I am not a rock climber. I climbed trees as a kid and even did some mild climbing on rock walls at a local Rec Center but I haven’t done so in decades. More so, I haven’t played many climbing games either. But I’m not opposed to the idea of playing them.

Enter: Day, the Steam Spring Sale has started and I decided to buy Cairn because...well...why the fuck not. I heard good things from The Besties podcast that did an episode on it back when it came out so I figured I could always try it out and if I hated it because of the survival aspect then I could return it within that 2 hour window.

What ended up happening was not something I expected, nor something I quite realized had happened until I wrote this review. I adored Cairn, not just because it’s a good game but because it’s a good experience. One that made me feel emotions, one that I related to immensely, and one that I think even more people should play if you haven’t already. So let’s get into more detail about what I thought and why I thought it and...actually I’m just gonna get on with it now.

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The Premise

You play as Aava, who is trying her best to climb the mountain Kami as a way of avoiding life and all that it entails. She meets people on her journey up, learns about the people that used to live there, and sees people who failed at climbing the mountain. And is still continuing to avoid life and all it entails. Obviously not a story that many people can relate to. But will Aava make it to the top? Will she give up and come back down? Will she ever actually face what life is putting on her plate? It’s up to you to help her climb and find out.

The Good

First, as I’ve talked time and time again about accessibility (mainly here in my difficulty accessibility article), I think it makes sense to cover this at the top. I went into Cairn incredibly apprehensive, I’ve played two climbing games before and had mixed success (Grow Home was not a good time for me but Peak was fun). But once I turned on the game and saw the accessibility options and different difficulty modes I instantly knew I was going to love this game. First off, the game has 3 different difficulty modes, I played on Explorer. Essentially, this mode lowered how intense the survival aspect of the game was and also allowed me to rewind after every fall that I had. Then in the assist (accessibility) settings I was able to actually deactivate ALL survival aspects of the game and also give myself infinite climbing gear resources and allow the game to autosave every time I came to a solid surface to stand on. These all changed the fucking game for me. Gone was the nerve racking worry about falling because of Aava being super finicky with her controls, gone was the frustration with survival mechanics that annoy me rather than make me feel more entrenched in the games atmosphere. All of a sudden I could enjoy the game how I wanted to enjoy it. The Game Bakers gave me a game about overcoming your own mountain, finding the thing that you’re stuck on and learning to either overcome it or fully let go of the fixation you had, and they let me do it how I wanted to do it. That’s the quintessential thing I want from videogames and the fact that Cairn gave that to me made me adore it so much and I have already plugged the game to multiple friends as a game they would like and totally should play (especially to my friend that actively is a rock climber). I mean, look at these difficulty settings:

They allow you as the player to decide how tough and realistic of an experience you want instead of forcing everyone into the most exhausting version. Then, look at these accessibility settings characterized as the Assist Mode (à la Celeste):

The Game Bakers obviously put the player experience first and show they want people to play their game, to learn how to overcome Aava’s mountain and work towards overcoming their own. TGB have made a game that is a labor of love that they want as many people as possible to play and I respect the hell out of them for that.

The story is also rather interesting, which I wasn’t expecting. Playing Aava as she continues to ignore all of her responsibilities was something I deeply related to as someone who plays games to avoid my real life responsibilities like doing the dishes, laundry, or working on my game. You hear, over most of the game, different people from Aava’s life call her and leave messages where they express their frustration or their sadness over what she’s doing. They are obviously dealing with the grief of having a friend get so stuck on a fixation that they’re driving everyone away from them. Plus with the character Marco, the teenager who is climbing Kami by himself (don’t tell his parents), also being there as a foil to Aava’s relentless push to climb the mountain even when continuing almost guarantees death it allows for some great character work that helps you to really tell how hard it is to both be the person stuck on a fixation and the people around that same person. It’s a beautiful and timeless story and I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

The art style is also beautiful. The game is able to convey the important bits of the cliffs you climb on while also being able to make the cliffs in the art style and aren’t too detailed to feel out of place. Slowly going up Kami, seeing the sky change, an Aurora appear, storms come and go, and stars shine bright is a beautiful experience and I adored it. Look at this picture I took earlier in the game with the absolutely fantastic photo mode (which all of my screenshots were taken using because I love that shit):

Just beautiful and I loved seeing the game change and the green parts of the scenery disappear and the ruins of the former Kami residents start to show up and the snow be introduced and the ice appear and all that during the course of the game. Very well made.

The core of the gameplay is, of course, climbing and the game has some jank but manages to handle it rather well. Often I would find myself accidentally using the right leg to go left and vice versa and while this would not at all be possible in the real world it was perfectly possible and really helped the game feel smoother. You’ll frequently come to moments where Aava slips or loses her grip because you either didn’t place your feet on ledges or holds that exist or they were too small for those and lead to Aava being in pain. There are pain killers and food and chalk that can help you grip better, be in pain less, and just all in all do better at climbing. Plus you can quickly place Pitons which allow you to hang for a moment and catch Aava’s breath. These Pitons also mean that you can fall and just end up being caught by the rope connection to the piton which is great because at least you don’t fall to the ground. Of course if you have the rewind assist setting active then the moment you fall you can just rewind back to just before the fall and continue climbing. Which is also infinite so you can use it to just keep climbing without dying at all. Yes, this is usually how I did that because I am cheap and don’t like having to redo so so so much climbing progress with how high some of these cliffs are. The mountains are also very well crafted and feel like there are real handholds and areas that allow you to climb easy peasy and areas that are super duper difficult and it’s just very well put together and feels rather realistic.

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The Bad

There were multiple times later in the game during ice climbing when I just didn’t know why Aava was having issues. Her grip was solid, I didn’t have survival stuff turned on, the ice climbing picks and shoe spikes were shoved in as hard as I could, I was using chalk, I was pausing so she could catch her breath, I would shake my arms to recover, and even better, I had a bunch of effects activated from food which were supposed to help me. Yet still, until I placed a Piton, Aava was struggling a bunch consistently back to back. It made little sense and was likely just me missing something but it was still bothersome.

The Meh

If you, dear reader, have read some of my other reviews you will have realized how much I absolutely despise forced slow walking for prolonged periods. Well, Cairn is, largely, free from that (which i didn’t realize for too far into the game until I had a popup tell me that RB was fast walk). Except for one of the endings. For around 45 minutes you are forced to walk super slowly. And if you try to move just a little faster with the speed walking then Aava says “Not...too...fast” or something similar while catching her breath. I get why this is a thing, it contextually makes sense and does enhance the feel of the tension, but I still just...I hate slow walking. And for it to be for such a long period of time and only be broken up by climbing just absolutely sucks. That said, I’m putting this in the Meh section, not the bad, because it is quite frankly a me thing that I hate, not a knock on the game itself.

The Ending - Reaction

The endings (yes, plural) to Cairn were either heartwarming and bittersweet or rather fucking sad and emotional. I got both during my playthrough and both had their own merits, although I prefer the heartwarming one. Personally, I felt like the game lead up much better to that one, it started to show actual growth in Aava, while the other one shows that no matter what she’s still who she’s always been. That said, both of these endings have a payoff to the themes of the game and of Aava’s character and her story and the story of other past climbers of the mountain. I just have a preference. Overall, the endings were good and I felt like they were satisfying, just in their own different ways.

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The Conclusion

Cairn is a magical experience of a game. It’s not that long, my first playthrough took about 7 hours, and then I played another 3 of another playthrough to get some extra things I missed on my first and to get some better screenshots to show you, dear reader, in this review. The game sticks with you though, it makes you think like Aava about how to overcome a mountain, about how focusing on the mountain is often the only thing you can think about even when it pulls you away from those you love most. Cairn is a game that isn’t just something that you can play it’s something that you can experience.

I highly recommend grabbing Cairn and giving it a thorough playthrough. It’s usually 30 bucks which I think is a decent price but if you manage to find it on sale for closer to 20 then you are in for a treat that is worth it at that price 10 times over. I just think you need to go in and be willing to turn some aspects of the game off if you don’t like them, or focus on them more than me. I know that if I hadn’t been able to turn off the survival mechanics then I wouldn’t have had as much of a fun time so you should be willing to find the experience that fits best for you. After all, we all have our own mountain and we all deal with that in our own unique ways.

Meow,

Cat

Just over 3 weeks ago Crimson Desert came out and has been taking over a lot of people’s time since it’s so big. Which is great. Personally Crimson Desert doesn’t interest me because it feels far more generic story wise than I care to explore and massive open worlds are just boring to me nowadays. If I reviewed it I probably would have a lot of issues with it. And I’m not the only one who has had (or likely would have had in my case) issues with it, reviews have been rather varied, some adoring it and some just not enjoying it much. This is genuinely how reviews are supposed to be.

But now, people are trying to make the excuse the bad reviews from a wide variety of people are not them just not liking the game but are people having a vendetta against it. They do this through using other reviews from the same outlets as reasons for why to dismiss those reviews. Specifically people focus on Dragon Age: The Veilguard and Concord a lot, particularly when it comes to IGN. IGN has a variety of different reviewers and each of them have their own opinions on games, they experience them differently like all people that play games do. These “gamers” love to ignore that and say the entire outlet reviews the games as opposed to individual people.

This has thus been super bugging me because of the seemingly misunderstanding of what reviews actually are. So today, I want to go over how reviews are subjective, not objective. I’ll be talking about how you can’t use reviews for games you dislike that praise it to invalidate reviews for games you love that disliked the game. I’ll touch on how there has been, in the past, a disconnect between reviews and their scores, or reviews and the gaming community or reviewers and the gaming community. And finally I’ll finish with a plea to the broad gaming community and to reviewers like myself about how we can do better as a community for understanding how reviews are not Gospel and never should be.

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Subjective, not objective

First, some definitions!

Subjective: based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

Objective: (of a person or their judgment) not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts.

Now, moving on.

This is at the core of my issue that I believe too many people don’t want to or genuinely don’t understand. Reviews are not objective, even if they’re being portrayed that way. They never have been and never will be. The point of being a reviewer isn’t to stick the landing and say that a game is the best thing ever even if you didn’t like it just because you know other people will like it. The point of reviews is to give your honest experience with the game regardless of what that means to your score or to how it is viewed by the gaming community.

For instance, the main focus people use as context, including in several articles here on Substack, are IGN reviews. They focus on the idea that IGN has to review games “well” because they’re being paid or are trying to push certain games as opposed to those games were just something the reviewer genuinely enjoyed or genuinely didn’t. This is most apparent with Crimson Desert recently where the press played the game before the day one patch that added a lot of things so they had more issues, even more, they played before a more recent patch that helped with the janky controls that was a key complaint for a lot of reviewers. Crimson Desert got the short end of the stick because of how reviews are meant to be done before release, they’re meant not to be done in, often, their best states. Rather, they’re done in the games worst state. This impacts scores a fuck ton because more people will have different experiences with certain aspects of a game that get fixed early in the life of the game.

At their core, reviews are not meant to be something that pinpoints the absolute quality of a game, or that “pushes an agenda” they’re just an opinion. That’s okay, that’s even ideal. We should gravitate towards people that have similar tastes to us and that’s what makes, arguably, the idea of looking at a place like IGN or Polygon as all-knowing entities that review games so damn flawed. People are the reviewers, not a media company.

Even I gravitate towards people that I have similar tastes to. I have significant issues with many bigger reviewers out there who like to concentrate on some games in ways that, to me, seem incredibly unfair (I will not name them as I don’t like calling people out and making beef). Some I think are incredibly thickheaded with not getting themes or not understanding parts of the game or not being willing to view the game for what it is as opposed to what they wanted it to be, or even barely playing enough of the game in order to see all of the mechanics or something as simple as one day/night cycle, but this actually brings me to my next point of just because you disagree with a review and how that singular person experienced the game doesn’t mean you can use other reviews to invalidate that review.

Don’t just blindly invalidate

I’ve already mentioned the IGN of it all. Specifically, the IGN reviewer of Dragon Age: The Veilguard seems to have adored the game. They had a genuinely fun time with it and really connected with the characters and with the story. They saw that even though it wasn’t perfect, it still had so much there and was still a Bioware Dragon Age game. Many, many, many people disagree with that, even going as far as to call it Disney or Marvel-like and say that the reviewer was actually handling the game with kids gloves and couldn’t possibly have enjoyed the game that much. All of the same accusations that were lobbed at Veilguard are ones that were lobbed at prior Dragon Age games (back then it was Whedon-esque dialogue as the criticism buzzword), including the original, and even Mass Effect games. I remember all of the gaming community criticizing them at the time, shitting on Dragon Age 2 for not being a Dragon Age game, for getting rid of the edge. But now people find that game to be one of the better Dragon Age games, at least in the Dragon Age community.

Okay, I’m talking about Veilguard too much, I already went into plenty of detail about my thoughts on this here in an older article so if you want to know more then check that out. My point is people look at the review from IGN of Veilguard, a 9/10, and then compare it to the Crimson Desert review, a 6/10, and say that they have to be reviewed differently. That these can’t be adequate judgements of the games. “How could the gaming press be so wrong?” they ask. How could IGN give Concord a 7/10 and Crimson Desert a 6/10 when the latter is very clearly such a better game.

They use this discrepancy, which is explained quite simply by reviews being purely subjective, and try to invalidate the reviews of Crimson Desert. They say that the people that reviewed Crimson Desert have a vendetta against the game, that they hate Eastern developed games (despite many in the Korean press also disliking the game), that they’re going after it for the same flaws that exist in other games. This is, quite simply, horseshit. It’s not that there might be people who hate the game and take that to create a vendetta against it, those people exist for literally everything and in every industry out there. It’s that these games are designed in ways that sometimes gets under people’s skin in specific ways to them and if there’s nothing to redeem the game in their eyes then it will just pull down the whole experience.

As an example of this, let’s look at a game that I reviewed very early on in my time writing Cat’s Controller Corner, Kingdom Hearts 2 (linked above). A game that many many people adore. Well, I fucking HATED it. Now don’t get me wrong, it had good bits, but dear god did I have issues with it. From the irritating combat to the quite simply underwhelming use of Disney properties that completely ruin many aspects of that Disney property (specifically I mean different shots and aspects of the movies style, not because of the other Disney characters being interjected, I found that interesting and fun). To me, as a film person, it got under my skin and made me just hate the game. I wrote a lot about why I hated it in the above linked article but it is much different than my reviews that followed so I’d just recommend keeping that in mind, I would likely change some of it if I could go back and redo it.

Simply put though, my experience with Kingdom Hearts 2 is fueled by my time with other things in my life. But you can’t just take my experience and say that it isn’t valid just because you disagree with it. That’s not how opinions work. I have one that says that Kingdom Hearts 2 was a shit game to experience, but I also understand why people enjoy it and won’t begrudge people for liking it even if I will gladly point out my problems with it if they ask. You can’t blindly invalidate a review just because you can’t believe someone would think a different way than you do. Doing so is the fallacy Argument from Incredulity or the divine fallacy: a fallacy where someone says something can’t possibly be true because it doesn’t line up with your own personal expectations or beliefs.

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Disconnects exist

I’ve been participating in the gaming community for 20 years, I’ve seen my fair share of contentious reviews. I know that there can often be a disconnect between the written review and the score. Those things give reviewers a bad rap. Essentially, there are many reviews out there over the last 20 years that give off the idea that they just generally dislike a game and have many, many problems with it, but then rate it rather high. It’s a confusing reality of how some reviews were written because of being afraid of larger publishers getting a vendetta against that review publisher and pulling early game keys from them. It can also come from people who try to nail that consensus idea of what a game will be to the wider community as opposed to what their experience is. This is but one of the disconnects that exists.

Not only that, there’s also the disconnect which is the “reviewers are bad gamers” of it all. Back in the day there was a reviewer who made a joke online posting a video of how he was having some issues with the tutorial for Cuphead. But it was a joke, the guy didn’t actually have the same amount of issues playing the game as the video would suggest. That joke though took on a life of its own and spread the idea that reviewers are just plain bad at games. That they’ll give some games bad scores because they just weren’t good at them so had a vendetta against them.

This does have some truth to it in that some reviewers are bad at some games, that’s called variety of experience. Not everyone is amazing at games and that, again, doesn’t invalidate that experience, even if it frustrates people who are plenty good at the games. The reality here is that reviewers are like everyone out there, are like steam reviews and twitch streamers. They all have a variety of opinions on games and that leads to disconnects sometimes between the review and some in the gaming community.

But, bringing this back to my main point here, there is this idea that the disconnects between scores and reviews written are actually because people are paid for the score they give, whether through money or other means. This was actually the whole basis for the original GamerGate dumpster fire where Zoë Quinn, an indie game developer, had a slanderous accusation thrown at her from a vengeful and abusive ex that she slept with someone for a good review. Something that was impossible as that reviewer never even reviewed her game and they had never met.

Shills exist, don’t get me wrong, but the idea that everyone who reviews a game and gives it a score that you disagree with is a shill is just plain wrong. I completely disagree with a lot of reviewers out there, but I know they’re not shills and would never make that accusation. The gaming community needs to learn how to understand that these disconnects exist, both between the score and the review (which I personally believe is all about trying to nail that general consensus of the game as opposed to being rewarded for good scores), or between the review and many in the gaming community. That’s okay, it doesn’t mean you have to get upset, it just means you have a different opinion.

We can do better

That brings me to my final point. We as game reviewers, and as a gaming community, can do better. The broader community needs to let go of fixating on a review score being bad means that the game you adore is being slandered. Letting go is what we all need to do sometimes and that’s a large part of what capital G “Gamers” need to do. We need to start reading reviews as the subjective experiences they are, not as an objective Gospel on the reality of the game.

The gaming community as a whole have a responsibility to understand that reviews are opinions, not objective fact. They have a responsibility to not hold a grudge against certain reviewers or publications just because of one review they disagreed with. They have a responsibility to search for reviewers and publications that share their opinions and use those people to inform themselves on how they might experience a game. And even more, this responsibility reaches out to include looking at new games that you might not expect to like, but because of a reviewer you like enjoyed it you decide to give it a try. Going out of a comfort zone is a part of this responsibility as well. Seriously, people have been doing that a lot with a lot of games I love in the last year, seeing people play games like Veilguard and Avowed and actually love them despite them having believed the hate campaign working against them is awesome. More people need to go remember that there is more to the world than their little corner.

And then we as gaming reviewers, or at least other gaming reviewers since I’m already working on this and have done with my own review scoring system which you can find out more about here, need to let go of the 1-10 score. More so, we need to let go of what scores have meant for so long. Games are a subjective experience and, more so, they’re about fun. They’re not about the massive quality of the games story, or the perfection of the smooth gameplay, they’re about having a good time relaxing. That’s literally it. This applies to every type of entertainment media.

I had conversations in Film School about this very thing. Personally one of my favorite movies ever is Sharknado. Not because it was the most brilliant film around, or that it was amazingly well made. Instead, it was because I had the best time and the best memories surrounding it. That’s what games are about as well. We as reviewers need to pick up a new scoring system that focuses and pays attention to the broader enjoyment you had with a game not as something with more weight. Whats more, we need to drop the idea of a perfect game, or the worst game ever. Each game is a unique experience for every player, no game is perfect, no game is absolute trash. We need to drop the idea of there being 10/10 games that are perfect. We need to look at games as just an experience.

What’s more, we need to adopt a system that uses all the fucking numbers. Despite what people think, the review of Crimson Desert has legitimate criticism in it, but it also says very simply, the game isn’t for everyone. The writer knows that some people will adore it and some will absolutely hate it. A 6/10, similar to the Starfield review of a 7/10, is not a bad game. It’s just not the best game the reviewer has ever played or their favorite in a while, something that’s taking up all their time, and is a more mixed experience.

We as a gaming community and as writers can do better. Now, am I, the writer of this article who has her own unique review system that focuses on enjoyment of a game as opposed to it’s overall inherent quality, somewhat biased? Yup. But that doesn’t make me wrong.

Also maybe we should stop having reviews come out before the game is released when it is in its worst state, particularly for large games. I dunno, it just doesn’t feel like a good option. There’s many possible solutions here and I don’t have one right now because that’s not my job but the current idea of putting games out on release day or before release just isn’t fucking working.

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The Conclusion

Overall, I guess I just wanted to say that it’s okay to disagree with a review, it’s okay to find flaws in it or to find something that the writer experienced as a flaw that you would love. These are perfectly fine things to have. What’s not okay is to look at a review and take it as a slight against the game that you adore. Unless of course that review is solely based around any kind of bigotry, a sadly prevalent aspect happening in some spheres of the gaming community. Then, you can dismiss it because bigots don’t have points, they just have shit coming out of their mouths.

I hope you have thoughts on what I said, that you didn’t dismiss it because of just one sentence you disagreed with (which would literally be doing what I talked about in the article). If you want to have a nuanced discussion in the comments that doesn’t devolve into me deleting your comment and blocking you, then please feel free to voice your opinion! Nuanced conversations need to happen more in the community and, as anyone who knows me personally understands, I adore nuance and see it everywhere. So to be able to have an adult conversation about this topic would be a joy and a lovely change of pace.

Meow,

Cat

About a year ago I wrote my review for Life is Strange: Double Exposure. It was the return of the original protagonist Max a decade after the first game with a lot of character progression since. She had become a teacher of photography and an award winning photographer, but Chloe was no longer in her life, even if you saved her at the end of the first game. I had issues with the game, primarily I thought it didn’t deal with the paradox of it all that well and it got too distracted during Chapter 4 of the game so it didn’t feel like the actual narrative progressed at all. I had some other issues but overall the game was a step in a good direction.

Then, there was the announcement just a few months ago that Life is Strange: Reunion was a thing and that Chloe was coming back. Personally, I was ecstatic, I thought Double Exposure laid some great ground work for a better sequel and was really intrigued to see what Chloe had been up to and how she had grown up as a person. I even wrote an article last week about how Life is Strange Will Always be Special just because I was so excited for Reunion.

So then, with me having played Reunion, rather quickly I might add, what did I think? Did it live up to my excitement? Were there flaws? Were those flaws something that made the game feel like shit? Or was the game finally a triumphant return of the Max and Chloe super team? Okay you’ve read the title, you know it’s great, so let’s go over the good the bad, and maybe a brand new section of my reviews where I go over the “meh”.

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The Premise

About 9 months after the events of Life is Strange: Double Exposure, Max and her friends have progressed as people, but most of them forgot about that giant storm that happened at the end of the first game and the powers that Max has and those two timelines merging. Those 9 months have lead to continually increasing tension between Caledon University and the town of Lakeport and, interestingly, Max’s original powers returning. After a birthday weekend in New York to be showcased at an Art Gallery, Max gets back to the school on Sunday and she finds it on fire. People are dying, buildings are burning, and she has to witness it all. After seeing some people she knows falling through a roof, she just so happens to find a picture of the selfie she took on Friday, a few hours before she was supposed to drive to NYC. She then uses her fancy returned powers to jump into that photo so she can go back in time and hopefully save everyone she can. Will she manage to save everyone? Will she have to use rewind a lot to do so? Will her ex girlfriend Chloe show up because she is dealing with the ramifications of the merged timelines from Double Exposure and needs to talk with Max about why she’s having the issues she’s having? Will that ex girlfriend then help Max uncover the reason the fire happened and how to stop it? Yes...probably. I mean it’s kinda up to you if you manage to figure it out.

The Good

The gameplay for Max in Double Exposure was a massive letdown for me. You had to go to specific points to shift between realities and it didn’t feel good going back and forth in order to have similar conversations over again and talk to the same characters again and again. It was disappointing. Yet, here in Reunion it was completely different because they got rid of that disappointing mechanic and brought back Max’s original powers. This was a really great change. It made the game feel like it should, like Max was doing what she was always meant to do. I mean the game just felt like it made more sense because of it. Less timeline fuckery leading to unsatisfying paradoxes and seemingly dropped plot points and moments of getting distracted, all of which Double Exposure suffered from.

The story is really really good. It moved fast of course, which I talk about more in the next section, but what was there felt so damn good. The characters had moments to shine, they each made sense in what they were doing, nothing really felt disappointing overall and, again, there wasn’t a significant distraction that Double Exposure seemed to have when dealing with the multiple timelines. Chloe particularly was a highlight. Seeing her having grown as a person, still being somewhat unsure about her future and traumatized, but also being an adult version of herself who wasn’t as reckless as she was as a teenager, and who had a full blackout sleeve coverup of the tattoo she had in the original game likely because of the trauma associated with it. She represented the punk adult who was that reckless kid but grew up into a less reckless but still punk adult who also manages a punk band because of course. It was great. I really enjoyed it and, as I really relate to Chloe as a person, it was emotional seeing her go through it. She thinks she’s doomed and I get it, I get it a lot. The writing here was top notch to me and I loved it.

Also I just want to say I really enjoyed the Humor of the game. In Double Exposure Max brought her characteristic wit and cheesy jokes to the game while here, not only do you have Max again, but finally you get Chloe and her standard punky jokey shtick that also comes with a lot of references. One that particularly made me laugh was she makes a Pepe Silvia joke. It was not something I expected and that’s kinda what I like about the writing of the humor in the game, it’s cheesy, sure. But it’s also fun and not trying too hard. It’s just enjoyable and that’s all that matters.

There were also many, many more key moments in the game, as opposed to Double Exposure, that really stuck with me and were fun. For instance, there’s a moment where Max has a...trippy experience where she learns that you might not want to look in a mirror when you find yourself tripping over some balls. There are many more moments that are very memorable but don’t want to spoil and I think that’s what the original Life is Strange also had, so Reunion hit that experience to a T.

These all add up to provide a game that brings me back to playing the first a decade ago. It brings me back to what I was going through back then. It helps me see not just how much these characters have grown but how much I have. The beauty of Reunion is that it provides a new experience of seeing the growth of the characters between games, not just nostalgia. Of course there is some Nostalgia, but it’s not the main push in my experience.

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The Bad

One of the core gameplay mechanics is supposed to be Chloe’s backtalk where you, through your responses, convince people to believe something or tell you something. Yet, during the entire game I only did that 2 times and missed the other 1 option (and to be fair might have missed another, it's hard to be sure). It felt like a significantly underutilized gameplay mechanic which made me sad as I was looking forward to using it as a way of mixing up the gameplay. Instead Chloe segments felt more like going around and talking to people and investigating, but not really doing anything that was uniquely hers, besides her personality. I still loved her segments but not using backtalk more felt bad. I think this likely has to do with how condensed the game felt given that it was likely built in around 18 months.

Which, speaking of. I think that’s a core problem with the game. It was very short. You could really tell that it was built quickly. They reused a ton of things, which I actually appreciated, but everything took place over the course of 3 days which made the game go by very fast. Overall it took me probably close to 9 hours, comparable to Double Exposure which I also thought was too short but this still felt shorter somehow. Maybe it’s because it was very fast paced. It didn’t feel like there was enough room to breathe, let alone enough time for Chloe and Max to feel like they did in the original. Many of the best moments came when they were apart and that kinda sucked. They had great moments together, don’t get me wrong, and I loved that you were able to decide how each of them responded to each other when they were in conversations together. But I think the quick pace of the narrative made me just want more. I mean I beat it in a couple days. I didn’t even feel like I played THAT long. I just wanted more. In a perfect world I think it would have been a week before the fire so we got a ton of extra time not just with Max and Chloe but with the characters we came to love from Double Exposure. Again, this is at it’s core the reality of how the game was built so quickly, it’s hard to make a long game when you have a year and a half.

Something the game does NOT communicate to you is the “time state” or something to that effect. Essentially, the more you rewind to get the “perfect” choice of yours, the worse state time ends up in. Wibbly wobbly timey wimey stuff. It’s a really interesting mechanic and all but there is zero communication of the state you are currently in. So, for instance, what I think would have been beneficial is if in the menu you could see how bad or good your time state was. Honestly, I’m thinking similar to a Dishonored situation where if you killed more people the city would get worse and it told you as such after every mission. I wanted something like that. Just some way to know this mechanic exists and have it represented somewhere so I can see what the state is. This state has outcomes late game so not being able to know how bad things are means I don’t know if I have to replay the entire game to get an ending I desperately wanted, or if I just have to replay the last half hour. It’s very frustrating.

The Meh

There’s two Meh things here, mainly that the game didn’t fix two problems I had with Double Exposure. You walk too slowly, even when you run, and there is no FOV slider. Max and Chloe take up a third of the screen and that was just too much. Let me see more of my surroundings, and let me run faster along side it. The game is perfect for these two changes but it really feels like Deck Nine are resisting allowing the characters to move faster because it would make the world seem smaller. And that they don’t want to increase the FOV because it....I dunno...it doesn’t feel like there’s a reason for this one especially since Unreal Engine has a integrated FOV slider (I say as a person that uses Unreal for my indie projects). It wouldn’t be that hard, it wouldn’t hurt the intimacy of the gameplay, they just need to do it. I mean, more and more games need to increase walk speed and include FOV sliders but aren’t. I hope that trend doesn’t keep going because it’s exhausting even if it’s something that is my particular pet peeves about many modern games.

Rewind to Buy me a Coffee maybe?

The Ending - Reaction

I mostly enjoyed the ending. I liked how I was able to come to a solution to save as many people as possible, I liked that several of my earlier decisions came into play. I even liked the “one week later” segment. What I didn’t think was the best was that there wasn’t the best closure on one of the main aspects of the game. I thought there was going to be a larger resolution instead of just finding ways to cope. In some ways that is a more realistic ending, not everything can be resolved or fixed. Sometimes you just have to find a way to deal with your problem and cope, even if it’s hard. If that’s the goal then I think it did a great job, I think I just expected resolution. It’s still a good ending though! Even the final decision is one that I appreciated, I even went back and quickly did the other option, which was actually the one I preferred. Most games don’t let me go back and try the other ending again without significant replaying so being able to do that was really nice. There also seemed to be hints that, if the game is successful, there might be another game that doesn’t have to directly do with Chloe and Max but might still include them as side characters or something, which I hope happens because I want more. I also found out that there was an ending montage I didn’t get but really wanted to and thought it was what was going to happen in the ending I got but didn’t like. So if you want that montage, maybe use Max’s power very very sparingly. Overall, I liked it even if I had nitpicks.

The Conclusion

Life is Strange: Reunion is the best Life is Strange game I’ve played since the original and almost exactly what I wanted out of a game like this. It’s got great characters and writing, a great story, and much better gameplay than Double Exposure. But the flaws still exist and because of the brisk pace of the story, likely from the brisk pace of development, it feels like there’s less time for the narrative and characters to breathe. That fact just holds the game back from really being fantastic. It’s still great, but the flaws are noticeable.

I think if you’ve experience Life is Strange at all then you should play Reunion. Not only is it a great experience, and a pretty quick one, it’s one that only costs 40 bucks. Even if you didn’t like Double Exposure I still think you should play Reunion. It allows you to get closure in a way we haven’t had with these characters before and I adored it for that. Also if you get it on sale then that’s a super good deal because it’s well worth the 40 bucks but less than that it’s even better. And also remember you can save everyone and if you want the best ending then use rewind sparingly. Or don’t, rewind to your hearts content, just know the game will remember it.

Meow,

Cat

Back in 2015 I was dealing with a lot of shit. Particularly my dealing with the realization of being queer, the realization of what the gamer community that I was a part of was becoming with Gamergate (thanks Steve Bannon and Jeff Epstein), and the fact that I was continuing to deal with significant health issues as I had been diagnosed with MS not much earlier. It was in this environment that the game that would become one of my favorite games that I have ever played would be released.

On January 30th of 2015 Life is Strange Episode 1 was released, back when episodic games were all the rage because of the massive success of the past few years of Telltale games, particularly The Walking Dead and The Wolf Among Us. The game was developed by Don’t Nod, a developer that I had never heard of and I went into the game with little idea of what it really was.

Or at least, sort of. See I didn’t start playing the game until episode 3, I had heard of it but I was already tired of episodic games, as everyone was starting to be. I didn’t expect to love it so much and I didn’t expect Life is Strange episode 3 to hit so damn close to home since I had, multiple times by this point, been in a hospital and having to have people I care about surround me with worry and sadness just like Chloe did in an alternate universe that Max created.

This solidified the game in my mind as one that meant the world to me and when it continued to develop the romance between Max and Chloe and the tragically ended before it really got going romance between Chloe and Rachel, I fell in love. So with Life is Strange: Reunion coming out tomorrow (at time of writing) I thought I’d go into some more detail about why Life is Strange means so much to me, how Double Exposure only grew that love, and how I am glad to finally be getting closure to Max and Chloe’s stories.

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The love never dies

The original Life is Strange covers a murder mystery in a small town on the coast of Oregon called Arcadia Bay. You play Max, a teenager in a fancy school concentrating on photography because she’s really good at it. It starts rather simply and develops into a love filled and depression causing ride that ends with one big choice: Bae or Bay. I picked both over the course of 2 playthroughs but I can only ever look back on how much I loved the Bae ending. Don’t get me wrong, sacrificing all of Arcadia Bay for Chloe is a shitty thing to do, but I get the feeling of you being willing to do anything for the person you love.

The love for that game survived through the years. I look back on the original game and I think about the characters, about the story, and about my life. As I covered, I had a lot going on at the time of release and the game helped me make progress towards accepting myself, something I will always be thankful for. Strangely, what mattered so much wasn’t even the story itself or finding out who the murderer was, it was the characters of Max and Chloe and how they very obviously loved each other, even if in an unhealthy way. It taught me that sometimes what matters most isn’t about focusing on what others want out of you but on focusing on what you want out of life.

Life is Strange is so special because of my life at the time, but, even more, that love has never changed because of my life since. The game was formative to me despite coming out in my early 20s. I saw myself in the angst of Max, in the anger at the hand one was dealt in Chloe. As time went on that just became more solidified. Not that I didn’t grow past it, mind, just that who I was at the time was reflected in many ways that the game captured. That’s the magical nature of Life is Strange. It’s not that it was something completely new or incredibly original, it’s that it was done so well that it meant a lot to a ton of people and allowed a lot of people to finally see themselves in the game.

Particularly because this was one of the first games that really allowed you to see queer teens in real life. Not the actual first, as I covered in my History of Queerness in Videogames article series (here’s part 1 if you haven’t already read it), but was during a time when the industry was becoming much more accepting. Even as Gamergate fumed at the edges of the community before it engulfed large swathes of it, the acceptance still existed and Life is Strange was a pillar of that acceptance and representation. It means so much to me because of the acceptance it had and because of my life at the time and how I just kinda needed acceptance. It showed me that while life can be strange, it is still mine and I have to live it how I want to.

Double Exposure doubled my interest and love

Many in the Life is Strange community think Double Exposure is a bad sequel to Max’s story. They think that if you picked to save Chloe at the end of the prior game then you experience a Max who was hurt immensely by Chloe who up and left Max. They view this as character assassination or at least very out of character. They think the game as a whole is just bad. Even I had issues with it (as you can read in my review from a year ago), but I still enjoyed the game a decent amount despite those issues.

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All that said, the game still pushed me into appreciating Max as a character even more. See, she grew a lot during the years between the original ending and Double Exposure. During that time she became an even better person. Someone who would still do everything to save her friends but also someone who had been so hurt by her original journey that she was still dealing with the trauma from it all those years later.

Max had depth in Double Exposure. More so, the characterization in her journal provided tremendous context to her as a person at that time. Particularly, her time detailing her and Chloe’s journeys and the eventual breakup. Chloe in the game started to realize she wasn’t quite what Max needed and that she was never quite sure whether Max had rewound time to “fix” their relationship, despite Max promising she hadn’t. Essentially, their relationship was doomed to fail because of the context of the events that lead to it. I mean if your partner sacrificed your entire hometown in order to keep you around how could you not feel guilty about being together? How could you not think she made a mistake? How could you not think that maybe your whole relationship wasn’t based in quite the same amount of affection for each other when she literally sacrificed a town for you? How could that relationship ever be actually healthy? Chloe and Max grew as people and that lead to Chloe second guessing their relationship, regretting being together, realizing how unhealthy it actually was which lead to thinking they weren’t right for each other, and then leaving. It wasn’t character assassination or even out of character. It was character development. Chloe changed as she became an adult just like we all do.

This is something fundamental to Double Exposure that I loved so much, seeing Max as a fully formed adult and having been through a ton between games. When the first game came out I was a completely different person than I was when I played Double Exposure. I mean it came out a decade later. By that point I had made friends, lost those friends, gone to college, started film school at that college, transitioned, got into a terrible relationship been told I wasn’t allowed to continue the production track of film school because my work wasn’t the right fit, dropped out of college, got out of the terrible relationship, went back to a community college, got into a much better relationship, got a certificate from said community college, bought a house, and started writing this very blog. Max and Chloe had both grown, just like I had. Sure, Chloe had grown differently than expected but how is that surprising? People don’t always grow up to be who you think they would be.

Double Exposure did something with their main character that most games haven’t been able to do, largely because of how most games don’t have sequels come out a decade later that have the same main character, it had the character grow with you, alongside you. Except you only found out about it if you played the thing.

Getting an ending means so much

Having Max and Chloe grow as people, including growing apart, having Max become a fully formed person with a career and new friends, having her use new powers again, and now having her have to face her ex again after a rough breakup all are things that people can relate to. Well, except the powers thing. But besides that, Max and Chloe were great characters back in the day because of the depth they had, because they were beautifully written and acted characters who loved each other and were willing to do anything for each other.

So now over a decade later we finally get a conclusion to their story. We get to see what they will have to deal with in their final moments together in the game (I dunno if anyone dies this is me just talking about how the game is the end of their story). This will hopefully provide some kind of closure. It’ll give you, the player, an idea of what Max and Chloe mean to each other even all these years later.

The finale to these characters could be disappointing, it could be just kinda...fine. Or it could be a finale that finally feels like it allows the characters to rest. Honestly, I don’t know what it will be, but I know it will be controversial in the community. Yet, it still means so much because of knowing what the characters endings will be. Who knows what those endings are but honestly I don’t know if I care right now as much as I am just glad we are getting an ending.

Rewind over to maybe Buy me coffee?

The Conclusion

Life is Strange: Reunion comes out in under 24 hours. I am tentatively excited. I know I had issues with Double Exposure, as I mentioned, but to be able to see the finale to Max and Chloe’s story is kinda nuts considering how it seemed like there wasn’t going to be another Life is Strange game after Double Exposure didn’t sell super well. I don’t know if I’ll feel satisfied with the story. I don’t know if having Max’s original powers back will feel good, although I think it’ll feel better than the reality shifting from Double Exposure. I don’t know if it’ll feel good or bad to play as Chloe one last time. I don’t really know anything, I haven’t played it yet after all.

What I can say is that no matter what happens, I will review it, I will cherish the fact it happened, and it will not change the fact that I love Life is Strange. It will not change how much Life is Strange meant to me. No development could happen in the game that changes that.

Meow,

Cat

The original High on Life came out in 2022 and it was a lot of fun but quickly embroiled in controversy due to Justin Roiland being an asshole of a person. Many didn’t know if Squanch Games would make a game again but here we are 4 years later and, amazingly, they’ve made a sequel! But is it really that good?

Well, I played it and I had a surprisingly fun time with it! Not only did it end up being better than the first game but while the first game felt largely just like a Justin Roiland shooter, this one feels like it brings more to the table that the first one could ever have managed. It actually feels like there’s more of a personality there when it comes to the gameplay as opposed to just the world. I want to go into more details so let’s get on with it!

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The Premise

After the events of the first game where you defeated the G3 cartel who were using humans as an illegal narcotic, you became a celebrity. But celebrity status only lasts so long when you’re a bounty hunter. Instead of saving humans from being a drug the push for using them as one has simply gone corporate and now Rea Pharma is trying to make a pill called Humanzapro that gives you all the same effects as the G3 cartel version gave you but in a suit. So what will you do? Well your sister has decided she wants to be a freedom fighter and try to take down Rea Pharma so that humans are never used as a drug again. You’re gonna end up joining her of course but first you have to betray what you built up and, even worse, learn how to use a skateboard. Can you do it? I dunno...probably? You’ll have to play to find out...okay fine yes you can do it, I just wanted to end on a fun question, geez why you gotta judge me.

The Good

Close to an hour into High on Life 2 I got plopped into the actual world you’re running around in for the rest of the game. I started to skateboard around until I came across a guy yelling at me to stop and see something. He said he was immortal and then...was going to say something else but I shot him to test it and he in fact was not immortal (obviously). Even better, he said as he died “agggh I didn’t expect this! I thought I was immortal!” This comedy is what makes High on Life 2 such an experience. The first one had this humor, but often it wouldn’t land. Here, It always felt like it landed. I mean, even a bit earlier in the game than that fake immortal you save your sister from some bounty hunters and you’re given the opportunity to kill her or shoot your fellow bounty hunters. If you shoot her the game’s done and credits roll (yes, I checked) but if you shoot the bounty hunters they’ll be confused and one of them will say “hey um, I think you must have mistook us for the target, but it’s okay we do kinda look alike”. Again, this random off handed comments that are just fucking dumb funny are exactly the kind of game you would expect and it’s fucking fantastic.

Also I’m a big fan of meta stuff, I know many people don’t like it but personally it’s my shit. There’s a moment where one of the bosses breaks the fourth wall to an extent and causes you to question what’s the game and what’s just in the world. It’s a wonderful moment that ends with the above image that is not inherently a spoiler, but if you don’t want to see it then feel free to skip it. Following the image, the game loads into a whole other experience which reminded me of my time recently playing Romeo is a Dead Man (review here) with how out of the blue it was. The humor is so much better than the first and I wish I could detail more without spoilers. So if you like meta jokes and moments you’ll love a bunch of the jokes here.

Now, something I genuinely didn’t expect to like was the movement. In the game you have a skateboard for you to get around faster and I figured it’d feel like trash since it’s a first person skateboard experience and I’ve never had one of those. Instead I found myself having flashbacks to Sunset Overdrive with how fluid and fun the movement is. The world is designed with the movement as a core mechanic and it allows you to get around super quickly if you’re able to perfect your jumps and grinding. I mean, just look at the video below, it’s really fun! Plus you can personalize and upgrade your skateboard to your liking which is also really nice.

The movement actually changed how I enjoyed the game. I’m not really a go around and collect things or open chests kind of person, usually. Well this movement is so damn good that I liked to zoom around on the skateboard and collect the different Lugloxes (chests), do the different skateboard letter collecting challenges, and find weird shit in the world. The movement made me a collector, nigh, a chaser of collectables. Of course I didn’t get them all because that’s not something I care about but I still got a ton of them.

Also, there are many, many moments throughout the world and story that provide you with opportunities to have a damn fun, and out of the ordinary, time. From escape rooms to comedy shows to kissing booths you’re able to do a lot of these things and it leads to some fun moments that add both twists and just weird ass shit that the game may as well be known for. While I wish there was more, what’s there is great!

Finally, the story has some really great moments, as I just mentioned, but particularly has things that kinda come out of left field that I never saw coming. There’s one moment about 3/4th or 2/3rd of the way through the game where your character has a big thing happen to them and you end up with a Half Life 2 gravity gun in all but name and shape and that’s fucking awesome. There’s a lot of swings it takes while sticking to the idea of you being a bounty hunter type person who chases after specific targets. So, generally, it’s a fun time.

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The Bad

The starting guns might have great personalities that are left over from the first game, but they’re still not the best guns. Gus (the shotgun) is useful but Sweezy (the needler) is just kinda an annoying experience to shoot. She’s a great character though. Eventually you get multiple more new guns that are significantly more powerful than the guns you started with and even than the guns from the last game so you go from having to fire at enemies multiple times to being able to take most of them out with 1 shot with the chillaxin’ bow aptly named Bowie. I just wish the base guns were more powerful so you didn’t feel like the game was starting so slow. The gunplay itself also isn’t super good, they don’t feel like there’s a whole lot of weight behind them. Specifically, when your shots connect it doesn’t really feel like much, there’s not much feedback. I think they could seriously improve that aspect in a third game and make these lovely buddies feel much better to shoot.

You aren’t able to go back to the unique locations for the main missions. This fucking sucks. There’s some damn cool levels for each target, places that have some really interesting design and make you want to explore but if you don’t bother to then, unfortunately, you can’t go back. The devs did think about how you might miss out on upgrades because of that so they added characters that’ll sell lugloxes from previous levels that you missed. That doesn’t change though that I wish I was able to explore the levels again without the pressure of a main mission. Some of these areas contextually make sense as to why you couldn’t go back but I don’t think that’s really a good excuse in a game that could just make up some meta reason for the ability to go back.

Importantly, while the story has a lot of good parts and is overall fun, I don’t think some of the side characters had much of a character arc and I think the story sticking to some of the formula from the first game held it back a bit. I mean, I think the best parts of the game were moments that tore you away from that formula and made you have to do different things. If there is a third game, as Squanch obviously wants to make, I hope they take more of those risks. I want them to introduce more weird shit that takes you away from being a bounty hunter person going after select targets. Risks are good and after what I’ve seen in this one I think they’re plenty capable of it.

The Ending - Reaction

Surprisingly, I actually really liked the ending. I thought there was payoff, they made all their baskets (that’ll make sense when/if you beat it), and it felt like things throughout the game actually mattered. More so, the final boss section does an absolutely wonderful job at using all of your weapons abilities and all of the movement stuff you’ve unlocked over the course of the game, as well as revisiting art styles and moments from previous levels. It was genuinely a great ending. Plus after the credits all the characters do their meta thing about you finishing the game and how hopefully the devs are making a third one and stuff. It was a good bow to a really fun journey.

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The Conclusion

I had a ton of fun with High on Life 2. The game made me keep coming back, it made me want more fancy movement in my FPS games, it made me believe there are in fact ways to introduce a concept to a genre that doesn’t usually have it and still manage to make it work. The game definitely has flaws and feels like just a taste of what Squanch Games is really capable of, but I think it’s a worthy successor and significant improvement over the first one. I can genuinely say that this one is a very good game.

All that said, it’s 60 bucks and I think it’d do better at the 50 dollar price point. I do think it’s worth 60, so if you’re interested it’s not a horrible value, but at 50 it’d be such a good deal and experience that I’d say you should grab it as soon as you’ve got the money and if anything I’ve said sounds interesting to you. Overall, the game isn’t perfect and could have taken more risks, but damn is it fun to play and experience and, especially, laugh at.

Meow,

Cat

There has been a trend in a lot of games in the last decade to making them more Realistic. Many developers and consumers argue that it is, in fact, very fun to have gameplay that doesn’t acknowledge that you are playing a game and it is not and will never be real life. I find this infuriating.

Not because trying to make some things realistic is a big problem, but because this trend towards Realism has become such a problem in the Industry that the fluidity and speed of gameplay has started to be sacrificed in favor of that idea. I’ve touched on this a couple times, both in my Indiana Jones and The Great Circle review and my Sea of Thieves not-review, both times I talked about different aspects of the games that were realistic that were just an annoyance for the overall gameplay.

So today, let’s talk about my opinion, about why I’ so damn tired of Realism as a mechanic in games. I’ll be touching on how it often leads to the loss of real fun and hurts gameplay, how it adds bloat, how not all Realism is bad, and how we as developers can implement realism in a way that doesn’t cause these issues. Obviously this is gonna be a bit long, but hey that’s what these kinds of articles usually end up being. So let’s dive in to make sure it’s not longer than it needs to be.

Oh also, Realism in this article isn’t about graphics, it’s all about the gameplay. Just to get that out of the way.

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Realism over fun

What do I mean by this? Well, put simply games are meant to be fun. There are definitely a lot of ways that you can find fun in games but at they’re core they’re still an experience that you are expected to derive enjoyment out of in some way, just like all pieces of media. But then there are moments where games have decided that the fun can take a back seat sometimes so the game can put realism first. So the game can make something tedious that you have to deal with every single time as a way of being “realistic” but not as a way of being fun.

For instance, let’s look at a game that many many people adore with a fiery passion, Red Dead Redemption 2. Specifically, it’s hunting. There’s plenty of things in the game that are realism first but it’s hunting is, I think, the most frustrating aspect. When hunting in real life, skinning the animal you shot is a whole lot of work and takes a long time, even someone like me who has never hunted knows that it can be a messy process depending on the animal. In Red Dead 2 they seemingly wanted to emulate as much as possible that long time of doing the skinning by having you wait while Arthur, your character, skins the animal in a too damn long animation. This is a way of trying to implement some kind of realism based “mechanic”, emulating the long time it takes to skin an animal, which slows down the game waaaaay too much. Plus it’s not really a mechanic either, hence the quotes, it’s a fucking animation. It’s boring. And all they had to do to was add a setting or option to skip the animation if you want, it would not have been difficult, options are always better.

This very same mechanic is actually present in other games as well but they get something right that RDR 2 doesn’t. They realize that players don’t like waiting for long animations. They realize that as a player you’re going to want to spend maybe a couple seconds having the animation play. Far Cry, for instance, takes a measly 5 seconds. Red Dead Redemption 2 can take up to almost 20 seconds depending on what animal it is. Is it “realistic” that bigger animals take longer? Sure. But that can easily take you out of the experience when all you want to do is get moving again and the animation has to finish.

Some games even do away with the skinning animation all together because they figured you’re playing a game, do you really need to have every little detail like that in it? Which, no. You don’t. What matters is the flow of the game, allowing the player to not feel like their time playing the game is interrupted by these moments of attempting to emulate realism. Red Dead Redemption 2 chose to put realism over game flow, arguably over fun.

Bloat is the enemy of enjoyment

Let’s move on from Read Dead Redemption 2 so it doesn’t feel like I’m picking on it too much and instead focus on a game I mentioned at the top, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. This one is a game that I adored, a game that made me feel like I was playing as Indy and was actually going on an adventure of his that spanned the globe. Plus I got to punch Nazis in it and I do love doing that, but there’s one part of it that bothers the fuck out of me: the bloat of the realism.

Now there isn’t a ton of realism in the game, I mean you’re literally going on a punching spree around the Vatican while surviving bullet wounds. But then there are the keys. I talked about this in my review but when you need to use a key you need to select it in the menu to be your item you have on hand, sometimes you then need to pull it out, then you need to stick it in the door when you’re at the exact right spot to press x to put it in, then you have to turn the key with the thumbstick. This is an introduction of realism where it’s emulating how you would actually use a key in real life. The thing is, keys are used rather easily in real life, they’re mundane and not important. The introduction of this realism does only one thing, introduce bloat.

All of a sudden you can go from enjoying your time running around as Indy to having to do annoying key things. This isn’t necessary and it interrupts the flow of the game, just like with Red Dead Redemption 2. Except here they try to make you more a part of the experience instead of it just being an animation. Yet it still feels bad. It still feels like all they needed to do was let you click a button to open the door instead of having to do the annoying other movements. The game is sort of an Immersive Sim and most im-sims don’t make you do these things for opening doors because they realize how annoying that would be when you’re trying to sneak around or do something.

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This is my frustration with games like this, they are often very good but then introduce some kind of mechanic that just breaks up all of the fun and adds bloat or monotony. Here in Indiana Jones they could have just had you have to pull out the key if they wanted it to have some kind of “realism” to it but to also have to do the key movements yourself to open the door is just bad. It feels bad, it will always feel bad, and it will always be that they have a mechanic that is pure bloat and annoyance instead of continuing to allow the players to enjoy their time.

Some realism can be good

After all this I think it might seem like I don’t think any realism is good. That I think the very concept of realism is a plague on the industry. But the reality is much different. See, my point in all of this isn’t that realism is a horrible thing but that it needs to have a point to it. Realism that I have talked about is realism for the sake of it, not for the purpose of creating a new mechanic or some kind of interesting aspect to the game.

I might not find the implementations with a purpose to always be interesting but that’s a taste thing not a problem with the mechanic. However I do have some friends who actually really enjoy realism when it has a point. Here’s a quote from one of them about the game Vintage Story (a realism survival minecraft-y game):

When I think of realism, I’m not talking about the corporate standard of only focusing on realistic graphics, I’m talking game mechanics and systems that are balanced with immersive environments. Graphics don’t matter if the environment is poor and/or the systems are not engaging, and adding in a irl autonomous system into a game (Like a breathing mechanic) when your game’s puzzle doesn’t require it/it breaks you out of a game’s evironment/story is also not good either. There needs to be balance, and it’s why I like Vintage Story because what systems/mechanics it has in depth it is enveloped in an immersive and engaging environment with a slower progression system which allows me room to appreciate my crafts I make (something we really need in an ever exploitive attention ‘economy’).

This is what I mean, realism can be good if it is implemented effectively. Now part of it is up to the developers to figure out ways to implement realism in a mechanic function as opposed to just bringing down the player with annoyances but that’s their job.

For instance, in the Portal games realism is implemented through the physics system that allows you as the player to use realistic physics to solve puzzles in creative, and sometimes completely unintended, ways. The realism here doesn’t hold back the player, it enhances the player and gives them more capabilities.

Or there’s RimWorld which has implemented realism through their injury and medical system. RimWorld is a colony sim and when your citizens don’t have any health, instead they live and, if they become injured, they then need to be healed. But the quality of this medical care is what determines how effectively they are healed. Realism enhances the experience where you have to have a doctor who is good in order to have your injured citizens survive just like real life. It intertwines mechanics of the game to make it have even more depth.

Then there’s also Steep which is a snow sports game (that I’ve talked about before) which uses a realistic physics system and environment to be able to make you feel like you’re actually snowboarding or skiing or paragliding around the area. Because of this realism it enhances the experience of playing the game without getting in the way of the player.

Realism can be implemented well, it just has to be done well and with a purpose that doesn’t get in the way of the player and the game flow.

There is a better way

Essentially, I think developers who want realism in their games need to take a good long look at their goals with their game. Are they introducing a mechanic with the realism that would mean the realism has some kind of purpose? Does the realism interrupt the flow of the game meaning the player has to either just wait for something to be done when they could be playing or have to do some kind of combination of button presses and such in order to mimic the experience of doing something like that in real life? Does the realism introduce a mechanic to the game that feels completely out of place in the grand scheme of things and is simply only there for some kind of difficulty aspect?

There are genuine ways to implement realism, ways that can provide depth to a game, like what my friends find enjoyable in Vintage Story (a game that I will never play because it does not sound like my thing). Or there are ways that you can implement realism that hold your game back. If you are sure that you’re right in how your realism might do some of the bad things I’ve talked about but “it’ll be different because I’ll do it right” I simply must ask you to add some options to change how realistic that thing is. If it’s animations let the player skip them. If it’s annoying going through menus then doing some button presses and shit to mimic something like real life, maybe add an option to simplify it.

Buy me a very realistic coffee?

And most importantly, do playtests, don’t think that you know everything, let the public play your game to see if some of the things you are doing are actually fun (this one should be obvious but given the recent failure of Highguard I guess it needs to be stated).

The Conclusion

Well at the end I just want to reiterate I don’t hate all realism. I find some of it rather interesting mechanic wise. But I’m a picky player and I make my opinions very obvious about aspects of realism that bother me in games I play during my reviews. Realism is a trend in the industry for a lot of developers and I want it to stop, but it doesn’t have to fully go away. It just needs to be implemented with care and with balance in mind with game flow.

So that’s that, do you have any opinions on realism? Do you disagree with how I’m saying that realism needs to be a balance? Do you have favorite moments where realism has enhanced the experience of playing a game for you? Let me know in the comments!

Meow,

Cat

I adore weird games and years ago I heard about El Paso, Elsewhere and how good it was. It was made by Strange Scaffold, a developer who has become known for making incredibly weird games. So with my partner poking at me to go play their games and me already knowing that I love weird experiences, last year I bought the entire Strange Scaffold catalogue that is on Steam when it was on sale and today I am launching a brand new series that I call the Strange Scaffold Double Feature!

See, their games aren’t usually long so I figured I could lump two of their games together. Also, I’m going chronologically from their first game on Steam to their newest. I was genuinely surprised how much fun I had with this week’s 2 games and despite having issues they were very enjoyable.

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An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs

This is the first game from Strange Scaffold that is on Steam and, while not their first game ever, you can definitely see how this is the game early on that they started figuring out the kind of game the team wanted to do. Strange Scaffold on Itch has prior games to this, but they’re all either browser games or more visual novel-like as opposed to a game you have more gameplay in, like this one. An Airport For Aliens Currently Run By Dogs is rough (haha) around the edges but it’s the beginning of the Strange Scaffold team finding their footing, their identity as a developer.

The Premise

What is An Airport for Aliens Currently Run By Dogs, however? Okay, imagine a series of airports across the solar system run by 2D images of dogs. Then, imagine playing one of the last 2 humans in existence and you have to go around these airports choosing to do things for these dogs because...well...what else would you do after the whole human race has been destroyed? Over time you’ll also meet up with your fellow human survivor, your fiancé Karla, who is a scientist working for R&Dog. You’re engaged, but long distance so she can do her science...things and you can help dogs across the system. And now, imagine that these dogs are fucking strange beings that make little sense and just have absolutely nonsensical personalities. And that they ask you to do things that sometimes either dont make sense or have questionable reasoning. This game you’ve imagined is exactly what An airport for Al...fuck it, this game you’ve imagined is exactly what Dog Airport Game is about. Because this is The Premise section and describing the games’ premise to you is what it’s for.

The Good

The weird ass writing in the game is one of the best parts of it. I’m aware that’s kinda the shtick of most Strange Scaffold games, they’re weird and make you laugh or at least have fun above anything else and the game definitely made me have fun in this regard. I enjoyed talking to the different dogs, helping them do the things they were doing might have been tedious but the hilarious dialogue were what really solidified my enjoyment of the game.

There’s also just weird shit. Like when you find a dog that has another dog with it and apparently is sitting on missiles which it will then give you one and say it better not regret doing that. Or the dog that’s been cursed to be a human and you have to help them figure out how to be a dog again. Or the dog that sells briefcases but hates briefcases, which also is when you’re able to express your dislike of briefcases as well which is fuckin hilarious. Or the dog who wants to give you a souvenir so gives you an “Actual Gun”. Or how the ticket dog for the route to Uranus often chuckles before saying it. Or how when you ask for 50 boarding passes the dog says “you like to live dangerously” which is a hilarious reference. Plus you can keep requesting 50 boarding passes over and over and over and...well...in the first 10 minutes the video below happened. I couldn’t help myself okay? It was just so funny! The game is just filled with this dumb hilarious shit that makes ya smile.

The Bad

The game essentially boils down to a bunch of fetch quests (how the turn tables with the dogs making the human fetch). The way to progress is by going from airport to airport to grab items from some dogs and give them to other dogs to get items from them and give them to other dogs. With a couple cats mixed in. The worst part of this is just how boring it is running around, finding dogs in the big maps if airports that exist, which can sometimes be difficult to navigate. Plus you don’t run very quickly and the area is large so much of the game is just walking. It sucked.

A frustration I had was also kinda just a core part of the game in that not all airports go to other airports. So when you’re doing the fetch quests and going to find Karla at different locations you’re often just going around, slowly, from one airport to another to the one you actually want to go to. I get that’s kinda part of the point but it just didn’t feel good that not only did I have issues knowing where the gates are each time, but I got so damn tired of moving so damn slowly around the maps. It got tiring and eventually once I had done most of the fetch quests I just said fuck it and went around to find Karla and finish the game.

The Ending - Reaction

The game is very loosely strung together, but it did kinda have a good payoff. It also had a good message, enjoy the time you have with those you love because it will eventually come to an end. Kinda sad but there is some hope there for what the future of the characters will hold. It was also rather satisfying to be done with the game and not have to run around so damn slowly.

The Conclusion

The game has some issues but I was expecting that. What I wasn’t expecting was the absolutely wacky game that I played. I never expected to find some of the things that I did, to get items like an alien orb or a Dog (Doug) Dimmadome ultra big hat, or even a Polaroid camera. I expected something weird with some jank but not something this weird. And that elevated my experience with it significantly. Add in that it’s only about a 4-5 hour game, depending on how many dogs you fetch things for, and you get a nice experience.

I genuinely think you should play Dog Airport Game but maybe wait for a sale. Sure I’ve scored it high but for 20 bucks that’s a lot to ask for such a short game. It’s definitely worth a playthrough though and I highly recommend it.

I'm on Patreon if you like weird shit!

Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator

The jump from Dog Airport Game to Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is a drastic one. Not only is it a completely new type of gameplay for Strange Scaffold to be making but it’s also a game that very quickly shows that they now know what type of stuff they want to make. They went from a much more basic game with not a whole lot of interacting parts to this much more ambitious experience with multiple mechanics all working in tandem to create the experience that is Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator. This is the game that really shows me the Strange Scaffold I have heard about time and time again, Dog Airport game was the teaser, this one is the actual starting point of the out of the blue game styles and wacky shit that the studio has become known for.

The Premise

You are a Space Warlord who trades Human and Non-Human Organs on the space trading market. It’s time to earn some money by fulfilling the requests of consumers and maybe use that money for upgrades and playing the Organ Trading Stock Market. Will you get to all 11 endings? Or will you get absorbed in the craziness of the organ trading world and forget that there even are endings? I guess it’s up to you.

The Good

Ya know, I never expected to enjoy anything about this game. It doesn’t really interest me and it just overall seemed rather boring. Yet, I still found myself coming across things that made me keep playing. I continued to play and play and play and, even better, I found myself actually wanting to play. I was house-sitting during my playthrough and when I couldn’t sleep I would play the game, it was addicting and satisfying to slowly get more money, unlock more things, game the stock market, see the weird shit that exists, see the often hilarious writing of the blurbs for the requests. They all made me interested and kept me going, even when I got tired of other aspects.

Actually let’s go into the core gameplay since I mentioned the majority of it but haven’t gone into detail. Essentially you’re an organ trader who buys organs to fulfill requests from buyers. But when you buy these things the organ stock market fluctuates accordingly. You start your stock trading day which lasts 2 minutes and 30 seconds and during that time you pick up requests, buy the organs, fulfill requests, and try to buy things before other organ traders (run by the games AI (not that kind) buy them. You have to also manage how much money you have and grab things that you can afford and requests that you’re sure you can get within your budget. Then your trading day ends and the possible request board is closed and you can no longer buy new organs, but you can still fulfill any requests that you have already picked up. Then you can then use your picked up requests to game the stock market before and after your trading day. You also have the opportunity to upgrade your storage and pay off other traders so you don’t have to fight them for organs and/or up your reputation by paying other traders for favors. You also have moments in the trading day when an event pops up, like you possibly having to pay taxes or just an influx of a specific organ to the market. That’s basically it. All of it together might sound complicated but it’s honestly pretty easy to grasp when you sit down and press play.

The game also moves fast. Those 2 minutes 30 seconds might seem like a decent amount of time but it is not. In reality the other traders move super duper fast so you just have to move quick. But with how the controller controls are (more detail in the next section), it just takes forever to get to the organs you need. While the ID of the organ shows the info you need to know, I did not remember how to read that and my dyslexia kinda makes that difficult anyway so I have to click on every organ to see the details I need.

With that, there’s an amazing accessibility setting (which you can see in the video above) that allows you to slow down the game pace significantly. You can literally make it more than double the time and at will, there’s no locking you in to your selection. Each second is stretched which means you’re able to go through all of the organs and buy the ones you need while still being able to go back and forth between the requests you have and the organs because who can remember all the organs you need when you have 6 different requests and each requires multiple organs? This setting literally saves the game from being something that is just kinda annoyingly fast and keeps it from being super fun to actually being able to be played without being as super focused.

The Bad

All of my frustrations stem from the controls. Specifically scrolling through the organ menu. Even more specifically you have to use the right stick to scroll but it doesn’t really scroll the selection. Plus when you’re not used to this you try to just scroll down with the left stick and you will go down to the last organ visible and it won’t keep scrolling through the list but jump to the menu item below. I think it was probably designed for PC with controller as secondary so it makes some sense that it wasn’t perfect, it just takes getting used to and doesn’t feel intuitive.

The Ending - Reaction

There are multiple endings to the game but what kinda bugged me about them is how they came about when I wasn’t expecting them. I was never clear on how to make them come about, what the goal was, or when I would end up getting an ending. They take the form of specific requests for you to fulfill so I did like, know when they were within reach, but not what got me to the point where I was even able to accept them.

Despite that I found the multiple endings I got fun and enjoyable. Weird and wacky. And even better, satisfying. Sure I had more endings to go until I hit 11 (which I didn’t end up doing) but each one (after the first one) still felt like it wasn’t a bad place to stop.

The Conclusion

As I said earlier, I really never expected to like this game. I expected to just be bored, to get annoyed with all of the...well...everything. That held me back from starting this series for a long time. But once I started it I just kept playing. Sure, I had a few days there where I didn’t charge my Legion Go S so I couldn’t play it on the couch but I was still itching to play it and kept thinking about it. Again and again I thought “I need to charge that, I want to keep trading those organs”. This is what makes a good game. One that worms its way into your brain and just keeps you thinking about it even when you’re playing other games. As such, Space Warlord Organ Trading Simulator is a damn good game.

It’s very much worth the money it costs, and if it’s on sale? Grab this shit if anything I have said sounds interesting. Sure, there’s some issues but all games have issues, this is a great experience that is very unique and fun. Plus, it teaches you a little on how to play with stocks...a bit. I mean it’s not super accurate but you’d be surprised how accurate it actually is.

Part 1 - Conclusion

Welp, that’s the end of Part 1. Two interesting games, one more fun and weird and one not a game I expected to enjoy but I ended up having a great time with! The interesting thing is seeing the Strange Scaffold team go from just finding their footing to actually seeming to know what kind of developer they want to be and I’m looking forward to seeing them improve on that vision in part 2 which will come...eventually. Hopefully about a month from now but I’m unsure depending on how things go.

Buy me a coffee?

Part 2 will be about Witch Stranding and El Paso, Nightmare. Strangely the second one is a side story for El Paso, Elsewhere which is their better known Max Payne-like game that came out a bit under a year later. That one will be in Part 3 but I’m getting ahead of myself. What matters is that Part 1 is in the books and I can’t wait to play more Strange Scaffold games. They’re genuinely a developer that if I had the opportunity to work with then I would jump at it without any hesitation. Maybe one day...

Meow,

Cat

Welp the first Steam Next Fest of 2026 has arrived and for the first time I’m actually writing an article about the Demos I’ve played. The past 2 days I took a break from working on other articles and selected and then played a total of 15 demos. Some were meh, some were awesome, and some were just not the kind of game I am into, so what follows are my favorite ones. And if you’re reading this before March 2nd then you can play these demos too! If you’re not and the demos are no longer on Steam then hey, maybe just see what I say about the games and see if they’re up for you and if so add them to your wishlist. Wishlisting helps devs a whole lot so anything that follows that you find interesting you should definitely wishlist.

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Bylina

This one is about a guy named Kestrel, a bogatyr who was born without powers but still wants to be a hero. The game takes place in a world inspired by Slavic Myth called the Thrice-Nine Kingdom and it gives off an Eastern European Arthurian era vibe. I genuinely enjoyed this and added it to my Wishlist. The combat feels weighty and satisfying, the UI isn’t bogged down with a stupid cursor for control despite being similar to other games UI that do have cursors, the Magic system was interesting, and the world is incredibly intriguing. I did have issues, mainly just that I hated how when I went behind an object I couldn’t see myself so I got lost. It sucked, but there’s a post Demo survey so I took that and listed my issue. Also, the voice acting is mostly great but the main character, Kestrel, is just...not good. He gives off mildly original Resident Evil vibes with how bad it is. And he does get better as the game goes on, often times he has good lines and is acted very well, but sometimes it’s just....very very cheesy and wooden. Besides those issues though I would highly recommend the Demo!

Crushed in Time

This is a Sherlock Holmes point and click, or in this case drag across screen to stretch, game that seems to have a time aspect to the story. The demo itself gives a good idea of what the gameplay is like, you stretch items across the screen to move them by clicking on them and dragging. When you’re at the right spot to trigger something an arrow or some other contextual thing will show up and then you just do what that says. But best of all, this is at it’s core, a puzzle game and there is an integrated Hints system that is actually rather helpful. It has 3 hints each which gets more and more specific with what you need to do. The demo itself is very short, literally just the first 2 rooms and it only took me about 20 minutes with about 5 of that being me messing around when I didn’t need to. But the characters of Holmes and Watson are there, they seem interesting, and I am as interested as I have been in any Sherlock Holmes game so the demo did its job!

Everything is Crab

A small little 2D Rogue-like where you go around killing enemies, eating food, and evolving. Each evolution you’re able to pick one from 3 randomly rolled perks which make your character look more and more different. You can get horns, a stinger, a beak, more eyes, scales, muscles, tentacles and more. You can get your little blob to look fucking weird and it’s very enjoyable to go through those evolutions. Also, I can only assume that the further and further you get into your run you eventually become a crab. Because...well...Everything is Crab. I don’t know if I’ll get it because I’m not the biggest Rogue person (I’ve got an article I’ve been slowly working on that details why) but I do know that if you are fine with Rogues and liked the creature stage of Spore then you’ll love this game. Plus the art is absolutely adorable and unnerving in just the right moments.

Support me on Patreon if you want!

Flock Around

Flock Around is a multiplayer Bird Watching Game. It’s great. You have upgrades for your cameras to be able to zoom more or be able to see what birds are when your camera centers on them, and bird call whistles. It’s pretty great honestly. It’s a chill thing to do, just looking around for birds and doing everything you can to get the animals you want. The only issues I had with it was that it wasn’t the full game so it was a much smaller map. That’s it. If you like the idea of Bird Watching but don’t want to have to go outside and deal with the wilds then this game is for you.

REPLACED

In a 2.5D Action Adventure platform where you play REACH, an AI that is trapped in a humans body against its will. Sounds interesting? Well here’s the awesome part. The combat is like a 2D Batman Arkham system with you flowing between enemies by using counters to interrupt them, dodging, and other such things. I imagine they’ll have upgrades and things for the full game, but even now it’s incredibly satisfying to fight a bunch, then do a finisher in a super cinematic fashion. It’s great. Then there’s also climbing that’s like 2D Uncharted which is nice to have a 2D platformer that’s actually fun to climb around with. While there are instant fail stealthy moments, they’re more akin to Batman Arkham Asylum’s Scarecrow sections. Not the best, but easy to deal with. The characters are insteresting but when the characters are 2D pixelated designs in a 3D modeled world it really makes them stand out. It all comes together to make for a fantastic demo and a game that I cannot wait to play.

Scott Pilgrim EX

A brand new Scott Pilgrim Beat ‘em up? This is obviously gonna be great. The gameplay is satisfying, the art is wonderful, the story is an interesting evolution of Scott Pilgrim being a Time hopping experience after the other members of Sex Bob’omb have been abducted. Honestly, if you’ve enjoyed this genre in the past I would highly recommend wishlisting if you haven’t already. My only issue is that when you run it just runs forward, I want to be able to run and make myself go up and down as well so when I need to go up I don’t have to stop my running, go up, then run again. That sucks. Besides that though, it’s great. Picking up a yo-yo and using it to beat a gang of Vegans is great fun!

Or buy me coffee if you want!

Wax Heads

A game about running a Punk Record store. You pick records for customers, help design the occasional flyer, and learn more about the people around you. Plus it’s all punk. This was a chill experience with wonderful art, fun writing, and an interesting premise. Although I was frustrated sometimes because, occasionally, I just had to guess what records to get for the customer. See, the customer does some dialogue and that, along with their general look, gives you hints about what you’re supposed to get them. But when it’s just tired dad who wants a record just for him and all he looks like is a tired dad with a lot of toys and videogames on him, how am I not supposed to get him the record that says “No you may not have that doughnut” like a parent would. I mean, I thought it fit great, but he was not super happy. But besides me wanting more obvious clues sometimes, I really enjoyed the experience and will also be wishlisting the game. If you like chill experiences, punk music, punk culture, music in general, and some mild drama then you should take a look at the demo and try it out!

ZERO PARADES

A game from ZA/UM, who technically made Disco Elysium, despite the original brains behind that game getting fucked over and kicked out of the studio. In it you play a spy on her final assignment where you have to do what you do best, spycraft. I adored the little time I spent with Zero Parades, it's basically a spycraft version of Disco Elysium. It still talks about political theory, it has just as interesting art, it still has great writing, it still allows you to be as outwardly fascistic or communistic as you want. For instance, I found myself talking to some kids early on in the demo and they talked about this show they love which is about techno-fascistic wolves, you're able to let kids be kids or tell them how that's all propaganda or even reinforce what the show is teaching the kids. It's a fascinating moment. Of course I did have some issues, specifically your character will gain anxiety depending on conversational direction and that anxiety will slowly mount up until it reaches your anxiety limit and you then have to lower one of your stats to compensate. And it doesn't seem like that's temporary, it's a permanent decrease. That absolutely sucks and feels trash but on the plus side I didn't take damage when I failed my rolls like in Disco Elysium so at least I'll probably be able to beat this one. While the original creative minds behind ZA/UM are gone, the ones that have taken over very clearly understand what made Disco Elysium so beloved and I think they've done a damn good job with Zero Parade and you should check out that demo to see if you agree!

The Conclusion

Overall, Steam Next Fest is always overwhelming and with how many games that participate I’m glad I was able to play all the demos that I did and that I was able to find ones that were actually enjoyable as well. If you haven’t ever engaged with Steam Next Fest then I highly recommend you do, there’s plenty of people who write articles similar to this one and there’s just so many demos to try out you might find something you were never expecting to be as good as it is. I think demos should be something all games have so, if you can, please support the indie devs in Steam Next Fest and try out their games and reinforce to other devs that demos are actually beneficial to the industry and to the games as a whole.

Meow,

Cat

I have never played a game with Suda 51 attached. I know what reputation he has in the industry, but just never got around to playing any of his games. So when I saw the original trailer for Romeo is a Dead Man I was intrigued. Maybe now that I have this site it’s finally time to experience a game from Grasshopper Manufacture that has Suda 51 as an Executive Director.

What I found was one of the weirdest games I have ever played, in a good way. But also one that had a lot of smaller issues that just added up to really impact my experience. The game has a lot going for it though and I was really interested in it when it was announced in a very strange trailer so let’s get going and talk about why I had such a mixed time.

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The Premise

You play as Romeo Stargazer who has died. Or has he? After he gets seriously injured by a strange monster, his grandpa shows up to stab a piece of tech into him that brings him back from the brink of death but makes him into a Deadman. Hence the title. Romeo’s grampa then dies and somehow becomes a part of Romeo’s jacket. They then go and become FBI Space-Time cops because the whole universe is falling apart all because of one woman. Romeo’s girlfriend, or ex girlfriend maybe, Juliet. Now, they go around Space and Time trying to track her down and destroy her and the Space-Time anomalies that she has unfortunately created. Will Romeo defeat Juliet? Will he ever actually be referred to solely as Deadman by his peers? Will he end up destroying himself with his Deadman powers? Who knows! It’s up to you to find out!

The Good

The biggest strength to Romeo is a Dead man is simply how fucking weird it gets. For instance, the space ship that acts as the home base for you and the FBI team is represented in an isometric 2D pixel art fashion. The 5th level turns horror-y and makes you loop through a series of hallways in an asylum that change on almost every loop as long as you make the progress necessary (similar to PT). A core gameplay mechanic of the game is going up to old TVs where a dude in a suit at a table talks to you in a very existential fashion and, best of all, sometimes he’s making himself coffee and just keeps adding sugar so if you don’t move forward in the conversation that coffee is gonna get waaaay too sugary (video in the ending section, but it isn’t spoilers). The TVs then take you to subspace where you run around occasionally solving puzzles and shit to unlock new TVs that take you to new areas in real space as you slowly unlock a key that will allow you to enter the boss arena. These areas are rather polygonal and remind me of the weird hacking sections in Deus Ex Mankind Divided. Then there are the moments where the game puts you in a comic reading section similar to Gori:Cuddly Carnage except much less cartoony. Those comic moments reveal important story details, introduce characters, end character arcs, even introduce boss fights in sometimes rather freaky fashion. Those moments are fantastic and every time there was one I loved it. There’s also the very very anime-y nature of the game where, for instance, you get little moments like the first image of this article where you have the title of the game with a freeze frame as a break between levels. Similar to the commercial break stingers for things like Fullmetal Alchemist. It’s fantastically weird.

Best of all there’s a moment that I don’t want to spoil too much that happens just after Chapter 7 where you load into a completely different style of game that’s very very retro and, best of all, it leads into a music video like segment of weird trippy visuals with MS Paint like graphics sometimes that remind me of a YouTube show that I adored called The Big Lez Show and its spin off prequel Sassy the Sasquatch. This moment is absolutely beautiful and made me so damn happy and seriously consider how much I’m actually enjoying the game. It was wonderful.

The combat is also a bit brainless but fun. I do have some issues with it which I’ll talk about below, but normally I had fun. Attacking enemies in their weakspot, going from a normal combo to a heavy combo to the ult that you get to shooting enemies in the distance to dodging and doing damage to the enemies around me (due to a badge that adds an effect to my dodge. Other badges do different effects but that one was awesome), to summoning bastards (summons that can do different attacks like siphoning blood from enemies around you to fuel your ult to running at enemies and exploding to just shooting at them normally). All of it chains together really well and is a good time.

Another fantastic thing in the game is how it’s well aware that it is in fact a game. See, it likes to fuck with you. This particularly came into focus in the 5th level when in the Asylum. It’s more than just the loop of just a couple hallways, it’s also fucking with your sense of the game. Each loop ends with a pixelated dissolve to go into the next loop but that’s not even the best of it: there are several moments, like the video below, where the game starts to glitch out as if it’s an old VHS that is on its last legs. The level also happens to have an annoying jump scare similar to that old internet meme of that freaky face popping up after a clip of a car having a serene drive through a meadow with calm music, but it’s still being aware of the game-ness of it. There’s also a moment where the game literally melts to the bottom of your screen. It’s just got a lot of moments where it fucks with more than just the characters in the game but also you, the player. It’s a really fun way of communicating different things to the player and I really appreciated it.

The story is also...convoluted. But interesting! I mean what I could get is interesting. The messing around with Space-Time stuff is particularly intriguing and there’s a lot of philosophical moments as well that had me intrigued. Honestly, it kinda felt like it was purposefully convoluted as a way of mimicking how Romeo is supposed to feel during the game. He frequently talks about how he just doesn’t know what’s going on and it felt like the developers wanted me to feel the same. Although, there were plenty of moments of coherent story, particularly the Romantic story between Romeo and Juliet were the most coherent parts of the game, there were also some interesting characters on your ship as well although I never really attached to any of them. Overall, there was a lot of interesting story there even if some of it felt nonsensical.

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The Bad

Put simply one of the things that bugged me the most in the game was that the FOV was too damn small. It’s not as bad as, say, Lost Records, but it’s still too close for the kind of action combat the game features. The worst part of this is that during the boss fights this is actually fixed. When the boss is large, like the first boss you encounter, the FOV zooms out so you can see more of the model and more of the battlefield. That FOV is the perfect one, not the zoomed in too close for comfort FOV that is normally in the game. I mean I frequently had moments where I was fighting several enemies at once and got disoriented that I couldn’t see them all when they were attacking me (this got so much worse once enemies with guns are introduced and enemies that can charge you from off screen). I had to keep moving the camera around and it just. It’s not good and they hopefully will add an FOV setting because the game is desperately in need of it.

The game is absolutely FILLED with moments where you have to hold a button to do something. Want to pick a level? Hold a button. Want to take out your weapon for a boss fight? Hold a button. Want to pick a level to unlock? Hold a button. Want to shoot the spaceships big weapon? Hold a button. Want to rev the engine of your bike?Surprisingly, just press a button. But want to then actually start the bike after that? Hold a button. Want to pick up an item? Hold a button. Want to upgrade your weapons stats? Hold a button. Want to pick up the loot after the boss of a level? Hold a button. Want to beam up back to the spaceship after defeating the boss of the level and picking up that loot? Hold a button. Want to grab and pull on the hand of the bastard that’s in the ground and ready to harvest? Hold a damn button. It’s absolutely fucking insufferable and feels completely unnecessary. All of these should have been done with either a simple 1 button press or no button press at all and it’s done automatically in the cutscenes. This feels like trying to make the player feel more engaged with the cutscenes, similar to why quick time events were a thing, except this is one button and nothing happens until you hold it. I hated this every. Single. Fucking. Time. That I had to do it and I desperately wish I had been able to disable it or at least decrease how long you have to hold the buttons for as it ranges from 1.5 to 6 seconds which is just...ugh. Insane.

Also, speaking of things that are insane and frustrating. I’ve been writing an article slowly about my exhaustion with mini-games. It’s genuinely something that I think way too many games have been doing recently. Not every game has to have them and not every single thing should be about mini games. Which brings me to Romeo is a Dead Man that has mini games for several annoying things. For instance, there’s a mini game to unlock new upgrades, although this one is easy to do. There’s a mini game for upgrading some items. There’s even a mini game for unlocking a new level that is particularly annoying. It’s 4 sided pong where you have to bounce the ball into the center of the screen, video below. You control the top and bottom paddles with the left and right on the road and the left and right paddles with the up and down on the dpad. This fucking sucks. The ball moves incredibly quickly and it genuinely feels like just luck when you’re able to get it into the center of the screen. Thankfully there’s no punishment for failing at it because it’s fucking hard and insufferable when all I want to do is keep playing the god damn game.

Also some of this writing is cheesy in a bad way instead of a good way. Specifically, the thing that got me annoyed the most was just how much the entire cast continued to call our main character Romeo and then correct themselves in some way to say Deadman. Like “Romeo, or actually Deadman”, or “Romeo, I mean Deadman.”. It was grating by the end and it just. Kept. Happening. I don’t know why this was constant, I don’t know what the writers were thinking having that be such a constant thing, but I got so damn tired of it.

Now, let’s get to the combat issues that I teased above. Put simply, you can easily get pretty stun locked when you’re fighting both a ton of melee enemies and some enemies with guns from a distance and some of the special enemies that can either charge you or attack from a distance or lay down a large AoE of poison damage, the FOV means that the camera can often make fighting large groups of enemies difficult especially in small corridors which happens a decent amount throughout the game, and while you can definitely unlock different weapons I never figured out how. I think it might be some of the dungeons I didn’t do (as I didn’t want to do all of them) but I just never was able to access any of the seemingly interesting other weapons (swords and guns) which left me feeling disappointed.

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The Ending - Detailed

**Start Spoilers**

After discovering the truth behind the Director of the FBI Time Police Squad thing, you find Juliet chilling and playing the piano. She confesses that the only reason she is destroying the world is because she wanted to see Romeo again. And then says that she’s also doing it to establish a New World Order, or NwO as the game loves to shorten it to. She then leaves and prompts you to follow her.

You do and after Romeo does some reminiscing about the events of the game the final battle commences with Romeo quoting some Shakespeare to Juliet (who would have thought) and her summoning her “pet”. The battle is fierce and filled with lasers and babies as knees for some reason and once you defeat the boss you get the big reveal.

Romeo has been destined to come to that location since he was young and the boss you were fighting is actually an ancient interstellar being that has been the force behind the space-time issues. Now that it’s dying, Romeo is the replacement. He will be the one in charge of Space-Time from now on and the plunging of the universe into this chaotic world of space-time anomalies has come to an end.

Romeo is then seemingly restored to pre-DeadMan and goes about his life. At least for a while.

Then we have credits. 2 credits. After the first there’s a scene of Juliet in the diner we have seen her and Romeo in during the flashbacks earlier in the game and we see her alone and hear someone enter the Diner and come up to the table, but without knowing who it is. Obviously we are supposed to think it’s Romeo.

During the second we have some summaries of what happened to the crew mates of the ship.

And then after that we are treated to a 10 minute anime cutscenes of Romeo’s younger sister in a giant mech defeating her brother in another giant mech. He’s dead and we get the Fin in the lower right corner of the screen.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I just. I felt like the ending was disjointed and weird. Characters left the scene with no explanation of how they left, we were treated to that second post credits scene that I almost wondered if there was a whole other game about to pop up or we were about to go and have a full 20 minute Anime episode or something. I also didn’t quite understand why that second post credits scene meant and how that challenged what we had already been told about the ending of the characters. It felt like telling us one thing earlier in the ending and then saying “nah this is what really happened” but not actually saying which it is. I didn’t get it and it felt weird. Not good weird.

At the same time there were some really good visuals and animation and reveals so it’s not like it was all bad. Just that it felt rushed and like it needed some more build up for certain parts and more details about certain things. A mixed experience of an ending for a mixed experience of a game.

The Conclusion

To be quite honest here, I had some significant issues that soured my time with Romeo is a Dead Man and made it feel absolutely exhausting to play. While later in the game I felt it less, I just wanted to be done and could only play for an hour or two at a time. It wasn’t that there’s not some significant stuff to love, just that the shitty things that are there kind grated on me and made me have a worse time. Some of these issues could be fixed with settings, or I guess most of them could. Give me an FOV slider and a setting to decrease how long I have to hold a button and I’d have had a much much nicer time. But, while that could conceivably come out later in the games life (there hasn’t been any patches since release and I have no idea if there will be), right now it sucked a lot of the fun out. I adored many other parts of the game though, I loved the weird shit and the quirky nature of much of the game, but. I dunno. There’s only so much I can excuse.

If you are capable of dealing with, or looking past, the issues I have listed then you’ll have a wonderful time with Romeo is a Dead Man. Especially, if you love past Suda 51 games. But if these issues would bother you, then you’ll have a mixed time. All this said, 50 bucks is a decent price for the game and I really appreciate seeing variance in game pricing, but waiting for it to be on sale wouldn’t be the worst thing. Especially since by then there might be a patch that provides the settings that would fix several of the problems above. So yeah. Overall, it’s a mixed experience and one you should only get if you know what you’re getting into.

Meow,

Cat

I don’t know if I would consider this a not-review or just an impressions article, but either way my partner has been wanting to play Hytale since the game went into Early Access. For those not in the know, Hytale is a Minecraft-like that is far better because the game is more about exploration and adventuring than Minecraft is. There’s a lot of reasons it’s better that I’ll talk about in this article but first a word about my own time with Minecraft.

I played Minecraft in creative mode as I have never been a big fan of the survival mechanics of it, eventually my friends made a Minecraft server world that I joined and built a massive house on the side of a cliff. Yet I still didn’t engage with much of the game that I had little interest in. All I wanted to do was build and occasionally dig through some caves. To be honest that’s all I really thought there was to do. I never went to the Nether because I hated the combat in the game and didn’t want to have to deal with that. I never fought the Ender Dragon for the same reason. The game for me was just building and occasionally exploring.

So that’s the mindset I entered Hytale with, a mindset of frustration with Minecraft and how annoying the gameplay was so I only decided to enjoy the most basic of basic stuff. I was very apprehensive of playing it, thinking that it was going to be just as meh as Minecraft was when I wasn’t in creative mode. Instead I found a game that gets rid of some of the annoyance of Minecraft while introducing a ton of really cool things! Which means today I’m giving my initial impressions of Hytale after playing it for about 10 hours with my partner and friends.

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What I used to only engage with

As I stated above I only used to build and do some mild exploring in Minecraft, so how is that in Hytale? Well building is definitely better. I think my biggest frustration with Minecraft building is just how damn basic it is. But in Hytale? Well, you have multiple different crafting benches for different things. Building wise you have the builders bench and the furniture bench that will allow you to craft whatever you have the materials for. Unlike Minecraft where you have to build the item in the grid of squares, Hytale just shows you what you can make and gives you a craft button. It makes crafting so much simpler.

More so, with the Builder bench you just slot in a material (like cobblestone or types of wood) and it’ll show you all of the things you can build from those items. There’s the standard things you can craft with like, doors, fancier versions of the block, and stairs. There’s also fences, or walls if you’re using stone, ladders, and most importantly, 4 different types of roofs. There are the 2 block shallow roof, a 1 block roof that’s a pretty average incline, and a 1 block roof that is steep as fuck and goes up 2 blocks, and then just a 1 block flat roof. That right there is what has made me incredibly happy as a primary builder in this type of game. I can finally, finally, make a buidling that looks normal without having to finagle a roof using different blocks like in Minecraft. Plus each looks slightly different when you use different materials. It’s just all around awesome to be able to build roofs.

Also, almost all the crafting benches are uprgradeable to be able to build more things, which is pretty cool and provides more options for the massive amounts of materials you are likely going to gather during your adventuring.

But what about exploring? Well I think that’s best addressed with this next section...

Improvements and getting rid of the fluff

There’s a lot of improvements that the game has made over Minecraft but in the realm of exploring two come to mind. First of all, the combat. Now in Minecraft (at least the last time I played it years ago) all you did was just...attack. Swing your sword and you’re done. No combos, nothing interesting visually, no different weapons. The most basic of basic. Hytale improves on that by introducing multiple weapons and each one has a different combo of attacks. For instance, I use dual daggers because they’re quick and I can move around easy with them. The attack for that is you stab down with one, then the other. Not bad but it’s also incredibly smooth. Then if you hold the attack button you can charge up a heavy attack which, for the knives, let’s you jump forward at the enemy stabbing down at them in one smooth motion while doing far more damage (and it makes an X if you miss). This is absolutely essential to get because stringing together basic attacks and the heavy attacks will also charge up your ultimate, which is also different for each weapon. For the daggers my ult was doing a fancy dual swipe around me with both daggers dealing tons of damage. Basically, the games combat isn’t boring and tedious like Minecraft, it’s fun and engaging. I also haven’t even reached the ability to cast spells yet so I don’t know how that’ll work in the future, but I do know it’s a thing because I went to a big run down tower/library thing last night and found 2 Void Grimoires which allow you to cast green fireballs like the spellcaster enemies do.

Also, speaking of, the combat makes exploring much more fun. With the big tower thing my group attacked last night it was run down with a ton of skeletons in it and also had a ton of books littered about (books that you could hit once with something and then be able to pick them up to be able to decorate your place if you want it to look like your characters read a lot). It was a tight place for combat but was really fun to deal with, once my friend gave me food since I got there first and almost died attacking a ton of enemies by myself. The world is filled with these types of things, big towers and buildings, goblin camps, a bunch of stuff that provides you with stuff to do throughout the map besides just wander around.

Then you have to take into account that in Minecraft there were two big problems with exploring. The first was that if you explored without any food and you were still plenty good at combat and didn’t get hit your hunger would go down and eventually you had to deal with that. The second was that if you happened to die you would drop everything and have to find your way back to where you were. So if you were a far far away from your spawn then you would have to deal with a ton of walking, if you end up even going in the right direction. Well these problems are non-existent in Hytale. Food is only used for healing now as there is no hunger mechanic (thank fucking god, I hate that type of mechanic) and in the world creation settings you can set the game to not drop anything when you die (you can also have it drop everything or only some). Even better, if you did die where you were doing something that you want to resume you can now just open the map and boom, you’ll see your death marker where you died. Of course you can also see that marker on the compass at the top of the screen but I wanted to bring up how you have an actual map in the UI instead of the shitty map in base Minecraft.

Subscribing is sort of exploration too!

That map is also incredibly helpful because you can also see any other people that you’re playing with on it so if they’re somewhere you want to go you can look them up on the map, find them, see that they’re currently on an island with a ton of lava, then you can close the map, look at your compass for their marker, and just start heading directly there. Of course you don’t need the map to be able to know the direction they are, the compass shows you where your bed is, where your friends are, and where your deaths have been (death markers can be deleted whenever you want as well) as long as they’re in the circle of area that the map covers or you turn on the option to always see your friends. It’s a great experience to just know where you need to go without the possibility of getting lost in the wilderness and having to make a quick shelter to survive. Just all around much more fun.

A quick tangent before I move on as well, customization is far more indepth here. Your character can be customized to have different hair styles and colors, different skin colors, glasses, fangs, different ears, tons of different clothes including gloves and shoes, and even capes. That character is then taken between whatever worlds you play in so you don’t have to customize for each world. In the main menu you customize then load into either your world or the one you play with your friends. Speaking of, joining your friends is rather easy, you just have a code that you share with them and then they can join. Simple as that. It does change each time you load up the game but still. It’s very easy especially compared to Minecraft.

The Bad

I haven't played enough to get a ton of bad experiences but there is something that has been rather...annoying. It actually has nothing to do with the gameplay and everything to do with the connection. See, Hytale uses Peer to Peer for server connections. This is not an inherent problem, tons of games do that, but for some reason Hytale struggles when it comes to connecting to people...sometimes. For instance, when playing with my partner with either of us hosting the world, the one who wasn't hosting was constantly getting disconnected for no seeming reason. We had played other games with Peer to Peer networking before and had zero issues, in fact this was the first time we had ever had issues like this with a game. But then when our friend was the host and we connected to her world we had less issues. There were still moments where it seemed like the connection was having issues but overall it was better.

Now, I hear you say, doesn't that mean it's the fault of one of our computers? Normally I would say yes but when other games work and this one doesn't? Yeah that's not the computers fault that's the game. Thankfully there was a hotfix patch recently that seems to have at least kept us from constantly disconnecting but we still get symbols that pop up in the upper left corner, one that is a standard connection bar graph and another that looks like a voice wave line (no idea what that symbol means) that you can see in my combat video in the last section or my screenshot above. It's confusing and if you're wanting to play Hytale with some friends be ready for possible disconnections in this early stage of development. Hopefully it continues to get improved with each patch.

The Conclusion

Despite being in early access there's actually a lot currently in Hytale. Some of the things I haven't engaged with yet are farming, anything to do with animals, unlocking Memories (only just did that last night and I still don't really understand it), exploring into caves, fighting more difficult enemies, and even just going around the map more than just what is directly around me. The developers intend on introducing a lot more things (including things that presumably will come like baby animals aging up into adult animals), which you can tell because in the fancy Forgotten Temple area that you get to through a portal near your original spawn there are some really fancy buildings that each have an under construction sign at their entrance. The game is definitely just starting out but there is far more here than there was in Minecraft at the start and what is here is just far more interesting than what I have ever played in Minecraft. Plus there are mods and if you dont' know how much I love mods then go ahead and read about it here.

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Basically, if you’ve enjoyed Minecraft in the past, I’d keep your eye on Hytale. It’s got a ton going for it, it’ll be getting further updates as time goes on and, best of all, it’s just a lot more fun to play. The biggest downside is honestly, for me, that it’s not on Steam. Steam is a great platform and it would be helpful not just for me to capture screenshots and footage but also because I could play it on my Legion Go or my partner could play it on their Steam Deck. My hope is that they eventually make the jump to Steam so that it’s not just a PC only game that has its own client, but who knows.

I have really enjoyed what I’ve played in Hytale, I’ve loved how improved it feels versus Minecraft. I can’t wait to keep playing it and seeing how it grows and develops as it is still in Early Access and, if you like Minecraft, I implore you to play Hytale eventually. I almost guarantee you will enjoy it.

Meow,

Cat

As I’ve talked about in multiple prior articles from last month, I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 a bunch. Both with my friends and in a solo game. It’s been a lot of fun and, now that I completed my solo run I wanted to review it. Sort of.

See, this is gonna be a bit of a different review. Not only will it be differently structured but it’s mainly focused on criticism and not about the positives. Not because I didn’t like the game but because there’s plenty of positive things out there about it you can find, I mean Baldur’s Gate 3 is adored all over the industry. You can’t go anywhere without people heaping praise on it. So instead I’m getting the score over with at the start so I can talk about my biggest problem with the game, the ending.

Also, as this is going to be focusing on the ending of the game, it is filled with spoilers so just be aware of that because I’m not gonna warn you about them before they happen like I do in my ending section. This is your only warning.

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The Conclusion Score

Again, I’m doing the score for Baldur’s Gate 3 here at the beginning to get it out of the way so I can talk about what actually matters to me in this article.

Ta-da. I scored it high. Who would have thought. Seriously though, I think the experience of the game is something that can’t be replicated, playing it might have moments of disappointment or frustration but it’s such a large game that has such a wide variety of things you can do in it (and things you can completely miss), that very few other games have achieved. Baldur’s Gate 3 is a once in a decade experience and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with it both during my Solo playthrough that I have already finished, and my still ongoing multiplayer playthrough. At least, I enjoyed most of it, besides the ending.

The big problem.

Okay, endings are hard. Like really hard. Sticking the landing is one of the most difficult things in writing and adding other levels to it like Games or any kind of visual media format just create so many more ways for it to go wrong. Baldur’s Gate 3 turns this up to 11 with a ton of different choices that can have some kind of impact on the ending you get, some large some small.

The problem then arises that some of these endings will just feel...weird. For instance, in my solo game I chose to wake the Githyanki prince Orpheus so he could help me during the final fight and so Lae’zel wouldn’t make me fight her. This caused the Emperor to do something incredibly out of character, turn against me and join the bad guy he had been fighting for the entire game and years before, he joined the fucking Netherbrain. I just don’t understand why he would decide to join the enemy that he had often talked about how much he hated. It was just so, so, so dumb. Then, when it came to killing Orpheus, I’m able to make a roll to be able to convince Lae’zel to not fight me but she will then be super pissed at me and says she will leave right after the final battle but there is no similar possibility for the Emperor? I can’t convince him that maybe joining the bad guy he hates is the worst possible thing he could do and maybe he should trust me that Orpheus can be helpful?

This was the only ending I got on this playthrough, I haven’t reloaded a prior save to get something slightly different, but this still just bothers me. As I said, endings are hard and Baldur’s Gate 3 has a ton of different endings, one even at the end of Act 2, but not all of them can feel satisfying. Some of them will feel disjointed, like something came out of left field and has no basis in the characters I have come to know. Some will, undoubtedly, feel pretty good, but those I think will be the minority.

When writing, figuring out a satisfying ending is one of the most difficult things you can do, trying to figure out something that ties up loose ends, maybe leaves a door open for a sequel if that’s possible, but overall doesn’t feel out of place is incredibly difficult and getting it right takes tremendous talent. And Baldur’s Gate 3 has so many endings, the one I got though just didn’t feel like it stuck the landing. Even the shift into the Epilogue after the final fight felt....weird. I romanced Karlach and my character and her walked toward the camera in a fancy room, one that I had never seen before, and their hands were what the camera was centered on. It was a sweet moment but...there was no music. No swell of satisfaction, nothing. They walked into the camera then cut to black. Then we get a 6 months later epilogue that was interesting but still didn’t feel super satisfying. I think it was definitely more interesting to hear from the characters where they are after 6 months instead of a slideshow but it still felt like a weird transition.

I just think that the game ending didn’t have the same punch that moments earlier in the game had. As if the best parts of the game were everything up until the ending where things just felt...fine. Which is something that I think other games have done much better, which, speaking of...

Subscribing has the same punch though!

In Comparison

Let’s talk about how the ending works in comparison to other games in the fantasy RPG genre, because it’s...complicated. I’ve played a lot of games in the fantasy RPG genre, two of my favorites were the entire Dragon Age series and Avowed. Dragon Age does their endings wonderfully because they don’t vary so wildly. The writers are able to predict the place the player is going to be effectively and only have to take into account some prior decisions as opposed to having to vary the ending wildly based on tons of decisions like Baldur’s Gate 3.

Even more so, the endings don’t actually change that much. In Dragon Age Origins you still defeat the Archdemon, in Dragon Age 2 the Templars and Mages will still end up at War, in Inquisition you still seal the rift and defeat Corypheus, and in Veilguard you still defeat the Evanuris saving Thedas from certain destruction. These all just have mild changes depending on decisions you’ve made, but they all end the same. Then, in Avowed, you still have to face Lodwyn at the end, even if you’re given the option to side with her to avoid the final fight.

Meanwhile Baldur’s Gate 3 has much more complex endings even if the predictability of fighting the Netherbrain is still there for the writers to consider, at least for most of the endings. This leads to, as I’ve talked about, some things just not making sense or not having a satisfying conclusion.

I actually find this rather frustrating how different I view this as opposed to many others in the community. I think less endings but all of them are satisfying is better than more endings where some of them feel flat out underbaked. I’ve seen many many people in the gaming community say they want more games like Baldur’s Gate 3 where there are a fuck ton of endings and you can make so many damn decisions in the game that can completely change some aspects of future story beats. I just don’t think this works well and even in Baldur’s Gate 3, as I’ve talked about here, I dont’ think it worked super well, at least ending wise. I think Avowed and Dragon Age: The Veilguard do endings better than Baldur’s Gate 3 not because they have more decisions that lead into the experience but because they feel like tighter, more well structured endings that didn’t have parts come out of nowhere and characters act completely out of character like The Emperor. Of course Baldur’s Gate 3 does other things better than those games but I don’t think it’s as simple as saying that it’s better than them.

The Actual Conclusion

It is perfectly possible that the ending I got is actually one of the few endings where it feels underbaked, where things felt strange or just plain unsatisfying. That the ending I get with my friends will feel much more satisfying. I know I’ve seen some endings online that felt better with the short clips of them that I saw but I just...I dunno. It still feels like Baldur’s Gate 3 has the reputation it does not because of the endings being satisfying but because of everything leading up to them. You make a ton of different decisions and get to see how utterly wild those are, which is cool, but if the endings don’t pull them together I don’t think it really has all the same weight that is implied by the games reputation.

Again, endings are hard to get right and I think many other games have gotten them right in the fantasy RPG genre, but I just don’t think Baldur’s Gate 3 did super well here even if there are a wide variety of endings. I also intend on doing another playthrough eventually where I play The Dark Urge that I think will impact my game more and might help me have a more satisfying ending but I doubt it will change that much.

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Pulling this back to this being a review, I’d still recommend Baldur’s Gate 3 to anyone who enjoys the fantasy genre. But I still think that the game, at the end of the day, is not something any other game can live up to. No other game will ever be quite like it, even Larians next game will be different to an extent. I don’t want developers to try and replicate the game with the idea that it is the new standard. I’d rather have more games akin to Avowed than I ever would Baldur’s Gate 3, although that might just be a me thing. Also, as I’ve talked about a couple weeks ago, I highly recommend modding the game, even for your first playthrough. There are some absolutely fantastic mods out there and they don’t ruin the experience. Just maybe don’t install the ability to turn yourself into a car on your first playthrough because, while funny, it’s really not helpful.

Meow,

Cat

I love snow. Or at least I do when I don’t have to shovel it. Recently here in the states a ton of the country underwent a massive snow storm that dumped record amounts of snow (and super low temps, at it’s worst it’s been -20°F with wind-chill where I am). In my area we got, for the first time in a very long time, about a foot of snow. Which I had to shovel. Now, one of the best past times people have with that fresh pow-pow is snowboarding, skiing, snow-tubing, or sledding. Personally, I loved that as a kid, but after I broke my foot on my first run of the day during what some guy on the ski-lift nearby very kindly called a “wicked wipeout”, I haven’t gone up a hill since.

There is one thing I have done though, play games that allow me to experience what I want to experience without having to put my bones at risk again. Or, rather, there’s one game that I play in times like these that I love and often think about going back to. It came out in the late 2010s and is just such a fantastic game for snowboarding, or really any snow sport. I’m talking about Steep, a game that didn’t get the love it deserved, in large part because of how Ubisoft didn’t really do a very good job with it. That game though gives you the feeling of being able to do almost any snow-sport in multiple massive maps of mountains that you are able to just drop in anywhere and start doing your thing.

So today I’m doing a smaller piece (that totally isn’t being written last minute because I don’t have some of my other articles done in time for today). Today I’m talking about why I love Steep, what it means to me, and why you should totally play it during snowy days.

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But Why Though?

Steep is a game that replicates the feeling of any snow sport. Whether it’s sledding, Skiing, Snowboarding, or other sports that can be done in snow but aren’t technically snow sports. You get the sound of the snow under your feet, the sound of the wind going past your ears, you even get the feeling of not knowing where you should go so you get to pick (as long as it’s down). There are 3 maps in Steep, the first is the Alps, which is actually where the developer was based. The second is Alaska and is X Games focused. The third is in Asia, I think China. Honestly I wasn’t able to go to it because it requires a lot of “Steep Coins” or whatever and in order to earn those you have to play a lot of different events and I just haven’t. Each map is beautifully rendered in the map screen in full 3D glory where it shows you different activities you can do across the mountains and drop zones you have unlocked. You also get to see the trail of whatever run you have just done and then are able to go back and select a spot during that run and respawn right there in seconds.

Steep does something that I genuinely don’t think any game has ever done for me, made me want to go out in the snow and try Snowboarding again. Okay, so that’s not that much of an achievement since there aren’t a whole lot of Snow based games, but it’s a big thing for me! It’s just, the feeling of having the freedom where to go, of the only thing that matters is the snow and getting down in whatever way you want even if it’s super slowly. That feeling is unmatched and I desperately want to experience it so I then boot up Steep and go ahead and get the closest thing I can to it.

The activities are fun little side things but I don’t think they are super important, even if they help you unlock more of the map. I just like fucking around in the game, finding out that I might have bitten off more than I expected with this particular route only for me to open the map and go slightly farther up my trail to try again right away. Or to just say fuck it and hold Triangle or Y to be able to start at the beginning of my run so I can take a completely different direction. The freedom the game provides is just second to none and it’s genuinely a shame the game no longer gets updates, even if there is the positive that there are no more micro-transactions so you literally just play the game and earn currency you can use to unlock more stuff. That’s really nice.

It Means More Than You Think!

As I mentioned in my intro I broke my foot skiing as a kid. I always loved being out in the snow and such so Skiing was a great fit, especially since I just couldn’t Snowboard to save my life. But once I broke my foot I was no longer brought to any places to ski by my parents, or rather my Dad because he was the only one who could afford it.

Yet, I always wanted to keep skiing, I always wanted to enjoy the snow in how I had before the broken foot. So I, naturally, found myself enjoying Snowboarding games. Specifically, as a kid I adored SSX on the original Xbox but it was still rather arcadey for my taste, I wanted something that could replicate that feeling of being able to just go anywhere without having to worry about it being a race or doing tricks or even having a finishing line. I wanted to go around a Snowboard to my hearts content. I got that with Steep.

Wicked Subscribe, dude!

More so, Steep gave me something that I had never had before, the ability to just go around a mountain and enjoy the sport of Snowboarding without any pressure. It was chill, it was fun, it was exactly what I wanted. Steep was able to give me back that feeling of being a kid and being able to be in the snow and not worry about hurting myself. It let me have fun shredding that fresh pow-pow again. It was awesome.

You should play it too!

Steep is not an expensive game anymore, it’s just 30 bucks on Steam and, while it doesn’t get updated anymore either, the game is one that feels like it didn’t need constant updates. I think you should play it if you have fond memories of doing any kind of Snow sport whether as a kid or as an adult. The game will make you remember those moments. It’s also, as the whole point of this article states, the best thing you can play when it’s Snowy out. Sure, it doesn’t offer you the ability to escape the cold by playing on a tropical island, but it does offer you control. It offers you the ability to take the Snow that is coming down outside and to experience it in a safer environment. An environment where you don’t have to worry about frostbite, staying warm, breaking bones, or having to end for the day and go home. It offers you freedom and the ability to do whatever you want on the mountain.

I genuinely think you should play it, if you haven’t already. It’s such a shame it never got more attention because it deserves it far more than some games out there. The worst part, the absolute worst part, is that it’s made by Ubisoft so does end up having some online only stuff. This sucks and pisses me off, it’s not the perfect game of course. Another big issue is the controller cursor is incredibly and unbelievably slow. But if it goes on sale, and you like snow sport based games, you should play it. Take that power back and shred some snow!

The Conclusion

I adore Steep, and when it was announced I knew I would. I will always love going around the maps and fucking around and being able to just feel the zen of doing a run without any tension or worry. To hear the snow under my character, the wind at her ears, the speed of going down the slope, the terrified sounds and phrases she makes/says when I make a jump that is way too high, it’s just such a wonderful experience and on days when there’s a ton of snow in my area, where I am literally snowed in, where someone stole my only snow shovel because they needed it for the snow and now I’m even more so left without a shovel until someone I know with a 4 wheel drive comes to my rescue, on those days it’s a great feeling to boot up Steep and experience the snow how it was meant to be experienced.

Buy me a coffee during this snowy day?

So I will leave you with one more video for you to watch, or rather listen. Just listen to the sound of the snow, the sound of the wind, the sound of the gentle music, and then the inevitable wicked wipeout that comes when you go too fast. Listen to the zen sounds of Steep and maybe go and grab it when it’s on sale. It’s a great experience.

Meow,

Cat

I’ve been playing Baldur’s Gate 3 with my friends recently and, as there are 4 of us, I installed a mod to be able to still take along companions. This has lead to a really interesting experience that’s broadly enjoyable. Then, I’ve also been playing my own playthrough as well and, as I both never finished the game back when it came out and a lot has changed, I’ve installed a ton of mods to make the game extra interesting and fun (I do plan to review it, or at least put out an article about my thoughts. even if the only part I never did was most of Act 3).

But all of this has brought me to a really interesting moment with one of my friends, who might theoretically be reading this right now (this isn’t meant as a slight against you dude). He doesn’t want me to mod our shared game too much because it might change or ruin his own single player run through he’s actively doing. He’s the kind of guy who hasn’t ever really engaged with mods for most games and it’s lead me to some thinking about what is the point of mods, are they worth installing, do they “ruin” a game, do they enhance the experience, and most importantly, are they easy to install?

So today we are talking about all of this. I want to first go over talking about installing mods for those of you who don’t know how (if you have any questions about this section please comment so I can address them as best I can, I’ll try to be more active in responding), go over how I think mods enhance the experience, and how I think everyone should mod their games and all games should have the ability to mod on PC and Console. Hope this one’s fun (and again if you’re reading this dude, let’s talk about it when we play Baldur’s Gate 3 next, I love a good conversation)!

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Installing Mods

Installing mods for PC (I’m only covering PC because Consoles rely on in-game mod managers) is far less complicated than it used to be, especially on Windows. Nexus Mods has a great app called Vortex that allows you to select a game and download and install mods right there with the click of a couple buttons. It’s not like the old days for most games, where you had to edit some files to be able install the mods, now you just install with Vortex.

Of course there are also more and more games that have in-game mod managers that allow you to install mods while playing the game and take care of everything you could possibly need.

Personally though, with games that don't have in-game mod managers, I go to the Nexus Mod page, download the mods I want, download the mod manager that the mods say they rely on, drag those mods into the mod manager, then install it through that. Vortex is great, don't get me wrong, but it does come with some overhead and not everyone wants to have another app they have to install and run in order to find some mods. Although this ability might be changing soon because Nexus is talking about how they're pushing to just do Vortex going forward. To be honest this is something I'm not super knowledgeable on so you might just have to use Vortex, hopefully they make it better.

There’s also plenty of tutorials out there for how to mod your specific game. Plus, the mods on Nexus Mods basically all have an install section where they tell you the ways you can install it, even some have multiple ways you can. It’s much less intimidating than it used to be. Plus some games even have Steam Workshop nowadays which is literally integrated into Steam and is easy to download and not have to worry.

Why mod?

I’ve actually talked about modding before, particularly in my Hollow Knight Silksong review and a little bit in my Difficulty Accessibility article, both from last year. The amazing thing about mods is how they can do so much for the game. From making it just flat out run better to introducing entire new systems to deal with, brand new stories to play, just small character design or character customization adjustments, or making the game just feel better to play. Mods are there to help for almost all problems that really bug you in a game that you come across.

For instance, Baldur’s Gate 3 has a great vanilla experience, but if you add in mods (via the in-game mod manager that I have a video of below) you can do things like remove weight limits, up your XP multiplier, unlock levels 13-20, allow people to play with all of the companions in your party so that you can have better roleplay opportunities and so that you can have an easier time in combat, introduce more spells that weren’t able to be included in the original game but are in DnD 5e, introduce more classes and races and backgrounds, and even allow you to Wild Shape into a car. There’s some nuts stuff in there. It’s awesome and many of them just enhance the experience, making it all around more fun and enjoyable.

Then there’s the Mass Effect Trilogy Legendary edition which has a bunch of fantastic mods that make for an even better game. You can get rid of those damn repetitive hacking mini games, you can make it so you have an infinite run, you can remove restrictions on what weapons you can use, you can make the Citadel DLC in ME3 happen after the final mission functioning as a post game epilogue instead of a last hurrah before the end, you can remake the dream sequences from ME3 to be showing people that have died or might die during your trilogy run through instead of that dumb kid, you can even remove the Starchild selection for the ending entirely and just default into the destroy ending after you sit down to chill with Anderson, and best of all, you can make the material collection in ME2 go from staring at a planet for 5 minutes at a time trying to collect everything to going into orbit and shooting off one probe and harvesting all of the materials. These mods make the game less annoying to play, especially on replays, and it just makes it feel like an experience that doesn’t drag as much as the vanilla experience did. That’s a massive improvement.

Or there’s Dragon Age: Inquisition, a game with a lot of great things in it that locks you out of continuing on in your main quest until you do meaningless collecting and other BS MMO like quests and such. Each of which award you these stupid points that, once you have gotten enough, finally allow you to continue in the part of the story that matters. This is a BS mechanic that’s all about extending the amount of time you put into playing the game. But with a mod, you can literally eliminate this issue. All of a sudden you can choose to do the MMO shit because you want to or can choose to ignore it because you don’t find it fun. That choice is what mods can offer you.

But do these things ruin the experience? It’s certainly different than the developers intended, but does what they intend really matter? Not to say that it’s not well intentioned but once you own a game you are now in control of what is the intended experience, no one else can decide how you play it, at least in many, many PC games. With Baldur’s Gate 3 it often can fuck with the balance of the game but is that such a problem when the game is already rather difficult even on the easiest difficulty? With the Mass Effect Trilogy it can get rid of some of the more monotonous moments in some of the games and make it more of an smooth experience, even enhancing it by making things make more sense (those dream sequences). And with Dragon Age Inquisition it can remove the most BS shit in that game that forces you to engage in the MMO aspects in a game that is not, in fact, an MMO.

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These are all different than the original intentions but they’re also just all around better. Sometimes developers make decisions for their development because of genuine artistic beliefs and sometimes they make decisions because of limitations, be they time or budget or capabilities. But none of those decisions are inherently gospel. None of them are things you should just accept as the way things have to be. Which leads me to my next point...

Everyone should do it!

I’m serious here. If you have something small that annoys you in a PC game, see if there’s a mod. It’s not sacrilegious to make changes to a game. If there’s not a mod for it maybe take some time to learn how to make one because I doubt you’re the only person who has had issues with that one thing.

And if you’re a developer, you should both make mods easier to develop by creating mod tools but also allow console players to mod things as well with an integrated mod marketplace. Baldur’s Gate 3 does it well of course, but let’s go back to my friend for a moment (hi again). He loves Skyrim and Oblivion, has replayed Skyrim so many times he’s having to find new ways to make the game feel fresh with every playthrough. But there’s a way he could help make the game feel fresh, by installing mods. There’s tons of mods out there for Skyrim and Oblivion (I don’t think the remaster has a mod manager like the Special Edition of Skyrim so modding on console is impossible) that add content, massive improvements to gameplay, and just make the games all around better. In-game Mod Managers are required to allow people like my friend, a console player, to be able to have the option to mod.

Whether or not he mods the game is irrelevant (based on Baldur’s Gate 3, he wouldn’t), the point is he, and all console players should have the chance to mod their games to make said games into something that has a more tailored experience just for them as players too. I know this can be a decent amount of work for developers to implement so I’m not expecting it to be something that becomes standard. Yet, there’s tons of big devs out there that could do this, but just haven’t. We need more in-game mod managers like in Baldur’s Gate 3, and yes, technically Skyrim Special Edition (although that has a whole other controversy behind it with the fact it supports Paid Mods).

The Conclusion

I guess my point is that I don’t think Mods can ruin a game. Mods are meant to give you options, to allow you to make changes to a game that has real annoyances that the developers couldn’t possibly have provided options for in some kind of menu system, to allow you to have brand new stories made by community members, to allow you to even turn the game into something completely unique. The Idea that mods might ruin an experience of a game is kinda baffling to me, games are works of art that can be changed and augmented, that’s a part of the charm.

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As I’ve made clear in many of my articles criticizing game development decisions or talking about mods (including this one), game developers decisions about certain things in their games is not dogma that you have to follow religiously. It’s okay to make changes, it’s okay to give Withers Big Naturals a try, it’s okay to remove busy work from games, it’s okay to take a game that is fundamentally broken and fix it with mods instead of waiting for developers to do it.

Mods are great, people should use them, I use them all the time to make games more interesting especially on replays. If there’s anything I can leave you with it’s just this: the only thing that matters about how you play a game is how you want to play that game. Break the balance if you want, wild shape into a car, and don’t let people who tell you that you “didn’t really experience the game” or that you “played it wrong” get to you. They’re wrong, you decide how to play the game, not even the developers can change that.

Meow,

Cat

For those not in the know, I’m a TRPG (Tabletop Role Playing Game which DnD is an example of, only one T because Tabletop is one word) Producer with my partner at Just Roommates Games. We’ve made a couple games so far and are working on a sci-fi one that I’m building the world for. The development is going decently well, but, as my partner works full time, it can take a while. Because of that time and my partner doing research by reading sci-fi media, I’ve had a thing on my mind. Adaptation.

So today I’m doing something out of the ordinary for me, merging my two main areas of focus. Today I’m talking about TRPGs and videogames. I’ve had this frustration in my mind for a while where there’s a lot of them that I think would make great videogames but there’s this large difficulty with adapting them. Sure some games have done it well but I think most haven’t. And those that have done some of it well often have large omissions that make the adaptation far worse.

Now with that, let’s talk about the biggest pitfall you can fall into with TRPG videogame adaptations, one success story, and one utter failure. And then we can talk about how I would recommend more people make the jump to videogames, using my knowledge as a TRPG Producer, a long time DM (Dungeon Master) with experience in a multitude of systems, my experience reviewing games on here, and my growing knowledge as a Videogame Developer. Let’s roll for initiative and get going!

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Rolling with Disadvantage

There’s a lot of common pitfalls but I’ll just be covering what I consider to be the biggest. Specifically the fact that a TRPG and a videogame are different mediums, so they play differently. Thus, what might work well at the table won’t work as well on the screen and with a controller. This usually comes from adhering to the rules in the worst possible way, by looking at all of them as dogma and following the Rules As Written (RAW) as opposed to what makes a more enjoyable experience.

Of course, for those not in the know, why is this such a problem exactly? What’s wrong with using the normal rules. Put simply, it’s because TRPGs are designed around being able to ignore some of the rules. At my table I’ve ignored both weight limits and ammo management because they’re, quite frankly, annoying mechanics to have to deal with in a game that is supposed to be fun. Particularly weight limits. These are called House Rules (which I’m sure you’ve dealt with in your own travels with many other games from Monopoly to Uno) and I do it because my focus is on the smoothness of the experience, not on adhering to what the books say. This even applies to the games I’ve been a Producer on and the one I’m currently helping our main designer create (filling the role of a TRPG designer for the first time).

So let’s look at how Baldur’s Gate 3 (a game many consider to be the best ever adaptation of DnD) falls into this pitfall with how it deals with death saves. Death Saves are where, in the rules, you’ll go down and then roll a d20 each turn, if you succeed 3 times then you’re “stable” and unconscious so not at threat of dying. If you fail 3 times then you die. But here’s the thing, a fuck ton of tables don’t do it like that. Instead, we make things smoother so that players don’t feel like, after succeeding on death saves they’re just sitting there. Specifically, on 3 successes you are up and back in the fight with 1 hp. Now you have a chance to, for instance, make an attack on the enemy that turns the tide of the battle. It’s positive for the players and makes them feel like the death saves are more impactful, as opposed to just not dying. Succeeding can actually have a positive effect, it’s an awesome feeling. Well, in Baldur’s Gate 3 it runs things RAW (sort of but that’s another thing) and that leads to moments of frustration, like where you have 3 of your teammates down and they’re all doing death saves and you’re getting ganged up on. If they had a House Rules setting for specific commonly changed rules this would be gone but right now, it feels so defeating to not be able to make a big comeback. At that point, as has happened during my recent playthrough, you just reload.

So the biggest pitfall would be adhering to the rules too much, causing frustration and being more punishing to the players than is necessary. This would be the perfect time for the devs to say “fuck the rules as they were written, this sucks as a limitation and we should change it”. Of course, with Baldur’s Gate 3, I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a limitation there with Wizards insisting on adhering to the rules for a lot of things, but it just kinda sucks and is not at all fun to have to reload when you shouldn’t have to.

Staying on the topic of Baldur’s Gate 3, I also want to talk about something that it does that is also a pitfall which is choosing to not adhere to the rules to make a more difficult game. For instance, in DnD 5th edition RAW (I looked this up) rolling a 1 is only an automatic fail inside of combat or with death saves and doesn’t have any special consequence outside of those situations. You could theoretically need to get a 10 on a persuasion check to convince the monk that you, a half orc barbarian who is covered in blood and has the head of a goblin hanging from your belt, are supposed to be at the monastery and then roll a 1 but, since you have a bonus of 9 that you add to it, boom, you succeed. But in Baldur’s Gate 3? If you roll a 1 you will automatically fail, regardless of you being in or out of combat. You could have a bonus of 15 and have to get a 10 and then when you roll a 1 you fail. It. Fucking. Sucks. This is likely some kind of decision to make failure at all possible outside of combat when you can add so many bonuses to your roll, a way to balance it. But there’s a difference between balance for the smoothness of the game and balance to make it more difficult.

This is at the core of adapting a TRPG to a videogame format. You have to define which rules you will follow and which you won’t and then just take it from there. While, in a game like Divinity Original Sin 2, you play just as deep a game but it is far more sensical with how the rules work because it can define its own rules and not have to be compared to the rules of the base game that exist outside of the videogame.

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Nat 1s

Okay let’s look at a game that I think is, broadly, a failure of an adaptation of a TRPG system. It’s one that I’ve talked about before and, if you’ve read my criticisms of it then you might think I have a vendetta against it, but I don’t. Of course I am talking about Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2. These games have fantastic storytelling and a wonderful story filled with interesting characters and well written dialogue for the excellent voice actors to absolutely nail.

The combat though, is still pretty damn frustrating. Not because of camera angles or even the pause and play combat, it all has to do with the dice rolls. KOTOR is an adaptation of a d20 system, much like Baldur’s Gate is, and that means you’re dealing with the exact same RNG (technically means Random Number Generator but has been used to essentially describe how some things in game aren’t designed with purpose and instead are simply random chance, like whether you get a 14 on that d20 roll to hit) as those systems are known for. So you will often end up attacking someone and have the attack “connect” where you hear the sound of it hitting only for it to miss. And miss. And miss again. The way they adapted this system just sucked and doesn’t make sense when I can literally see the weapons connect, how could I possibly be missing?

But the thing is, the game wasn’t always the third person angle it is now. It originally started exactly like Bioware’s prior games at the time, isometric just like Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2. From that angle it makes sense to have the rolls happen and to miss sometimes because, well, it was the early 2000s and from an isometric angle you can’t make out enough to see the weapons actually connect. When the perspective changed the combat should have changed too...yet it didn’t. So because of that it became the absolute worst experience I have had playing an adaptation of a d20 system. Are there ways to make your attacks hit more often with armor and upgrades? Yeah, of course, but with this camera angle nothing will make it feel good to see the weapons connect, hear them connect, and then get a miss. While this wasn’t an exact adaptation of one of the Star Wars TRPGs, it was still an adaptation of the structure of the system with some differences.

Also, I still love those games, they’re something special and deserve to be played, but the combat is still just...shit. Take away the RNG nature of it and it’s great, my hope is the remake that is supposedly still in development modernizes the gameplay while keeping what made the game really memorable, the story and world and just general experience as opposed to the combat.

Nat 20s

Interestingly, I don’t personally think Baldur’s Gate 3 is the best adaptation of a TRPG system. I mean, it’s great of course, but I think this honor falls on another game that I’ve only written about once in my Finding Comfort in Non-cozy games (see here). The game takes the best parts of the system and drops the stuff that just doesn’t work in a videogame as opposed to at the table. Cyberpunk 2077 is the best adaptation of a TRPG system, just flat out.

The game I’m making has some Cyberpunk elements so I’ve been aware of a lot of the aspects of that system for a bit, but first, the core of TRPGs is about playing a character in a specific world. In the actual Cyberpunk game you roll a d10 instead of a d20 and have a lot of skills and things that 2077 absolutely drops. But they both have what is fundamental to the experience. Over corporatized tech augs in a world torn apart by militarized corps. In both you’re able to absolutely chrome yourself up and it’s awesome.

Not only that, you’re also able to pick the builds you have in both and use those builds to solve problems you come across. I, of course, realize this is just how RPGs work but that’s kinda my point. 2077 is aware of how the game works to a very minute level and is able to drop the things that don’t matter to make a better game, largely because the creator of the system was integral to the development of 2077. In the TRPG system you have to roll to see if you hit, like all TRPGs do. Imagine how horrible that would feel in a first person shooter. That’s the core part of my point in this article, game feel matters more than some nebulous rules that, at the end of the day, really don’t matter.

I mean, existing in Night City is a wonderful time in Cyberpunk 2077 and the ability for CD Projekt Red to have restraint, to let go of rules and adhere more to the world and feeling of playing the game was genuinely one of the best parts of the game. When I went and read up on Cyberpunk Red I knew what the world and game was meant to embody. The best adaptations don’t perfectly replicate the feeling of playing at a table, they replicate the feelings the game evokes when you play at the table. Cyberpunk 2077 does that perfectly.

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Recommendations

I think my biggest recommendation is to just not be too constrained by the pre-established rules and game. The job of a TRPG developer is to create a system and world for DMs to guide their table of players through. That DM is somewhat on the players side, they are a thinking and feeling person who can and will react differently depending on the situation and, sometimes, how their day has gone. Sometimes this is giving the players a break if they’ve rolled horribly all damn night to the point where they’re wanting to sage the house they are playing in and something it’s liking an idea the player has so much that you are willing to say fuck it and let them do it anyway because you think it will be cool and fun. The DM is a fundamental part of the TRPG experience and they can make the game go from unbearable to absolutely fucking fantastic.

But, a videogame isn’t like that. A videogame is cold and calculated and doesn’t care the type of day you have had or the type of friendship you have with it or the cool idea you might have (like if you plan to kill an authoritarian leader of a Druid camp who everyone seems to hate and instead of them being grateful for your overthrow of their leader, they decide to kill you because it’s a videogame and it won’t adjust to this cool idea). A videogame will punch you in the gut and cause you to die over and over just because that’s what was decided upon by the rules. Rules that the DM could bend.

It’s also important to think of the type of game feel you want to have before you decide what rules to drop. So with Baldur’s Gate 3 it makes sense to have the miss and hit system still intact because of the perspective but with KOTOR it doesn’t. You, as a developer, have to remember that what perspective your game is at will absolutely influence how the game feels to play and the type of rules that need to be dropped and what can still be included.

So yeah, my recommendation is to just be flexible, try not to feel too tied down by the rules already defined for the system. Remind yourself that what matters more isn’t about adapting the rules exactly and is about making a game that feels good and consistent to play. Also, maybe check with a bunch of different groups for whatever TRPG you are adapting to see what rules are more often dropped or gotten rid of with House Rules, and then if they are gotten rid of incredibly often, maybe add a setting for House Rules. Because seriously, TRPGs are designed to still feel good even if you drop a couple rules, so let that be the same for the game you’re developing, don’t just leave it up to the modders to release days after the game comes out.

The Conclusion

Honestly, I adore playing TRPGs. I’ve been a DM for 3 and a half years now, we’ve gone through multiple systems and played a multitude of different adventures and during that time I’ve seen how players react to these different rules that I’ve talked about here. I’ve seen them love some of them and hate others. When I work with my team at Just Roommates Games I use those experiences to inform my opinions on the games we develop and try to let the main designer know that I, as a DM who has issues with some of the smaller rules they have created, will run a game without those rules and we should make sure the game still works well that way too (obviously this can only really be done with the smaller rules, if we dropped larger stuff then that’s more influential on the game feel and how it all fits together but I’m not here to talk about the intricacies of designing TRPGs and how some rules are more impactful than others).

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I think if more Videogame developers were willing to piss off the fanbase of different TRPGs that might also help as making a lot of the changes I am suggesting will undoubtedly bother a lot of people. Even me talking about bending the rules or fudging some rolls at my table will ruffle some feathers. But a videogame is a different type of experience from a TRPG. They have different strengths and weaknesses. We shouldn’t try to pretend they’re the same, we should be willing to make changes between them so they play more fluidly. Game developers who are adapting these systems should aim to make a game that lets you feel like you’re playing your character at the table, not like you’re playing yourself playing your character at the table.

Meow,

Cat

This is not a review. Sea of Thieves is a live service game, one that I wasn’t initially into because of my Thalassaphobia. And a core part of my review process is that I have to be able to complete the game, I will never review a game that I have not finished. I initially played this because my TTRPG team was working on a pirate game but that was moved to the back burner for us to concentrate on our Space Opera TTRPG with Cyberpunk and Mass Effect like elements (oh hey this is the first time this has ever even been talked about before, congrats you got behind the scenes stuff before our game is even officially announced).

Now, with all that I’ve experienced in the game, I have many thoughts, some positive, some very negative. It is important to say that I only had one other person to play this with, the main dev of the team I’m a part of, so there are some issues I had that I likely wouldn’t have had if I had more people to play with. With that said, I’ve played a lot of the game now, played multiple “stories” and stuff so I think I can talk about it rather effectively. I will be structuring this differently than my reviews and this will not end with a score, this is purely my impressions and thoughts. So let’s get going.

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The Drowning

I talked about this in my Why I Quit Playing Destiny 2 article a while ago, but I’ll restate it here. I’m not a big fan of live service games and my only real experience with them has been Destiny 2 (although I’ve been enjoying Helldivers 2 a lot recently so that’s also in there). Part of the reason I have issues with Live Service games is that the on-boarding is fucking rough for almost all of them if you haven’t been there since the beginning. In Destiny 2, it is overwhelming and it has lead to you having to buy expansion after expansion and dungeons and seasons in order to even be close to people who have been there for years. Well, here in Sea of Thieves I experienced a similar feeling that here I will be referencing as Drowning...because Pirates.

The Drowning experience includes a short Tutorial that is pretty decent, and then being let loose in the giant world of Sea of Thieves. It loads you into a main Island that has everything you need to get going. It’s got all the factions, bounty boards, merchants, and quest givers. When you first load in though you don’t really get a whole lot of Direction. In Destiny 2, it’ll tell you places to start, but in Sea of Thieves, you just kinda have to wander around to figure out some stuff to do. Which is fine, to a point, but it also doesn’t really introduce you to the factions that exist. So what ended up happening to me is that I had to look up the symbols for the factions over and over again because I kept forgetting which is which. If there had been a proper tutorial in this experience, I would have had an easier time. I ended up just wandering around the entire fucking Island with my first bit of treasure trying to figure out where the faction is that I’m supposed to sell my treasure to.

Which brings me to a large annoyance I have with the game, there’s no Fucking map. Sure, there’s one for the world and usually for the Islands you are going to in order to find treasure, but once you’ve docked at a Port, good fucking luck trying to find where you need to go. I was wandering around trying to find the (soul faction) in my first port, trying to follow the sign post directions, but I just couldn’t find them. The other person I was playing with ended up finding them for me because I was so damn lost. This is not a good experience. Just give me a map. It wouldn’t be that hard. Every time you unlock a new port, just give a map to the player so you can look up where you need to go immediately as opposed to wandering for minutes. Destiny 2 does this wonderfully because you can just open the map, see where the vendors are, and even where you are so you know how to get to them.

This then brings me to my other issue with Drowning, Menus (which you can see above). Now, Destiny 2 has a massive amount of menus you have to deal with, and Sea of Thieves has just as many, except here, many of those menus are missing obvious pages, like quests. See, I have to hold my left bumper button for the radial wheel menu to pop up where I can press another button to pull out the quest book or other quest items, and sometimes as you’re still getting used to things you will accidentally store your quest and lose the very important item you needed to know what to do (you can of course get it back but if you didn’t realize you stored it, well, it feels like you lost it). Then in the normal menu where, in Destiny, you’d be able to see all your quests and items and bounties and such, here it is basically useless unless you want to quit the game or go through the battle pass or select one of your normal inventory items. It feels like Rare wants you to have to “realistically” pull out your quest items and all that because it’s, of course, “realistic”. Yet, this just leads to confusion when it would make much more sense to have your quests in the normal menu and whenever you select an item, you then leave the menu and pull out the item.

I have already talked about how I have frustrations with “Realism” in games nowadays back in December 2024 in my Indiana Jones and the Great Circle review (which is here) but let me restate some things here if you don’t want to go read that first. Realism gets in the way of having fun. Let’s take the menu system I described above, how does it being realistic make it more fun for a newcomer to get used to the nonsensical controls? How is it not easier to just pull up the menu when you press select and have your quest inventory there? Why is there not a quest inventory section when there is a regular inventory section in the normal menu? How is it not just keeping you from being able to easily interact with your quests? Aren’t quests the whole point of this game? Why can I even store my quest items when you could just have a bigger quest section in the actual menu? Am I just completely missing where the quests are?

Basically, I think realism should only be considered up to the point of whether or not it inhibits you from being able to play the game faster or more fluidly. It simply adds barriers in a game like this to have newcomers get used to the controls. While I did get a bit more used to the controls eventually, it took so long when things could have been much faster with a menu system that makes sense and doesn’t only serve the battle pass. I do understand that you can pull out the quest items while running in the current set up of the controls, but I don’t think that matters since it would take such a small amount of time with opening the menu and selecting the object. I’ll eventually write something rather in depth about my hatred of realism but that’s obviously for another Wednesday.

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Tall Tales

One of the things about Sea of Thieves that makes it enjoyable isn’t even the core gameplay of the game. Over the last several years, Rare has been releasing story DLC for free. I started with the Monkey Island story not because I know anything about that set of games, I don’t, but because it interests me. Plus it was the first one they made so I was interested in seeing how it was structured. Immediately, upon getting to Melee Island, the game showed me that this, these Pirate stories, are what I needed to experience. What I was there for to begin with.

It’s not inherently the storyline that is interesting here, although that is a part of it. It’s the atmosphere. You load into Melee Island where Ghost pirates have taken over the town and you have to figure out how to make it to the Mayor’s House. The characters in this single area had more depth than anything in the normal game I had yet to experience. You have the Pirate Lords chilling in the pub, the skulls on the mantle in said pub, some dudes hanging out in the street and making fun of you, the ghost Pirates blocking some areas, and the lookout who is way too old to be the lookout. The game comes alive not because of the gameplay on a ship, but because of the gameplay of being a Pirate in an actual story, an adventure. Think about it like this, would Pirates of the Caribbean be fun if all they did was sail around and dig up random treasure from random people? No, adventures are what make being a Pirate so thrilling. Sea of Thieves, in their story content, accomplish this wonderfully.

That said, there are moments where I wish there was more communication. For instance, in the first mission of the Pirate’s of the Caribbean story, A Pirate’s Life, you “stow away” on the Ferryman’s ship. My partner and I expected it to take us somewhere so we sat waiting expecting the ship to get somewhere. As far as we knew the game didn’t tell us what to do. I looked it up and you’re supposed to take out your lantern, light a big brazier that is already on fire, and go below deck to find Captain Jack Sparrow. This is interesting but I do wish that the game had given me some kind of direction here. I don’t like just sitting and waiting, thinking it will lead us somewhere. I don’t remember whether it told me there was a prisoner we had to “save” but if it did, I missed it. This might have been my fault, but if the game had added a page to the Quest book then I could have known what I was looking for, instead we waited 10 minutes. It sucked. The atmosphere in the mission was top notch, so the failures of communication was that much more frustrating.

My Kingdom For A Ship

A core fantasy of Pirating is sailing on the High Seas. Sea of Thieves, mostly, does this very well. You’re able to play with 3 types of ships and can either, load in with a generic one of those ships every game session, or buy your own for sooo much gold. I only had one other player so we used a Sloop which was the perfect size. It was also more maneuverable. You turned faster, had one sail which made stopping faster, and it was easier for the helm to see the map since you can look down off the back of the helm and see the map right below. It’s a great little ship that I enjoyed riding around in.

There are moments, however, where you are forced to drive a larger ship, these are in Tall Tales. I can tell you’re wondering, why have this as a separate section from the Tall Tales if it has to do with them directly? Because I wanted to, and because this is where the “mostly” comes into play for the sailing fantasy of being a Pirate. See, the bigger the ship, the harder to do...well...anything. It takes 2 or 3 sails to slow down, it takes forever to turn, and you can’t easily see the map from the Helm. I already knew this because of accidentally selecting a larger ship once but I figured that that would be the only time I’d have to captain one of those ships. Unfortunately, it was not. In the last mission of the Monkey Island Tall Tales, you are forced to pirate a Ghost ship down an annoying but not difficult cave of magma. Then you come to an open area that has rocks you have to avoid while fighting the final Boss’, LeChuck, ship. Here is where the awful controls became the bane of my existence for the entirety of the fight. Sailing the ship was already a bitch, but having to avoid rocks and get up next to the ship in order to be able to shoot it with canons was the worst experience I had in the entire game. Add on to this that the cannons I was trying to aim had a very small horizontal swivel so I could only shoot 2 cannon balls before getting out of range in some way. Then, when I tried to use the ones on front, I was told I was unable to use it. For some reason. Now, when I was sailing the ship, my partner was able to use those cannons, which was annoying and odd. The outcome of this fight was nothing but frustration and nothing but hatred for large ships and a hope that I would never ever, ever have to deal with one ever again.

Besides that massive issue I had, the sailing is still rather good in the game. I think my main criticism is just that I wish I could go third person to make steering easier. Assassin’s Creed games have amazing sailing, allowing me to captain my ship easily and without frustration since I can see the entire thing. In Sea of Thieves, you are never able to do that which lead to me being the navigator and my partner being the one at the helm. This is probably the point, as it has this odor of realism attached to it that just makes for annoyance. As long as you have multiple people and a small and agile ship, however, the sailing isn’t a big problem.

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Treasure Remains

I have obviously kinda shat on the game so far during this not-review. That’s largely because of my disliking of realism. Yet, I found myself sitting through that disdain for realism and playing more with my partner (until they accidentally wiped their windows partition and since it doesn’t seem to work on Linux I haven’t played in a while). I found enjoyment of sailing around and finding treasure on different random islands. I loved, despite my fear of the ocean, diving down to get treasure in those Siren Shrines that allowed me to get a ton of treasure and do some small puzzles. I enjoyed unlocking new customization gear for my pirate, getting a new peg-leg was always a joy. I enjoyed loading the ship up with treasure so that when you went below you saw chest after chest just sitting there waiting for my partner or me to pick up and take to the appropriate vendor. The combat felt rather fun as well.

That’s kinda the thing that bothers me most about Sea of Thieves. I actually had fun. Mainly in the Tall Tales of course, but even in the normal standard gameplay I had a decent time. I just think it could have been even better is all. I don’t mean to disparage the game too much, it is really enjoyable once you’ve adapted to the menus and systems. It just takes time, like almost all Live Service games.

The Conclusion

Sea of Thieves is a game that feels most worthwhile when you’re playing the story content with friends but once that’s done it still retains some fun but is significantly less interesting. Sailing feels unsatisfying in anything bigger than the smallest ship (but is decent in that smallest ship), having to buy a boat to be able to customize is awful when it’s both super expensive and takes forever to grind your way there (hmmm, I wonder if Micro-Transactions are here to “fix” that forever grind???). The annoying dedication to realism holds the game back when it feels like it just doesn’t want to admit to itself that it is, in fact, a game. The UI is confusing to get used to and even when you are finally used to it there is still frustration with the general design of it. Plus it’s still a Live Service game with Seasons and battle passes and shit.

Overall, I just think that the non-story parts of the game are, while fun, just more boring because when you’re in the Tall Tales, playing through the story and gameplay moments that are designed with actually fun context in mind, almost everything falls into place and it feels great. If Rare would lower their realism when it comes to the menus, which is realistically an impossibility with how long the game has been out, the game would be so much better. Give me a third person camera for sailing and better menus and this game would be the quintessential pirate game. But hey, if you can deal with those things and have friends to play with, grab it on a sale and play those Tall Tales first to have a ton of fun and get into it quick.

Meow,

Cat

It’s the last day of the year and, as I’m a games blogger, I figured I would do what literally everyone else does, a games list about my 10 favorite games I’ve played this year. Here are the 3 rules (last year’s list had more, one rule didn’t return because it was only relevant for the first year and another rule was removed because of refinement).

Rule 1: This is not a numbered list, and it is not limited to games released this year.

Rule 2: These games are all new to me (or games I only played for a couple hours or so prior to the full experience I played this year).

Rule 3: These have to be whole games, I’m not gonna include any DLC even if I enjoyed it.

Now that I’ve established the rules, here’s my list.

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Avowed

I adored Avowed so damn much. It eliminated a lot of the fluff that isn’t necessary for open world-ish fantasy games, made the best first person fantasy combat I have ever experienced, and had a fantastic Pillars of Eternity story attached. I loved wandering around the Living Lands with its amazing hub design and the tremendous density of things to find. Obsidian had managed to cram so much into the game that it felt like there was something going on around every single corner. It is genuinely my favorite game of this genre and it likely will be until Avowed 2 comes out years from now. Truly amazing.

Nine Sols

This year was when I finally got into Metroidvanias and when I learned of, and then played, Nine Sols I fell in love. Not only was the game filled with fantastic metroidvania mechanics, wonderful bosses, amazing world design, and intriguing philosophical underpinnings, but it also had the best Metroidvania main character I’ve ever seen. Yi has so much personality that elevates Nine Sols from being great to being something special. Add in the accessibility difficulty settings so that anyone can play the game at the friction level they’re comfortable at and you’ve got a game that had to be one of my favorites of the year.

Lies of P

The only Souls-like I have ever been able to fully enjoy all because of the genius move to introduce difficulty settings with the recent DLC. Lies of P had this air about it that still makes me think about it even months later. I think about the atmosphere of Krat and how uneasy I felt wandering the streets, about the depressing story behind the puppets and how they might be more human than they’re given credit for, about the fantastic combat that (despite having issues) was tons of fun. I had so few issues with it and I’m so glad I found out about the difficulty settings because Lies of P was an unforgettable experience and I adored it.

Sword of the Sea

The best parts of Sword of the Sea were the beautiful environments and the kickass hover-boarding. It felt great to surf around on the waves of sand and then water. To go fly around with fish and other water inhabitants of varying sizes all with the aesthetic of a Journey type game. Learning about what brought the world to the state it was in, seeing the final moments of the story, feeling the emotional swell of the world as it continued to heal, it was all amazing and I loved every second of its very short playtime. Plus, I could ride on a giant turtle and manta ray, how could I not love it here!

Clair Obscur: Expedition 33

In film school, I constantly fell asleep (and I wasn’t alone in this) during the French films we were shown in class. They might have had interesting concepts and ideas and some great filmmaking, but they were just so...boring. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 took all of that interesting stuff from my film class that were the only good parts of the movies and put it into a game that had so much personality and interesting themes that I couldn’t put it down. The only issues I had with it were that I was frustrated with how hard some of the optional bosses were. But besides that, the game made me not just enjoy the filmmaking ideas of French cinema, it made me desperately want to see more. It made me think that those moments of learning about French cinema in film school wasn’t a waste and, in actuality, helped me appreciate the game even more. It’s an amazing experience and one that I will look back on fondly for years to come.

Psychonauts 2

Psychonauts 2 took what was a great concept in the original game and made it into an actually fun game to play! It introduced more types of trauma for Raz and co to deal with, delved into the history of the world and of Raz’s family, and did it all in a story that kept me guessing and made me enjoy every second. Not only was it what Psychonauts 1 was striving to be, but failed, it is what all sequels are supposed to be. A categorical and massive improvement over the first in every possible way. I will not soon forget learning about Raz and I hope to see more from him in the future.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Not many games can make me replay 20 hours after I haphazardly wiped a save without making sure it was uploaded to my Steam Cloud Saves. But The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy did that and made me keep pushing so I could get what I believe was one of the most satisfying endings for this kind of game I have ever experienced. One of, as in this very game also happens to have other just as satisfying endings that are also completely different. All of which you are able to experience, if you are persistent enough, and have to unlock certain endings as well. I don’t want to spoil what I’m talking about but The Hundred Line took what made Danganronpa great, turned it up to 11 and then on its head. It’s just amazing and felt perfect for me because I love games that take wild turns and have bizarre characters with truly story changing decisions. This is such a special game made by some really passionate and weird devs (who did a live stream announcing the disbandment of the studio only for them to reform at the end of the stream) and I adored it so much.

Gori: Cuddly Carnage

The idea of playing an adorable kitty who likes to chill out with a sentient and cursing hoverboard that happens to have a bunch of blades on it is such a fantastic concept for a main character. Gori: Cuddly Carnage took that and ran with it making it into a great game filled with interesting and gory combat, fun story moments, and hilarious writing that had me laughing my ass off a whole lot of my time playing. I can’t wait to see more from Gori. Or at least I hope to see more from him because, at the end of the day, my biggest issue with the game was all about it being so short. I NEED MORE GORI!

No Man’s Sky

I’ve been playing No Man’s Sky with my friends a lot recently, we’ve been looking for a relaxing game that was fun to play with multiple players and this was perfect. I was skeptical at first, but now in the past two months I’ve poured in more than 100 hours and there’s still so much for me to do. From doing multiple Expeditions to building out my freighter base, to building an actual base, to doing the story, to building a Corvette, there’s so much to do and this is ignoring some of the other things in the game that my friends have been focusing on more. The game is so great because it’s so weird, it’s so varied, and just because it’s fun to fuck around with your friends while flying in space. The best multiplayer experience I’ve had this year is No Man’s Sky (despite much of the multiplayer aspects being sub par), and I can’t express enough how I am glad I gave it another shot after not playing it for more than 6 years.

Indika

The best part about Indika to me was how much it hit home. How much it mirrored my own, and many others, experience with organized religion. The experience was philosophical, it was deep, and it provoked real issues with religion in general. It’s a fascinating piece of philosophical religious theory as a game and despite some of its issues (fuck the slow walking), I adored my short short time with it. It helped me process my religious trauma and gave me a lot to talk about with friends of mine who have similar issues. I was introduced to it from a Steph Sterling video and I’m so glad I took the plunge and played it. If you relate to any of what I’ve said about it then I’d highly recommend playing it.

Bonus: Peak

Peak is a hard game. Not only does it often feel impossible for you to be able to climb up that cliff, it also feels like the days randomly generated biome layout is designed to fuck with the player. It also has lead to some of the most frustrating but fun moments I had this year. Playing it with my partner and our friend was truly something special and it took me a long time to really get it. I still have issues with the game of course, particularly when you slow down near the end of your stamina, but there’s nothing this year that replicated that feeling during the most recent Roots biome update where my partner died, I ran over to try and revive them, only for me to think they had been automatically revived by something. Except, they hadn’t. In fact they were an ever pursuing Zombie thats whole goal was to fuck up our run. And it did. Quite badly. But that experience was incredibly memorable and because of that it is a Bonus choice that I had to mention. Not as amazing an experience as the other games, but still one filled with great fun as long as you play with friends. Seriously, don’t play solo. It will not be as fun. Play with as many friends as you can (it has a limit of 4 player), the more playing will make it much, much easier.

The Conclusion

Well, that’s the year, and my first full 365 day calendar year of writing on here. Tomorrow starts a whole new experience and I just can’t wait to see it. What games will come out, will Half Life X (or 3 or whatever it ends up being called) come out alongside the Steam Machine, Controller, and Frame? Will there be any surprises like Clair Obscur? Will there be any more old games that I play and absolutely hate or just hate how old and outdated they are like Resident Evil was this year? Will I have so many games that I have issues with that I will finally make a “The Worst Games I Played This Year”? Will the entire industry come crashing down as the AI bubble bursts and layoffs sweep all large companies? And most importantly, can I finish my game and put it out for the world, and all my peers on here, to see and heavily criticize?

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I guess all of those will have to wait because no one can possible know the answers to them. All we can do is wait and see. But hey, let’s do that together. Happy New Year and I hope you have a great 2026!

Meow,

Cat

I played The Outer Worlds earlier this year and enjoyed it enough (review here). I had some issues with it feeling a little light in the interesting story department and with how finicky the game was as a whole. I had also played Avowed earlier this year (review here) and I adored that and loved so many of the QoL features and the simplicity of a lot of the world while still having some complexity in the parts that I actually cared about.

Because of Avowed I was rather excited for Outer Worlds 2, hoping that the same things I loved about the former would appear in the latter. But did it? Did the game show that Obsidian is capable of not just producing kickass more refined and smaller RPGs, or is Outer Worlds 2 simply the poster child for how companies with 2 teams really shouldn’t release 2 games of the same genre within 8 months of each other? I have a lot to say on the topic, both positive and negative, so let’s dive in.

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The Premise

You are an agent of the socialist government known as the Earth Directorate that is known for liberating different solar systems across the galaxy and now you’re on a mission to the system of Arcadia. There you are working with an Ancient who has already infiltrated the local government and science facilities and you’re there to help her with a mission. When that mission goes very wrong, and it takes an unexpected direction that ends with the destruction of the entire space station, you get launched out in an escape pod. There you end up in cryo sleep for almost 10 years. Once you wake up, the system has changed, corporate mergers have taken place, and massive rifts have emerged around the system threatening to destroy not just Arcadia but the entire universe. With you being awake, it’s time to find the agent who infiltrated the facility that exploded all those years ago and maybe find out why the mission went so wrong and even why the rifts exist in the first place. And possibly influence the ideology of those around you.

The Good

The gameplay is genuinely the best done in sci-fi version of this genre, it feels so good to go around shooting enemies with all of the different types of guns. It does take some time to really find the best feeling weapons in the game but even in the prologue you get a great little pistol that feels fantastic to run around and shoot. It’s smooth, the reloads are quick and have great animations, and just overall it’s a great feeling game. Obsidian has done something amazing this year where they took a genre where both the sci-fi and fantasy versions had underwhelming gameplay and made them both have fantastic gameplay. I mean the gameplay in the most well known games of this genre (the Elder Scrolls Games, Fallout and Starfield) have gameplay that is only fixed when you introduce mods, while Obsidian managed to make the base experience something that feels good and is, at its core, incredibly fun. Even if both Avowed and The Outer Worlds 2 have issues overall, the fact they accomplished this is truly something special.

Okay, the companions in this game had a lot to live up to and personally, i think they delivered. I was far more interested in all of them than in the first game where it was really only 2 or 3 I was interested in. I did all of the personal quests here and it felt fantastic to both learn more about the characters and to disillusion them with their respective faction, moving them towards the Socialist Earth Directorate that, despite it’s issues, was still the better option. Particularly, Inez, a former contractor for the corporation Auntie’s Choice who was experimented on by getting a graft of a creature on her that unfortunately failed, was so so so pro-Auntie’s Choice and pro-ultra capitalism at the beginning. But then, after the developments of her story and my poking and prodding, I was able to move her away from that. I was able to pull her away from being an Auntie sycophant to her finally understanding that the corporation she dedicated her life to is kinda fucking awful and has lead to so much suffering. Of course it isn’t just her you’re able to do this with, being an ideological influence on your comrades is such an interesting experience and one that I cherish as I’ve done some similar things in real life but none have been as easy as it is in Outer Worlds 2 (since one is a videogame and the other is real life).

The general quest design and writing is also rather well put together. While there are plenty of moments of choices that are interesting and sometimes morally ambiguous, I think many of the best moments in the game come from smaller, more human character moments. They come from the characters reacting to something you said, to an implication, to your annoyance, or even to your intelligence (or lack there of). Those moments make a lot of the writing to me because it makes it feel more real. If my character said something really dumb, sure you can just ignore it and move on. Other times you can move on after unnervingly acknowledging it happened and that it was kinda awkward. Of course these moments are often centered around the very ideologies the characters each represent. Auntie’s Choice characters will react far differently to your snide anti-capitalist comments than The Order will. These seem pretty obvious that they’d be like that but I think what really sells it isn’t that it happens but the outlandishness of it all.

For instance, there’s one quest on Auntie’s Choice ship where you help a former Spacers Choice employee get back at the assholes of the new mergered Auntie’s Choice. You sneak into a PA room and put a tape in for it to be played ship wide. It rips into Auntie and how terrible the company is, but it blatantly does so outlandishly and without regard for how Spacer’s Choice was pretty fucking dog shit as well. While I would have liked for me to be able to do something more with this, like challenge the former employee’s ideology, I think it wasn’t necessarily needed. It was more of just a wish.

Back in November I reviewed Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines 2 (review here) and I kinda hated how so many quests boiled down to running back and forth across the map. Obviously, Outer Worlds 2 did this much better, but it is just so apparent how much better they did it when you’ve played a game that felt so bland besides the fact that running around was really fun. So again, I loved the quest design in Outer Worlds 2 not just because of how great it is in general but also because of how great it is in comparison to many other games I’ve experienced recently. Even the original Outer Worlds had me bored during many of the quests because the writing felt more one dimensional with how everything had to be a joke and critique on capitalism and capitalism alone. Instead, here in the sequel, we see not just a base line dissection of Capitalism with a post-merger mega corporation that bought up a main competitor (gee I wonder who that makes you think the situation is based on, certainly not Obsidian’s Parent company) but also critiques on the issues with blind fascist monarchy and belief in a higher power to the point of destruction for the people around you. Or, one could say, a critique on Fascist Monarchy and religious driven Monarchy. And, make no mistake, despite The Order being so fixated on “the plan” and science and math and shit, they are fundamentally a critique on those who believe in religion blindly and, instead of seeing something that contradicts their understanding of their beliefs as something that should make them question their blind faith, they bend over backwards to provide some kind of reason to the thing their beliefs didn’t predict.

Actually, speaking of, one of my favorite parts of the game comes on your second planet and it’s a fight with a guy who is trying to coup up The Order. He claims he, through his tremendous skill in math and science, has predicted everything. That he knew how you would act/react and therefore it showed how he must be the best and the one who is meant to lead The Order to greater heights than ever before. But then, at least for me, you don’t fall into his predictions. Instead you are incomprehensible and there is no rationale for you. This moment happens when you are chasing after him and are then given a choice, either save some hostages from being crushed or continue chasing after the guy. I chose to spend the time to get the key to save the hostages. But then I specifically pulled the lever to crush them. Because I was curious if it would let me. When I told this to the guy he begins to talk about how he knew I would save the hostages but pauses mid sentence and says “wait, you did what?”. To which I reiterated what I did and he just angrily expounds on how I am nothing but a ball of uncertainty and how fucking annoying that is.

That’s something amazing, that you as a character are actually breaking the idea of the plan even being a thing. Even if you aren’t ever actually able to convince people to stop believing in the idea of there being some known plan that must always be coming to fruition. The best thing about our world is the chaos that exists in it that allows us to choose who we want to be as people, but that’s far more philosophical than I’m interested in getting into.

Finally, I of course loved the Flaws System even if I didn’t choose to take most of them, the very idea of having your actions in the game be taken into account to determine what kind of flaws you get offered is a novel idea that Outer Worlds 2 really excelled at, far more than the original. Above are some of the flaws I was offered during my playthrough, some funnier than others. I didn’t take all of them but I could feel the game judging me every time I had one offered.

Ya know what's not a Flaw? Subscribing!

The Bad

Since I’ve covered the positives of the hub world design, let’s cover the flaws. One of my biggest issues is that I feel like the hub worlds are just too damn big. I know people like worlds that feel expansive but, to be honest, I felt drained with having to run everywhere in such large hubs. Eventually, because of that, I was just fast traveling everywhere because it was easier and less draining. To me this is frustrating because, in Avowed, the hub worlds felt like the perfect size. There, I was able to run around and always feel like I could find something new, something interesting. While in Outer Worlds 2 I simply feel bored. As if the only thing I could find is either emptiness or clusters of enemies with little purpose to be there. It felt like, because of Outer Worlds 2 coming out a mere 8 months after Avowed, they were unable to learn literally any lessons from it. They didn’t learn that one of the best parts of that game was feeling like the world wasn’t empty, like it had things that were important or useful everywhere. The Outer Worlds 2 failing at this core aspect made me really miss Avowed and feel like what made it so great was that that team was up against the wall having to develop the game with, likely, less budget than Outer Worlds 2, and less time in full development given the reboot in early 2021. I think Obsidian does their best work like that and it’s why I enjoyed this part of Avowed so much more than Outer Worlds 2.

The size of the hub worlds also just make it a pain to run around in. Again, in Avowed the world’s didn’t feel too large, there was never a moment where I picked my quest marker on the map, went out of menu, and then felt like it was so far away. While that was constant in Outer Worlds 2. It came to the point where every time early in a new location where my quest marker was over 900 meters away I just rolled my fucking eyes and started the trek. Sometimes, I did manage to find some interesting things but most of the time the only thing standing in my way of getting there were mountains (oh so many mountains) or some enemies. This sucked and was another reason I ended up fast traveling everywhere, something I only did very late in my time in an area in Avowed.

Also speaking more about Avowed, in Avowed they had this perfect QoL feature where you didn’t have to be looking exactly at something to be able to interact with it. You could be looking just pretty close to it. Like here for instance.

Notice how far away I am looking from the bush? Well here in Outer Worlds 2, let’s see how close you have to be.

See? It has to be almost exact. This makes for a lot of tiny tiny movements when you’re trying to pick up a lot of things right next to each other while in Avowed you could just tap the interact button multiple times to pick up things close to each other. I genuinely don’t understand why the Outer Worlds team would not make that small QoL feature a thing in this game. One of the worst parts of the first game for me (which I mentioned in my review) was that annoying exactness that Obsidian just didn’t change and that fucking sucked considering Avowed did it perfectly.

Something I got really tired of in the game is that I didn’t really have a ton of ability to push Arcadia towards the Earth Directorate. It was more just dealing with the ideologies there as opposed to spreading my own throughout the system. There definitely were some times but most of those were off hand comments. Like the time where I told a fascist something to the effect of “the only thing I hate more than capitalistic shills are authoritarian bootlickers like you.” There’s influence of the socialist origin of your character but, at least for me, there weren’t truly socialist decisions to make. Which I thought was sad since it seemed like the game wanted to critique capitalism, monarchism, fascism, and even a little bit of socialism, but then for the last one refused to dive super in depth on it. Even the Protectorate, the fascist faction that rules much of the system of Arcadia, gets a ton of detail about the goings on of their internal world and their history, even if we don’t get a ton of their motivation. I think part of this is that we, specifically the main character and Niles, are literally the only socialists from the Earth Directorate in the entire system. I basically just wish I had been able to find another solution to a lot of my choices that weren’t just capitalism or monarchism.

The closest I got to have a more socialist influence on an entire quest line was one side quest where i was tasked with breaking a strike of Auntie’s Choice employees. The Auntie’s Choice characters didn’t even know what a strike was (they thought the employees were literally attacking people), I was given the task by this horrible manager of, essentially, “negotiating” between the workers and the manager of the plant. But once I saw how the manager of the plant didn’t even seem to regard the workers as humans, viewed them as merely a stepping stone for ascent of the corporate ladder, I called her a monster and she basically said “okay? Now go get the workers back on shift, break some bones if you have to” (telling me to Pinkerton the place up). So I did break some bones. Hers. I shot her and the workers immediately went back to work and thanked me for changing the management and such. Now I don’t know if they managed to get a better person in charge, I kinda doubt, but that little amount of resistance felt pretty good and the workers were obviously very grateful. I wanted more of this, instead, this kind of situation was unique.

Now, this one is more complicated as there was a patch halfway through my playthrough that impacted it. Essentially, there are so many skill checks in this game and, at least for the first half of my time with it, they were just too damn high. Even after they were lowered the amount needed, it frustrated me that I felt like I had the game discouraging me to spec into more than 2-3 skills. Part of this was because you didn’t get as many skill points as I think you should have per level up but also just because you can’t re-spec. If you were allowed to do that whenever you wanted that would change this entire experience from a negative to a positive. It’s very possible this will be changed either through patches or through DLC. But right now? The game needed the ability to re-spec.

The Ending - Detailed

As with all of these types of games, there’s variations with endings and with the impact of prior choices you made in the game. This is purely my experience with the ending and yours will vary slightly, although, obviously, some core parts will remain the same. Anyway. This is how my Outer Worlds 2 playthrough ended.

**Start Spoilers**

After unlocking the archive and letting it process your rift data and getting the Order and Auntie’s Choice to work together, Horizon Point reappeared! Yay? That’s the center of the rift problems and as the Protectorate swoop in to control the area so they can research the rift to harness it for authoritarian purposes, you and your allies go there as well to fight back (doing the great circular narrative here of ending where it all began, but, this time, the environment has changed). Except it’s been morphed by the rift, torn apart and is filled with past dead enemies who have been reconstituted by the Rift, all of whom have lost their very sense of self and see everyone as a threat.

After a bunch of firefights, finding De Vreis and one of the original crew mates from the prologue that died in the fire talking together until she goes crazy and attacks all of you, getting resources from both The Order and Auntie’s Choice, you find a ship to fly up to the Protectorate Ship. There you do more firefights, but this time Auntie is there with her fancy new robot body, and you explore the ship. You discover that the rifts are impossible to stabilize and will tear everything apart, and eventually you confront the Consol.

He’s just as crazy as you’d expect a fascist leader to be, especially one who has essentially done a coup against the prior fascist leader, and he is convinced that the rifts will allow him to rebirth Arcadia into a system firmly under the Protectorates vision, instead of just tearing it apart and ruining everything.

Thankfully I was able to talk him down (much like the ending I got of Avowed), and he...decided to fly the ship into the rift causing them to close because of the absolutely massive rift modulator on it that is, afterall, designed to close the rifts. Interestingly for me, Ava wanted to go with him. I didn’t let her but she was definitely upset. She believed in her cult even after finding out it was all a lie...much like a lot of cultists do in real life so that’s a pretty accurate representation.

Then, there’s a slide show about what happens with all of the choices you made and characters you met in the game. Afterwards, credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I honestly rather enjoyed most of the ending but there was still one thing that really bugged me, I wanted more of an influence with the Earth Directorate and, frankly, another choice for how things would play out. Besides that though, it was pretty great. It felt satisfying, I felt like my past decisions had a small amount of weight, and overall appreciated that I could still not end with a boss fight. That said, I think compared to the first game this ending felt more satisfying to me. There had been more build up and I felt more attached to the characters and choices. Plus in the first one I really didn’t feel like any of my choices mattered at the end of the games section, but this one? This one felt much more influential. Maybe not as influential as it could have been but there’s only so much you can do there without expanding the work out exponentially.

Buy me Coffee for the Earth Directorate?

Also, I always appreciate a good slideshow and Obsidian showed me with Avowed that it can feel really satisfying to have the specifics. Especially seeing what happens with my companions after having done all of their quests. It was great.

The Conclusion

Honestly, I really did enjoy The Outer Worlds 2. But given a lot of my issues with the game and how, very similar to the first game, (I was comparing it to Avowed instead) I don’t think it left as big a mark as I was hoping. I loved the critique on different ideologies and showing that no matter the ideology there is a lot of nuance in the world and we should acknowledge that there is no perfect system when run by imperfect people. I loved the gameplay. I loved the writing. But there were still things that held it back and, when added up, mean I didn’t have as much of a good time as I expected to after my love of Avowed. As I alluded to in my intro, Obsidian releasing two games of the same genre within 8 months of each other fundamentally just lead to the Outer Worlds 2 team not being able to learn basically anything from the Avowed team. Sure it’s great, but it could have been amazing.

So yeah, I’d say if you really liked the first game you are likely to thoroughly enjoy the sequel too. That said, there are 2 DLCs in the works and it’s also still 70 bucks (except right now on Steam where it is on sale!) so it’s not a horrible idea to either wait for a sale or the inevitable complete edition. Just keep in mind that if you’re looking for something that feels as dense as Avowed or has as great of a hub world design, you are likely to be disappointed. Keep your expectations in check and you’ll have a great time!

Meow,

Cat

Back when Deaths Door came out, I attempted to play it on Game Pass. Or at least, when it came to Game Pass, I attempted to play it. I just did not enjoy it. But with my recent stint of playing a bunch of games that are both out of my comfort zone and are more Metroidvania/souls like, I decided to give it another try. And wouldn’t you know it, the game was on sale for 4 bucks. So I grabbed it.

Deaths Door I think fits perfectly into a subgenre of Souls-lite. That is, a souls-ish game with less punishing mechanics that is still difficult and requires you to learn how to approach a fight with a boss. So, as I’m not a giant fan of the punishing mechanics of some of the souls-like genre, it fell right into the sweet spot for me. Its both somewhat difficult without feeling tedious, it’s unique and whimsical without losing the mildly oppressive atmosphere that many Souls-likes adhere to. It’s got interesting combat and a lot of exploration. It’s genuinely, a fantastic game. Even if it does have a decent amount of flaws. So let’s get into it.

Meow-scribe

The Premise

In Deaths Door you play a new little crow reaper who goes around collecting the Souls of those whose time has come. But, when one of your souls gets stolen just before you can collect it, you have to chase after the one who stole it as you certainly can’t deal with the shame and punishment of not having completed your job. During your journey, you’ll come across fellow Reapers, a big ol’ Door, and even a Yeti like creature. Will you manage to get the Soul you were sent to Reap? Will you help those around the world who have dealt with some influential people just not dying? Will you discover what’s wrong with the world and maybe even fix it? Or will you fail at your mission and be forever exiled from your whole reason for being? Hopefully, you’ll be fine.

The Good

The combat of the game isn’t super deep, but it still all feels good. You’re able to do basic slashes of combos that limit is determined by the weapon (for instance the base sword does 3, but the lightning-hammer-axe thing that I used for half the game does 2). You’re also able to roll and attack which can really allow you to get close to a boss and strike, then quickly roll away. It’s pretty damn fun once that clicks. You also get a charge up attack that’s great when you know your enemy won’t be moving soon but can be quite useless if they move just before you finish the most powerful charge.

There’s also the 4 abilities that you unlock over the course of the game, 3 of which are super useful for combat and 1 that I was never able to get quite right for that instance. Those abilities, however, really allow you to attack from a distance and be able to mix up your close strikes and far abilities. The three I’m talking about are bow, bombs, fireball. They’re all great and are used for environmental purposes as well.

In fact, one of my favorite boss fights, the Toad King, requires you to use your bow during the fight in a way that the game teaches you earlier in that area. This is something fundamental about the game that I think some other games need to get better at, teaching. Not throwing you into a difficult section in order to teach you how to use some new ability or deal with some new environmental object. The game slowly trickles in new mechanics that then get used later on in boss fights so by the time you get to them you’re an expert on how to both recognize and deal with those mechanics. It does this so incredibly well I was actually really surprised. I think the best way to get your players to want to keep playing and not feel stuck with new mechanics is to slowly introduce it. Again, not dropping the player in a really difficult section to force them to learn while also having to deal with death and the punishment that comes with it.

One of the best things about it is how little punishment you get for death. The game decides it’ll give you tough fights. Both in boss fight and gauntlet form, and that it doesn’t want to punish you for failing. It wants you to learn and improve without having the stress of losing something alongside it. The only real punishment takes place during gauntlets and it’s just a run back to the gauntlet. That’s literally it. Not losing things on death really helped me be able to zero in on getting better, on learning the bosses moves. Multiple bosses took close to 20 tries, if not more, but I almost always felt like I was learning something new. It was really effective.

The bosses are all interesting and have good designs but the best part are the health bars. Or rather, the health representation. Instead of a standard health bar, you start to see cracks spread across the boss/enemy. It’s a really helpful representation that doesn’t “impede on immersion” and still communicates beneficial data. I had so many moments in every boss fight where I knew, because of just how many damn cracks were in the boss, that after I died I had been so close. It drove me to keep playing. If you’re not gonna have a health bar, you need to have some kind of visual representation for that kind of communication. It helps the player and drives them.

The story and setting are also incredibly intriguing. The best part I think is how the world is dealing with the oppression of a purveyor of death that is rather authoritarian and mean. You see that very early on for instance in the Gravedigger wanting you to kill him. He’s tired of death and wants his time to end but you’re not strong enough at the time so he just says “maybe when you’re stronger” and moves on. You also have Eulogies after every boss fight that feeds into the themes of death being a constant and something the world is struggling with.

Finally, I think one of my favorite things in the game is the humor of it all. The world might be dealing with the oppression of the system of death they find themselves living in but that doesn’t mean the game doesn’t want you to enjoy your time in this world. The first sign I got that showed me it was a game that I was going to love was the introduction of the character Pothead (picture above). He’s a character in one of the areas where you’re chasing a soul. Just seeing him made me think to myself “okay so this game knows it’s weird and enjoys that”. There’s nothing more endearing to me than a game that knows its weird and fucking runs with it.

As an example of running with it, I’d like to highlight exhibit A. One of the bosses name sequence. It slowly kept growing initially only showing the name and the first line but then kept adding and adding more lines. It knew that it was absurd. It knew that it was funny. That’s the best part. That enjoyment that I can only assume the developers felt making it is also one that the player is meant to feel when playing it and the Devs did a perfect job making me enjoy these little moments of humor in a world gripped with death.

Pothead would have Subscribed by now!

The Bad

There’s no way to heal during combat or just wondering around until you find a seed pot. This. Fucking. Sucks. Its not so bad in regular exploration but once you come across gauntlets where you’re fighting multiple waves and then where you’re dealing with water being a hazard that takes away some health. Well. That just makes it seem like an oversight, even though it’s definitely not. I do appreciate that the game isn’t super duper difficult, but being able to heal once or twice mid combat would be such a big improvement for the combat experience. But hey, at least the enemies only do one damage per hit.

Another thing. The game is at this 3/4ths perspective which is, most of the time, great. But then there are times like the image above. See, you’re able to end up behind a wall which makes your silhouette displayed so you can still tell who you are. Which is great right? But enemies don’t have that. So you can have moments where enemies chase after you, you end up behind a wall, and you have no way of knowing where the enemies are so you’re able to get around them or fight them. You’re left to just hope your attack hits. Plus then there’s the times when the water hazard can occasionally also exist behind a wall and you can’t predict exactly where it is so sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong and fall into the water. This is a product of the camera angle but I think at least adding enemy silhouettes would be beneficial to the experience.

Also, there’s no map. The areas feel like a maze and there’s no damn map. It’s a massive issue where I’m trying to remember where I need to go and how I can get there. After enough times wandering around in circles I managed to learn the places layout pretty well...but I shouldn’t have to wander around in circles for so long. Give me a map where it’s on a piece of parchment or in a book like the ones the other crows are writing in and then have there be some feathers or something. Just. Anything. It’s such a design flaw to make levels like this and not have a fucking map.

There’s also a significant overuse of gauntlets that is quite frustrating. Some of them are easier than others and when you get them down you’ll end up often stuck on the last round, but it’s still exhausting having to go through them over and over again when you’re fucking up. This happened a lot in the Mushroom dungeon level for me where you have water hazards in several of them and I just kept accidentally walking into it and fucking up over and over and, as I said, there’s usually no heals so I would be fucked. There were several moments where I just gave up for that try because I knew I wasn’t gonna get it. Figured I should start fresh with full health. Adding a healing plant in some of the gauntlets would have been awesome and made them much less frustrating. But that said, I did get through the water hazard ones eventually. After getting lucky several times.

The Ending - Detailed

**Start Spoilers**

Okay first off, there is a “true ending” to the game that you can complete by going around and collecting and doing a bunch of stuff, including defeating another boss and shit. I did not do that. Im sure it’s good but i had other stuff to do so this is the ending of the game that I played not of the true ending.

Welp. Turns out Death was stuck in the “Deaths Door” the whole time. Who would have thought. The Lord of Doors kicked Death in and after defeating the grey crow you’re able to free him. You then go to defeat the Lord of Doors back at the office.

You have 2 phases to the fight with the Lord. After confronting him you go through a bunch of platforming and short moments of fighting in all of the main locations you’ve been too. It’s a really cool part of the fight and it introduces all the moves you have to deal with during the second phase. It’s a really well put together segment and then leads you back to the home office.

The Lord seems to have wrecked the place and you have to do one more fight with him. It’s a long one and you have a lot of stuff to remember and you can’t get greedy but once you’re done, that’s it. The world is saved. We get a eulogy to The Last Lord of Doors and then Death kicks his soul into the remnants of Deaths Door. Credits.

During the credits you get to see small moments where the characters in the game are trying to find a way back to normal, which is really adorable.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I loved it. The fight was tough but fun and I figured out that the best place in the last arena during the laser section was just to hug the left wall which made the fight much easier. I had a damn good time. Seeing the little moments of calm during the credits was also really sweet and made the experience even more worthwhile. I loved every single moment.

Hate Spoilers? Maybe buy me Coffee then?

The Conclusion

I loved Deaths Door. It didn’t take a ton of time to beat, but most of that time was rather enjoyable. The game’s somewhat difficult, sure, but it’s not overly so. And most importantly, it doesn’t punish you as much for dying as other Souls games do. It doesn’t assault you with adds in boss fights as some more recent difficult games do (cough cough Silksong cough cough. It’s a very well designed game that just has some flaws that I wish had been thought of. Specifically not having a map and not being able to see enemies behind walls like you can see yourself were the most frustrating.

Besides that, if you’re someone who likes the idea of a Souls game that has more humor to it than you’d expect, and isn’t nearly as punishing for failure, I’d say this is a great game for you! There aren’t difficulty settings, which sucks, but with how the game is structured it’s much less egregious not having them. Not that having them would have ruined the game, just that it’s a lot easier than you’d expect so it’s more easy to look past. Overall, it’s a great experience and I highly recommend it.

Meow,

Cat

Have you ever done something that you ended up regretting mere days later? Well I did that back in June of this year when I published an article (here) that I was sure was gonna be on point for my experience with the Ally X. I was sure I was done with my journey of trying to find a more powerful Steam Deck to play games on my couch with a show in the background and enjoying my AC window unit.

Then the Saturday after my post I noticed something that changed my opinion entirely. What once had been a great device suddenly became just downright shit for what I needed it for.

Now, here I am, having waited almost 6 months just in case, with a short update article for this week so I can help others not make the same mistake I made.

Meow-scribe

Hands hands hands

In my original article I talked about how the Asus ROG Ally hurt my hands a ton because of how flat it was. It sucked and that’s what made me go with the Ally X.

The problem? The Ally X didn’t fix these issues. It just changed things. Sure it was better for my fingers but it wasn’t better for the rest of my hand. They just hurt. They were aching after long periods and, at the time. I had been playing The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy (review here) which meant I was fucking glued to my device because I adored the game. It sucked where I wanted to keep playing this amazing game but my hands kept meaning I couldn’t. I got a DBrand Killswitch case that I was desperately hoping would help and it unfortunately did not and introduced a whole other type of discomfort with that sand paper feel it has.

Eventually I decided to return it which meant I had to revert the OS back to Windows, since I had changed it to Steam OS. This, unfortunately, lead to me wiping my save of The Hundred Line. It hadn’t uploaded to the Steam Cloud so the last 20, or however many, hours I had played were forgotten and I had to redo all of it. Which sucked but hey I got it done and reviewed the game so that’s positive. Never before had I questioned my principle on finishing a game in order to review it more than I did right at that moment.

Anyway, I returned it but was left with a Dilemma, do I just accept that I can’t get a Portable PC that doesn’t hurt my hands because of how it was designed to be just as uncomfortable as the Nintendo Switch? Or should I go looking for another PC. This whole journey had begun because I wanted to be able to play Expedition 33 at a reasonable frame rate on my couch where the AC was, so I resolved that I wanted to find something that was better, even if I had to pay a little more to get it.

Did I find another portable PC?

I did. And, embarrassingly, I had sworn off even trying this one because I thought it was too big. The Legion Go S z1e Steam Edition just looked so large from the pictures but I just wanted something that was more powerful than a Steam Deck, so I took the plunge and returned the Ally X in order to spend another 20 bucks to get the LeGo S. It took a bit to get here because Best Buy didn’t have it in stock and the entire time I was incredibly nervous that it would be too big or too heavy or something.

Once it got here, I was pleasantly surprised that it was actually pretty damn perfect size wise. Now don’t get me wrong, it’s definitely bigger than the Ally X, but not significantly. And the hand issue was fixed where I didn’t get pain after holding it for a little while. Although the ergonomics aren’t as good as the steam deck, I’d say they are a close second. The screen being 8 inches also significantly improved my reading ability for some of the games I play on my portable device. Just overall it was much better than I was expecting.

Now of course I could have technically waited and spent another 230 dollars to get the ROG Xbox Ally X but...no? I know it’s rather comfortable ergonomics wise but I 1. needed it soon to be able to play and review Expedition 33 (review here) in the comfort of my couch and 2. wanted a Steam OS console not windows and didn’t want to have to deal with switching over OS’s again. Plus, I had no idea, at the time, what the cost of it was going to be and I had assumed it would be more expensive than what I had spent (which I was right about) and I did have a budget to try to desperately adhere to. Thus, the Legion Go S has been my portable PC that I’ve been playing all of the games I have reviewed in the last 6 months on. It’s been great and I’ve had next to no issues! Well. Except lack of a high quality case that doesn’t feel like sandpaper when holding it (the DBrand Killswitch), but that’s not an issue with the device itself.

Subscribing is as good as a Killswitch!

How to not make the same mistake

Basically, try to use the devices first. For me that means going to Best Buy and fiddling with the devices they have up for public use. Obviously this isn’t perfect because it won’t give you the best example of what it’s like to hold the device for super long, but it can give you a general idea. If you happen to know someone with one of these devices I would recommend asking them to try it out first as well because that would help even more. The sad fact is that there is absolutely nothing that you can do besides just using them. I personally wish I hadn’t had to go back multiple times to Best Buy to return things and each time been more and more embarrassed just so I could find a better fitting console for my needs.

At the same time, there is also another option which is just, have good internet that isn’t being used all the time and allows you to stream from your, ideally, more powerful PC to a Steam Deck. That’s how a lot of people do it so they can feel like their system is more powerful than it is and don’t have to spend a ton of money on a more powerful handheld. Personally that doesn’t work because my partner works from home a lot of the time and uses the internet for that work so whenever I’m downloading something it fucks with their work so I can only assume that streaming something would be just as bad.

You could also just read about others who have used the devices you are thinking of getting. Take my experience that I had and think “Is a console that doesn’t have the best ergonomics for a person with small-medium sized hands something I’m willing to roll the dice on?” Or just go for something you know for a fact will be comfortable because of how it’s designed. Or, finally, get whatever you want and buy a case or grips that make the thing more comfortable to hold so you don’t have to spend an immense amount of money on a more comfortable device that isn’t that much more powerful.

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I swear this is the only update

As I stated at the top, I waited almost 6 months to do this update article. A part of me wasn’t sure it was necessary but I thought that if my experience could help just one person not make the same mistake, or could entertain one person with my mistake, then it’s worth doing. There won’t be another update because this journey is done. I don’t regret making this mistake, besides regretting the embarrassment of going to the Best Buy 2 times for returns within a week of each other. Having a more powerful Steam Deck is pretty damn awesome and the bigger screen is also, surprisingly, very nice.

Overall, it might have been an embarrassing journey, but it was a worthwhile one. Not only did I find out a lot about how ergonomics make my hands feel pain, I also discovered that an 8 inch screen isn’t too large, that I am willing to pay much more money than I had anticipated just for the experience of playing something on my couch instead of in front of my desk, and that I maybe should wait to talk about some of my tech decisions on here because I might end up changing them less than a week after hitting that publish button.

Anyway, thanks for reading about a mistake that I’ve been avoiding tangentially mentioning in several of my articles over the last several months! I wanted to provide a bookend on this journey (that most didn’t even realize was happening) before the end of the year and I am 3 weeks ahead of schedule. Next week we will get back to what I usually write about instead of this more personal mistake like topics. I’m desperately trying to finish The Outer Worlds 2 before the end of the year and that one is...well...it’s gonna be a review I was hoping would be better. But that’s for then and this is now. And with that...

Meow,

Cat

I adored a lot of the original Telltale games, they were definitely of the era they were made in because of how frustratingly annoying they controlled and how they’re incredibly difficult to replay, but I still really enjoyed them. Add in the game that gave me a ton of amazing moments, Life is Strange, and you have multiple episodic games that I adored. But the experience of playing it with months in-between was exhausting and it was always best to play it all at once after the final episode. A feat I didn’t manage to do for the ones I liked.

Then, back in October, came Dispatch, a game about Robert Robertson who has to work as a superhero dispatcher with a colorful cast of characters doing super hero things. It’s an episodic game that strives to fix the problems with the old episodic format, while keeping the best part of experiencing the game slowly as a community, by having the episodes come out in 2 episode batches weekly for 3 weeks post release. This worked well, from what I read, but because of my past experience with the episodic format I decided to view this from afar (I like to binge games not play them piecemeal like when I was in my teens and early 20s).

Still though, I bought it post finale and after finishing Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines 2 (review here) decided to dive in unsure of what to expect. I found a game that made me feel confused about how I felt about it. A game that simultaneously had me wanting to know more about the story and also had me yearning that it was similar to another game I adored. A game that had me frustrated with a core aspect of the gameplay while also had me still enjoy that core aspect of the gameplay. A game that had characters that I truly loved to see develop and had romances that were difficult to really start. I just feel all around confused by the game. I don’t know what to think. So let’s just dive right into my thoughts.

Meow-scribe

The Premise

Dispatch is the first game from AdHoc Studio (a place started by former Telltale devs and among them is the original writer for the Wolf Among Us who wrote this game) where you play Robert Robertson, a sort of superhero who has been forced, by circumstances beyond his control, to sit out of the hero game for a time. Instead he gets a job at the SDC, a company or something that dispatches Heroes around the city of LA in order to address problems from their subscribers who pay monthly for their help. Essentially like a security system for your home or business or self... or the city in general. There he meets a whole cast of characters as he takes charge of Dispatching the Z Team, a team of reformed Super Villains who are there to try and become...well...heroes. Will they succeed? Will Robert find awkward love with his boss or with his subordinate? Will he find a way to be a hero again? And of course, will he ever get furniture in his apartment because it looks like a serial killers place?

The Good

Let’s get this out of the way right at the top. I adore a good story about underdogs and morally not the best characters. Dispatch fit right into what I wanted when it came to providing characters that were both assholes and genuine people. Characters that I enjoyed listening to and that I thought did shitty things. It was so well written that I loved to see the different members of Z-Team fight and loved to see them come back together. The characters of Dispatch are just top notch. The story is also pretty good, but it’s really just fueled by them.

I really enjoyed the strategy of which hero to send on which mission, of strategically waiting to select a mission until the heroes are rested and available meaning I often picked a mission in the last second it was available, of upgrading the heroes so you could place them together with certain heroes to either help that hero or do that mission especially well. For instance, I got Bruno, the Golem character, an upgrade that allowed him to duplicate and fill all the other hero slots in a mission. So I could send him on a four person mission alone and he’d often succeed because it was basically 4 of him. It was great and the upgrades for the characters were all similar where they all played together really well and allow you, the player, to be even more strategic with how you go about dispatching. It was great fun even if I had a frustration that I will go over in the next section.

There’s one particular thing that I really appreciated what Dispatch did that enhanced the experience for the episodic nature of the game. It often hid when you were making big choices that would decide the future of the characters and the path things would go down. For instance, there’s a character that thinks they would be better as a villain, that that is what they were made for. Over the course of the game the decisions you make when talking to them decide what kind of direction they go in their life. It’s really interesting. Especially when you compare it with other games of similar type like prior Telltale games, or the Life is Strange games, or even Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical, that all kinda prompt you or make it obvious when you’re making a big decision. Some much more than others. Dispatch hides that shit away so you don’t know what you’re gonna do that changes thing and it makes the whole experience a lot more of an unknown and I appreciated that. This can backfire for some replaying if you make a few different decisions but still somehow end up with a rather similar experience, but overall it’s still really well done.

The game really nailed the episode format. There’s another game that I played earlier this year that has an episode format that just put them all out at once, Life is Strange Double Exposure (review here). That had me at the edge of my seat for the first two and a half episodes but very quickly afterwards started to fall apart. Meanwhile, Dispatch feels like a slow burn where it just got better the further into the story I got. The first two episodes were...fine. But once I got to half way through episode 3, and then to episode 4? That really nailed what an episodic game’s structure should strive for, at least when it comes to story development. And best of all because of the relative shortness of the episodes, only about an hour, I didn’t have the experience so many other games have where it “gets good about 10 or 15 hours in”. It took 3 and a half hours for me to be hooked and while that is longer than id like, it’s also similar to a lot of shows in recent memory and since this game is mimicking a show I think it makes sense to compare it that way.

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The Bad

I often found myself frustrated with how the game was designed. I wanted to explore the building, to talk to the other characters for more info. I wanted to have genuine moments where I felt like I was directing the game instead of just playing along. I was constantly reminded of the game that I adored when I played it a year ago and have also already brought up, Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (review here). In that I’m able to ask more questions of the characters, get to know them outside of the main point of talking to them. You’re able to decide different areas you go to when you end up at a new location or go between people to talk to. Like when you end up at a nightclub and can go back and forth from character to character to get more and more information. This is something fundamental that I thought Dispatch was sorely missing. Stray Gods didn’t allow you to walk around the space so Dispatch wouldn’t have to either.

I also think the romance was written much better in Stray Gods. Or, rather, the romance I was able to see in Dispatch. There’s a lot of reasons why but, particularly, because it was obvious what you were gonna say was expressing interest. In Dispatch, I ended up not romancing anyone because of two reasons, the above reason I gave where I couldn’t tell which options expressed interest most of the time, and because it was just so... awkward. The idea of this guy coming into this workplace and very quickly romancing his coworkers, including one that he literally has power over for whether he will cut her from the team and the other being essentially his boss, is just uncomfortable and weird. There was also only a couple of opportunities outside of the office to express the interest that you can express. I did end up having Robert go on a date with Invisigal at the movies because it was obvious and made some sense. The problem was that was the only real time that kind of thing showed up. It was bothersome that it both didn’t happen more and that that still didn’t solve my key issue that it was still awkward having this kind of relationship with your, essentially, subordinates. We also recently found out that there were multiple cut romance scenes in the game because when you’re an indie studio you often have to kill your darlings.

In Mass Effect your companions could technically be called subordinates but often they weren’t replaceable and had fully decided to be there and you needed them there too so you wouldn’t be kicking them out. You just didn’t have much power over them (I think the Virmire survivor is the most subordinate-like character in the entire trilogy that you can romance). More so, you had moments of talking to them and expressing interest in them as people, getting to know them, before you could romance them. While here in Dispatch you only had a couple of those moments and many felt awkward or like you were forcing yourself in places you didn’t belong. I think if you were able to talk to the individual people outside of the main storyline then it would have made more sense even if it might have interrupted the flow.

Both of the above issues likely just go back to the game being in the episode format and feeling more like a TV show as opposed to a full game or even at all close to a Telltale game. Which is, again, the developer that the studio rose out of post closure. I just didn’t like the lack of control in these episodes. Expand them out a bit allowing us to have some amount of control over talking to some people and learning about different areas of the world and it’d be great. It’s definitely got many better aspects than the Telltale games of old, while introducing these new issues as well. Just. Frustrating.

Speaking of frustration. While some of the gameplay is enjoyable, I think I was constantly frustrated with how random some of the final outcomes can be for the missions. There were several times when the little bouncing ball thing would all of a sudden slow momentum for no reason causing me to fail the mission. It’s not that failure is a problem, just that I hated how it seemed like it wasn’t really random and the ball bouncing around was all for show. This wouldn’t have been a problem if the ball was more consistent and not doing the “let’s randomly slow down despite the fact that the previous momentum that I had would end me in the success area. Because that makes sense I guess”. It just needed better and more predictable momentum during the pathing.

The Ending - Detailed

Okay, obviously with this kind of game the ending will often be slightly different for everyone so this is my version of it and things will likely be different for you if you play it. With that covered, here’s my ending.

**Start Spoilers**

Welp, Shroud is attacking the city and eventually, after a ton of Dispatching, gets to the SDC branch everyone works at. Once there, a massive fight commences with all of the characters you know and love. You discover Royd and Invisigal fighting because she was looking at the Mecha-Man suit and while he goes off to defend the SDC I chose to trust Invisigal. This allowed me to become Mecha-Man again and wreck some shit around the branch. It was great fun and lead to some truly amazing visuals.

After a ton of kicking ass, Chase comes back from the Dead using Blonde Blazers power jewel (because apparently she wasn’t born with powers either and gets them from her jewel and, at the last moment, manages to down Shroud. Unfortunately, you start to celebrate too early until we discover the unthinkable has happened, Shroud has taken Beef Hostage, either give him the Astro Pulse or Beef, and the rest of the team who is surrounded by Shroud goons, will die. So you fly up and while up there and talking with Shroud he reveals that Invisigal is on his side, that she’s been a plant from the beginning. She then is “embarrassed” and goes invisible (maybe to climb up to the roof where you and Shroud are). You’re then given the option of giving him the prototype Astro Pulse that we know is fucked up because of an early episode, or the real one. Or both of them. I chose both.

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Seeing Shroud say “What the fuck is this shit” (essentially) was fucking perfect. The asshole who had believed he could predict everything couldn’t predict Robert doing that. It was great. He then has to pick which to use. He picks and it was wrong causing him, and all of his buddies, to start vomiting. He gets pissed and shoots at Robert only for the bullet to hit invisible Invisigal, who has been convinced that she is capable of heroism by the conversations you had with her over the course of the game, in the shoulder, but doesn’t hurt Robert since it had slowed due to her body being in the way. You then get to run at him and start punching only to choose whether or not you decide he’s has enough or if you should kill him. I killed the fucker (don’t mess with the Beef).

Invisgal is alive and not a traitor and by saving Robert she kinda saved the day, Chase is alive, Z Team are literal heroes that saved the city, and you were the one that helped them do it. You also get given the option to forgive the hero you cut at the start who went over to work with Shroud, in my case Sentry, which I did because he didn’t deserve to be cut anyway. Then you celebrate with Chase flying you around and dropping you into the group so they can throw you up and catch you repeatedly while a picture is taken with everyone (including Chase, Royd, and Blonde Blazer not just Z team) in it. Including Invisigal who is injured and threw herself into the photos as she made herself visible despite the fact that she really should be in the Hospital by now. Freeze frame and Credits.

**End Spoilers**

The Ending - Reaction

I honestly adored the ending. I don’t think there was a single thing I had significant issues with, besides the romance stuff I’ve talked about already. Having the twists, the tension, the sacrifices, the “what the fuck” moments. It was great and really stuck the landing, a tough feat in an episodic game.

The Conclusion

I am just so unsure of what to think of Dispatch. While I definitely enjoyed my time with it and know it’s a very good game, the flaws bothered me and just made me think of playing a different game. It’s hard to score something when I’m constantly comparing it to a similar type of game (minus the episodic nature of Dispatch). Finding out that there were removed Romance scenes helps somewhat but that doesn’t change the general vibe. I think scoring it based on my experience with it outside of thinking about a different game because I feel like that’s probably an unfair comparison since there are definitely distinct differences between the two and they are from two rather distinct developers with different former attachments (Stray Gods with Bioware and Dispatch with Telltale).

Overall, Dispatch is a really good game with mostly great writing, but the romances feel underbaked and uncomfortable so I wouldn’t go into the game with that as a focus in your mind. If you want a great superhero comedy/drama with Telltale like choices, some interesting gameplay, very well acted and humanized characters, then Dispatch is the game for you. Just also check out Stray Gods: The Roleplaying Musical (Steam page) afterwards cause that one deserves a playthrough as well.

Meow,

Cat