Can a character escape his past? Can a game series?
God of War started as a series based on the ideas of what is cool from “a teenager’s notebook”. Now, it wants to do better. It’s great to have all the new progressive titles, but I have to admit that it’s also valuable for an old and popular franchise to pull something like this off.
Does it? Norse era games – God of War and God of War Ragnarök – are far from ideal, but they’ve come a long way from their questionable roots. They would have been extremely progressive if released 20 years ago. Today? Even without spoilers, I can point out a couple of things where someone should have raised their hand and asked, “are we sure we want to do this?”
Overall, I enjoyed playing them, despite some minor gripes. I mostly didn’t care about combat, which might be my issue. I liked the combat in Doom: The Dark Ages quite a lot, but I haven’t liked the combat in any game since then. For me, running around in a not-so-open world, solving puzzles, and listening to NPCs was way more enjoyable. Thank goodness for a modern approach to difficulty that lets you breeze through encounters and most boss fights if you so desire.
Speaking of combat I didn’t care about… South of Midnight is a great game! It’s a dark fairy tale. Emphasis on dark: expect serious subjects to be brought up. It’s also going to get political, for sure! But it also has plenty of whimsy, have interesting characters and stories, looks great, and is an outright musical, with lyrics that help tell the story.
Speaking of musicals… Mayor May Knott is a horror-themed game in which you rebuild a small town, and has a lot of original parody songs. To be fair, most of the game consists of busywork and light puzzles, and its performance is dreadful on any machine I have. However, the theme, quirky characters, and overall feel-good-ness, that I liked since I played the demo, pulled me through. You’re giving people homes, c’mon! No regrets!
In Shadow Man: Remastered, the world itself is the main hero. It is hellishly confusing, but extremely satisfying to figure out. Even with the addition of higher-resolution textures, it remains vague, which works in its favour: your imagination does the work. It’s colourful, yet dark and moody. While not wholly unique – we’ve seen similar examples of the combination of natural and mechanical elements in the depiction of otherworldly places – it still has its own style. It’s great!
Mechanically, the game is a 3D Metroid-like, which, given how rare those are, deserves some attention in its own right. And it’s a good one, provided you can tolerate its very hands-off approach. By that, I mean that it doesn’t provide any guidance beyond the bare minimum. The remastered version rectifies this to some extent by providing a lot more information than the original. I think not knowing where to go is one of the worst feelings in a video game. So why am I tolerating it here? Honestly, I have no idea.
I tried a non-remastered version, but I didn’t get very far. I think it’s fine, but there’s no reason to play it at this point. You won’t miss anything by playing the remastered version, and the quality-of-life improvements and restored content are very nice.
Right, the elephant in the room. It’s a character created by white people. It’s a game created by white people. One of the two black characters is voiced by a white actor. The culture they depict is clearly not their own. Problematic? Of course! More than that? It’s not for me to judge, but personally, I didn’t find it egregious.
Doom: The Dark Ages is basically a fantasy game now. Starting with
Doom (2016), this iteration of the series has been playing with the fantasy/sci-fi duality established by the original
Doom (1993) and has gradually leaned more towards fantasy. In fact, I can’t help but think of it as a fast-paced, first-person spell-slinging game rather than a shooter. It still abbreviates to FPS :)
I also can’t help but think how this series in a conversation with Metroid Prime games. They start on different sides. The Prime games are open world, and the Doom games are linear. But they meet somewhere in the middle, where exploring the world is tremendously satisfying.
The fact that the latest games in both series have more story, cutscenes, and NPCs is also very funny.
Froggy Hates Snow has a very satisfying snow-clearing mechanic, and sometimes, that’s all you need.
I was somewhat disappointed with Keeper. It’s a neat looking puzzle game with a number of turns, so to speak, but ultimately, I didn’t care about its story. That story also felt stuck between being very vague (there isn’t a single word spoken throughout) and a fully-fledged one. Not bad, just not for me.
Some things have improved. Others just changed. The game now has even more open levels. I bet that if there were a third game, they would have tried to make it a full-on open world.
Kingdom: New Lands is also a proper sequel. Or maybe a better description would be an expansion pack. It adds a significant number of new features to the original game and splits the progression into multiple islands that you need to escape.
I was dreading playing Bullet Witch, but it turns out it’s not bad. First, aside from the outfit (which you can change, but the others are not better), the game is not sleazy at all. The camera doesn’t ogle Alicia’s body, no one questions her ability to fight, nothing like that.
Second, it’s just a mediocre game. I mean that in the most neutral way possible. You play it and go, “huh, that was a thing, ” and move on with your life. There are cool set pieces and some spectacle, but they’re overshadowed by dull visuals. There’s no reason to explore the pretty big levels. The combination of guns and magic is neat, but doesn’t feel that great. The story is fine, but it’s pretty shallow and short. We don’t even know who Alicia’s companion is. Perhaps they intended to write a sequel.
From the moment of discovering them, frog loved playing video games. Frog even learned some English to play games that hadn’t been translated. Then, when the internet became more accessible, frog realized that it was more convenient to read about games in English. There were more sources, and they were faster.
Then, gaming publications challenged frog’s views on some aspects of games. Perhaps it was meaningful who was represented on the screen and how. Maybe it was important to consider who makes games and under what labor practices. Frog grumbled for a bit – no one likes to have their views challenged – but ultimately agreed with the arguments. Besides, the other side was clearly disingenuous and malicious.
But then the gaming publications started to let frog down. At best, they stopped evolving. At worst, they became problematic themselves. Questionable advertising, harassment scandals, disregard for their own standards. It was all too much for our little frog.
With a sigh, frog put all the collected baubles – the bad companies, the problematic games, the overall state of the gaming industry, etc. – on a shelf where they were clearly visible, and hoped that no more bad things would ever happen because not reading any more gaming news meant there were no way of knowing.
I realized is that demos are a great way for me to get my FOMO fix. Since they are short and free, I can figure out what people are up to these days and then go back to playing the game I was playing before, which is probably from years, if not decades, ago.
Gravebound is a short, free arena shooter. And if you’re curious, a companion is your fire spell friend.
There are plenty of games that try to distill a particular genre into something minimalist. Too often, they throw out something important and break the whole thing. Kingdom nails it. It’s as minimal as possible, yet it still allows for strategy. It looks great, is simple to control (three buttons, really), and can be pretty short if you just want to win or last you dozens of hours if you’re going for achievements.
