Metroidvanias are a hard sell for me, existing well outside of my preferred styles of game. The problem is mine, as I have little patience for hitting a literal wall and having to backtrack to find the new tool I need to make progress. Once I do have the needed upgrade, I struggle to remember where I was supposed to backtrack in order to use it.

Islets won me over with its whimsical animation style and combination of side scrolling platforming mixed with bullet hell aerial boss battles. But what kept me playing until the credits was its willingness to cater to my needs at every step of the journey. For instance, when I got lost, I could go to an NPC and pay a small fee to have my current goal marked on the map. Be it a new upgrade, a boss, or whatever I was struggling to find, having a little question mark on the map made it possible to avoid getting lost. There were other accessibility features, and I’ll cover those later.

Let’s get into the story first, which is about a floating island made up of several smaller islets that drifted together and created a perfect biome. A group of industrious critters decided to keep them held together with huge electromagnets, as the combined island was perfect for promoting biodiversity. Some unsavory varmints conspired to shut down the magnets, and the islets drifted apart, making each biome more barren and hostile as a result. Continue reading

I had another review planned for this week, a positive one at that. But then I remembered that after the launch of the highly enjoyable Fallout on Amazon Prime, Bethesda promised an update to Fallout 4 with the bait, quote, “bug fixes.” That update arrived, and like a noob, I downloaded it hoping for the best.

Some of you might be new to my blog and don’t know that I don’t care much for Bethesda, but I also rather liked Fallout 4 because it was the most stable of the 3D Fallout games. (Okay, also because I like the music. I’ve actually played sometimes just to listen to Diamond City Radio a few hours before erasing my save file.) Granted, it always has been buggier than an ant farm, but it rarely crashed on my PS4 (RIP) or on my PC with the settings all locked to Medium.

So “bug fixes” called me back because I wondered, could I finally recruit Tina DeLuca to join me at Sanctuary Hills? Would I finally get Sanctuary to 100 percent happiness even if I recruited The Concord Five? Could I convince Marcy and Jun to work for more than one day on farming instead of watching them pound a hammer on a rusted metal wall?

But of course, nothing got fixed, and Bethesda went and Bethesda’d so hard that no one besides Mr. Matty is happy. Continue reading

Looking at the video trailer for The Big Con, I didn’t really feel like it would be a game for me. But then I read a longer description and decided to give a shot. The story goes that Ali is a small town girl living in a looonely wooorld. She took the midnight…whoops, wrong notes.

Right, Ali is a small town girl working with her single mother in a video store. She learns that the store is going to be taken over by loan sharks, and that her mother owes ninety-seven thousand dollars. So Ali hooks up with a complete stranger to try and gather enough money through pick-pocketing, shoplifting and fencing garbage in pawn shops. So, a high fantasy setting.

Before I get to the gameplay itself, I should mention that Ali has a hallucinatory friend named Rad Ghost, the kind of mascot D.A.R.E. would think up who frequently says stuff like “Thank you for not doing drugs!” Despite the hallucinations and questionable setup, I felt for Ali. As a teen I spent a lot of time hanging out in video stores and at the dollar theater, so like her, I’m something of a film nerd. Add in her desire to get out of her small town and do ANYTHING combined with her crush on a friend, and she really hit all my feels in the best way to make her an endearing protagonist. Continue reading

Not long ago, I watched a speedrun of Diablo on the YouTube archives of Awesome Games Done quick, and as the runner got into the lowest floors, I suddenly realized that I had never finished the game with any character. I saw it was only ten euros on Battle.Net, so I figured I would fire it back up to sort out why I stopped playing.

I could nitpick on all the game’s flaws. No, check that. I will do that anyway, but the sum of all its flaws can be condensed down to one damning statement: accounting isn’t fun.

Spending ten minutes in every session trying to sort out whether to call a financial loss on a run by casting a portal or lose twenty minutes walking back to town is not fun. Being financially penalized for wanting to hold onto items is not fun. Even when the game is almost starting to feel fun, here’s a room filled with thirty enemies who will deplete my carefully budgeted supply of potions while dropping no gold or items to sell back in town, and I’m right back to having no fun. Continue reading

Way back in 2021, I did a review for the mobile version of My Friend Pedro and said that Devolver Digital games never fully clicked for me. I still hold that same opinion, but I keep giving their games a chance because as a publisher, they seem to be the most earnest and ethical folks in the gaming industry, and because they are willing to publish weird, original games instead of chasing the latest bestsellers.

Take Cult of the Lamb as a prime example, where the main character is an actual lamb being led to the slaughter to prevent a prophesied return of an evil god. One minute into the game that lamb is killed, only to be resurrected by the aforementioned god. He commands them to kill his enemies, build a cult, and free him from his eternal prison. It’s one part The Binding of Isaac mixed with Cult Simulator. On paper, that sounds fantastic.

In practice, the wonderful dungeon crawling bits are dragged down by the cult maintenance, and a large part of managing the cult being a drag falls on the industry-wide decision to have ridiculously accelerated day/night cycles. I hated that “feature” in Skyrim and Fallout. I hated it in GTA V. And in Cult of the Lamb, they decided to make an even faster clock speed while chopping the night into a ridiculously short quarter wedge of the in-game clock. Continue reading

Fair warning that there will be higher than average swearing in this week’s review. That’s because I didn’t play Grow Home so much as I endured as much of it as I could stand before throwing my aching hands up and declaring “fuck this.”  Part of this physical agony could be blamed on my first controller choice, which has triggers with a higher amount of tension than the standard PC gamepad. It’s great for shooters, helping me avoid accidental misfired shots. But here, the constant back and forth of “left shoulder, right shoulder” left me ending sessions with massive hand cramps.

But even setting that aside, this is the kind of half baked formula that could be good with more effort, and instead it got released as good enough in a damn near broken state. It fails to explain some of its most important mechanics, botches control schemes for both gamepad and mouse and keyboard gamers, and adds a list of busy work to drag out what is already a tiring slog.

I got to the point of the game where I had grown the central plant up to the little robot’s (BUD) mothership. (MOM) I collected a star seed and delivered it where I was instructed. Credits rolled, and the game was done, yes? FUCK NO. The game said, “Go fetch eight more seeds for us. Do you want to?” I selected NO, and the game went, “Thank you for your opinion. Now go get them seeds, biyatch.”

It was then that I said, “No. And not just no, but fuck no, and Grow Fuck yourself.” Continue reading

Readers, I come to you a broken and defeated reviewer. In the last two weeks, I have tried and bounced from five games. Some, like Pillars of Eternity and Kao the Kangaroo, I knew were going to be iffy at the start. But then there was Party Hard 2, a game I wanted to love, until they kept tossing in new ingredients I never asked for. (Why was “Kill everyone” dubiously upgraded to “Follow a boring checklist” anyway?)

Running out of options, I decided to go back and play something I started ages ago, but never reviewed, Unit 13. Back when I first got my PS Vita, I bought the digital version of the game, only to discover that any attempt to play it in English caused it to revert to French. At the time, my Italian wasn’t strong enough for me to play that version, so I ended up getting a refund.

But it always stuck with me for reasons I couldn’t put into words. The simple premise for a third person shooter, a mercenary team taking out terrorists, had just enough meat on it to carry forward a set of missions of increasing difficulty within a limited number of locations. It’s kind of like if Counter-Strike had a single player version. Continue reading