who’s who, in case you forget which names goes with which face – I actually liked doing the delivery requests, mainly due to this QOL feature.
BUT, the chore type jobs suuuuuck. They’re almost like mini games, except too much mini and not enough game. I’d rather this follow the request board style of previous games, where if someone is asking for 10 pieces of chopped wood, you just go out and chop the wood yourself, and make sure it’s in your inventory when you talk to the person in order to finish the quest. I don’t really want to be yeeted into a mind numbing mini game where you load into a section to chop wood, press A 10 times... and that’s it. It takes ages to load, and there’s not enough challenge to bother with it! I only did them so often cause they paid well enough for next to no effort on my part, other than the weed-pulling job in Tsuyukasa where the weeds would blend in or be almost un-pullable in the rice paddy fields, locking me in this dumbass chore quest until I finally managed to get the last weed and end it. These chores left a lot to be desired, which is a shame, as having little quests of things to do is a nice way to break up the monotony of farming.

When foraging for items to either store or sell, there are certain bugs unique to each area and season you can collect. However, you don’t get to actually collect them, just an automatic catch and release. Why can’t I catch a physical bug and sell them for a bit of money, or have collecting certain bugs could be part of item requests? It feels so pointless to add in a mechanic to catch them if it doesn’t do anything! Well, technically, it does do something, as collecting them all will get a special cutscene and gift from the harvest goddess apparently- but I don’t care if I don’t get the bugs! I don’t even care for bug catching mechanics in games if I’m honest, but what’s the point in such a half baked one here!? Other items like wood and flowers could be picked up and used in recipes or sold for a little money, and you can go fishing, why on Earth are the bugs not included as a quick way to get a few bucks in the early game?

Another thing I noticed is that produce items don’t seem to auto stack into each other when I put them in my storage, and have to force them into stacks manually myself, which is a waste of time. This is the downside to the interesting mechanic of having various aspects for one item of produce – if there’s even 1% difference in a single category, it won’t auto combine without me giving the ok to flatten a stack and get a median of all attributes. Even if they were identical in stats, they still wouldn’t auto stack, which was a pain in my ass!
AND THE ANIMAL BARNS. The doors on the barn are so narrow, my fat-assed cows would always get stuck on the corners and couldn’t enter and exit the barns without a perfectly correct path. Why couldn’t they have had an invisible wall opening out from the doors like an open cone, so I can funnel my animals towards the doorways without being pixel perfect?
Which, mind you, I’M PUSHING A COW TO MOVE IT.

I CAN’T. BE. PIXEL. PERFECT.

Visually, the game was fine. I don’t really have much to say, other than the nitpickies I've already mentioned. It looks fine, there’s good colours and the models of each character and their art was generally pretty cute and nice.
However, they did whitewash the fuck out of the Lulukoko villagers, especially my man Ludus. I was trying to marry him, and he’s clearly meant to have a nice mid-brown complexion, yet his character art while talking to him is basically white!? It left a bit of a sour taste if I’m honest, it’s yet another oversight to not have the art match the models.

Source: Meeeee

Regarding the music, there were a few tracks I really loved! In particular, I’m super glad the autumn theme was nice! Even though I think the OST is a bit simple in general, the good tracks stand out. However, there were some tracks that got annoying, and I particularly hated the Westown theme. It had these awful and shrill eagle screeches playing through it, which are just sound effects on top. I turned the sound effects off in the menu, but turning off ALL sound effects ruined some of the feedback that was helpful in regards to the audio design. Even when I had them muted, the eagle screams were so ingrained that I can hear them even as I listen to the song without them. I hated that fucking track so much that I ended up playing the game on mute for a lot of it and listened to different music or watched youtube. It’s a shame, cause as I said, some tracks were nice, but god, the screeches were awful enough to hurt my ears :(

All in all? I was bored and frustrated with this game.
It had promise, and there were some aspects I liked- they just weren’t enough to keep me playing. It’s a shame, I love farming games and get addicted easily, but I never felt that compulsion to keep playing and indulge the addiction. This game unfortunately sucked.


Autumn
Lulukoko
Festival #2

directory

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Moonlighter, Switch

Source: electricpipeorgan on Tumblr

I’ve had this game for a while, but never got around to it until now. After having my first real exposure to rogue-likes through Hitman’s Freelancer mode, I was curious to try and get a feel for it as a more prominent game mechanic. I couldn’t remember why I’d originally bought the game (other than it was on sale lol), but here was the perfect excuse to give it a go!

You play as a merchant named Will, who’s inherited the sole responsibility for his family’s shop- the titular Moonlighter. In this world, there seem to be two main aspirational jobs; that of the Hero and the Merchant. Heroes go out into the mysterious dungeons on the outskirts of town to collect goods, and merchants sell those goods. Will wants to become the first Hero-Merchant, and ventures off to find things he can then sell at his shop.

This illustrates the two main aspects of the game you’ll be playing through, dungeon crawling and shop simulation. The common thread between both is inventory management- picking which items you’ll be keeping from your dungeon crawls and how much you wanna sell them for.

You’ll quickly notice how the rogue-like elements come into play after a handful of dungeons. There’s three floors to explore, each with their own set of connecting rooms, each ending in a boss to fight, and the final boss of that dungeon found at the end. There are common areas to expect once you start to see the patterns; like, a room that looks like someone was camping in it, some rooms with chests that only unlock when all enemies are defeated, a hidden room you have to find, a warbly preview of the next dungeon, and a healing pond right before a boss. Every time you exit and re-enter the dungeons, you’ll see that the layouts have been shuffled, and you’ll have to explore and find all of the rooms once again.

You have a fixed amount of inventory space, 5 pocket slots and 15 backpack slots. You can equip armour and weaponry before going in; these will not take up inventory slots, however you can equip two weapons and swap between them as you wish while playing. In your inventory, you have a max bundle of 5 or 10 items, depending on what kind of item it is - so you’ll have to get real picky about what you choose to keep!
As your pack fills up with the items you’ll find, either from slain enemy drops or by looting chests you find along the way, you’ll notice that some items have curses. These curses range from needing to be placed in a specific orientation within your backpack or they’ll be destroyed/become destructive to surrounding items, to being hidden by the curse and only getting revealed upon leaving the dungeon. This adds a layer of thought to the literal arrangement of your items, and prompts you to choose what items you’ll be prioritising, and which items you may discard to make room for others.
While this is an interesting mechanic to keep focus on your inventory, after longer grindy sessions of collecting stuff, it became a bit more of a hassle, and I’d just throw out low-mid tier items with annoying curses. I do think it is interesting though, as the items you choose to bring back with you become the stock you sell to make money, and the items you use to buy and forge upgrades to your weapons, armour and potions. It’s an incredibly tight and interconnected loop.

If you die while in the dungeons, you’ll lose everything you had in your backpack, and only get to keep the five items that were in your pockets. When you’ve made a bit of progress in the dungeons, you’ll get the ability to sell items directly from your backpack and get a small percentage of it’s base value; and you can get an ability that lets you pay a certain amount to return home, or another ability that lets you pay a bit more to warp out and come back to the point of the dungeon you warped out of. This was more helpful during late-game grinding for me, as I had figured out the general patterns that the dungeons were using for the rogue-like, and made it easier to strategise around when I knew I’d be making a lot of money to make up for the cost of teleporting out. When you teleport back in, you return to the same dungeon without it being shuffled, and can continue through the depths to collect as much loot as you can.

When you return home, it’s time to sell!
You can only open your shop during the day, so in the early days, its encouraged that you do your shopkeeping during the day, and go dungeon crawling at night. To start making money, you first have to pick from your inventory what you’d like to sell, and for how much.

Yup, you get to figure out how much you want to sell things for. You can pick whatever price you want, and wait until customers come in and react to fine-tune how much everything costs. The expected supply and demand waves are present here, as selling lots of one item will affect the base prices people expect of it.
If you’re thinking this sounds a little overwhelming, it kinda is, but don’t worry! You have a little store inventory book that you can look through to see the history of prices you’ve set, and what price ranges seem to be the best for each item. I really liked this book, as it helped me to guess what I could sell similar items for once I’d started to get a bit of price history through selling. It still felt like a bit of guess-work for me to figure out how much everything should cost, and I’d just eyeball it and hope that I’m not underselling an item I didn’t realise was worth more.

For the mathematically inclined, you could figure out the base prices of every item in the game by calculating the percentage cost of selling items in the dungeon for a fraction of their base, or by calculating how much items cost by looking at the prices of another vendor in town, who seems to have jacked the prices to four or five times their base. I don’t want to do math, so in classic Rads fashion- I brute forced and learnt what prices I wanted to charge by using the customer reactions and price book in tandem. But, if you really cared about squeezing the absolute most out of your items, there are ways you could figure that out.

I actually really enjoyed the shopkeeping part of the game, which wasn’t really a surprise, given that I enjoy these kinds of sim games anyway. It’s very simple, but has a few moving parts to keep track of to get the most out of.
There are a few types of customers you’ll get- most are normal, but some are rich, and won’t mind paying higher prices, and some are heroes and are only interested in buying gear and weaponry for travels of their own. However, you’ll have to keep a keen eye on all your customers, as sometimes thieves will try and pinch something from the store! You’re no pushover though, and if you can catch them with a stolen item before they leave the shop, you can recover it and kick them out. There are other little quirks to the shop management, but I’ll leave it at that for now, as part of the fun is to figure it out on your own.

As you progress, making more money and buying upgrades to your weapons and armour, you can also buy upgrades for your shop, and various places around town. You’ll have to invest in the town to get more out of it, livening it up along the way. My favourite things to buy were upgrades and expansions to my store, making more room to sell more stuff, and buying better and better things to make selling stuff go more smoothly. I also liked that you could buy various decorations and put them up in certain areas of the store, as decorations usually had some kind of property to them that benefitted you! Things like calming decorations that make customers more patient while waiting in line, or upping the percentage of tips you’ll receive. While you can’t rearrange the floor layouts, you’re free to lay out your goods on their plinths how you please, and I had a little system of where I’d put certain types of things so I felt more efficient while running to the back and restocking from my hoard in storage.

One of the biggest upgrades you can get is the ability to hire a cashier, leaving the store to her and going off to do more exploring and looting. You’ll still have to stock everything before handing the shop over to her, and she takes a percentage of profits as pay, but leaving the shop to her when you don’t feel like shopkeeping is a great option to have! I still preferred to manage the shop myself, subtly adjusting prices of things until I’d found the exact price my customers and I could agree on; but when just putting out a bunch of goods I know the prices of, I was more than fine to leave it to her.
Another big upgrade is that you’ll be able to take requests for certain items, getting a few days to go gather all the things and return them to the requester. I found out after I’d finished the game that you can mark certain objects with a star, so that you remember you wanted to collect them for whatever reason while in the dungeons, so that’s pretty cool.

In terms of dungeon progression, the more you unlock, the harder they get! I really liked that each dungeon is a legitimate increase in difficulty, and forces you to think about the skills that come with each weapon as you figure out how to fight the common enemies found in each area. There were unique tactics to figure out for each enemy, and there were environmental hazards in each that generally built off each other as a step up in hostility. Things like puddles that slow you down in one dungeon, in the next they’re poisonous and there are enemies who can spit and make more, then there’s fire and electricity in later ones. These are tangible steps up, and as you progress and upgrade your gear, going through earlier dungeons becomes a breeze!

Onto controls, I found everything to be fairly pleasant. It’s a top down style, one clearly inspired by The Legend of Zelda: A Link To The Past, and although theres 8 directions and it’s compatible with joystick controls, I just found it better to play with the d-pad. It’s always going to be more precise, and I felt more confident using weapons and knowing that it’s never going to accidentally drift away from where I’m aiming due to the joysticks.

While there are a variety of weapon types to choose from, I ended up sticking with a trusty sword and shield + archer’s bow combo. I tried out the spears and longswords and what have you, but just felt that the combo I went with gave the best coverage to fight close up (which I preferred) and the arrows as a good fall back when ranged. I like that there’s options to choose based on what you feel comfortable with, and you can spend your resources upgrading and enchanting based on that.

The visuals remained lovely throughout, I really enjoy seeing modern pixel art like this. It’s clean looking, and the style for this game was very cute. The only real gripe I have here is that the colour of the selection cursor was the same colour as the rest of the UI colours, which had me a little visually lost sometimes and unable to see what I’m selecting. I like the UI in general here, but a bit of a stronger contrast while still in the same aesthetic and colour scheme might be helpful for increased readability.

The OST was pleasant in general too, I like the calmer and more contemplative vibe for some of the songs, and enjoyed most of it. I did find that I’d get a little tired of the songs after a while, particularly the boss fights, but that’s much more of a background complaint. Overall, this OST is nice! The sound design was pretty good too, and one part that made me laugh a little was that during one boss fight, there was a sound that was similar to that violin sting, you know the one, that they use on every US reality show ever. That sound just feels funny to me, I’ve heard it in too many memes to take it seriously.

You might be noticing that I breezed past the story section I usually open with, and well… that’s because there’s not much story at all. It’s a shame, really, if there were just that little bit more lore, something more tangible and neatened up, that would shoot this game up waaayyy further in my eyes. The gameplay loop is solid and easy to figure out, but difficult to master... and the story fell flat for me.

I also want to talk briefly about inspiration vs imitation. I’d brought this up and discussed it a little for my Bug Fables write-up, and it bears repeating here. I already mentioned that this game is heavily inspired by LTTP, and at first I found this game to be a nice example of inspiration! There’s the hero’s bow and the hero’s sword and shield, there’s even a middle aged guy who looks a little like Link would in this world who comes in to buy stuff on occasion, and those are nice nods to the game.
However, the longer I played, especially upon realising the hero’s gear is the best when fully upgraded, along with the general layout and progression of the dungeons being so incredibly similar to LTTP’s made it feel like it crossed the line into imitation. It’s a hard thing to balance, and I’m not sure what the exact ratio would be, I just feel a bit odd that the dungeons in LTTP are kinda better due to the linear/intended progression they were designed with, and basing one half of the core gameplay loop around a randomised version of it slowly morphed into something a little dampening the longer I played. I think it’s great to be inspired by aspects of other people’s work, and put your own spin on things and bring it to life - I just err on the side of caution when it comes to baking that kind of inspiration into the core identity of the game, as it can easily look like (or become) imitation.
Imitation has limitations; but I’m not sure if I could suggest anything to fix this feeling, other than maybe scaling back on the easter eggs so I’m not prompted to make stronger comparisons between the games as a player. It feels like an unfair suggestion to make, but idk. I think it’s something worth attempting to articulate again, as I’ve noticed it in quite a few indie games (not just this and Bug Fables) and it can add a sour taste to an otherwise fantastic game.

Overall, I think I can say I enjoyed the experience. I was very curious about rogue-like games, unsure if I understood how that would be used as a primary mechanic in a game. It was interesting to play, as I now understand it to be something like shuffling details within pre-set parameters, which can be interesting. I think I thought it was something much bigger and more random, which confused me haha- but now I have a better grasp on it. I don’t know if I’ll replay this game, but I don’t feel worse off for having played it. A little frustrated with some aspects, sure, but I can appreciate a solid indie game even if I’m not the exact target audience for it!

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The Sims 3, 3DS

Source: Impulse Gamer

This and the following entry are a call and response, as I played them back to back when my hands had recovered just enough after my hospital visit to hold my 3DS in bed. I wasn’t originally going to write about these, but hey… it could be fun.

Unlike this game.

I thought it would be more fun in the early stages – the character models look so much nicer than Sims 3 DS, and allowed for a better, yet still limited, range of customisation. I just wanted to play out my OC Harland becoming the best nurse in the world while having a fun romance with Magus, but this game made that so difficult!

To start, yes, I’m so happy that you can make multiple sims and build relationships, AND YOU CAN WHOO HOO!!!!!!!
But... they’re not the only aspect of playing The Sims, as you’re balancing their whole life. This was really frustrating to play here, as you don’t have any metres for basic needs. You can’t see the basics like hunger, hygiene, tiredness, ect, through some simple colour-coded bars and see what needs attention, like in every other Sims game.
No, the only way to know what your Sim needs is via any moodlet/wishes that pop up- and this sucks because they usually only popped up when something was way too urgent, or at the most inconvenient of times!

This bled into how difficult it was to manage your Sim’s personal, work and social life. This blind balancing act was so frustrating, and it’d become even more so, as the Sims were incredibly needy and seemed to be programmed against you…

When I’d made Harland, I made Magus as a neighbour Sim who you could come across sometimes and invite out to places once you got to know him. Once I did meet him, I tried to go out to a few places with him or invite him to a mini party at Harland’s, but it was so hard to keep their relationship stats up!
Just having one day where Harland would leave for work, and then scramble at home to get on top of his basic needs like making sure he doesn’t piss his pants then starve to death, was enough time spent away from Magus to make him no longer interested. I can’t see Harland’s fucking needs, and it takes so long to do things like cook something or fix the shower that fucking broke once again.
I’d have to sacrifice Harland’s basic needs and risk him going rogue to attend to them in favour of forcing him to flirt and otherwise get along with a perpetually uninterested Magus. That’s dumb! If we’ve been on five dates around town and spent a couple of nights in watching TV and playing chess, it shouldn’t take one work day for you to forget all of that and think of Harland as basically a stranger...

Everything is so scaled back and limited here, which is partially expected, due to it being on a handheld- but not like this! Even something that should be simple- like getting two Sims in the mood to whoo hoo -was incredibly difficult! It’s been a while since I played on the computer, but off the top of my head, to do that, you just need to get two Sims that are close to start flirting enough that they get a bit saucy, and then some options will appear beyond what you can normally do cause they’ve both got a moodlet that lets you go down that path.
HERE, you couldn’t do anything without jumping through hoops! On the friendship tab, you’ll get pink and red hearts next to your Sim’s special someone, but going from a pink to romantic red heart didn’t unlock options despite spending A LOT OF TIME FLIRTING, you had to do the right things to get to a purple passion heart, and only THEN can you do anything more than make out.
DO YOU HAVE ANY IDEA HOW DIFFICULT IT IS TO GET TWO SIMS TO PAY ATTENTION TO EACH OTHER LONG ENOUGH TO GET TO PURPLE PASSION WHEN THEY’RE CONSTANTLY FIGHTING FOR THEIR LIVES TO GO TAKE A SHOWER OR A NAP OR GO TO THE FRIDGE CAUSE I CAN’T SEE THEIR STATS!!!!!!!??????

Even when I eventually got Magus to move in, I would’ve hoped that them living together would make it easier to keep their interest in each other up while they work on their skills and advance in their careers. But no… This game doesn’t really let you play Sims, seemingly balanced in a way that forced me to play a certain way, and not the way I wanted to.
Like, no, I don’t really want to go to town right now because you’re feeling stir crazy, you just got home from work and you’re starving and exhausted, and you can’t even shower cause the pipes burst again and one of you needs to start fixing it before you die from being smelly.

Also, fires frequently broke out on my lot, and sometimes my Sims would get stuck in a never ending loop of panic, despite me queuing up ‘call the fire department’ and ‘put out fire.’ I nearly lost Magus cause he was stuck in that never ending panic loop – not a good look!

I don’t have anything more in depth to say, as I didn’t take notes and was mainly using this as a distraction while recovering from hospital, so beh. Scaling back the game in this way was horrendous, I believe there could be ways to scale back the experience and still have it be fun and feel like a Sims game, but this was a great example of how to make that miserable. I couldn’t play dollhouse in the dollhouse game!

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The Sims 3: Pets, 3DS

Source: Digital Trends

In the Polo to the previous’ Marco, this game was muuuuuch better to play! And, there’s pets!

Immediately, the gameplay was more fun because I CAN SEE THE METRES FOR EVERYONE!!!!! I can tell when they’re hungry or stinky or lonely or tired, it should’t have to be said, but I’m so glad it’s there. You can even see these for your pets, so it’s easier for them to immediately feel like part of the family as you balance their needs as well.

The basic gameplay is the same as previous, but better and more balanced to let you play how you want a little bit more – though I found that it was still a bit tricky, as the Sims were very needy and things were still balanced against you, just less egregiously, so I didn’t mind.
All the things you can do with your humans, you can do an equivalent of with your pets – this means you can help them build their skills with their owners, or alone, and there is always something to do, even if all the humans in the household are out to work or asleep. If you’re close enough with your pet, you can even bring them to work, and depending on your pet’s skills, you may be able to get a promotion too!

Instead of starting from the beginning in my made up narrative, I just jumped off from where I quit the previous game, and made Harland and Magus live-in boyfriends with their cat, Alfador. I wanted to build up their skills and careers, slowly saving up and upgrading their stuff until we could afford to move to a bigger house and live in a comfortable lower-middle class (what an unrealistic fantasy~). It was soooo much more attainable, and venturing out to the various places around town was a little more fun, especially bringing Alfador to play in the park and use his foraging skills to bring in a little extra pocket change.

But… there are still gripes from the previous game that can be transferred here…
It was still incredibly tedious to make sure Magland felt lovey dovey and still liked each other, despite them hanging out to watch TV or play chess after sharing a meal most nights, and the multiple dates a week they went on in town. Just having one or two evenings after work where they needed to fix stuff around the house or work on skills by themselves meant they’d go back to barely liking each other… what the heck!? They got fucking married, yet one evening with minimal attention before bed meant they were basically strangers?

Overall, this game was much easier to get the hang of, despite it still feeling like it’s pulling me in directions it wants, and not letting me play the way I want. It was so much more enjoyable, despite the limitations and being so scaled back- but I actually had fun while playing this during recovery!

Also, Harland loved shaking his ass to this song, and I've had it perpetually stuck in my head since.

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Donut County, PS4

Source: insanityisthecure on Tumblr

A simple premise for a simple game – you control a hole, and need to swallow up stuff.

I like that, I had fun playing.

This was a shorter indie game, and I remember when it was a hyped up fad years ago. I saw it on sale while I was getting Katamari as a game that’d have easier controls while my wrists and hands were still recovering from my trip to the hospital, so… why not?

I finished the game in one sitting, over an hour or two, and have come back to play it now and then when the itch hits. I really like the simple puzzle elements of swallowing items into the hole and getting progressively bigger as you swallow more stuff. In later levels, there are more mechanics added to this, like absorbing water which makes items float instead of getting swallowed, or a catapult that you can launch recently swallowed items up into the sky with. These get a few chances to evolve and force you to think about how to interact with the environment and solve the puzzle of swallowing up everything.

The story is simple, everything that did get swallowed is now living in a cavernous underground, and no one is happy about it. As you progress in gameplay, a little more of this story unfolds as you try to swallow up stuff that will help everyone to escape, until it all escalates to a final showdown with a boss fight. The writing itself is quite simple, and you can tell it’s a recently made indie game based on some of the meme-y talk and such, but its fun. The only thing I wish was the ability to skip cutscenes, at least on subsequent playthroughs, or having some kind of infinite play/level select without the cutscenes for when you just wanna play. You have to click through the cutscenes every single time, but that’s not the worst in the world. They’re just a little long if you don’t care to see them again and would rather skip through.

This was nice to play on my PS4, but I needed to turn the controller sensitivity wayyy down, as the hole was flying around everywhere and felt better with some resistance. This isn’t a negative, as it’s yet another win for indie games that provide customisation in their settings!

The soundtrack is really lovely, and has a really unified sound with what sounds like a ukulele and some nice synth sounds. It’s a bit alternative/hipster sounding, and clearly inspired by the lo-fi vibe that was very popular around the time it came out.

Overall, this was very cute, and a perfect distraction while I couldn’t play more physically demanding games. I only wish there were more levels, or slightly easier ways to just replay like I mentioned previously. Great game, and a good way to spend and afternoon!

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Katamari Darmacy: Reroll, PS4

Source: prnsn001 on Tumblr

What a weird little game! A really fun one, but super weird. This one has been in my peripheral for years, and I’ve been wanting to play for a while - so it was nice to finally have the excuse to get it.

The game is pretty simple – there’s stuff everywhere, and you need to roll it up! You play as the little Prince, and have a self-absorbed father- The King of All Cosmos, who talks in exclusively in record scratches -who tasks you with rolling up stuff to turn into stars and refill the sky after he destroyed it. To do so, you will be dumped into an area and told to roll up a certain amount of stuff in a certain amount of time, and if you do a good enough job, you’ll get a slightly less condescending response from the King.

The vibe is really fun, with low poly models of everything and a distinctly jazzy soundtrack, bringing a unique and charismatic charm to the game. It’s easy to see why it became a bit of a cult classic, and still seems to be held in high regard from what I’ve seen; it’s genuinely pleasant to play when you get the hang of the controls and immerse yourself in the humour of it all. There are cutscenes here and there following two young children who notice the stars in the sky have disappeared, only to be dismissed by their mother. The more you fill the sky with stars, the more you’ll see what they’re up to, which is a funny but nice way to see your progress.

While the premise of the game is simple, the gameplay is deceptively so. Starting with controls, you have to move both joysticks as though they were the Prince’s hands pushing the ball; ie, both joysticks up to move forward, one up to pivot, both to the side to roll to the side, ect. This took me ages to get the hang of (and I gave myself a bit of extra time to be frustrated, my body wasn’t in working order right out of the hospital!), but once it started to click and I got better with the controls, it started to feel a lot better. There is an alternative control scheme that’s a lot simpler, but when I tried it, it just made me understand why the default controls were the way that they were, and I had to just suck it up and figure them out, haha. Nothing my stubborn ass can’t do, but I feel like the initial learning curve here could turn off a lot of players if they’re not patient or stubborn enough to give a chance to this admittedly unconventional control scheme.
There are other things you can do while rolling around in the levels, like looking around in a pov mode, or flying up real high for a second to get a more birds-eye-view before getting back to rolling, but I didn’t end up using these much.

Onto the actual rolling, while it seems you can get by and complete levels by just having fun and rolling up what you can in the allotted time, if you get to know the levels and employ a bit of strategy, you can grow pretty big and roll up pretty much everything! The more you play, the better you’ll get at weaving through levels and dashing through levels. If you rapidly flick the joysticks alternating up and down, you’ll charge up a dash and can speed in the direction you’re facing for a short burst. This is imperative if you wanna complete the later, larger levels with any kind of success, as the game will get harder and more complex as you go.

What you can and can’t roll is pretty simple; if it’s smaller than you- roll it up! If it’s any bigger than you, you won’t be able to, and depending on how big it is will depend on if you get any knock-back and take ‘damage.’ There’s not a health metre in this game, but you can lose mass if you roll recklessly. Rolling too fast into bigger objects or walls will cause a bit of knock-back and some items will fall off your ball. You can re-roll those items and pick them up, but it’s a real time waster, making it an apt consequence to keep some challenge.
Some of the living items, like people and animals, can be knocked over to make them easier to roll up when you’re not quite big enough to absorb them immediately, but you’re not small enough to be knocked back by them. This state is special, as you’ll have a few seconds to roll them up while they’re stunned on the floor, but if you don’t catch them in time, they’ll run off and disappear. I found this to be a fantastic gauge for how big I was, as once you can start rolling up a few people, the exponential growth starts to get really fast, making it worth going over previous areas and seeing if you’re big enough to roll over things that used to be obstacles. I found it really fun and satisfying to start the levels in a micro level, and end them more macro.

There were some stages I didn’t care much for, and these were the ones that required a certain theme. Like, only roll up crabs for the cancer star, or get as big as you can without touching a bear or the level will end, and of course that one wanted you to get the biggest bear possible. These are interesting on a technical level... Like, yeah, it’s a lot more challenging to limit the kind of things you’ll be rolling up… but it sucks a lot of the fun out when you have to play around a challenge that’s antithetical to the core method of playing. Some were better than others, but I much preferred the levels where the objective was to get big.

As you play, you’ll notice that the same handful of locations are reused for most levels, just allowing you to see more when you’re able to get bigger. While this can make some levels blur together, I think they did well getting the most out of these levels. When you start really small, the larger parts of the level are obviously inaccessible to you, requiring you to grow big enough to enter different areas. These areas are often gated off by some traffic cones with a sign showing the number of metres it needs you to be before you can cross that threshold, and as you size up, you’ll sometimes be interrupted by an exclamation from the King as he comments on how you’re going. This seems to be the way that the game is able to despawn the smallest of items that you won’t be able to see at your current size anymore, while loading in whatever data it needs to make the objects at your current size be roll-able.
While it’s annoying to be interrupted, there’s a skip button for it in this remaster, and it seems to be just a quirk of the limitations at the time. Considering in later levels when you go from tiny objects on the floor to rolling up chunks of islands in the sea, I can’t bring myself to be annoyed at it, as it seems clever to only have loaded objects you can actually roll up instead of tanking performance by having literally everything loaded from the start.
You’ll also get the ability to unlock endless mode on three of the levels, which allows you to come back and replay the levels at your own pace and just have fun! To unlock these, you’ll need to be really strategic and go waaaayyyyy beyond the goal, but you’ll know you’ve unlocked endless mode when you see two white angelic figures circling your Katamari ball.

There are also some collectables you can find throughout various levels, your cousins, and gifts from The King. These take a keen eye to find, but once you gather them (and don’t lose them while rolling!) you’ll unlock your cousins, which you can swap with The Prince to play as, and you’ll unlock various accessories from the presents that you can wear. I didn’t bother going out of my way to collect all of the cousins and presents, but that’s a cute thing to further challenge your rolling and observational skills if you’re so inclined.

I already mentioned that the graphics have a cute and stylised low poly 3D style, but it’s worth emphasising how fun the visuals are. It often reminded me of little carved wooden toys for a children’s play set- and with bright and fun colours, it’s super nice to see all the details as you roll everything up. It’s here where the influence of Keita Takahashi’s background in visual and sculptural art can really be felt, and the quick look into the game that I’ve done has revealed some interesting trivia. I really enjoy the fact that Takahashi had an idea, and stuck with it, aiming to create something fun that’s not really been done before. In that regard, I think he’s definitely succeeded!

The sound design in this game is quite hilarious at times, too. There are noises made by pretty much everything you roll up, and I found it quite amusing to hear the screams of the people I’d absorbed during my rolling sprees. I can hear how much fun the voice actors were having, and that brings a smile to my face. The jazzy soundtrack is really nice too, but I will say… not every song was a hit for me. There was one level that had this more… experimental sound, and the song mainly consisted of shrill high pitched beeping. I hated that. But, considering the good songs are really good, I can ignore the ones I don’t care for in peace.
There were a few sounds in the levels that got annoying too, and I’d often lower the volume to lessen the sensory overload of it all, but I wouldn’t change that. I’m just sensitive to that sorta stuff in general, and needed shorter playing sessions so that I wouldn’t get headachey or motion sick.

Overall, I loved this game, and periodically come back to play the endless levels. It’s unique, feels distinctly Japanese in it’s humour, and has a timeless charm that’s aged fantastically. It’s the perfect brain-off game, too.

Just roll up everything in sight, Little Prince...

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Hitman: Blood Money, PS4

Source: haloinfinite-archive on Tumblr

Having fallen in love with the World of Assassination Trilogy, I was curious about the previous entries in the series and wanted to see more of how Hitman came to be. I often hear everyone hype up Blood Money as the best one, so... why not start there?

The story is framed through a series of flashbacks during a conversation between a former FBI director and a journalist. They are discussing the many run-ins they’ve had with the elusive Agent 47, segueing into the missions you play. There’s background information you’ll notice if you pay attention, like the controversial nature of clones and how the current vice president is involved in some kind of political ploy for a rival agency to the one 47 works for.
I won’t lie, the plot felt a little messy and melodramatic to me, so it wasn’t the easiest to follow along with, but on the whole it was engaging enough to keep me interested.

The game starts with a great tutorial, that- while a bit hand-holdy and linear -gave a thorough introduction to all of the main mechanics you’ll need to play the game. There’s basic stuff; like changing outfits, sneaking around, hiding bodies, and using various weapons and distractions to your advantage – but there’s also more advanced mechanics to be mindful of, like how to smuggle weapons, poison food and drink, setting up accidental kills and using people as covers while shooting. Some are more polished than others, with some feeling well executed for what it is, and others leaving a little to be desired.
The one thing that was absolutely busted was the coin. This is a distraction you can throw, and a seemingly infinite one at that. I read into it, and it seems that in higher difficulties there actually is a limit to it’s usage. But, when I saw how many times I could use it, I kinda felt that it sucked a bit of the fun out, and tried to avoid it for most of my play through. I’ve seen some pretty wild techniques used with the coin used in speedruns, so it’s fascinating to see something so jank and/or game breaking here.

Anyway, the tutorial level is quite scripted, intending to cover all bases and force you to use most game mechanics so you understand how they work before spitting you out into the main levels of the game. From that point onward, you read some mission briefs and are plopped into a level, left to do whatever it is you need to do. I actually liked this, having to deal with the mini-sandbox levels and figure everything out myself. I found it a refreshing contrast to the overly tutorialised nature of modern gaming, and though it isn’t perfect, I like to actually, y’know, play the game.
There’s a lot of hints and places of interest if you pay attention and wait around, giving you room to connect the dots yourself. However, I don’t know if it’s a case of modern gamer syndrome (where, in this case, retroactively playing games I have no prior experience with makes me miss certain cultual-context cues or misunderstand the game’s design), or if some of these levels were just not designed all that brilliantly, as there were often times where I was stumped and couldn’t understand what I was supposed to do. You can buy hints with in-game currency you earn from completing missions, and while that’s an appreciated helping hand for those that need it, I often found these extra hints to be too vague and unhelpful. If you’re REALLY lost, and have looked around everywhere and bought all the hints and STILL don’t know what to do, you kinda have to resign to fucking around and finding out. Luckily, most missions do not have a time limit- so barring a few with time sensitive aspects, you’re free to wander around as you try to figure out the patterns and details of each mission.

The in-game currency I previously mentioned is awarded to you based on how well you performed your mission, and a few other things like retrieving your suit and weapons before exiting the level, otherwise you’re forced to pay a fee to get them back. This money is primarily used to buy upgrades for various skills and weaponry, and for unlocking hints during missions – but you can also use it to lower your notoriety. The notoriety mechanic is an interesting one, and one where I can see what it was trying to do… I just think it wasn’t robust enough and fell flat.
Notoriety is something you get by being a sloppy hitman - the more people see you doing suspicious things or find evidence you were there, the more notoriety you gain. You can kinda feel the effects of higher notoriety on a small scale in individual levels, and on a larger scale across the campaign. From what I could tell, you can feel the affects of notoriety in an immediate/isolated sense when you’re caught being suspicious through the alert bar going in the yellow suspicious range, and in a more general sense through people giving you a thinking face and less lenience to get away with acting suss. If you do a shit job and leave too many witnesses- and don’t have enough money to bribe your way out -you get a visual representation of your notoriety in the newspaper’s front page that you get to read at the end of every level. This seems to aggregate your notoriety based on the whole campaign, but is most influenced by the mission you just completed. If you manage to get yourself caught on CCTV and don’t destroy the evidence, a photo of you will be plastered across the front page. Otherwise, a police sketch of the main suspect will be shown; and depending on how many witnesses you left, the closer it looks to 47. If you were only a little bit messy, it’ll simply show a blank silhouette with a ‘?’ over it – but if you were a good little assassin who left next to no trace of yourself, the photo will instead be of the recently assassinated target.
Unfortunately, this notoriety system is largely unnoticeable if you’re good at the game, and when trying to describe this to a friend as I was playing, he put it rather aptly;

‘The game gets harder if you’re shit at it.’

I wanna go more into the newspapers you get at the end of every mission, as I thought these were BRILLIANT. Not only is it an additional peek into everything going on in the main story, but it’s interesting to read the background murmurings of the clone debates and some of the silly side stories and advertisements. If you leave witnesses alive in the level, they’ll detail your description and a police sketch is all but guaranteed.
I think my favourite part was just reading the columns on the front page, as it’s where the humour of the game really showed. It’s a shame that this isn’t something that lasted and was brought back or otherwise revamped in WOA, as it’s a nice little break between levels to evaluate how you did, and have a bit of a laugh. When you’re reading the front page story about your assassination, I noticed that you’d get different descriptions of the kind of killer you were based on how you did. For example, if you shot a lot of bullets, and missed targets, you’d get labelled as sloppy and amateur, but if you were more precise and meticulous, you’ll be labelled as a more skilled assassin.

As far as the actual gameplay though… It left a bit to be desired.
I think the UI was a bit basic and ugly lol, but it did communicate what it needed to well enough. There’s a visible health metre, and you can see decreases in health if you jump off ledges or are getting shot at by enemies. It’s good to keep an eye on that, but if you get in a shootout, you’re kinda fucked. There isn’t really any aiming, it’s just straight up shooting, which got frustrating. There is a first person mode you can enter at the click of a button, but it doesn’t offer any enhancements to shooting, and in fact, takes away mechanics. It feels more limited and just as hard to control, and something that you can no longer do is move the camera to peek around corners! That’s exclusively a mechanic for the default third person point of view, which can be activated in certain circumstances.
The exception is the scope on rifles, which puts you in a point of view mode, and even then… the aiming is jank. It’s just a permanent reticle in the middle of the screen, and moving the whole screen to ‘aim.’ The reticle isn’t just for shooting, though, as it’ll turn red when you hover it over something interactable - like if you’re holding a syringe and point the reticle over some food or drink. While that would seem helpful, it’s actually not, because the reticle is fucking miniscule. You can barely see it- and in fact, a lot of the UI and text elements were too small! They may have looked better on a smaller screen, or a desktop monitor that’s right in front of your face, but I was struggling with some of the visual cues. It was also pretty frustrating finding out that once you dump a body in a cupboard or chest, you can’t access their outfit anymore. That’s something I loved to take advantage of in WOA, so it was a bit of a rude shock to see something mechanically cruder.
I admit that I’m pretty spoilt by the WOA UI and controls here, and most my observations on the gameplay and mechanics are filtered through that, but damn. This was janky feeling and I don’t think I ever truly got used to it. Plus, if you died, the death animation took soooooo looooooonnnnnggggggg……..

One thing I did find interesting, though, was that the idle chatter of characters in the background were usually in the language of the location! It was nice to hear, and helped a lot with the atmosphere. However, most levels were set in various states of the US. These levels had varying accents depending on where you were, I’m unsure if each state’s accent is authentic. Most seemed to be from middle and southern states and sounded very similar to my untrained ear- if exaggerated into a caricature. Some stand-out examples of what I mean are the New Orleans accent in the Mardi Gras level, and the… Mississippi accent in the Mississippi level.

That brings me onto one of my biggest gripes… The subtitles! They’re so inconsistent, and switching them on will only show them during cutscenes, and not during the actual gameplay. This may be another instance of being spoilt by WOA, but c’mon… At least put subtitles for when Diana is speaking to you, or the very obvious and notable characters you will be interacting with?
For Diana’s debriefs, you can find a transcription in some menus, but that’s not the same. On the debrief screens, you’re presented with the info on your targets and location to look through, and Diana is just talking at you raw with no subs and won’t shut up. I can’t read and listen to different sentences at the same time, I don’t think anyone can, so this is frustrating. You either have to stop and just listen, and then read through the extra info, or try and read while ignoring Diana and then read her transcription later. When you’re in the mission, the first time you open that briefing screen again, she’ll start talking - but only the first time you open it. If you open then close then reopen, she won’t speak anymore, and you’re free to read in peace. This is just… So odd!?
To make matters worse, when you do get subtitles, they’re not good subtitles. Instead of, I don’t know, spelling things correctly, they did the most atrocious thing I can think of when captioning: opting to phonetically write out the accent. This is really bad, all you had to do to convey her thick accent is put (in a southern drawl) in front of what she’s saying. To top it all off, the text isn’t centred, and it’s too damn small!

Accessibility blunder!!

One thing that was definitely a highlight of my playing was the OST! There was a grand orchestral feel with the vocal choir motifs regularly placed throughout the soundtrack, mixed with a modern feeling through some of the beats and instrument choices. It really helped to up the feeling of bad assery, making it feel more grand as you slunk around gathering intel and offing targets. It just makes it even more of a shame that I didn’t think the sound design was that great...

Apart from my gripe with the subtitles, I only have one other major gripe with the game. And that is: the women feel very… made by men.
There’s only two types of women: fat or sexy. And being originally released in 2006 in the PS2 and Xbox 360 era, you can very clearly tell which type of woman is meant to be derogatory. To be fair, there are only fat or sexy male base models for the NPCs too, but idk man. It didn't feel like they were sexualised the same way, y'know?
The sexy ladies are almost always in something revealing or otherwise sexually suggestive, and sexy ladies are skinny with itty-bitty waists and huge… assets. Even the locations where you see these women are really objectifying, with the pornstar getaway, casino staff and fetish party patrons being particularly sexed up.
In contrast, the fat women are all depicted in the most unflattering angles. They take up space, wear frumpy outfits, are often loud and boisterous in ways intended to be annoying; just designed in a way where I can see the modellers laughing in disgust as they add rolls of fat to them. There’s a certain amount of leeway I can give for wanting to save on resources and only using a handful of base models for generic NPCs and just changing the outfits, but these feel so clearly designed to be hot and not.
Theres a scene in the hotel casino where, upon walking through a certain hallway, a larger woman (who is clearly intoxicated) sees you and invites you to her room, coming onto you quite strongly. This is played as an incredibly mean spirited joke, as the humour seem to come from the audacity that a fat woman dare express her sexuality, AND that she’d think you’d go for her. To top it all off, if you go to her room- which happens to have a great vantage point from her balcony -she starts to dance before lying down and passing out on the floor. When you try to exit the room, you’ll come across her husband, which just adds more layers, doesn’t it?
To be fair, there’s not one, but two instances of ~hot babes~ coming on to you that turn right around and start stabbing you; but that doesn’t feel much better. Both are scantily clad, leaving nothing to the imagination; and when the veil is lifted, they’re actually psycho babes that you instantly regret talking to.
What a great depiction of women! At least Dianna isn’t sexed up to hell and back, but you barely see her as she’s always obscured when she makes appearances in cutscenes.

Oh well!

Oh, also- while I've got you, I may as well say what most people think about the ending.
It’s a great idea that’s executed so, so poorly. Narratively, it’s set up to be a perfect catharsis and closing point, and it’s let down by how frankly awful the shooting mechanics are. I think it’s further let down by the fact that if you fail to do what it’s very clearly setting up for you, you’ll just have to reload and do it again. Way to end a decent game on a sour note.

Overall, this game was interesting. I found that there were plenty of things that felt innovative and interesting for it’s time, yet also it was very much a product of it’s time. It was cool to see the seeds of mechanics that would sprout into the more refined versions I'm familiar with, and I enjoyed most of my playthrough- but I think I’ve been spoilt by WOA.
While this game is clearly the blueprint for what I’d come to know and love, I don’t feel it really lived up to the expectations or hype it’s garnered as a classic. I’ve seen it talked about as being incredibly innovative in the level design, however, I often felt like there wasn’t actually much to do other than the one, maaaybe two intended paths the developers wanted you to use. I didn’t feel that freedom to assassinate how I pleased, rather, shoehorned into adapting my plans to what the game was telling me would be a good idea.
I might come back to this on occasion and play the levels I liked, and try out various things I didn’t think of during this playthrough, but it’s rather restrictive and I’m not sure how many more ways I can do things.

I’m glad to have played and seen the history, and there were moments I enjoyed… but I think I’ll stick with WOA as my go-to for the Hitman experience.

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Power Wash Simulator, Switch

Source: devileaterjaek on Tumblr

I wasn’t going to write about this, as I didn’t think there’d be much to say… but I got addicted.

And of course I have a lot to say.

After spending something like 350+ hours with the game this year, it’s safe to say I enjoyed it. So much so, that it became a danger for me to play. It was a great brain-off comfort while struggling with shit life syndrome, long term chronic pain and recovering from my hospital trip - and even when I’d worked hard and started to get a bit better physically, I’d still lose days to this game. I even bought the Shrek DLC (which was pretty fun), and would end up just mindlessly replaying my favourite levels over and over simply out of habit.

So, what do you do in this game?

You clean shit with a pressurised water spray. That’s pretty much it.

If you find no satisfaction with that kinda thing, then this isn’t the game for you! The more I played, however, the more I noticed some of the quirks and cool features of this game. So lets get into it.

To start with, this is a game played in first person, and you control the nozzle of your water gun. Walking around and aiming the water is pretty standard for dual sticks, but you can press a button to hold the camera still and only move the nozzle if that’s what you’d like. The main goal is to clean something that’s filthy, and at the end of every level you get to watch a little speed run of your cleaning. When replaying levels (and knowing what angle this speed run view is) I found it fun to clean away the dirt in patterns that’d be more interesting to watch sped up- it’s like one last treat at the end!
As you progress through the game, you’ll get the options to buy and upgrade your gear in order to power wash more effectively. You get various spray heads to work with, ranging from a pin point beam to various widths of spray- all with various pros and cons. The smaller sprays had better pressure, and can blast dirt clean off, but wider beams allow for a greater surface area to be cleaned while needing to be sprayed over slower to actually get anything. There’s a few fancy tips you can get later, that rotate automatically and have a concentrated spray, allowing you to get to those pesky spots that are hard to spray- but I was more of a purist and only wanted to use the two middle widths of spray and be methodical about it. These tips are easy to cycle through, with a click of the shoulder button, so equipping the spray head you wanted was super easy.

Other things you can equip are various soap sprays you can buy, which have a very wide spray and are really good at dissolving dirt when you match the soaps with the correct surface type. These were quite fun, but again, I was more of a purist and preferred to use my two favourite nozzles. You can also choose what extension you’d like; a short, medium or long distance attachments that helps to get everything, from right up close to very far away. As you play through the story mode and rank up, you’ll unlock various water guns themselves that get increasingly stronger in pressure. This allows you to use wider beams of water with stronger force, and allows you to easily clean levels however you’d like. You can also buy cosmetic changes with the in-game currency, and I have bought everything, even though I’m only using the strongest water gun and all it’s attachments. I just needed something to spend all my money on…

You also have three heights to spray at; your normal standing, a crouch and prone. This is great to get the dirt under various ledges and in weird crevasses, but it’s not the only way. Levels that may need them will have a step stool, a ladder or two, and some scaffolding stairs to utilise for those high up places that you can’t reach on your own. While the stool and scaffolding can be moved and placed around wherever there is a flat surface on the floor that can fit them, the ladders can only be placed on specific pre-programmed areas. You’ll see these areas when you pick up the ladder, seeing blue silhouettes of where you’re able to place them, but this was a little bit limiting. It also frustrated me that I couldn’t just put the ladder back on the floor, and instead had to walk around the corner and place it somewhere out of the way. You can run when clicking in the joystick, but you can’t run while holding any of these climbable things, so it really felt like a hassle sometimes.

As you play through the story mode, you’ll find yourself cleaning various vehicles and locations that are caked in dirt. It’s quite amusing that these jobs have things get so incredibly dirty, but it’s all the more satisfying to blast it clean. Personally, I found that cleaning things with wider, flatter surface areas were not only easier to clean, they were just more fun. I liked buildings and location areas to clean the most, not really enjoying vehicles and locations that had too many curves and thin poles and tiny things to clean. As fun as it is to play in general, I noticed a few quirks about the cleaning itself that would sometimes get on my nerves.

You see, I noticed that the way the sections get completed is calculated on a percentage of how clean that specific item is- which hasn’t been scaled very well for what that looks like in practice. That probably sounds confusing if you haven’t played, so I’ll do my best to explain.

When cleaning, say, a car- there will be multiple parts of that car to check off as clean. You need to clean the body of the car, but it’ll be broken down into door, window, handle, ect. All these individual parts can be seen when you pause and a menu pops up, and you’ll see the percentage of how much you’ve cleaned of it so far. You can even click on one of the things that’s still dirty, and the entire surface area of that part will start flashing so that it catches your eye. That in itself was great, and I often used this flashing to point out where I hadn’t finished yet. You can even press a button and it’ll briefly highlight all the dirt orange so that it stands out more, so there’s multiple ways to make sure you’ve gotten everything.
The problem arises when you get to small things… When you’re cleaning something with a larger surface area, like the roof of the car, you’ll notice that it counts it as complete despite not manually cleaning off all the dirt. That was a little frustrating, when I’d set up a beautiful line by line cleaning and it gives the ‘ding!’ to complete it before you get to go over the last line of dirt yourself. But, as much as I don’t want to get over it, you can understand that the game doesn’t need you to clean every pixel of dirt for it to be considered complete.

Right?

When cleaning smaller and fiddly areas, like the car headlights, this near-enough’s good-enough doesn’t actually kick in at a reasonable percentage of dirt cleaned compared to the surface area. You have to get right up in there and do multiple passes with the strongest, tiniest jet stream you’ve got, and sometimes it still won’t have gotten all the dirt! It’s so frustrating too, cause even if you highlight it, you can barely see it flashing because its TOO DAMN SMALL!
My theory is that the percentage of clean that results in the completion of that section is just a one size fits all, despite not all the sizes of each section are the same. As a guess, let’s say the percentage rate required for the auto complete to kick in is 99.5% of the surface area cleaned. For bigger surface areas, this is perfectly fine, but also explains why it sometimes kick in too early; and explains why trying to get 99.5% of a teeny tiny surface area clean is just miserable.

The most fun is when you feel like you’ve cleaned it yourself, and had a chance to spray over everything. If I could suggest adjusting when the auto complete kicks in so it’s adjusted to the actual surface area and size of that section, I think that’d make the game nearly perfect.

Cause, as it is, it’s a super nice simulation game that does exactly what it says on the tin. There are a few other little gripes I have that are honestly nitpicky cause I’ve spent way too long playing and noticing these quirks, but that auto complete thing is the one that sucked the most.

Anyway, with the story mode is something unique that I appreciated at first, but found myself glad that it was taken out during free play. See, the whole setup is that you’re starting your business of power washing, and clients will text you throughout your job. There were some that were amusing, like your friend who helps you set up your business and spreads the word- she often elicited an amused exhale from me. But… Some of the clients are downright annoying, and I didn’t find the writing to be very good in general. It’s a shame, cause I like this concept; there’s a vague mystery and some drama about a corrupt politician, and for some reason all the cats are missing? I don’t know, I wasn’t really paying attention cause it felt a little superficial and tacked on. The texting isn’t constant, you’ll just be texted every now and then- and I’m pretty sure you can read the full transcription in the menu somewhere if you are interested.
But I wasn’t.
That’s ok, as although I do prefer strong and engaging narratives for gaming in general, there’s some- like this one -where I don’t really care. All I need to play through the main campaign is that theres things that are dirty and people to pay me. The ‘resolution’ to the narrative was weird and felt kinda out of nowhere, but whatever. It’s easy enough to ignore the texts and not read the briefs if you don’t care, and you don’t get the texts at all when playing on free play modes, so I'm happy!

Instead of any narrative upping the ante, I was very satisfied with the way the levels themselves became more complex. It was nice to slowly earn money and unlock upgrades to buy; going from simple cars and building exteriors, to more complex tasks, like boats and planes and carnival rides. As I mentioned with the whole percentage cleaning thingy, some levels were too fiddly to have fun with, but I can understand and appreciate the stakes getting higher- especially when the levels I liked were really, really fun.
My personal take is that the jobs with very rounded surface planes like the helicopter, or too many thin poles and tiny bits like the ferris wheel sucked, and the places with more structure and surface areas to clean, like the house exteriors, and interiors like the underground bathroom and train platforms were the best! That seems to align with general consensus, as I noticed that a lot of the free bonus content and Shrek DLC seem to have taken that into consideration!

And, lets talk about the free content, cause it was really cool! Any game like this that releases free content is automatically a little bit cooler. They already had a great base game with some challenge modes and free play to access after you’ve played through the story at least once to unlock it all, then, adding some free seasonal levels and bonus packs with more buildings and vehicles to clean is the cherry on top! And to add, like, a couple more cherries, there’s a handful of crossover promotions where you get to clean stuff from other IPs.
These crossovers were pretty fun, as they’re mini campaigns to play that let you clean vehicles and locations from other stuff. The Final Fantasy crossover was cool, I haven’t really played any of the games and forgot that mechs and shit are a big deal, so you cleaned a lot of them. I didn’t enjoy the fiddly bits much, but I did enjoy cleaning the bar that they all hang out in! Another that I really enjoyed was the Tomb Raider one; you get to clean Lara’s mansion front, and some mazes and shit, and her secret treasure room! After spending a couple months just playing the main story levels over and over, it was a really fun surprise to find out just how much free content I could access when I realised it was there! It was nice to see that a lot of my favourite parts of levels seemed to be noted and enhanced upon for these updates, and I enjoyed how creative and complex some levels would get. Out of the general free updates, I really liked the aquarium and three storey modern cubist house the most. I’ve played them about 20 times each. And while we’re here, I’ll just quickly say the only DLC I paid for was the Shrek one, and it was great. The levels were interesting and it was really fun to explore the locations you see across the movies. There is just one complaint… and that is...

They would not fucking say that.

Yeah… the texting is still kinda bad. Maybe other people got more out of it than I did, but it was kinda weird to read texts from Shrek or Lara Croft that felt completely out of character, just so that they have something to blab about while you’re power washing. Oh well, they tried, and the levels speak for themselves!

All in all, if my only real complaints are such nitpicky things… thog. I really enjoyed this game, and had to make a conscious effort to wean off it and actually play other games this year. I relapsed again towards the end of the year when some stressful shit was going down, but hey- a new festive level released!

This was the perfect game to just sit and chill with, I’d enjoyed so many YouTube videos, new albums and audiobooks while playing. My friends made fun of me for getting addicted, but I make fun of them for other stuff- plus, it is kinda funny that I played for so long.

Wish me luck weaning off for a second time so I actually play other games for next year’s write ups!

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Jojo's Bizzare Adventure: Eyes of Heaven, PS4

Source: highdio on Tumblr

girugameshhhhh

text about hating video games

text concluding that I still hate video games

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Mario and Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story, DS

Source: suppermariobroth on Tumblr

girugameshhhhh

text about hating video games

text concluding that I still hate video games

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Fear and Hunger, PC/Mac

Source: pocketdaan on Tumblr

girugameshhhhh

text about hating video games

text concluding that I still hate video games

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