1. The term Metroidvania should only refer to the Castlevania games w/ Metroid-like structure but instead refers to all games w/ Metroid-like structure. This is proof that every last person who plays video games is stupid. Also, Hollow Knight is a Metroidvania game.
2. There's some really clever hints of the Metroid influence early on. Little things like crawly enemies that stick to all sides of platforms like the zoomers in Metroid are abound. It makes Hollow Knight come off as a winking but sincere homage. I thought this was funny and cool but I play video games so I'm stupid.
3. Presumably, most people reading this will know the deal but here is how Hollow Knight works in brief: you are presented w/ what is theoretically an open world map with some pathways visible but tantalizingly unreachable. When you run into one of these pathways, you go off some other direction until you get an item that increases your mobility options then you go back. You repeat this process until you win. Go you!
4.Typically, this style of game is fairly short. Super Metroid, for example, is under ten hours and in no way feels short or incomplete. Hollow Knight is two or three times that easily. It is set in a sprawling world that takes a long time to traverse and that has some interesting effects on how the game plays.
5. I initially didn't like Hollow Knight's controls. The jumps seemed slippery and lacking impact but it all started to feel natural as my skill level built up and more of the moveset became available to me. This is pretty much what you want.
6. The Chirstopher Larkin composed score is a highlight . It combines orchestral elements w/ a touch of synth, giving it an expansive feel that suits the game's vast scope. The main theme is one of the most hauntingly beautiful pieces of music in all of gaming. Actually, a lot of these pieces are.
7. The graphics don't work nearly so well for me. Part of this is personal preference; I just don't find its cartoonish style terribly appealing. More so than that though, it fails from a gameplay standpoint. Specifically, it's often hard to tell harmless background objects from enemies and hazards and there's frequently enough action in the foreground and background to be distracting. It never breaks the game but it's enough to be annoying.
8. Hollow Knight is essentially a plotless game. There is a story there but everything notable happens before you show up to put the final pieces together. You see, videogames are typically much more about the world they build than exactly what happens while you play them.
9. Many of the items you find are straight-up upgrades and new moves but Hollow Knight adds an additional system of mix and match charms which grant different abilities but you can only equip so many at a time. This is cool on the surface--you can re-kit depending on what you are currently doing--but it kind of just winds up being a pain in the ass because you can only change them at save points. Most notably, the ability to see where you are on the map is a charm and it seems like you are forever swapping it out for boss battles then, once the boss is beaten, you can't tell where you are in the new area that opens up to you. I see that they were trying to add a layer of depth and strategy w/ this system but it just winds up feeling like a chore.
10. And speaking of maps, you cannot map areas yourself w/o purchasing a map for each new area you find. I understand making purchasing the map optional if you want the challenge but not having the area map fill in at all w/o purchasing the map is just cumbersome. This and the requirement to use a charm to tell your location on the map are the two design choices that strike me as the most strange in Hollow Knight. These are two abilities you'd typically have by default in most games removed for no real positive effect.
11. This gets us in to one effect Hollow Knight's massive scope creates. Little things that would be slightly annoying to deal w/ for ten hours get obnoxious when you have to deal w/ them twice that long. Things like long, dramatic walks before boss battles stop feeling tense and exciting and start to become busy work. Having relatively few fast travel locations goes from pushing you to re-explore previously visited areas w/ additional abilities to just having to walk past the same scenery again and again and again and again.
12. The other thing I noticed is that the giant world made things more open and created a sense of freedom in what you do next. You can really feel the opportunities to explore sprawl before you. It even reminded me a bit of playing an Elder Scrolls game at times though unfortunately sometimes to the point where the list of paths I wanted to visit or area bosses I had to defeat started to feel a bit like the Radient quests in those games.
13. If you took any ten hour stretch of Hollow Knight, you will have yourself a wonderful gameplay experience in that time. You will also have to have a couple additional and nearly identical gameplay experiences to finish the game. I will say though that I do appreciate the ambition behind Hollow Knight's scope. I appreciate how Team Cherry pushed boundaries and how pushing those boundaries changed the way the game played. I do think they made a few missteps but, ultimately, Hollow Knight is still a must-play game. Check it out, nerds.
Tuesday, January 22, 2019
Wednesday, January 16, 2019
13 Points on Child of Light - Ubisoft Montreal - 2014 [PlayStation Vita]
1. Child of Light is the game equivalent of big movie studio releasing an Oscar bait movie. It's quiet, contemplative game released by Ubisoft, a giant studio known for sprawling open worlds and considerable bombast.
2. W/ its ornate, hand-drawn look, it is unequivocally a beautiful game. A later sidequest had me going back through from near the end to the very beginning area by area and, even after looking at this stuff for hours on end and having seen everything before, I was continually impressed by the gorgeous detail top to bottom.
3. Almost as striking as the graphics is the fact that all of the dialog is done in verse and it's most often rhyming at that. This is a brave artistic decision, which I appreciate, and fits the fairy-tale setting perfectly even if there's quite a bit of it that doesn't really land.
4. This gets categorized as a platformer and an RPG but it is really neither. It's really more of an adventure game. You can injure yourself traversing the world but it doesn't really feel like this is supposed to be a challenge like and most of the gameplay is pure exploration and storytelling punctuated by RPG-like turnbased battles.
5. Actually, it has the makings of a wonderful, deep RPG but these elements ultimately feel underutilized. Child of Light is a really easy game. There's no way around it. Still, its many aspects come together marvelously.
6. The battle system, for example, is a fantastic dance between actions that take varying lengths w/ varied cool downs and a myriad of ways to manipulate the timeline of events to your advantage. You can dominate or be destroyed w/ the same party build depending how you manage the encounter. It's awesome.
7. Rather than a full kit of equipment, each character can equip three gemstones, giving you a paper, rock, scissors type system of elemental attacks and defense or an array of other buffs if you prefer. The variations you can get w/ just three equipment slots is pretty staggering. It's enough that you can make pretty much any party work so long as you get everyone equipped w/ the right gemstones. Again, awesome.
8. On top of all this, you get a branched skill tree to use as your character levels up in addition to some fixed bonuses. This doesn't so much let you completely rejigger your characters so much as it allows you to focus them on the skills you actually use.
9. The real issue is you level up so often it's actually annoying. Esp. once your party swells in size, it feels like every encounter winds up w/ someone leveling up. After a while, you just stop being excited about it. This is also probably the reason the game is so easy. Balance is a really tough thing and, to be blunt, they whiffed it here.
10. Or maybe I'm just so smart and amazing that is was easy for me but will be hard for you.
11. They story here served mostly to set the fairy tale mood rather than be strictly engaging in its own right. Aurora, the titular Child of Light, is tasked w/ defeating an evil queen. In conquering this task, she meets a miscellany of companions who inevitably join her party and bring about the opportunity to do side quests. This is nothing groundbreaking but it works really well and never gets in the way.
12. The reason I say this feels like an adventure game more so than an RPG is just because the progression of the main plot is so strictly linear. You feel very much like you are wandering a single path much more than you are creating a presence in a world. It is a joy to wander this path but there is not much to do outside of it. This is all fine. It just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. (Sorry to talk about my feelings.)
13. Big developers and Ubisoft in particular sometimes struggle when they try for something smaller w/ a more immediate connection to the player like you often see in indie games but here I think they succeeded wildly. You would not know there was a huge studio behind Child of Light if there wasn't an enormously long roll of credits once the game was complete. There is a hand-crafted level of detail top to bottom and you cannot help but to get the sense this was a labor of love for those who made regardless of who they work for.
2. W/ its ornate, hand-drawn look, it is unequivocally a beautiful game. A later sidequest had me going back through from near the end to the very beginning area by area and, even after looking at this stuff for hours on end and having seen everything before, I was continually impressed by the gorgeous detail top to bottom.
3. Almost as striking as the graphics is the fact that all of the dialog is done in verse and it's most often rhyming at that. This is a brave artistic decision, which I appreciate, and fits the fairy-tale setting perfectly even if there's quite a bit of it that doesn't really land.
4. This gets categorized as a platformer and an RPG but it is really neither. It's really more of an adventure game. You can injure yourself traversing the world but it doesn't really feel like this is supposed to be a challenge like and most of the gameplay is pure exploration and storytelling punctuated by RPG-like turnbased battles.
5. Actually, it has the makings of a wonderful, deep RPG but these elements ultimately feel underutilized. Child of Light is a really easy game. There's no way around it. Still, its many aspects come together marvelously.
6. The battle system, for example, is a fantastic dance between actions that take varying lengths w/ varied cool downs and a myriad of ways to manipulate the timeline of events to your advantage. You can dominate or be destroyed w/ the same party build depending how you manage the encounter. It's awesome.
7. Rather than a full kit of equipment, each character can equip three gemstones, giving you a paper, rock, scissors type system of elemental attacks and defense or an array of other buffs if you prefer. The variations you can get w/ just three equipment slots is pretty staggering. It's enough that you can make pretty much any party work so long as you get everyone equipped w/ the right gemstones. Again, awesome.
8. On top of all this, you get a branched skill tree to use as your character levels up in addition to some fixed bonuses. This doesn't so much let you completely rejigger your characters so much as it allows you to focus them on the skills you actually use.
9. The real issue is you level up so often it's actually annoying. Esp. once your party swells in size, it feels like every encounter winds up w/ someone leveling up. After a while, you just stop being excited about it. This is also probably the reason the game is so easy. Balance is a really tough thing and, to be blunt, they whiffed it here.
10. Or maybe I'm just so smart and amazing that is was easy for me but will be hard for you.
11. They story here served mostly to set the fairy tale mood rather than be strictly engaging in its own right. Aurora, the titular Child of Light, is tasked w/ defeating an evil queen. In conquering this task, she meets a miscellany of companions who inevitably join her party and bring about the opportunity to do side quests. This is nothing groundbreaking but it works really well and never gets in the way.
12. The reason I say this feels like an adventure game more so than an RPG is just because the progression of the main plot is so strictly linear. You feel very much like you are wandering a single path much more than you are creating a presence in a world. It is a joy to wander this path but there is not much to do outside of it. This is all fine. It just doesn't feel like an RPG to me. (Sorry to talk about my feelings.)
13. Big developers and Ubisoft in particular sometimes struggle when they try for something smaller w/ a more immediate connection to the player like you often see in indie games but here I think they succeeded wildly. You would not know there was a huge studio behind Child of Light if there wasn't an enormously long roll of credits once the game was complete. There is a hand-crafted level of detail top to bottom and you cannot help but to get the sense this was a labor of love for those who made regardless of who they work for.
Tuesday, January 8, 2019
13 Points on The Room - Fireproof Games - 2012 [PC]
1. The Room is originally an iOS game but you shouldn't hold that against it. It plays just fine w/ a mouse on PC if that's how you chose to play. Relax.
2. Conceptually, this is straight forward: things have happened and you've got to solve puzzles.
3. You'd think, given the title, The Room would be escape the room type adventures but it's actually a series of virtual puzzle boxes. The intricacy and detail of the design of these boxes--just how pretty they are--is one of the chief appeals of the game.
4. If you are a big puzzle game fan, The Room will probably strike you as being on the easy side. I feel like this term is more damning that it should be but I can't help but to describe The Room as being a casual game.
5. Absent of a strong gameplay challenge The Room still manages to draw you in w/ its dense and well-crafted atmosphere.
6. The backstory is revealed through notes left behind by some unknown person who seems to vaguely be some sort of colleague of yours. He delved into some serious cutting edge alchemy and shit got heavy on him real fast. Now you have to solve a bunch of puzzles.
7. Part of the aesthetic of the game is really cool looking alchemical symbols. I can't tell you if these were made up by the game designers or drawn from actual alchemy because alchemy is useless and there is no reason to know anything about it.
8. There is an in game hint system which continually seemed terrible but then were always somehow helpful. It would be like, "Look at the box more," and you'd be like, "Damnit, I've been looking at the box. The only thing to look at is the box." Then you'd find yourself looking at just the right place in a few seconds. There is probably some sort of real life magic involved here. I'm just gonna leave that here.
9. My only real complaint about this hint system is it delivers the hints based on time and it occasionally gives you hints for something you already figured out so then you gotta just dick around a minute and wait for the next one.
10. I realize that using hints kind of undermines me saying this was a bit easy earlier and I don't care at all. The real reason the puzzle boxes are easy is they are mostly divided into discreet and easily digestible chunks so you don't need to hold the whole of it in your mind at any given time, just the part you are immediately working on.
11. As far as art and sound design, this reminds me very much of Myst. It's got this quiet tension and otherworldly smoothness to everything. Thankfully, the puzzles here are not nearly as obtuse as the ones in that seminal adventure title so The Room is not horrible to actually play.
12. Really, what's impressive here is just how much The Room draws you in w/ its fairly simple puzzles, smallish settings and sparse sounds. It is not a huge world it builds but it feels real. When you sit down to solve these puzzles, you will be sitting down until the puzzles are solved.
13. The ending was sort of abrupt and was almost painfully obviously meant to simply leave the door open for sequels. This is especially obvious writing this after no less than three sequels to The Room have already been released. I'm looking forward to playing them eventually though so good enough for me.
2. Conceptually, this is straight forward: things have happened and you've got to solve puzzles.
3. You'd think, given the title, The Room would be escape the room type adventures but it's actually a series of virtual puzzle boxes. The intricacy and detail of the design of these boxes--just how pretty they are--is one of the chief appeals of the game.
4. If you are a big puzzle game fan, The Room will probably strike you as being on the easy side. I feel like this term is more damning that it should be but I can't help but to describe The Room as being a casual game.
5. Absent of a strong gameplay challenge The Room still manages to draw you in w/ its dense and well-crafted atmosphere.
6. The backstory is revealed through notes left behind by some unknown person who seems to vaguely be some sort of colleague of yours. He delved into some serious cutting edge alchemy and shit got heavy on him real fast. Now you have to solve a bunch of puzzles.
7. Part of the aesthetic of the game is really cool looking alchemical symbols. I can't tell you if these were made up by the game designers or drawn from actual alchemy because alchemy is useless and there is no reason to know anything about it.
8. There is an in game hint system which continually seemed terrible but then were always somehow helpful. It would be like, "Look at the box more," and you'd be like, "Damnit, I've been looking at the box. The only thing to look at is the box." Then you'd find yourself looking at just the right place in a few seconds. There is probably some sort of real life magic involved here. I'm just gonna leave that here.
9. My only real complaint about this hint system is it delivers the hints based on time and it occasionally gives you hints for something you already figured out so then you gotta just dick around a minute and wait for the next one.
10. I realize that using hints kind of undermines me saying this was a bit easy earlier and I don't care at all. The real reason the puzzle boxes are easy is they are mostly divided into discreet and easily digestible chunks so you don't need to hold the whole of it in your mind at any given time, just the part you are immediately working on.
11. As far as art and sound design, this reminds me very much of Myst. It's got this quiet tension and otherworldly smoothness to everything. Thankfully, the puzzles here are not nearly as obtuse as the ones in that seminal adventure title so The Room is not horrible to actually play.
12. Really, what's impressive here is just how much The Room draws you in w/ its fairly simple puzzles, smallish settings and sparse sounds. It is not a huge world it builds but it feels real. When you sit down to solve these puzzles, you will be sitting down until the puzzles are solved.
13. The ending was sort of abrupt and was almost painfully obviously meant to simply leave the door open for sequels. This is especially obvious writing this after no less than three sequels to The Room have already been released. I'm looking forward to playing them eventually though so good enough for me.
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