Sonic Team September Round-up

During the Console Wars of the 90s, my camp was firmly established on the Nintendo side of the schoolyard (see The Sega Gap for more info). Recently, the availability of Sega's library on PC has made catching up on the games I had previously skipped due to childhood biases quite easy. With this month being #SonicTeamSept, I thought this would be a find time to tackle several Sega games in my Steam backlog in one fell swoop on my Twitch channel.

Nights Into Dreams

My first and only prior experience with Yuji Naka's Sega Saturn title, Nights into Dreams, was at a department store demo kiosk. Back then, I could not make heads or tails of how to play this bizarre fever dream of a game. Two decades and a very careful readthrough of the instruction manual later, Nights is still a really difficult game to figure out; it doesn't neatly fit into any existing game genre. 

Here's a short summary of how the gameplay works in a level of Nights Into Dreams:

• Nights flies through fixed 2D planar routes within a larger 3D environment collecting orbs
• By collecting at least 20 orbs within the time limit, Nights can destroy the Ideya machine
• After destroying the Ideya and returning to the starting point, the flight path changes and a new Ideya spawns
• Destroying 4 Ideya machines warps Nights to a separate battle area to take on the level boss

It took a while, but once I got the hang of soaring through the air, collecting orbs, and the somewhat opaque boss battles, I found that I was having a pretty good time. It also helped that the gameplay was accompanied by colorful, stylized graphics and a poppin' soundtrack. After finishing it in a single sitting (it's a pretty short game), I was struck with the feeling that the game was a bit too barebones for a major console release, yet too esoteric for the arcades. I'm really glad I got to experience it as an affordable Steam release in order to better understand its place in gaming history but I don't think I would have been satisfied if I would have bought it as a full-priced Saturn game back in 1996.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 4 hours and 20 minutes

Flying through rings and collecting orbs as Nights

Sonic Generations

Since Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the few Sega series that I have considerable experience with, I was pretty excited to play this game that serves as a celebration of the franchise's history. In Sonic Generations, you alternate between playing 2D platforming stages as retro Sonic and 3D platforming stages as modern Sonic. Each stage is based on iconic locations from previous Sonic games such as Green Hill Zone from Sonic the Hedgehog 1 and City Escape from Sonic Adventure 2. It was awesome to see high-definition reimaginings of classic areas; they also sported some interesting rearrangements of the music from these stages as well. The gameplay itself, however, was a mixed bag. In many cases, the game successfully captured the smooth and snappy gameplay of classic Sonic games, but in other cases, either the level design or controls felt janky. As a long-time Sonic fan, I had fun with Sonic Generation's retro-modern nostalgic mashup but it may lack the polish to reel in people who aren't already invested in the adventures of Sega's blue hedgehog.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 6 hours and 30 minutes

Green Hill Zone as depicted in Sonic Generations

Sonic CD

Among the classic 16-bit Sonic games, this is the only one I've never played (due to it being confined to a Sega Genesis add-on system for so many years). This game's use of CD technology provides a notable boost to the graphical detail and music quality compared to the standard Genesis titles. It was quite nice. However, I found the level layouts and time travel mechanics (a concept unique to this entry in the series) to be quite confusing. Perhaps if I had spent more time with the game, I could have come to appreciate these aspects of Sonic CD but I generally come to retro Sonic games for a straightforward pick-up-and-play experience. On the other hand, this game does some cool things with boss battles, many of them added a puzzle-like element that made them much more interesting that traditional Sonic battles. Overall, this was a solid 2D Sonic but it didn't come close to touching Sonic 2 and Sonic Mania as my favorite 16-bit Sonic games.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 2 hours and 18 minutes (Bad ending because I don't understand time travel)

I loved the rich color pallet of Sonic CD

I found playing all three of these games to be interesting and worthwhile experiences, though I don't think I would put them on the same level as some of Sega's timeless classics. That being said, seeing three very different phases within the evolution of Sega's aesthetics and gameplay design in a single month was a lot of fun.

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #SonicTeamSept event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Nier Automata Review

2017 was a huge year for games. With the release of the Switch and behemoths like Breath of the Wild and Mario Odyssey taking up so much of my time, there were a lot of other great games that piqued my interest but ended up never making it into my queue. In fact, I even made a Missed 2017 Games list to help me keep track of all the games I wanted to circle back to in later years. Among these was Square Enix and Platinum Games' award-winning sci-fi action RPG Nier Automata. Finding myself with extra time to stay home and play games lately, this year turned out to be the perfect time to finally experience this open-world post-apocalyptic epic.

Background

Nier Automata set in the distant future thousands of years after a successful alien invasion has forced humankind into exile in space. The story follows two android soldiers, 2B and 9S, who are dispatched to Earth on a mission to reclaim the planet from machine lifeforms that have been maintaining control of the planet on behalf of the aliens. By playing through the campaign three times, players can experience this proxy war between the human and alien's respective robotic armies from the perspectives of 2B, 9S, and a third character that is encountered later.

Aesthetics

When you think about it, Nier Automata's setting is rather bleak, but I'm ok with that. There's something about exploring a crumbling post-human world, a world torn apart by a pointless war, that's deeply compelling: it's as beautiful as it is sad. It's an experience I wasn't entirely sure I would be comfortable with given current world events, but I'm glad I did it.

Nier Automata feels "directed" in a film-like sense during gameplay in a way that 3D open-world games rarely do. In many cases, this is accomplished by taking control of the camera away from the player to force a cinematic camera perspective.  The game's ability to adapt its mechanics for behind the back, side-scrolling, and overhead perspectives on the fly makes the whole thing feel remarkably smooth while still showing off major setpiece moments from the best possible perspective. Older pre-rendered 3D games like the Resident Evil attempted to have dramatic camera angles like this, but it would often have an awkward or jarring effect on the feel of the game.

The incredible musical score sets the tone perfectly: haunting, mysterious, sad, with just a little bit of wonder mixed in. The fact that the lyrics of the music are in a made-up language gives the world a mysterious alien quality even though it takes place on our planet. This dovetails nicely with the game's themes of returning to decimated occupied earth thousands of years after humans have left it behind. The strange multicultural mishmash language gives the sense that though this world was once the domain of humans like us, the humans of Nier's world were far removed from us by the passage of time.

Every movement the characters make has a distinct style. While I expected this to be the case during battles, it's kind of the norm for games with action combat, it was the personality injected into the more minor animations that really struck me; 2B and 9S have a way of turning simple actions like climbing a ladder or sliding down a sand dune into cool and flashy maneuvers. Each type of enemy also has a unique and vividly animated form of locomotion based on the configuration of their bodies; I particularly liked the bouncy and jerky movements of the stubby robots and the skittering of the insect-like machines.

Nier Automata's character and costume designs may feature very limited color pallets, but this ties them together in a cohesive yet very stylish way. The figures of 2B and 9S clad in black and with their eyes covered by blindfolds is bold and iconic. The one downside of this is that cut of 2B's outfit combined with the game's fabric physics and camera angles can lead to some "fan service" imagery in places where it feels inappropriate (anime fans will know what I'm talking about). Having a character's underwear being prominently featured in an otherwise serious scene detracted from the dramatic weight for me. I think this could have been avoided with a few minor tweaks that wouldn't have sacrificed much from the character's style.

Mechanics

Combat in Nier Automata takes the form of fast-paced real-time battles that play similar to a character action game with some RPG systems layered on top to make the action a little more forgiving. The mechanics work a little differently depending on which character you're playing. As a combat specialist, 2B wields two swords, gracefully flips through the air for aerial combos, and polishes enemies off with flashy finishing moves (imagine a simplified version of Devil May Cry and you get the picture). On the other hand, 9S, as a scout, only has access to a limited set of these combat capabilities but can make up for it by being able to hack into his foes to take them down from a distance. Hacking success is contingent on winning a shoot 'em up minigame similar to Geometry Wars. As someone who enjoys both character action games and shoot 'em ups, both of these mechanics worked for me and helped keep combat feeling fresh when playing through each character's routes.

Nier Automata uses 3D action combat, top-down hack-n-slash, side-scrolling, and shoot 'em gameplay in concert with each other to keep the action as fast-paced and stylish as possible. Amazingly, it juggles all of these and makes them feel natural. As someone who plays a fair amount of shmups, I thought some of these segments were a little too easy; I could often spot ways to cheese my way to victory. However, I'm thinking it was a deliberate design decision to lower the friction when switching back and forth between gameplay styles and to ensure no one mechanic creates a stumbling block for players. On the whole, it's very impressive the way this game manages to implement so many types of mechanics so effectively. 

To truly complete Nier Automata, you have to play through the campaign three times. Each time you experience a different character's route and gain new information and perspectives that make the whole story come together. While this is an interesting concept, I had mixed feelings about the execution. The first route, in which you play as 2B, is by far the freshest and most exciting from a gameplay standpoint because every enemy you encounter and area you gain access to is a new discovery; however, her story is somewhat unsatisfying. In the second route, you play as 2B's companion, 9S. Since these two characters spend the majority of the campaign together, 9S's route is largely a retread of 2B's route, but with a few new scenes interspersed throughout that provide more context to the story. The fact that 9S's mechanics differ from 2B's helps keep things from getting stale but I still couldn't help but feel like I was repeating a lot of scenarios I had already done in order to get a small amount of new content. The third route covers entirely new ground from the first two routes and provides the story with a conclusion that brings everything together, it's just a shame that it takes so long to get to it. I think it would have benefitted this game to abridge 9S's route so that more players would have made it the far more interesting third route. Based on Steam statistics, only about half the players that finish 2B's route end up playing through the third route. (My feelings about Nier Automata's three-route structure mirror my though's in my review of the similarly-structured Ys Origin.)

Nier Automata's save system is inconsistent. In the opening mission, which takes about 45 minutes to complete, you can't save your game at all. In other parts of the campaign, you must manually save your game at marked save points on the map. In other circumstances, getting killed doesn't result in a game over but revives you in a new body; you must then go find your previous body to collect any of the stat-buffing items you had equipped when you died. There's an in-universe justification for the save system's inconsistency that works from a narrative perspective, but it still led to some frustration on my part when I would wander into a high-level area by mistake and end up losing progress. I recommend that most players temporarily drop the difficulty to Easy in the game's opening mission to get the best experience.

Like any open-world game, Nier Automat provides plenty of opportunites to engage in sidequests. Most of these were pretty bland fetch quests, though the fact that they added to the lore, supplied considerable XP and crafting supplies, and provided an excuse to explore the world more made them worthwhile. It also helped that your side quest completion carries over each time you play through the campaign, meaning you can spread the sidequests out between routes to keep them from feeling too repetitive.

Conclusion

By combining a rich world, a strong sense of style, and a variety of gameplay styles that feel good individually and work even better in concert, Nier Automata's strengths far outweigh any of the game's minor negative attributes. The game is both aesthetically and mechanically an artistic achievement that deserves to be experienced by anyone that enjoys action RPGs and science fiction.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 48 hours (all three routes, medium difficulty, 82% sidequests completed)

Nature taking over urban areas is a common theme.

The creepy old amusement park was one of my favorite areas

Scrolling shmup gameplay

Geometry Wars-like hacking sequence

3D flying shmup battle

Racing Game Round-up

While it's never been my number one favorite genre, I've always had a soft spot for racing games. They make great side games when playing something more involved like an RPG (in fact, one of my favorite games last year was Forza Horizon 4). Since this year's community game-along calendar happened to feature a month devoted to racing games, I decided to prepare a little sampler platter for myself and tried out 7 different titles on my Twitch channel!

Here's a quick round-up of mini-reviews:

Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing

This Mario Kart competitor from 2006 features characters and race tracks based on Sonic the Hedgehog and many other Sega franchises (e.g. Shenmue, House of the Dead, Jet Set Radio, etc).

Pros:

• The courses make good use of the themes from their respective Sega franchises (especially for a game of this age).
• The game features an announcer that gives dynamic commentary on your race performance during each event. Some of his lines are pretty funny.
• The game's controls feel very smooth. The very drift-focused mechanics remind me of Mario Kart Double Dash.

Cons:

• While the game offers six cups of races, many of the courses are just minor variations of the same thing.
• The game only features local multiplayer, which is kind of a bummer.
• Despite being over a decade old, this game did not run smoothly on my PC. The options to adjust resolutions, graphics, etc are extremely limited as well for a PC game.

Verdict: Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing is a solid Mario Kart-like but has been more than surpassed by more recent games in the genre, including its own sequel.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Garfield Kart

Thanks to a "generous and wholesome" donation from one of my Twitch viewers, I ended up with this racer based on the Garfield comic strip.

Pros:

• While not as good as a Mario or Sonic racing game, the controls felt surprisingly good for a cheap licensed game.
• There are few interesting items that stray from the typical kart racer mechanics. For example, there's a magic missile that changes your position with whoever you hit. Several items can also have different effects depending on whether they're deployed forwards or backward.
• Despite being labeled a "beta", Garfield Kart's online multiplayer works well. The downside is that you'd somehow have to convince multiple people to play Garfield Kart in order to use it.

Cons:

• The course designs are very boring and don't make much use of the Garfield license.
• The game's content is very minimal: 4 cups comprised of very similar racecourses
• Unlocks of new courses and characters are handled via collecting coins rather than progressing through Grand Prix. I would have had to play through each cup many times just to unlock the next one. I ended up just using cheats to spare myself from having to grind.
• The implementation of items is very unbalanced. All it takes is to get hit by a single item to be dropped back to last place with little chance to recover before the end of the race.
• Collision physics feel a little off. Sometimes slightly grazing an obstacle can bring your cart to a sudden dead stop.

Verdict: Garfield Kart checks off the absolute bare minimum requirements of a kart racer. There's no reason to play it with so many other better options available.

Score: ⭐⭐

Desert Child

This indie racing RPG caught my eye during an E3 presentation several years ago. In Desert Child, a hoverbike racer tries to race his way to wealth and stardom in a dystopian sci-fi world.

Pros:

• Desert Child has a very striking visual design. Both the town and racing scenes look really cool.
• Similar to the graphics, the music in both towns and races stands out for its great style.
• The use of RPG elements introduces some interesting mechanics, like changing out parts of your bike to modify its performance or help you earn more money.
• The game's racing is fun, at least initially. Races take place in a side-scrolling perspective and have players using weapons and dodging obstacles while trying to stay ahead of the opponent.

Cons:

• This game is very grindy and features a very unfavorable economy. Bike repairs and food for your driver eat heavily into your race winnings and all progress in the campaign is gated by money. Similar to Garfield Kart, I used to cheats to bypass the excessive grinding.
• The player character walks very slowly through town, which makes navigation a pain after a while.
• Desert Child's gameplay is very repetitive; it sports minigames and jobs for your character to do between races, however, all of these are basically just races with a slightly different coat of paint.
• The late-game races often seem to involve just as much luck as skill thanks to the procedurally generated courses.

Verdict: Desert Child's strong sense of style make it worth taking a look at either via a quick play session or checking out some YouTube videos. However, playing through the whole campaign was not a satisfying experience.

Score: ⭐⭐

What The Golf

Not quite an actual golf game, What The Golf ended up being deemed a racing game by an esteemed panel of judges from the Chic-Pixel community, so here it is. This game starts out as simple putt-putt and then rapidly heads toward a series of surreal challenges that are only loosely tied to anything resembling a real sport.

Pros:

• This game is funny. Whacking golf balls into explosive barrels, ricocheting balls off planets, and hitting random household objects with golf clubs can be pretty amusing.
• There is a lot of creativity and variety here. Each golf course introduces a unique mechanic or idea.

Cons:

• With each course offering something different, the overall package is a bit of a mixed bag. There were some mechanics I wished the game would expand further upon and others that I felt were funny as a one-off joke but not particularly engaging from a gameplay standpoint.

Verdict: "Amusing" is definitely the best word I can think of to describe What The Golf. It's a fun game to play in short bursts, but don't come to it expecting much depth.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed

This game takes the strong foundation established in Sonic All-Stars Racing and expands upon it with the introduction of boats and aircraft. The "Transformed" in the title references the dynamic nature of the races, each lap on a course involves some sort of change in the environment that creates new routes and obstacles. 

Pros:

• Transformed doubles down on the Sega references. I was excited to see courses based on Dreamcast and Saturn games like Skies of Arcadia and Panzer Dragoon. Each course looks great and is clearly crafted with admiration for Sega's history.
• Unlike most other kart racers, this game features a structured single-player campaign that offers various types of races.  Progressing through this mode unlocks new characters and tracks.
• The cars, boats, and aircraft all handle differently from each other but each feels good to control.
• The transforming racecourses provide a great visual spectacle but also make for more engaging gameplay. They serve as a good way to have a single course accommodate multiple vehicle types (for example, a section of the course may flood mid-race causing your car to transform into a boat during the next lap).

Cons:

• The online mode works well but is very limited in terms of features. You can only do one race at a time (i.e. no online multiplayer grand prix) and some modes feel half-baked (e.g. battle mode doesn't allow you to add bots, making the arenas feel very empty).
• During single-player races, the AI racers have a knack for hitting you with weapons on the last leg of the final lap, causing you to finish in 8th place in a race that you had been leading for 90% of the time. This is true of a lot of kart racers, however.

Verdict: Sonic & All-Stars Racing Transformed is a great kart racer that gives Mario Kart a run for its money. If you enjoy this genre of racing games or are a big Sega fan, this game comes as an easy recommendation.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Earlier this month, Itch.io released the massive Racial Justice and Equality bundle; a massive bundle of over 1000 indie games with the proceeds going toward civil rights charities. From this huge collection, I picked out a couple of racing games to include in this round-up.

Daemon Detective Zero Racing

Daemon Detective Zero Racing is a low-poly sci-fi racer featuring characters from various indie games. It is very clearly heavily inspired by the F-Zero and Wipeout games on N64 and PS1. I can't really split this one into "pros and cons"; it's a very fast, barebones, and somewhat janky 3D racer that was a fun little nostalgic diversion for me.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

Rock n Rush Battle Racing

This game plays somewhat like a hybrid of Mario Kart and Twisted Metal. It also features a great rock-n-roll soundtrack. I found the gameplay of this one to be much more polished than Daemon Detective Zero Racing; however, the game only features 4 tracks. While each of these tracks has a day and night and mirror mode version, there's still not much content here. That being said, I enjoyed my short time with it and it's definitely worth the download if you bought the bundle.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐

While the games I played for this round-up varied considerably in quality, I had a lot of fun digging into a genre that I enjoy but often tend to neglect!

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #RacingGameMonth event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Shenmue 3 Review

Considering the unusual circumstances behind Shenmue 3, a surprise modern sequel to a pair of cult Dreamcast games from nearly 20 years ago, and all nostalgia and baggage that comes with it, this "review" is going to be a bit different than my usual write-ups... more like a spoiler-free review, analysis, and retrospective all rolled into one. That being said, I hope you're along for the ride.

Background
When I was a teenager, I got absolutely absorbed into the Shenmue games. In fact, I got Shenmue 2 right before spring break and I'm pretty sure that I spent the subsequent week off from school doing nothing but exploring virtual 1980s Hong Kong with Ryo, Joy, Ren, and the rest of the crew. It probably wasn't the healthiest way for a young man to be spending his vacation, but it was a magical experience that I don't think I'll ever forget. However, having the second game end on a cliffhanger that would seemingly never be resolved, was quite painful. Thus, when the Kickstarter campaign for Shenmue 3 was announced at E3 2015, I signed up to back it immediately; in fact, I'm pretty sure I created a Kickstarter account specifically so I could secure a copy of Shenmue 3 for myself.

Now that the game has finally come out and I've played through it, my feelings on it are incredibly mixed.

Game Overview
Shenmue 3 continues directly from the events of Shenmue 2. The Shenmue games follow Ryo, a Japanese teen martial arts student, who is on a quest to find the man that murdered his father and exact revenge. In Shenmue 3, Ryo visits two different cities in China where he gathers clues to pick up the trail of his father's killer, Lan-Di. There is also a third smaller area that serves primarily as a location for the game's conclusion. Essentially, each of these areas is used to divide the game into three acts. In addition, to gathering clues, the game features occasional combat in the style of a 3D fighting game (similar to Virtua Fighter) and a variety of minigames. Shenmue 3 was released on PS4 and PC; this blog post is based on the PC version.

Observations - Shenmue's Disparate Genre Influences

Coming back to the Shenmue franchise caused me to realize many things about these games that I was never quite able to articulate when I was younger. Shenmue is often miscategorized as an "action RPG," and this third game really cemented in my mind what a miscategorization that is. Shenmue's combination of gameplay elements and themes make it much more complicated to pin down... so here it is in Venn diagram form:

• Adventure game: While the combat of Shenmue is prominently featured in media surrounding the game, fighting makes up an extremely little of the gameplay. Ryo spends the majority of his time talking to NPCs, looking for clues, and bartering items; all of which are much more consistent with a traditional adventure game (think a point-and-click adventure) than any other genre.
• Slice-of-life: Ryo may be on a quest for revenge, but the game encourages him to slow down and make progressing the investigation part of his daily routine rather than the sole focus of his time. In addition to investigating, Ryo must eat several times per day to keep his stamina up, exercise to improve his strength in preparation for the occasional combat, earn an income via part-time jobs, and even go home at the end of the day to get enough sleep. This cycle feels a lot like slice-of-life games like Harvest Moon or Animal Crossing. Something that adds to this slice-of-life feeling is that the game world is constructed to be a place that Ryo inhabits along with the NPCs, rather than just serve as a venue that provides Ryo with a set of objectives (as would be the case in most other game genres).
• Kung-fu film: Thematically and aesthetically, Shenmue 3 has a lot of elements in common with classic kung-fu films. Much of Ryo's quest revolves around seeking out eccentric old martial arts masters and finding some way of convincing them to teach Ryo one of their signature techniques that he needs to beat one of Lan-Di's henchmen. If you've ever watched old martial arts movies, this formula will sound very familiar. Further adding to the kung-fu film vibe, Shenmue 3 retains the series' now-infamous deliberately stilted voice acting, which reminds me of the dubs of 1970s kung-fu films that I used to watch on TV as a kid.

Now that I've gotten all that explanation out of the way, let's get into how I, as a fan of the series, felt that Shenmue 3 managed to package all these elements together.

Observations - Shenmue 3 as Compared with its Predecessors
Being a Kickstarter-backed revival of a cult video game series, Shenmue 3 was inevitably going to be a nostalgia-focused work. The rigidity with which it adheres to what was established by the previous games works both for and against it.

• Shenmue 3's characters are simple and move stiffly by modern game standards, but look very clean on hi-definition displays; a successful attempt at being consistent with the art style of the original games while still making enough updates for it to work in 2020.
• Similarly, the game's environments are reminiscent of those from the Dreamcast days, but at a much higher level of detail. Guilin, the area at the end of Shenmue 2 and beginning of Shenmue 3, is particularly beautiful; it looks the way I envisioned it in my mind's eye when I played the previous game, rather than how it actually looked as rendered by the Dreamcast.
• In the past, I had wondered if Shenmue's awkward-sounding English voice work was an intentional directorial decision or just the product of an inexperienced cast. Seeing as Shenmue 3 recast several characters with well-established actors but the delivery of the lines retains the feel of the first two games, I've concluded that this is an intentional style choice. Seeing as this game leans heavily into kung-fu movie tropes, I think this retro-sounding delivery works in the context of the game, but I can see how it wouldn't appeal to someone who didn't grow up with this unusual cultural connection. Thankfully, the game gives the option of switching to Japanese audio for those who don't like the direction of the English voice acting.
• Quick-time events (QTEs) return in Shenmue 3. I was initially concerned about this as these were a source of frustration for me in the previous games in the series. In the past, QTEs would occur suddenly during battles, and executing them incorrectly could mean abruptly losing a fight that you were previously winning. While this is still the case in Shenmue 3, the QTEs are foreshadowed during the story leading up to the battle so that the player can be prepared to execute them in advance. Most of the time this takes place in the form of Ryo learning a new martial arts technique before the battle; this training sequence gives the player a low-stakes way to learn the QTE's inputs before the critical moment that they come up during combat. I thought this was a smart tweak on the part of this installment's developers.
• When it comes to the game's UI and controls, these are areas where I think nostalgia and faithfulness should have been discarded in favor of a complete overhaul. Digging around in the game's menus felt cumbersome and I frequently had to check the context-sensitive button mapping indicator on the HUD to know which button did what in a given situation. The game's controls and UI are not even consistent between similar types of menus (e.g. the select, confirm, and cancel buttons are not mapped the same on the inventory screen and item shop screen).

Observations - Shenmue 3's Unique Content

While in many ways, it's impossible to separate Shenmue 3 from the nostalgic background of the franchise, it's still its own game. Like everything else in Shenmue 3, the new content is also a mixed bag.

• Shenmue has always included some sort of slice-of-life elements, but the third entry in the series drastically increases how prevalent they are. 
• The most notable example is the new stamina system. Ryo must eat regularly to keep up his stamina, a stat that serves two functions. As Ryo goes about his business, his stamina slowly depletes; if it gets low enough, he becomes tired and can only walk slowly until he eats to replenish the stamina meter. In combat, Ryo's stamina meter becomes his health meter. This means that if he gets into a fight when he's hungry, he could potentially get taken out by a single punch. As a result, making sure Ryo is well-fed not only keeps exploration moving at a reasonable pace, it can also be a matter of life or death. It's a case where the game's mechanics are very deliberately telling you to slow down and take care of the little things, rather than charge ahead single-mindedly.
• Practicing techniques and working out are important parts of the daily life of a martial artist. Shenmue 3 tasks the player with making this process a part of Ryo's regular routine by stopping at dojos regularly to work on his punches, horse stance ("karate squats" as I like to call them) and having sparring matches. These are very simple and repetitive tasks, much as they would be in real life, but they are essential to getting Ryo strong enough to win the handful of battles that serve as gates to progressing the story. Initially, I really tried to get myself in the mindset of a martial artist and focus on the training. However, it eventually became clear to me that I would have to spend a large chunk of my playtime repeating these routines and I inevitably found myself checking out and listening to a podcast while tapping the A button for the thousandth time to keep Ryo in his horse stance.
• The slice-of-life elements of the game all serve to reinforce the story's central theme of the value of patience. While this works well from a purely artistic standpoint, it isn't necessarily fun to play. I think it's ok for a game to include some amount of drudgery for the purpose making the player relate more to the character or make the game world feel more real, but Shenmue 3 took this a little too far for my tastes.
• While the two main areas Ryo visits during his journey, Guilin and Niaowu, each have their own unique flare in terms of settings, the events in each place follow the exact same formula:
1. Talk to NPCs to learn about criminal activity in the area
2. Find and confront the criminals, only to lose to their leader (who turns out to be one of Lan-Di's henchmen)
3. Seek out an eccentric old kung-fu master who knows the technique you need to beat the henchman
4.  Undergo some trials to prove to the kung-fu master that you're worthy to learn the technique. In both cases, this includes winning a match against every student in the local dojo and saving up a large quantity of money to buy an expensive item of some sort.
5. Learn the kung-fu technique (a QTE sequence) and then use it in a rematch against the henchman to win the fight
6. Winning the fight leads to a scene that advances the plot
• Going through this sequence in Guilin was very satisfying, but having to repeat it, almost to the letter, in Niaowu right afterward sort of cheapened the experience for me and made the game feel padded.

• The third area of the game is comparatively very small and dense with plot developments and combat. Compared to the rest of the game it feels disjointed and rushed. I think it would have served the game well to have cut this third area and instead just spread its combat and story events throughout Guilin and Niaowu instead. This would have broken up the formula of each of those areas and made the plot developments easier to digest. 
• Ultimately, Shenmue 3 moves the overall story of Shenmue forward only a very small amount. In fact, most of the important new information Ryo gathers during this installment of his quest is found in the first area, Guilin. The next act of the game in Naiowu is essentially a rinse and repeat (albeit in a cool new setting) that just serves to keep Ryo busy until the game's hasty conclusion. At the end of the game, Ryo is only incrementally further along on his quest for revenge than he was for the start; after waiting for 20 years for this game, I was hoping for more than that.

As a long time fan of the series who has been waiting for the next installment of the Shenmue series for the majority of his life, playing Shenmue 3 was paradoxically a joyous and disappointing experience. I was delighted to see that much of what made me love Shenmue is still here; for a big fan like me, that alone was enough to make the money and time I spent on this game feel worthwhile. However, there's a difference between something being worthwhile and being satisfying. Shenmue 3 doesn't do very much to bring the series forward in terms of game design or narrative, it is simply content to just stoke the fires in fans' hearts and serve as a demonstration that a new Shenmue game can still be made. As one of those fans, this is something I can accept this time, but it's a card the developer can only play once.

I typically like to end a review with a recommendation; in this case, the recommendation is contingent on your background with the series:

• If you loved Shenmue 1 and 2, by all means, go ahead and play this, just be sure to set your expectations accordingly.
• If you played the earlier Shenmue games and they didn't do anything for you, Shenmue 3 is certainly not going to change your mind.
• If you have no prior experience with Shenmue but think you fit somewhere near the center of the Venn diagram depicted earlier in this review, I'd recommend adding the first two Shenmue games to your Steam wishlist and picking them up the next time they go on sale. (Also, kudos to you for managing to read through this mess of a blog post!)

Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Completion Time: About 42 hours

Thoughts on the Shenmue Series Going Forward

 A little bit after I started writing this post, I read a news article about how the investors that made Shenmue 3's development possible were surprised that Shenmue hasn't turned out to be a mass-market AAA franchise (i.e. this installment primarily only sold well to existing fans and wasn't especially profitable). To be honest, I don't really know what investors were expecting.

I love Shenmue, warts and all, but I'm not sure there's a future for it. In its current form, it's too expensive and ambitious for the limited audience it has. The only paths forward I can see would involve making drastic changes to pull in more players and investors, or it would have to scope down massively to fit a more traditional indie budget in an attempt to deliver a satisfying resolution to the diehard fans as efficiently as possible. The risk with either route is that it could lead to a result that just wouldn't feel like Shenmue any more. If a fourth entry ever gets made, there is going to be a tremendous amount of pressure on it; based on Shenmue 3, it's unclear if the series director, Yu Suzuki, and company are up to the task.

Guilin looks beautiful

Ryo's gotta make money somehow

"C'mon, Ryo! You can't seek karate justice unless you build strong glutes and quads!"

Strider (2014) Review

Strider is one of Capcom's series that I've often admired from afar; I've watched Twitch streams of the 8-bit and 16-bit games, and I've looked longingly at the box art of the PS1 game as a broke kid in Walmart, but I've never really dug into any of the games myself. So to close out my celebration of #CapcoMonth, I decided to finally jump in with the most recent entry in the series, Strider (2014), which I was able to pick up as part of a Humble Bundle.

Overview
Strider (2014) is a 2D "Metroidvania"-style platform game that serves as a revival of Capcoms's classic ninja action series. In the game, an elite ninja operative, Strider Hiryu, must infiltrate a heavily fortified cyberpunk dystopian city to assassinate an evil dictator. As he explores the city to gain access to the dictator's stronghold, he acquires a variety of new abilities and faces off against the dictator's generals. This review is based on the PC version of the game.

Pros

• Being a ninja is awesome! From the get-go, Strider can climb almost any surface (including ceilings), slide, dash, and flip through the air. Even with his most basic starting sword, he can pull off rapid slashing attacks in multiple directions that have both ground-based and aerial variations. There area lot of games about ninjas out there, but this one really stands out for absolutely nailing the lightness, speed, and agility that you would expect of a classic anime ninja.
• The game features a couple of cool set pieces, like fighting a dragon flying through the sky that breaks up the regular gameplay and solidifies this as a Strider game and not just a generic ninja Metroidvania.
• While much of the music is fairly indistinct, the electronic remixes of classic Strider tracks are very catchy and kick in at just the right time to enhance the action.

Cons

• With a few exceptions, the game's environments are primarily drab industrial areas that don't make for a particularly memorable setting.
• Strider's difficulty was often inconsistent. In some cases, I would breeze through several areas and boss battles, only to be hit with an abrupt difficulty spike. However, on the normal difficulty level, even the spikes were approachable as long as you have a good grasp of the mechanics.

While Strider (2014) lacks some of the bells and whistles that many newer Metroidvania games might have, this game nails the most important facet of the genre: character locomotion. Ninja-ing my way through the dystopian future landscape and cleaving through waves of enemies always felt satisfying. For that alone, I can comfortably recommend Strider (2014) to any Metroidvania fans. This experience also has me interested to go back and try the older Striders that I missed; maybe I'll finally pick up that PS1 game that my younger poorer self missed out on.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 6 hours, 17 minutes (Normal difficulty, 68% map completion)

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #CapcoMonth event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Duck Tales Review

While I generally consider myself to know my classic games pretty well, I have to admit that I tend to dismiss licensed games offhand. Thus, Duck Tales wasn't on my radar until rather recently. In fact, I wasn't aware of this game's classic status until I started noticing how frequently its music was featured on video game music podcasts and name-that-tune events.

Overview
Duck Tales is a 2D platformer based on the animated series of the same name. In the game, Scrooge McDuck must explore six sprawling levels to recover his stolen valuables. Scrooge's unique ability is to use his cane as a pogo stick to traverse the environment. He can also use his cane like a golf club to whack small objects across the screen. This game was originally released for the NES. I streamed the PC version via the Disney Afternoon Collection on my Twitch channel.

Pros

• While this game only has six levels, it gets a lot of mileage out of them due to their massive size and intricate designs. Exploring the various pathways of each level looking for secrets is easily this game's standout feature.
• Scrooge's cane mechanics are pretty novel for a game of this age. Bouncing on enemies and across spikes using the pogo cane is a fun form of traversal once you get the hang of it. I also appreciated the way you could use the cane to dispatch enemies from a distance by hitting rocks at them like golf balls.
• Duck Tales features some very cute sprite work the manages to exude personality despite the limited rendering capabilities of the NES. For example, when Scrooge is about to whack something with his cane, you can see his tail wagging back and forth. This animation is only a single pixel moving back and forth but it still manages to make a big difference in terms of making the character feel alive.
• The music in this game is a real treat. Thanks to video game music podcasts, I already knew this game had some catchy tunes and I can now say from experience that it features catchy chiptune bops from start to finish.

Cons

• Duck Tales does not offer any way to save your progress in the game; there are no save points or passwords. In fact, there are not even continues. Thus, if playing this on the original hardware, losing all three lives completely resets the game to the beginning. This sounds like a very frustrating way to experience this game. Thankfully, the Disney Afternoon Collection version adds the ability to use save states. Using save a state at the start of each level made it much more enjoyable.
• To initiate a pogo jump, you must first hit the A-button to jump and then while in midair hit the B-button while pressing down on the D-pad. I found this to be a little cumbersome for an action you have to execute so frequently and quickly. Messing up the coordination on this set of inputs lead to many accidental deaths before I got used to it. Since the B-button serves no other purpose while airborne, I think it would have made far more sense to have the B-button alone initiate a pogo jump whenever Scrooge's feet are off the ground. 

Playing through the original version of Duck Tales was a pretty cool experience; I can definitely see why it's considered a classic. Given that the few minor issues I had were mostly the product of NES-era game design, I'm very curious to try Wayforward's remastered version of Duck Tales to see what kind of tweaks they may have made. Either way, I definitely recommend trying out Duck Tales via the Disney Afternoon Collection to anyone interested in 8-bit classics or Disney cartoons.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Completion Time: About 2 hours and 30 minutes

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #CapcoMonth event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Resident Evil Zero Review

I have tried to get into the Resident Evil series many times in the past: in-store kiosks of the original PS1 games, playing through the Gamecube version of RE1 due to the instance of a friend, and being coached through the opening section of RE4 at a party. In each case, there was some sticking point (often the control scheme) that kept the series from really clicking with me. That all changed last year when my wife and I had a fantastic time playing through Resident Evil 2 Remake. Now that I've come to appreciate what this series is all about, I thought it might be interesting to go back to an older game in the series for my next #CapcoMonth game.

Overview
Resident Evil Zero is a survival horror game that serves as a prequel to the original Resident Evil. It is the fifth game in the series and the last to be made in the classic pre-rendered adventure game style of RE1 before the series transitioned to the full-3D action game format of RE4 and its successors. Resident Evil Zero's unique feature is that it features two protagonists, Rebecca and Billy, who must work in tandem to navigate zombie-infested environments to discover the origin of the T-virus. This review is based on the PC version of the game, Resident Evil Zero HD, which I streamed in its entirety on my Twitch channel.

Pros

• It's been a long time since I've played a game that uses pre-rendered backgrounds and fixed camera angles. While it can be an impediment to action and navigation at times, the aesthetic appeal of this style is hard to deny.
• While most of the Resident Evil games feature underground scientific facilities at some point, and this game is by no means an exception, I appreciated that RE Zero offered some new types of environments to explore as well. Starting off on a luxury train in motion was a nice change of scenery. I also liked the abandoned church in a later section of the game.
• Alternating between controlling Billy and Rebecca added an interesting wrinkle to exploration and puzzle-solving. Since Billy and Rebecca each have their own distinct abilities, this character swapping mechanic reminded me a bit of the classic puzzle game, Lost Vikings.
• The puzzles in the game make for some surprisingly good brain teasers. However, I have to admit that the contexts in which they appear in the game often make very little sense. Why would it be necessary to solve a number puzzle to activate the emergency brake on a train, or map out a logic puzzle to reset a power breaker?
• The PC version's mouse and keyboard controls were easy to pick up compared to how I remember the gamepad controls of the original RE games feeling. Using WASD to move the character and the mouse buttons to use weapons and interact with objects felt pretty natural. A few exceptions existed in areas where the camera perspective would abruptly change, leading to momentarily disorientation. 

Cons

• The inventory management in this game is extremely cumbersome. Each character only has six item slots with many items and weapons consuming two of these slots. The game does not offer any opportunities to expand the size of your inventory or store items externally. As a result, a disproportional amount of my gameplay time was spent shuffling items around between my characters or dumping items on the floor to free up space. I would then have to backtrack across the map any time I needed to retrieve an item I had dropped. The other games in the series solve this problem with item storage boxes located at each save point. It baffles me why the designers of this game decided to omit this feature.
• Resident Evil Zero retains the slow door opening animations present in earlier RE games every time you move between rooms or floors in a building. While these screens may have been necessary to accommodate loading times on the PS1, I don't see why the PC version of RE Zero elected to keep them. This slowdown coupled with the large size of Zero's map exacerbates the issues with backtracking that result from poor inventory management.
• While the controls of this game are generally improved over earlier RE games, I found that they were very fiddly when it came to trying to pick up specific items on the floor and interacting with certain objects in the environment. The frequency with which you have to shuffle your inventory by picking up and dropping items really highlights this particular issue. 
• Due to the issues above, the game feels tedious after a while and outstays its welcome. In order to spare myself some time and frustration going into the game's final area, I elected to use a cheat to replenish my ammo supply rather than trudging back and forth across the map to collect all the extra ammo I had dropped in various places throughout the campaign.

In summary, I was initially really enjoying this journey back to the classic Resident Evil style but over time, quality of life issues made the game feel like a slog. I think similar to my experience with Final Fantasy 13, using cheats to spare myself some late-game tedium was the right decision and keep me from being soured on the overall experience. There's enough interesting ideas here to make RE Zero worth a look for RE fans or those nostalgic for the pre-rendered style that was popular 20 years ago. For everyone else, however, I'd say this is an entry in the Resident Evil franchise that can comfortably be skipped.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Completion Time: About 20 hours

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #CapcoMonth event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Many years removed from its original release, this is still a very pretty game.

My scorecard at the end of the game reports an artificially low playtime since the game requires reloading your last save after every game over.

Azure Striker Gunvolt Review

Long time readers know that I am a regular participant in Chic-Pixel's Community Game-Along events. With April's theme being Capcom games, I had a lot of options. For my first #CapcoMonth game, I selected Azure Striker Gunvolt. This game wasn't developed by Capcom itself, but by ex-Capcom employees at Inti Creates. Gunvolt is heavily inspired by Mega Man, which isn't among my favorite retro series, so I had previously looked the other way when Inti Creates decided to take their own spin on this style of game. However, after getting some hands-on time with one of the Gunvolt games on the show floor at MomoCon last year (impressions), I could immediately tell this was more than a simple Mega Man clone and the first game ended up on my Steam wishlist as soon as I got home.

Overview
Azure Striker Gunvolt is a 2D action game in the style of Mega Man. The game is comprised of action-platforming stages that culminate in a boss battle; the order that these stages are played is up to the player. However, unlike Mega Man, Gunvolt does not defeat his enemies purely by firing projectiles at them. Instead, he tags enemies with a needle gun that does minimal damage but increase's the target's electrical conductivity. He then emits an electric field that strikes down each tagged enemy with lightning. (You've probably figured out by now, why the main character is named "Gunvolt".) Azure Striker Gunvolt takes place in a dystopian cyberpunk setting with heavy anime influences. This review is based on the PC version of the game, which is available via Steam.

Pros

• I really enjoyed the game's core mechanic. Loading up as many enemies as possible with conductive needles and then unleashing the electric field to zap them all at once was very satisfying.
• For an otherwise pretty straightforward action game, it has a surprisingly involved story. While this story leans heavily into anime and comic book themes and tropes, I found it to be entertaining and a good way to break up the action. I would absolutely watch an anime series or movie with this cast of characters and setting.
• This game has a kicking soundtrack that features synthy instrumental tracks for the general action as well as vocal electro-pop songs that play during certain story events or when certain criteria are met during gameplay. The vocal tracks are very catchy and would always get me hyped whenever they would come on.
• Gunvolt has great 16-bit-like pixel art that is embellished with higher quality effects for certain elements like the electric field. This can make for a pretty chaotic display during the heat of battle, but I found that I really liked the way it looked once I learned to be able to keep track of the action. During dialog and cutscenes, characters are represented with nice-looking anime portraits in a visual novel-style presentation. 
• As someone who struggled with some of the Mega Man games, I appreciated that Gunvolt adds several features that make getting through it a little more manageable:
• Each level features multiple checkpoints including one right before the boss room. You can continue from these checkpoints as many times as you would like until you beat the level.
• The game includes some light RPG mechanics that allow you to level up your character and upgrade his gear. I only made minimal use of this feature because I felt like the game's difficulty level wasn't high enough to necessitate replaying each level multiple times to grind for XP and crafting materials, but it's nice that it's an option for players who get stuck and want to increase their chances of success.
• Every once in a while, an angel-like character will appear and resurrect you when you are about to die via a mechanic called "Anthem" (there's a justification in the game's story for why this occurs). In addition to resurrecting you, Anthem temporarily powers you up and changes the music to an especially catchy song. Sice Anthem occurs by random chance, it only triggered a few times for me during my playthrough, but it often saved my bacon during multiple-stage boss fights and the song that played added to the excitement of the battle.

Cons

• Gunvolt has some dialog that takes place during gameplay. This dialog is voiced in Japanese and displays in textboxes with English subtitles. With how busy the screen can be in the midst of the action, I found this dialog to be very distracting and ultimately had to disable it. For example, in one case I had a character exclaim "Watch out for those spikes!" while I was platforming; the problem was that the dialog box displayed over the spikes, causing me not to see them and skewer my character as a result. Thankfully, the mid-action dialog didn't seem to be essential to the story, so I don't feel like I missed out on much by disabling it.

After loving the last Inti Creates game I played, Bloodstained (review), I was pleased to find that this studio had knocked in out of the park with another excellent 2D action platformer. I'm already looking forward to playing the next two games in this series! I highly recommend Azure Striker Gunvolt to anyone who enjoys retro-style action, even those who aren't fans of Mega Man, Gunvolt's source of inspiration.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 9 hours, 52 minutes (includes reaching both the "normal" and "true" ending)

Note: This post is part of the Chic-Pixel community's #CapcoMonth event. For more info and their full list of events, check out this page: Community Game-Along Master List 2020

Control Review

While I play a lot of indie and retro games, I've been trying to make it a point over the past year or so to keep up with some of the critically acclaimed major releases as well. Of 2019's critical darlings, one in particular that caught my eye was Control. This game was awarded Game of the Year at various media outlets including IGN, Ars Technica, and EGM.
Overview

Control is a third-person action game by Remedy Studios. The player character, Jesse, is on a search for her long lost brother which leads to her finding out about the existence of a secret organization within the US government, the Federal Bureau of Control, which investigates paranormal phenomena. Through a set of initially unclear circumstances, she becomes the leader of the Bureau, gains supernatural powers, and ends up being tasked with thwarting an invasion by an alien force called The Hiss (it's kind of a lot to take in at once). The bulk of Control's gameplay consists of exploring the massive labyrinthine headquarters of the Bureau and clearing out Hiss invaders, which usually take the form of possessed Control agents.
Combat

The key to combat in Control is successfully juggling gunplay and Jesse's psychic abilities. She has a single gun that transforms into different modes that allow it to function as a handgun, shotgun, etc, all of which have infinite ammo but share a single cooldown meter. Similarly, Jesse's powers (telekinesis, a force shield, air dashing, and levitation) all share a second cooldown meter. Managing these two cooldown meters is tough at first, but once you've sufficiently leveled up Jesse's weapons and abilities, combat feels looks and feels pretty slick. The combat is enhanced by very detailed physics modeling that affects the use of the psychic powers (especially telekinesis) and the destructibility of objects in the environment.

Unfortunately, as novel as using a mix of gunplay and superpowers is at first, Control wears the player down by frequently throwing one similar encounter at you after another. For how combat-focused this game is, there isn't much variety in the enemies or the combat situations presented; often the game just spams you with wave after wave of the same few enemies. While there seems to be a lot of options for how to dispatch these enemies, I ultimately found that a pretty simple tactic was the ideal strategy in almost every situation: stick to two of the six weapon forms and then just alternate between shooting and launching debris with telekinesis.

On the bright side regarding combat, I appreciated that the game maintained a consistent level of challenge; many games that involve using superpowers tend to let the player become some overpowered that battles become trivial. Control kept the difficulty of battle pretty high. I think having to stay on my toes helped make the combat feel meaningful despite its repetitiveness. The only downside is that some enemies have attacks that can instantly reduce Jesse to a sliver of health, regardless of her stats and upgrades; this meant for some cheap deaths if I got caught by surprise.

Exploration

Control takes place almost entirely inside the Bureau's headquarters. However, due to various paranormal phenomena that bend the fabric of time and space, this building is essentially a giant Metroid-like maze. Throughout the story, events take place that change and distort the building's layout, making it even more of a labyrinth. Also in Metroid-like fashion, many areas of the building are initially off-limits until you gain the necessary keycard or traversal ability to gain access.

The idea behind Contol's setting is to feature stark contrasts between the mundane (office spaces) and the surreal (paranormal objects and events). However, I found that the mundane areas outnumbered the surreal areas to a point where I did not feel especially motivated to explore; wandering through room after room of cubicles is not terribly interesting. It also doesn't help that rewards for exploration are fairly minimal.

To the game's credit, when you manage to venture out of the office areas and into pockets of otherworldly space, they are pretty cool. These areas often feature bizarre distorted landscapes, great lighting, and a creepy atmosphere; it's just a shame there aren't more of them. There is one area in particular that shifts around you in time with the background music as you wander through (I'm being vague about this in order not to spoil it for others); this segment was the highlight of the game for me.

Another aspect of the game design that impacted exploration, was the game's save system. Throughout the Bureau building are fixed checkpoints called, of course, "Control Points". While the game autosaves the world state regularly, getting killed results in respawning Jesse at the last Control Point she passed. Unfortunately, in some areas of the map, the Control Points can be pretty far apart or in impractical locations, which results in having to retraverse sections of the map over and over if you find yourself stuck on a particularly tough fight. It also doesn't help matters that enemies in areas you've been before will respawn over time, making retraversal after a death extra punishing. While this system was manageable on the game's main story path (with a few glaring exceptions toward the end), I found that it discouraged me from exploring the map and engaging with the side missions as much as I typically would in this kind of game. For example, there's a difficult boss battle in one of the side missions that's located quite far from a Control Point in an area where enemies respawn especially frequently. I would've liked to keep making attempts at this boss but having to trek back to the boss room each time eventually lead me to abandon this questline.

Storytelling/Presentation

The story of Control is initially very cryptic; the Bureau of Control, its mission, and the forces it's facing don't initially make much sense. However, I found that by piecing info together from in-engine cutscenes, collectible documents, and full-motion video files, I was able to make sense of it without much trouble. That being said, my level of interest in the story and world of Control waxed and waned significantly over the course of the game. The theme of government agents covering up paranormal events is one that doesn't always land with me. In the case of Control, the strong voice acting and atmosphere generally helped sell the plot, but at times scenarios it presented as dark and serious came across to me as kind of ridiculous, which caused me to disengage. It doesn't help matters that several of the scenarios in the game are coincidentally similar to a very silly children's show called Odd Squad. When a scene in an M-rated triple-A game immediately evokes images of a TV series designed to teach small children math, I couldn't help but feel pulled out of the story... however, I realize that my mental association between these unrelated things is more of a me-problem rather than a real issue with the game. (Here's a clip of Odd Squad for reference: Odd Squad)

Like many recent third-person games, collecting case files, letters, and other documents is a way that the game expands its lore. When this is done well it can be an engaging way to enrich the game world for players who are interested in it without bloating the game's story for those who just want to follow the main plot. I found that the documents in Control were interesting to collect and read, but the game makes doing so more cumbersome than it should be. For one, the inventory screen doesn't offer a way to sort read and unread documents, so each time I found a new one would then be followed by scrolling through my entire inventory trying to find where this new item ended up. The other issue I had was that each document has seemingly random segments redacted. I realize this is supposed to provide the aesthetic of the document being a "secret file" but it makes no sense in-game; why are documents kept inside the Bureau redacted? The whole point of redaction is that it's something done to a file when it gets released outside of the agency that produced it. I acknowledge this is an extremely small nitpick, but for me, it made me take these documents a little less seriously and made them harder to read.

Much to my surprise, the area where this game's storytelling worked best on me, was the full-motion video. Throughout your journey through the Bureau, you occasionally find video recordings of live actors giving agency announcements and briefings. Matthew Porretta, the actor that plays the Bureau's chief scientist, does a fantastic job of giving an initially grounded performance that slowly becomes unhinged as the game scenario gets more and more surreal. His scenes are incredibly effective at setting the tone of each phase of the game's story and I was always excited to find another videotape while rummaging through the Bureau's offices. If you would have told me years ago that one of my favorite features of a game in 2020 would be full-motion video, I never would have believed you, but here we are.
Conclusion

In all likelihood, this review probably reads as being quite negative. The thing is, Control is actually a very well-made game, and at key moments it really gets things right, making for an evocative experience. The problem is that the highlights are separated by large sections of mediocrity that give the game's various minor issues extra time to rise to the surface. As a result, my sentiment toward this game went back and forth many times throughout it's run time. Ultimately, I appreciate Control's level of quality and ambition but I am surprised that it took so many Game of the Year awards. I think players who are really into TV shows like The X-Files would be enthralled by this game. However, general action game fans will likely find that Control is good but certainly not Game of the Year material.
Score: ⭐⭐⭐
Completion Time: 23 hours (main campaign plus several side quests)

Ori and the Blind Forest Review

Keeping the #PlatforMonth train rolling, I decided to play a game that I've had recommended to me by quite a few people, Ori and the Blind Forest. This Metroidvania from Moon Studios and Microsoft was originally released on Xbox One and PC in 2015. This review is based on the "Definitive Edition" of the game on PC. I live-streamed my entire playthrough of the game on my Twitch channel.

Observations:

• This game features gorgeous painterly visuals. The aesthetic reminds me of Ubi-Art games like Rayman Origins and Child of Light. In general, I really liked the look of the game but in some cases, it was hard to discern what was an interactive object/platform and what was just part of the background art. A lot of stylized platformers have this issue, however. 
• For a game that initially looks very cute, it goes to some very dark places thematically, both in terms of atmosphere and storytelling. The mysterious and forlorn tone of the game reminded me of classic European fairytales (i.e. the pre-Disney versions). I found this to be intriguing but could see it being offputting for children or players expecting something lighter from a platformer.
• Unlike most other games in this genre, Ori features very few fixed checkpoints on the map but instead allows you save almost anywhere at the cost of a small amount of MP. Since it deviates from the norm, I initially found myself having to do a lot retraversal any time I lost a life because I kept forgetting to save. Once I got used to it, however, I came to really appreciate the flexibility of the system. In some of the tougher areas, it was nice to be able to save every few minutes.
• Similar to a game like Monster Boy (review), Ori's world is comprised of a large main map with a few separated dungeon-like areas. I like this structure since it provides your exploration with defined destinations rather than just having the whole game be comprised of aimless wandering. Also, segregating these dungeons from the rest of the map allows them to introduce unique mechanics that help break up the gameplay. For example, there is one dungeon that focuses on manipulating the effect of gravity; this mechanic wouldn't make sense in the overworld but is a lot of fun within its own dungeon.
• The gameplay of Ori focuses heavily on movement over combat. In fact, many of the boss encounters playout more like escape sequences rather than battles. Not only does this work well from a thematic standpoint, it also plays to this game's strengths. Ori is a nimble character with a robust move set of aerial maneuvers such as wall jumps and air dashes. After receiving a few powerups, Ori can traverse many environments without ever touching the ground. This approach to platforming reminded me of one of my recent favorites in the genre, Celeste (review).
• The game features an RPG-like skill tree and experience points. While this gives you some flexibility in how you set up your character, I found this to largely be a superfluous feature. In a game so heavily focused on locomotion, I didn't see much point in putting points into anything other than the movement skill branch of the skill tree.
• In order to be more atmospheric, most areas of Ori feature pretty minimalistic music. The moody soundscape is occasionally broken up by grand orchestral swells for dramatic effect. While I appreciated what this approach accomplished artistically, my preference tends to lean toward persistent melodic pieces that I can enjoy humming along to or listening to on their own.

If I had played Ori and the Blind Forest when it had come out back in 2015, I think it would have been a mind-blowing experience and an easy 5/5. However, in the Metroidvania-rich gaming landscape of 2020, it's hard not to compare this game to subsequent games in the genre that I liked a little more. All that being said, Ori is still a fantastic game and accomplishes everything it sets off to do masterfully; I highly recommend it to fans of Metroidvania games.

Score: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Completion Time: 9 hours

Acknowledgment: #PlatforMonth is part of the Chic-Pixel monthly game-along calendar. Check out this page for the full line-up: 2020 Master Game-Along List