games

The Spirit and the Mouse is a nice little game about, you guest it, a mouse that helps a spirit helping people with problems caused by a recent thunderstorm. Kind of a puzzle-platformer, except you don’t jump, you climb and fall. The mouse is female, by the way.

I think I collected everything in Lunistice, which means it is not a super hard game. I had about 40+ deaths in one level, but I finished it anyway because it felt mostly fair. Mostly because there is still a problem with precise jumping in 3D platformers, so some failures are clearly not on me. That minor annoyance aside, a pretty good platformer.

TOEM is just lovely. Running around, taking pictures to solve quests. Neat. Not sure what else to add, but I want to highlight it anyway.

Mythic Ocean is a visual novel with some exploration. It’s hard to explain why I liked the story, partly because I don’t want to spoil anything, and partly because it’s a bit dreamlike: mostly fantasy, with a pitch of sci-fi, and some alegory thrown in. Just slightly fuzzy, you know, in a good way.

I’m also a good indicator of point-and-click adventures: if I can complete one without a guide, there’s no “moon logic” in the game. She and the Light Bearer is a good one of those, quite beautiful with a nice story.

I wanted to check out the Mario Kart series, so I chose Mario Kart 7: it is relatively short (if you want to “finish” it in a sense) and you can play as Princess Peach. Pretty good, but I can’t say I loved it and want to play more or the 8th one. Burnout Paradise is my car game, so news that LEGO 2K Drive would be the blend of the two got me interested.

The in-fury-ating thing about Super Mario 3D World + Bowser’s Fury, is that all other characters with costumes and animations and whatnot are right there, so why are we stuck with just the mustachioed stereotype again? Other than that, I think this open-world structure is my favorite for games like this. Super Mario 3D World itself? Nah. I bet I’d love Odyssey, I just don’t want to! :/

Can you finish Tetris? I played through all the stages of Tetris Effect Connected, so *shrug*.

On the other hand, I did something that I almost never do: I stopped playing a game before the official end, but still consider it finished, with an asterisk. Dragon Quest Builders makes enough changes to a Minecraft formula, and some of them are pretty good and should be stolen by other games in the genre, but ultimately there are enough bad or pointless changes that I can’t justify playing another, what, three chapters? I backed up my save so I can return to it or, most likely, just play Builders 2 at some point. Or not.

It is not for me to judge whether stories like The Suicide of Rachel Foster should exist. What is a fair question is why only stories like this seem to exist? Why is it that almost every narrative game with a female protagonist is about that protagonist’s suffering, almost always at the hands of a man? Again, a valuable, very valuable story, but where are the alternatives that are so abundant for male characters?

Beasts of Maravilla Island, Behind the Frame and Paradise Marsh are in a category of games that, if you want to play something like that, that’s fine, they’re fine games. Fine. Really. But none of them grabbed me and actually reminded me that we’re way, way past the time when these cool, quirky, beautiful, unique indie games were a rarity and would have gotten a lot more attention just for existing. That’s kind of cool.

Continue playing the nonogram games. Finished Picross from S3 to S7, Club Nintendo Picross and Puppy Cross. Will include The Solitaire Conspiracy here, similar enough.

Finally dipped my toe into the Metroid series. Decided to go by timeline chronology rather than releases. Also chose remakes over originals. Which means I finished Metroid: Zero Mission on my, ahem, liberated 3DS. Minus the stealth part, a pretty good game overall and a great introduction to the series.

Curious if Nintendo will release remasters of two other Prime games before Prime 4. Plausible.

Been playing the Picross S series on Switch. Finished all E’s and S1 on 3DS a while ago, and now S2, S3, and S4 on Switch. Perfect podcast games. BTW, as a colorblind person, I can attest that their Color Picross variant is quite good.

A Plague Tale: Requiem is in the “was a sequel necessary?” category, but is pretty good, so OK.

There are three last levels in Captain Toad: Treasure Tracker that broke me, and soured the overall impression a bit. But otherwise a great game.

You play as Toadette for half the game. And the traditional kidnapping is presented as not really a kidnapping: Wingo wants a star, it’s just that Toad and Toadette can’t let go of their capitalistic nature and that star. Does that give Nintendo a pass? Not really, but I think it is a good example of Nintendo being less evil and more traditional to a fault. They would stick to a structure, but be willing to work on the periphery or in new areas.

Well, started this blog for no apparent reason.