Author Archives: Zoe_E_W

Oh, this game, y’all. I am glad I got it on sale, at a steep discount, and before I get to the actual review (with spoilers, so this is your only warning), I need to offer you full disclosure. I have sunk eighty hours into Hades. In that time I have beaten every boss with every weapon available, except for the eponymous end boss. I’ve beaten him two times, once with the gauntlets, and once with the spear. I’ve unlocked every ability from the magic mirror in Zagreus’ room, and fully refurnished the house of Hades.

But I have not beaten Hades, because the grind finally soured me to the point that I would rather do anything else beside play this game. What kills me most is that this is Greek mythology, which has been my jam since I first started borrowing books of parables from the public library at nine. Not even my love of Greek mythology can see me through to the end.

Here’s the plot in a nutshell: Zagreus is the defiant son of Hades, who learns that his birth mother is alive and well on the mortal plane. With help from his adoptive mother, he makes plans to traverse Tatarus, Asphodel, Elyisum, and the labyrinths that divide the afterlife to the mortal world. Each room he clears reveals a new gift from the gods, who are eager to help him ascend to Olympus. If at first he can’t succeed, he can die, and die again. Continue reading →

Dread Delusion was brought to my attention on BlueSky in the Discover tab by a fan announcing that it had come out of early access. They described it as Oblivion-like, but with PS One-styled graphics. I went to Steam to check out the trailer, and it intrigued enough that I bought it and downloaded it the same day.

Before I get into the nitty gritty bits, I would like to say that what I really appreciate about the game is that it does retro nostalgia right. Yes, the graphics are clunky and similar to the PS One era, but the controls and camera are designed with a far more modern sensibility. I never once suffered with to trying orient myself even in tightly walled areas. I never struggled with the controls, even during more frantic bouts of combat. (Well, with one short exception, but that comes later.) There’s two different versions of fast travel to make tracking and backtracking less tedious. This is a game that wants to tickle you with nostalgia, but knows that not everything from the past was all candy sprinkles and Pop Rocks.

Starting out on a tutorial island of sorts as a faceless and nameless prisoner, player creation amounts to mixing three historical backgrounds that determine starting stats. Choosing one will make a character better at lockpicking or bartering, while another might make them better with physical damage or magic spells. No matter what is chosen, the first weapon given is a rusty sword. If you want to cast spells, you have to hunt them down later. Continue reading →

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 →