Saturday, February 24, 2024

Stella Glow - Thoughts


From the word "go", Stella Glow shoots itself in the foot. For a handheld game, its offers a tantalizing package: a fun bundle of anime characters, an item crafting system, battlefields that make good use of height, some downtime relationship management, and hours of cutscenes to sit back and watch... er, read. But for every cool feature hides an ugly flaw, some so terrible that it makes it impossible to recommend Stella Glow to those that would admire it most. Which is a shame, because it can be an enjoyable experience when all the pieces finally come together...

... but to get to that point, you have to suffer through eight hours of the worst the game has to offer.


Stella Glow's introduction is interminably long. For the first five combats you'll be relegated to 1-2 characters, with only the main character capable of using special abilities. This keeps battles woefully basic, imitating oldschool RPGs where most encounters are optimally solved via attack spam. Except instead of battles lasting under a minute, Stella Glow's scuffles are painstakingly lengthy, filled with a lot of movement animations, buff/debuff notifications, and languid battlefield effects. By the second fight you'll be wondering when the game picks up; by the fifth you'll be dreading that it won't.

Finally assembling the core cast in Chapter 1 doesn't alleviate matters either, as they're too frequently separated from one another and lack diversity. While it helps having more characters on the battlefield to control, it will take some time for each character to learn an ability other than "big attack"—and since you'll be facing the same enemies for the entire game (there's a total of like, 20 monsters), battles won't feel more interesting as much as they'll just feel longerStella Glow touts itself as a strategy RPG, but there's very little "strategy" involved in its first quarter: simply whack enemies from the side and heal if low on health. Combat isn't just simple—it's rudimentary and lacking.

By the time you reach Amatsu (the game's Japanese-style "fire" city) your feelings on Stella Glow will likely settle. Most of the mechanics and systems finally plateau here: you'll get accustomed to the free time system, understand how to craft and use orbs, know what "tuning" entails, have a good grasp on the story, and know how to handle combat by this point. Each party member will have 1-2 abilities to alternate between during battles and you'll finally be given the chance to switch out party members for one another, curating a team you prefer. However, none of these ever coalesce to form a satisfying hook; Stella Glow will waffle for too long between mediocre and decent, rarely breaking out of those bounds in either direction. Ultimately I'd describe it as an "okay" game—and sometimes, "okay" can be worse than both good or bad.


Yet one categorically bad thing about Stella Glow—which will irritate you like a toothpick caught in your throat—is that the game is slow as molasses. I mentioned before that the animations were languid, but another baffling issue is how enemies will loiter in the turn order queue. Every creature on the map gets a place in the queue, and those that do less actions on their turn will have their next turn pop up quicker. But Stella Glow's enemies are the patient sort, calmly waiting until your characters approaches their doorstep to act... which constantly places them ahead of your active characters in the queue. Over and over again the camera will pan over to these slackers and wait a beat, obsessively reminding you how much of the battle still remains.

This may start off as a minor annoyance but it becomes downright vexing later, with entire turn order rows clogged with inactive enemies (seriously, try Sakuya's 2nd tuning mission and tell me with a straight face that it doesn't intentionally seek to waste your time). It never lets up either, with even the endgame missions featuring legions of enemies that will lazily sit on their hands and watch the fight unfold. This grievance alone is so exhausting that it dooms Stella Glow to the "do not play" dustbin, which is a shame because the solution is so simple (warp them in later or just skip their turns!) The only saving grace is that while you're in Amatsu, you at least get to while your time away with its awesome battle theme, the best theme in the game (outside of the final boss).

The conducting ability is perhaps the most novel concept Stella Glow brings to the table, but it's equal parts inventive and bewildering. As a battle unfolds, a five-tiered status bar at the top of the screen will slowly accumulate levels, which can be spent on powerful AoE abilities. The lower tiers can dish out devastating attacks or multi-target buffs, while the higher tiers are legitimately game-changing, granting a full-party HP/MP restore or disabling every enemy on the map for four turns straight. The problem with this is that the non-witch party members (those that can't be conducted) lose a lot of their value as the game goes on, and even then witches like Sakuya and Mordimort have flat-out worse songs than Lisette and Popo (the full-team-heal, full-enemy-shutdown duo respectively). I appreciate the options that conducting adds to a strategy-light game like this, but it only serves to remind me that more could and should have been done to broaden the playing field.

Although I've spent an ample amount of time bemoaning Stella Glow's failures as a SRPG, I should note that the game is actually half RPG, half visual novel—that is, expect to read it just as much as you play it. In the story-department Stella Glow fares much better (the protagonist in particular is thankfully level-headed and proactive), but I still wouldn't describe it as captivating, well-written, or deep. Expect some decent characters (Klaus, Rusty, and Hilda), some stupid characters (Keith, Marie, Nonoka), and some that fall in-between that you can't help but love how annoying they are (Popo, Archibald). It's moe-heavy, rebel-against-god fluff at the end of the day, even if the story does throw out some cool ideas here and there. For instance, the most ambitious portion of the story upheaves the happy-go-lucky status quo, dangling some serious stakes in front of the player. Sadly you'll likely see it coming a stage or two beforehand, and its melodramatic after-effects can linger for a little too long.


I had basically no experience with developer Imageepoch before playing Stella Glow, and now learning that this was their last title released, I'm not sure what to think after hitting the credits on their portable swan song. In a way, it leaves me kind of curious: this was their culmination after 10 years of video game development? Did they peak early with Luminous Arc? Do they even have any die-hard fans? In any case, none of this changes the fact that Stella Glow lacks the luster to be called a hidden gem. I think the best thing you can say about it is that it at least tries to be its own "thing", even if that thing is a housed inside a box of trite anime nonsense mixed with some of the slowest, dullest SRPG combat I've ever experienced. Oh well.

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Images obtained from: imdb.com, outcyders.net, gematsu.com, myshopville.com

Monday, February 12, 2024

Superliminal - Thoughts


Among gaming's innumerable copycats, the Portal-likes are arguably the most creative. That's due in large part to the imitators' aversion to copying the central portal mechanic; rather, what they fancy is Portal's sardonic writing, compartmentalized structure, and science-first focus. This tends to make it obvious when you're playing a puzzler that comes from the school of Portal—but thankfully it's a good school, encouraging its students to break Newtonian Physics in creative new ways.

Superliminal is a recent graduate from this school, one that earned high marks with a relatively obscure focus: perception.


Of course, video games are no stranger to visual trickery. Almost every genre utilizes silent warps and illusory walls (horror games are smitten with mind games), but there aren't too many crunchy puzzlers built around this idea. Major titles like The Witness and Antichamber feature a decent chunk of perspective puzzles to grapple with, but those are merely fractions of a larger, more surreal whole. Superliminal on the other hand simple is humble and down to earth, placing the player in an empty workshop where everything functions as you think it should. Well, except for the fact that you have the uncanny ability to expand and shrink objects just by touching them. But it's not your fingers that are doing the manipulating, oddly enough—rather, it's how your see objects in relation to their surroundings that changes their physicality.

The easiest way to explain Superliminal's mechanics is to harken back to being a bored kid. There isn't a child alive that could resist bringing their index finger and thumb close to their eye and squishing members of their family, all while making a loud, wet "pblsbh!" noise. Depth is ignored in this silly action, rendering the squisher's fingers as large as their eyes see them and their unwitting victim as small as they are distant. And this is exactly how Superliminal works: bring a chess piece close to your vision and it will balloon in size when you drop it. Likewise, you can glance down at an apple between your feet and instantly pick it up, reducing it to no bigger than a grape. It's a phenomenally cool system that takes a bit of work to get used to, especially once you start trying to make stairs by cloning a single object.


Thankfully, Superliminal teaches you the ropes via a series of Portal-esque quarantine puzzles. You'll learn and re-learn the ins and outs of this strange new perspective mechanic, discovering how to fit large objects into tiny crevices and expanding morsels of food into indestructible loading ramps. Afterwards, the puzzles get a lot more obscure and intermittent, eschewing with the room-by-room challenges for more varied and unorthodox sandboxes. Yet the game never morphs into anything too complex or oversaturated; like Portal, the developer's goal is to stimulate, not stymie you. Superliminal is carefully curated so that you'll reach the credits in under three hours—provided you don't mind getting lost now and then.

Unlike Portal however, Superliminal rarely activates the lightbulb in your mind. The game is at its strongest when it introduces new mechanics for you to play around with (Induction, Clone, Dollhouse), but that's only a third of the game's material—if not less. The majority of Superliminal's challenge comes from navigational struggles, like finding a hidden object or escaping from an infinitely looping hallway. The final leg in particular leans heavily into optical illusions and obfuscated pathways, feeling less inspiring and more... disappointingly monotonous. Maybe I just wanted more cuboid puzzle rooms, unprepared for the game to pivot from Portal to The Beginner's Guide. In any case, I was pleased with Superliminal by the end, though not as ecstatic as I was when I first started it.

A minor thing that hammered this point home was the game's challenge mode. Similar to Portal (speaking of monotonous, how many times have I said that by now?), Superliminal tasks the player with using the fewest moves possible to reach a puzzle's solution. Every jump and interaction will be marked down once you begin a puzzle, with some of the restrictions initially feeling ludicrous, if not downright impossible (even the first puzzle is no joke!) But like the main game, the challenges shift from finding creative solutions to standing in precise spots to execute obvious but increasingly annoying maneuvers; it's less about thinking outside the box and more about finding the exact right-sized box to stand atop of. Towards the end, a lot of the challenge solutions become identical to those you discover during first playthrough, just with a minor tweak (if any) added. It's nothing that ruins the game, but merely reinforces the fact that the game was strictly designed with your initial playthrough in mind.


Superliminal is an excellent experience that's only so-so as a puzzler. During your first playthrough you'll run into some brilliant, mind-bending situations!... which will sadly lose their luster on replay. Like the perspective mechanic itself, the longer you toy with Superliminal's illusions, the less magical and more mechanical the game itself will become. The challenge mode in particular feels like a strange afterthought, more concerned with quizzing you on where and how you place its objects down, rather than on what you're doing or why. But if you avoid over-analyzing and instead sit back and relax, Superliminal takes you on a wild wide full of surprises, proving at the end of the day that it learned the right lessons in Portal school. What's big can be small, what's thin can be large, and maybe the exit you're looking for isn't going to be the one you're walking through.

Friday, December 22, 2023

Starfield - Thoughts


There are two questions swirling about in my head, and I am unsure which will lead me to the answers that I seek: "how did this get made?" or "why did this get made?" It's an issue of intention, stemming from the same source of bewilderment: Starfield.  As Bethesda's next big premier franchise, it was easy to get drawn into its grandiose mystique, wondering what they've learned from working on Elder Scrolls and Fallout. I stayed away from any prerelease coverage once I knew it would be coming to Game Pass, allowing me to dive in head-first, ready to explore its boundless universe.

I emerge out the other side confused and wildly irritated. Why is Starfield the way that it is? The question jut out at me again and again, like a turgid hangnail I could never clip. The game raises too many red flags for a seasoned developer, especially one with a devoted fanbase eager to show them where and how to make improvements. It stands to reason then that this is all by design, Bethesda intending for the game's foibles to come off better than they do. But the sheer clunkiness of Starfield's systems and its puddle-deep universe reek of something worse than simple scope creep or design oversight—it's a fundamentally slipshod experience that relies on you being too dumb to put it down.


Note that this isn't to say Starfield is devoid of merits. There's a lot to like here: the setting is well-fleshed out, the alien design is beautifully weird, the gunplay is leagues better than Fallout 4 (which was leagues better than Fallout 3), and Constellation feels like a proper family by the end of your journey. Your companions start off somewhat uninspired but grow considerably more interesting during your travels, and I like the motivation behind the enigmatic Starborn. On the surface, Starfield is both competent and confident, able to justify the hundreds of hours its fans will inevitably pour into it. But if you so much as scratch Starfield's pristine shell, you'll uncover the ashen remains of Bethesda games of old.

Skyrim's horrid inventory system makes its ugly return here, offering few ways to customize or manually sort through hundreds of items—and no way to mark anything as a ware to sell later. Important quest items and lore get piled into your "misc" tab, which is also where all of the game's junk gets shoveled into. There's no visual preview for any of the items in your inventory either, forcing you to manually flick through them one by one if you're looking for a specific weapon or ammo casing that you forgot the name of. Likewise, containers you loot out in the wild like locked chests and dead bodies only reveal the names of their contents, requiring a load to your inventory to glance at their sell value or individual statistics. I can't think of a single person that thought Skyrim's inventory system was flawless, which is why it's so baffling to me that it's been preserved here like a precious amber insect over ten years later.

The inventory system is its own can of worms, but I also have a special hatred in my heart for Starfield's physical marketplace—or lack thereof. For the first 20 hours I had no idea how to navigate it, burdened with questions the game had no care to answer. Where is the best place to buy ship parts? Digipicks? Offload contraband? Where are all the stores on New Atlantis? Are there merchants that can mod my weapons? Why can't I upgrade my reactor's capacity? Why don't any of these cities have any goddamn maps?! For far too long I'd wander around like a sleepless drunk, trying to remember what shops such as Outland, Whetstone, and Enhance sell (did you know one of them is an eatery?), with my stamina depleting every few steps thanks to the game's appallingly low carry capacity. And even when I did find the seller I was looking for, more than once I wound up buying some of their useless stock because your inventory screen and their inventory screen look the exact same.

The more of it I played, the more Starfield's atrocious inventory got on my nerves. Why can't the items you purchase get transferred directly to your ship? Why do I have to manually lug ship parts back to my vessel's miniscule vault? And why aren't direct heals (ie ship parts and med packs—the most used items in the game) given their own tab, instead of being lumped in amongst a bunch of useless food stuffs and situational drugs? Why do I have to remember the ammo types of my weapons when purchasing ammunition, instead of the game simply telling me I have a weapon that uses the ammo I'm looking at? Why are weapons denoted by color rarity when their preceding adjective (calibrated, refined, advanced, etc) is far more indicative of their value? Why isn't there an option to turn off contextual pick-ups for items (like staplers and beakers) that are worth less than ten credits? And why in god's name do you not auto-dump all of your heavy metal minerals onto you ship when you board it?! Who in their right mind wants to walk around with chunks of titanium and lead in their pockets, dragging down their pants until their pasty-white dumb ass is exposed?


The underlying issue this all points toward is that no matter how fun Starfield might look to play, it's a royal pain to navigate. And nowhere is this point more aggressively obvious than in its spacefaring, a veritable black hole dense enough that you can't grav jump away from it. Your spaceship, for as cool and customizable as it may be, is a glorified loading screen for 90% of the game. And this is in addition to the game's other unavoidable loading screens which bookend it! So you'll load to get into your ship, use your ship to click on your destination, and then load again to arrive. As if that wasn't enough, these bits are also bookended by unskippable animations, forming a sandwich so thick with loading that only the grotesque hoagie from Sonic '06 can rival it. This is no exaggeration—Starfield avoids taking the crown of inactivity solely because it loads faster than Sonic '06, not less.

This issue only gets compounded when you're trying to venture out to far-off solar systems, as you have to manually jump to every unexplored system on the way. At the start of the game this isn't a problem as exploring is still a novel idea; every moon could hide secret, every outpost a valuable quest to stumble upon. But there is nothing of value in Starfield's procedurally generated galaxy—just the same abandoned outposts, abandoned mines, and boring laboratories. Each rendition has only a few variations too, with the abandoned mine being the worst offender that you'll have to venture through it multiple times even within the main storyline. Eventually you'll learn to skip every celestial body you come upon, sticking to your terribly-organized quest log—and thus rendering every unexplored solar system between you and your objective another unnecessary loading screen to suffer through.

Occasionally space combat breaks out to remind you to stay awake, but it's a strongly love-it-or-hate-it affair. I commend Bethesda for doing a decent job in handling how it plays and giving you full control over your ship's systems (even if it's impossible to manage in the midst of combat), but the problem is that space combat is significantly more volatile than regular-ol' ground-based shootouts. Better weapons, engines, and ships are harder to come by due to their hefty price tags, and one enemy on your tail is harder to shake than an army of mercs bumbling about a space station. Not only is it impossible to tell what kind of weapons your enemy might have on them, but it's also difficult to discern what in your arsenal is effective due to how infrequent the dogfights are. Plus when you're outmatched in a gunfight on land, you can often hide behind a nearby rock to swap equipment or pump your veins full of performance-enhancing drugs. Meanwhile in space, your tin can is going to get shredded time and time again, with no way to alter the outcome. It's strangely antithetical to Bethesda's playstyle, narrowing the solutions from "play smarter" the singlular, boring "get better gear, dummy." Well, that and "dump more points into the spacefaring skill tree."

Like with a lot of other systems in Starfield, the skill trees are one step forward, two steps back. On paper it works well: each tree type is well-organized and allows players to put up to four points into a single skill, provided they complete a number of fun sub-objectives throughout their travels. But in Bethesda's quest to make levelling-up as gratifying as possible, they've hamstrung the player's abilities, planting essential skills across their tree. Things like being able to use your jetpack, pilot better ships, hack, see your stealth meter, parlay with NPCs, and carry more equipment are all relegated to skill tree upgrades, and you'll learn early on that level-ups are about as infrequent as the space battles. On the bright side this means there's always something on the horizon that you'll be anxious to pick up. Most of the time however, it makes the game feel frustrating and intentionally hobbled, requiring at least 10-20 levels to get properly settled (and even then, you'll wish you could dump even more points into carrying capacity).


For some folks, Starfield will scratch a special itch they can't get anywhere else—and look, I've been a fan of From Software since Demon's Souls, I get it. But like No Man's Sky years before it, you have to admit that the game is squandered potential made manifest. I went into Starfield without a chip on my shoulder but it beat me down with its draconic inventory system and fetish for loading screens. As a follow-up to Fallout 4 it feels shockingly unambitious; as a game from 2023 it is categorically outdated. Starfield's universe emulates—almost zealously—the very concept of outer space, filled with vast nothingness that's interspersed with boring, ubiquitous rocks. Sprinkled about are moments of that special, Bethesda magic (Barrett is a real sweetheart), but like a total eclipse, its pros are overshadowed by the immense dullness of it all. There are thousands upon thousands of worse video games out there, but none of that changes the fact that Starfield was one of the most irritating games I've played this decade, if not my entire life.

Saturday, November 4, 2023

Super Mario World - Thoughts


When I think of a games similar to Super Mario World, the first thing that comes to my mind is Doom of all things. It's not as though the two are similar thematically, visually, or even gameplay-wise—rather, it's that they owe much of their sustained prominence to their devoted fanbases. Don't get me wrong, the base games are plenty of fun and all, but they're just the tip of a massive historical iceberg. Both communities are alive and well in 2023, releasing new custom edits every week, often with superior visuals, stage design, graphics, music, power-ups—you name it. And while a smattering of Doom clones have transcended to a commercial debut (REKKR, Age of Hell, Supplice), Super Mario World hacks remain just as impressive in their own right, requiring equal amounts of skill, dedication, and technical know-how to create.

Yet what really ties these two together in my mind is that in nine out of ten cases, I'd rather play the fan creations than revisit the originals. Part of it is simply oversaturation, having played both games until the stages were embedded in my mind like the creases of my brain. But another part is that the games are unimpressively solid, being good enough to recommend to genre newcomers... yet never blowing me away on replay. I confess it's a strange stance to hold; I wouldn't wince at anyone calling either title their favorite game of all time, as they're both worthy of such adoration. Perhaps I just find Doom and Super Mario World more mundane than magical nowadays, unable to rekindle the same spark that jolted through me as a child.

But enough with the comparisons—let's dig into the SNES's launch day juggernaut: Super Mario World.


From the moment the player is put in control, World reveals that it is a joy to play. The nuts and bolts of Mario's physics have been tightened to pit stop perfection, ramping up the plumber's acceleration while granting more control over his aerial movement. Gone are the racoon leaf and p-wing, replaced by a versatile cape that requires a bit more work in order to stay airborne. But once you master it, the cape grants unparalleled freedom, allowing the player to bypass entire stages up in the safety of the clouds. Yoshi is also a welcome addition, capable of different abilities based on the last shell slurped up. Additionally, Yoshi provides the player with a small buffer of health, one they can replenish so long as they can catch the scuttling dinosaur after taking a hit. Neither of these power-ups are game changers in the grand scheme of things, but they're honestly the most fun renditions of their kind (flying & mount) that the series would ever see.

Super Mario Bros. 3 is a difficult act to follow up on, but World tries its damnedest, handing the player 73 varied courses to sprint through. Unlike SMB3 however, these stages are rarely rapid-fire affairs; expect chunky gauntlets stuffed with 5 dragon coins, a mid-level checkpoint, and the occasional hidden exit. This boosts World's playtime to over double that of 3, but new players need not worry—saving is now a staple for every Mario game going forward! No more frustrations with power-outages tanking your runs or having to start over if you want to replay your favorite level. In fact, replaying stages is now encouraged, as there are two routes through every overworld (sans Dinosaur Island), with the fully optional Star World itself housing a super-secret, extra-challenging Special world. The golden age of brief, single-session Mario games is over—the sprawling overworld buffets are here to say.

And filling the buffet trays are a curated blend of new obstacles mixed with old. Of course, World still includes the traditional Mario staples like koopas, bullet bills, lakitus, and podoboos. But the imaginative new additions are the show stealers: spell-slinging magikoopas, towering pokeys, patrolling fuzzies, fireproof dino rhinos, and the doggedly-annoying rip van fish, just to name a few. The spectral bestiary also receives its own expansion, with a host of Boo cousins (big boo, boo circles, fishin' boo) coming over to crash at the ghost houses, which have transformed from wannabe-castles to (the superior) puzzle-mazes. And last but certainly not least are the ever-tenacious chargin' chucks, the natural evolution of the hammer bro that ditches the obnoxious tool-tossing for a wider variety of attacks, adding a little extra spice to your platforming purview.


Super Mario World isn't content to stop there either: there are plenty of non-hostile objects to encounter along your journey, like climbable fences, rope pulleys, portable springs, countdown platforms, magic keys, and a balloon power-up that... well the p-balloon kind of sucks, but the other items are cool. However, the game's most interesting "item" has to be its colored blocks, which make their first (and only!) appearance in the franchise here. To activate them, you must first find a secret exit that leads to one of the four colored switch palaces, and then beating said palace will activate its corresponding blocks permanently for every level they appear in. This grants a range of benefits, from additional power-ups, to pit protection, to even a new means by which to reach a secret exit. The colored blocks may come off as little more than set dressing if you're used to playing with all of them "on" at all times, but I appreciate how much more difficult the game becomes if you opt to skip all of the switch palaces, giving World its own pseudo-"hard mode". I think it's worth a playthrough if you've never done it before.

Of course, if you really want to to crank up the challenge in Super Mario World, the Special stages eagerly await your attendance. Here you will be tested and battered, starting with a rain of projectiles in Tubular, to brutal single-block jumps in Awesome, to the busy bullet bill forest of Outrageous. It's a fantastic set of bonus stages that, while downright tame compared to the torture chambers fans cook up nowadays, struck terror into many a young child—myself included. It's an excellent postgame gauntlet similar to the lettered worlds of Japan's Super Mario Bros. 2, albeit a lot easier to access and considerably more creative. Sure, the reward for beating the Special stages is essentially a lame novelty (some bizarre palette swaps), but the levels merit a playthrough on their awesome challenge alone. Despite the optional nature of the Special stages, I always make sure to cap off a replay of World by blasting through them.

Would that I could lay the same praise upon Star Road—the unique warp zone world—but here are where my Super Mario World gripes bubble to the surface. While every other world is packed with decent-to-excellent levels, Star Road reeks of nothing but stinkers. Stage 1 feels like a subzone outtake, Stage 2 is a featureless hallway, and Stage 3 is probably the shortest—and thus worst—Mario level of all time. Only Stages 4 & 5 have any sort of competent level design, and even then it's nothing exceptional. The best thing about Star Road is that it's thankfully short, but even then you'll still have to play through it twice if you're looking to achieve the game's 96 exit completion.

Worse yet is that Star Road is useless as a warp zone; its only practical use is as shortcut for the overworld once completed. Using Star Road to skip worlds is impossible due to the fact that the warp nodes leave you stranded unless you've completed the pathway to them on the overworld. The one level you can reach early is Bowser's Castle—the final stage—which is a far cry from the flexibility of 3's warp whistle. Plus most folks will have to discover the red and blue switch palaces to finish Star Road's Stage 4, which makes roughly a third of the game mandatory to play through anyway. From top to bottom, Star Road is a celestial blunder.


Another lackluster addition to Super Mario World are its newfangled dino coins. Spread around each stage are five golden bits that will grant you an extra life once gathered together, marking the start of what would eventually become New's collectible star coins. The dino coins are neat in that they double down on the exploration aspect of Mario... except for the fact that World doesn't keep track of any of the coins you've picked up. Even if it did, the coins are startlingly inconsistent: some stages have more than five, some should have them but don't, and a ton of coins are placed in utterly effortless spots. While it's not fair to blame World for failing to utilize its collectible in a way that future titles would, I still can't view the dino coins as anything but missed potential. There's a reason that among the vast additions World brought to the series, nearly nobody mentions this prehistoric specie.

And then there's the game's hideously boring bosses. On one hand the Super Mario Bros. series has never been fixated around its boss fights—and thus doesn't need them to be compelling—but on the other hand there's plenty of games with excellent and creative battles, illustrating how well a boss can fit when done right (Yoshi's Island, Land 2, NSMB Wii). Super Mario World doesn't have a high bar to clear when compared to its predecessors, but its feeble boss roster fails outdo the variety of 2 and the dynamism of 3. Reznor and Big Boo are fought in nearly the same manner in every encounter, and the only good Koopa Kids are the Lemmy/Wendy variations. Every other fight ends just as quickly as it started, and I could write a thousand words alone on how pathetic the Bowser finale is. I'll just say that any final boss that allows you to crouch in a corner like a coward for the majority of the fight is a real stinker in my book.

Lastly—and the point I'm least passionate about—is that the Super Mario World is kind of ugly. There are a couple of addendums that come with this gripe, like how the game a launch title, that the pastel palette hasn't aged as poorly as other SNES titles, or that its simplistic art matches World's laser focus on pure platforming. But these are ultimately excuses—not remedies. Foreground blocks are mostly made of a single color, backgrounds are sparsely detailed and frequently repetitive, and the animations aren't anything to write home about. World looks its best when you're inside of a ghost house of all things, but what you'll see far more are the repetitive gray caverns of the underground—areas which fail to leave any kind of impression on your memory. For the record, I don't hate or detest the art style... but I'm far from being enamored with it either. Honestly, World's visuals are just disappointingly dull in retrospect.

Looking back on what I've written, what befuddles me the most about all of this is that Super Mario World  remains a 9/10 experience at the end of the day, capable of rivaling the best platformers of the last thirty years. All of its issues are vain, minor blemishes that only stand out if you're paid to scrutinizing the game, as your first reaction upon playing it isn't to gawk at the flaws, but to simply mutter in amazement, "wow this is fun." What makes World excel is that it is Mario to its binary core: a fun platformer with controls that prioritize speed and ease, the two things that Donkey Kong Country would steal and hone in on. During a casual playthrough, World's missteps come across as eccentricities you'll blow by faster than the rolling hills in the background, all while you bounce atop the heads of paratroopers and monty moles. It's only under a lens thick enough to hammer nails with that the game's ugliness comes out—and even then, it's rarely more than a trifling crack.


Perhaps an unshakeable issue I have with Super Mario World is how the game fares in hindsight. For me at least, a lot of other Mario titles offer a more enticing package: some games have better overworlds, or more dynamic levels, or more powerups, more stages, better bosses, better visuals, etc. Though one could make the same argument for Super Mario Bros. 3, I feel that time has been kind to that 8-bit goliath, its vicious limitations making it shine even brighter in retrospect. Super Mario World is great—phenomenal, even!—well-deserving of its favoritism and fandom... but I just don't find it as immutable or flawless as its siblings. The fact that fans have made more impressive iterations on World using its formula means there's room for improvement; as gratifying as an "A-" is to receive, the existence of an A+ means things could be better.

Of course, even after saying all of this, I'll still fully play through Super Mario World at least a dozen more times before I kick the bucket—and I'll have a ripping good time every time I do. I can reason out a myriad of excuses for preferring or Galaxy or NSMB Wii over it, but none of those post hoc arguments can take away from the fact that the game is sheer fun distilled into a delicious little brew. It's something the World community has known about for decades, understanding that World's sublime engine—not its nostalgia—is what gives the game it's immortal reputation. Super Mario World may not be the best game of all time, but like with Doom, it will forever stand shoulder to shoulder among the best.

Saturday, September 30, 2023

Caveblazers - Thoughts


[contains minor spoilers]

Few games miss the mark as sloppily as Caveblazers does. A Spelunky clone with Terraria-esque items isn't exactly a novel idea, but the concept does have decent legs. All one has to do is offer a smorgasbord of weapons & enemies, tune the controls to a buttery smoothness, and then coat it all in a bland-but-serviceable pixel art dress—et voila! a b-grade roguelite is born! Even if it's unable to surpass its idols, the game should be strong enough to establish its own niche fanbase, standing proud amidst the great the field of roguelites...

... at least in theory. In reality, Caveblazers stumbles in a myriad of small ways, dragging even its best aspects down into the muck of mediocrity. It's not such a precipitous drop that I'd laugh at anyone claiming the game to be one of their favorites, but a few hours are all you need to understand why Caveblazers has failed to gain traction. To put it plainly: the game is willfully annoying in the worst ways possible.


First off, the main bosses are a masterclass in obnoxious design. There are a total of eight big baddies to topple (four of which you'll face on a full run) that vary drastically in strength and difficulty. And I do mean drastically; on the far ends of the spectrum you have Azguard and Chrono'boid, the former rarely managing to hit you more than once while the latter is unironically harder than all three phases of the final boss. And then you have bosses like Grubbington & Iron Face: unpredictable but easily bested goons, which are counterbalanced by Medusa & Deathrig: repetitive slogs that will punish the slightest miscalculations. The last two fiends—Felfang & Goliath—are messy, manic fights that you'll either coast through with ease, or be sent flying around the room like divorcee's stress ball.

Imbalanced bosses may be par for the course in gaming, but here's the kicker: these bosses can be encountered in any order, with nothing but their HP values changed. Hell, even their damage remains the same! This means you'll often face the game's hardest bosses right off the bat, all while you're probably still stuck with your impotent starter weapons, tiny health bar, and whatever two blessings Caveblazers has deigned to give you. Occasionally you might manage to pull through. but your rewards are also randomized, ranging anywhere from healing items, to much-needed blessings, to shit-tier bombs you'll never use even in an emergency. So there's always a chance you could strike it rich and get a piece of equipment that carries you to the end of the game... or—and what occurs more often—simply bleed out from a thousand little cuts, in spite of all your hard work.

And look, I get it—roguelites are all about the individuality of a run, and making do with the scraps you've been given. Of course an early jetpack in Spelunky or an S-tier chest in Enter the Gungeon can swing momentum wildly in your favor, but the difference here is that Caveblazers refuses to offer the player meaningful decisions. There aren't any shops here, nor stage branches, nor optional challenges beyond the secret arena in the first level. In this linear land you'll live and die by Caveblazer's RNG, subject to its capricious whims like a raft caught in a tempest. Even the gambling shrines have a massive loot table, dropping anything from a powerful new weapon to yet another shit-tier bomb—and those shrines aren't cheap!

There are two quasi-remedies to Caveblazer's RNG-dependance, but I find that neither is a reliable fix. The first is perhaps the coolest mechanic unique to the game: altars where you can combine items together. The hitch is that it has to be two of the same item, but the resulting super-item is almost always worth it, and you'll likely to stumble across a duplicate to use somewhere during your journey (it's usually another ring). The second is far more game-changing: a run-modifier that adds a shop to the end of every odd-numbered floor. But to unlock it, you'll have to delve pretty deep through the game and know exactly where to look for the relic. Not only that, but it also removes the free blessings offered to the player, a change that initially makes the game harder as you have to divest funds away from healing in order to now afford equipment and blessings. So it's not a step in the right direction as much as it's an equally-punishing sideways hobble.


Speaking of equipment, Caveblazers offers players both sword and bow to conquer its perilous depths with, but your survival depends largely on your use of the latter. Enemies in this game are quicker, stronger, and more ruthless than you could ever be, able to react instantaneously amidst the chaos of combat, all while you're still processing which one of you just took damage. This leaves you fundamentally outclassed—that is, until you take potshots at them a screen away, where they'll happily let themselves be used as target practice. As someone that tried his damnedest to make melee builds work (and they can, but you need both range upgrades and lifesteal), trust me when I claim it's far easier to find a decent bow and to lean on that for the rest of the game. Plus if you stumble across some arrow blessings like pierce, double damage, and ricochet, your enemies will be lucky if they ever share a screen with you again.

What really kills melee builds in this game however is the fact that half of the bosses prefer to hover outside of your attack range. Some may welcome a good thwacking (Felfang, Grubbington) but most are aerial threats that either spend no time on the ground (Deathrig, Goliath) or punish you when you decide to get up close and personal (Iron Face, Chrono'boid). The last boss in particular loves to be a floating, squirrely little cad, bombarding you from afar with homing explosives. Again, it's not to say melee builds are impossible (though they kind of are against the last boss), but rather that the path of least resistance winds down the obvious road of archery.

Even then, the road is still riddled with plenty of resistance, with most of it coming from a handful of enemies: Jumpers, Kullos, and Demon Orcs. The Jumper is Caveblazer's resident Creeper, able to fling its explosive body around at great distances whenever it wants. While they're the most nettlesome of the lot (expect to take plenty of explosions on the chin), the Kullos are the most dangerous, able to slip through your barrage of arrows and harass you 'til death do you part. Demon Orcs are out of depth monsters that make rare appearances but can be a stubborn adversary, relentlessly hunting you down and deflecting a majority of your attacks. Tiki Grubs and Cave Trolls also earn honorable mentions for being able to single-handedly end runs, but the evil trinity above earn their infamy for how early and often they appear. Unlike Spelunky, Caveblazers's traps, hazards, and foes don't really scale as you progress; Kullos are the most dangerous enemy at the start of the game, and they'll remain the most dangerous enemy by the end of it.

All of these systems add up to make Caveblazers a wildly imbalanced experience, where a dozen little roadblocks can equal your inevitable end. Causes for defeat are numerous: it could be a combination of enemies you're fighting, or an important blessing missing from your repertoire, or a lack of decent equipment before facing your first boss. And there are more major issues I haven't even covered: sometimes blessings are hidden behind walls you have to bomb when you have no bombs (and no, the shit-tier bombs don't destroy terrain). Sometimes you'll be saving up for a health shrine that won't appear for multiple floors in a row. And the potion system is atrocious, devoid of the typical means to identify what it does before quaffing it (ie identify scroll or vendor appraisal). You either have to toss it to a specific genus of monster and remember of color potion they drank, or throw your dice to the wind and hope its not a permanent debuff to an integral stat... something that'll happen far more often than it feels like it should.


The amateur game designer in me is stupefied over Caveblazers. I feel like its problems are glaringly obvious after you spend a short amount of time with it... but perhaps the twisted truth is that all these eccentricates are intentional. For all I know, Deadpan Games may see Caveblazers as a resounding success, evoking a heady blend of dungeon-delving randomness with precision-based combat. But it's a messy, unwieldy concoction, one that grows more bitter the further you delve. The dungeon's offerings are too random, its combat too frantic to feel graceful (or even controllable), and even your wins can feel as undeserved and capricious as your deaths do. Caveblazers makes a valiant attempt at being a well-built roguelite, but all it proves is how difficult it is to even reach the shadows of the genre's greatest.

Tuesday, August 15, 2023

Colorzzle - Thoughts


Simplicity can be a fickle concept. Akin to an amateur tightrope walker, it wobbles awkwardly between elegant and boring, ready to plunge off either side at a moment's notice. The Atari 2600 and its ilk know this pain all too well, their vast libraries reduced to little more than droll oddities nowadays. But puzzle games tend to fare better at skirting this fate; sudoku, crossword puzzles, Wordle, Minesweeper, Tetris, and innumerable others are played daily by folks both young and old. There's something about a repeatable brain teaser that never grows stale, like listening to your favorite song from a decade ago or sipping from a cold drink after a mile run. However, boredom awaits on the other side of the tightrope, a dreadful reminder that inoculation does not mean immunization. 

Case-in-point: Colorzzle, a visually-pleasing, simple puzzler that's about as deep as a single coat of paint.


The premise behind Colorzzle is deliciously succinct: match open blocks with their required color. Got a red open block? Slot a red square next to it. A green open block? Try a green square—or you can sandwich it between one blue and one yellow square instead! The ability to "blend" adjacent colors to create secondary (and tertiary) hues is at the core of Colorzzle's challenge, as well as its main draw. Being given a scattered rainbow of cubes and having to neatly organize them can be a fun endeavor... but the appeal doesn't last long.

The big problem is that Colorzzle doesn't really require much thought from the player. Once you've memorized the various color combinations, puzzles boil down to mechanical busywork. The longest puzzles tend to be those that require the most reorganization, the solution only mildly obscured from the player. Colorzzle tries to spice things up with new mechanics like color-changing blocks and optic beams, but these aren't new tools in your repertoire as much as they're static blocks that take a couple of clicks to get "right". In Colorzzle's hour-long run time, I only found the postgame puzzles to be worthy of my brainpower—so about a tenth of the game. The rest of my playthrough was simply fine: too pleasant to ever become annoying, but too dull to deserve a place in my memory.


All things considered, there are worse things for a puzzle game to be than boring. A hellish experience like Understand instantly flits to mind, with its dense web of obscure rules and moon-logic that blows past "stupefying" and lands on "just stupid." It's probably better for a game to be "boring" rather than "dumb", but there aren't really any takeaways to be had with the former—just a gentle disappointment, like crawling into bed only to realize you forgot your phone charger downstairs. It's an innocuous sin that—at most—elicits a tsk... which was my exact reaction upon finishing Colorzzle. For a game so visually vibrant, Colorzzle's gameplay is about as gray as you can get.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Scorn - Thoughts


(contains minor spoilers)

A weird thing about humans (or all living organisms really) is that we're frighteningly adaptable. Conditions we might have once called upsetting or untenable can be made numbingly commonplace after an extended period of time. Likewise, even luxury and leisure can be rendered stale and boring as they become one's new normal. In the best cases, we can transform an annoyance into a non-issue; in the worst cases, we grow immune to unspeakable cruelty. Our adaptability can help us survive, but in doing so, we can lose sight of the reason why, driven to keep on living long after the reasons for doing so have entirely vanished.

Scorn takes at this carnal ability to adapt and deifies it, imagining a world where death is one of the least worrisome things that could happen to you. The game has its fair share of problems (most of which is derived from its laborious combat), but it's a fascinating experience, completely unlike most other games I've played. Scorn takes its art design seriously, prioritizing it over coddling the player or ensuring they're having a smooth "gaming experience". That's because Scorn aims to immerse you in a world where life itself is a cancer, twisting the need to survive even in the most dire of circumstances into a new, violent nightmare.


The worst thing I can say about Scorn is that it's fully indebted to the groundwork paved by H.R. Giger and Zdzislaw Beksinski. Their haunting, unsettling artwork is the periodic table from which every molecule of Scorn is formed. Although the films Alien and Species partnered with Giger to help bring his vile creations to life, it's this game that best embraces his work, offering an ostensible museum wherein even the walls are designed by the Swiss surrealist. On one hand, you might be tempted to damn Scorn as a sycophantic knockoff of its betters... but on the other, Scorn is a visual masterpiece, flawlessly bringing its feverish inspirations to life. If there's one reason to play Scorn, it's to bear witness to Ebb Software's dilapidated playground of oozing insanity, where you can personally inspect every rotten orifice and gawk at the turgid abominations retching acid from what you can only assume is their "face".

Besides its putrid, cannabalistic world, the other way Scorn upsets the player is with a sharp genre shift midway through your journey. At first Scorn plays somewhere between Gone Home and Myst, tasking the player to solve contextless puzzles in a possibly-abandoned, possibly-haunted environment. But near the halfway point of the game (or rather, its middle third), Scorn becomes a full-on oldschool FPS, complete with ADS, health stations, and a shotgun made from bone and flesh. Wisely managing your health and ammo trumps analyzing the environment, as you'll soon find that enemies are numerous and supplies are rare. There are still puzzles here and there to solve, but most of your time will be spent keeping your hide intact as sinewy monsters close in on you, blood and sweat dripping from their pores. You might come to Scorn eager to explore its morbid environment, but cumbersome shooting will eventually take center stage—for arguably too long.

As an avid appreciator of both environmental puzzles and tough combat, I didn't mind Scorn's shift towards the latter... but it's obvious the game is more adroit at the former. Despite the lack of enemies early on, Scorn is comes off as eerie and unnerving, making the world feel as tense as it is revolting. Unfortunately, once you've tangoed with the game's four basic enemies enough times, a lot of the apprehension vanishes, the tension refocused. Now what's scary is trying to figure out where the next health station is, or if you're about to get sandwiched, or when to use your precious pistol ammo. Scuffles can get dire quickly, prompting you to lean on the weaknesses in the enemy AI such as camping corners or de-aggroing your foes so you can run up and stab them from behind. By the time you reach the game's (somewhat silly) final boss, fear has been stripped from your mind, replaced by stoic analyzation, the urge to reload, and a tinge of annoyance.


Scorn's combat is pretty terrible—but at least I understand why it's there. One of the unique ways video games can convey horror is through punishing gameplay systems, like depriving you of resources (Resident Evil), making your character difficult to control (Clock Tower), or even threatening to trap you in an unwinnable save state (Silent Hill 4). While Scorn comfortably slides into the survivor horror compartment, it lacks the items, bestiary, and maze-like setting that makes games like the Resident Evil franchise so lush and captivating to experience. Scorn by comparison is crude and brutish, largely concerned with robbing you of health and ammo whenever you happen to stumble across an. There aren't interesting systems at play, secret caches, or special items to uncover (beyond a single, uninteresting key ring)—all that stands between you and the ending is an intestinal hallway clogged with locked doors and faceless foes.

Yet despite having the ability to fend for yourself, there's a moon-sized gulf between you and action heroes like Doomguy and Gordon Freeman. They are veritable gods of death, grim reapers that dispense a personal justice one pile of corpses at a time. But in Scorn, you're just a weak, scared, naked nobody that lives health station to health station, the grim knowledge that death is inevitable eating away at the back of your mind. Scorn's combat sucks to play because Scorn's world sucks to live in—it has to be one of the absolute worst in fictional media, eclipsing even the desolate apocalypse of I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream. Happiness was never even an option here—the only hope you carry is that your death will be swift and painless... a baseless fancy you know is too good to be true.

In a twisted turn of events however, you'll learn to appreciate Scorn's world for what it is. While it stays viscerally upsetting to the very end, you'll adapt to its once-grotesque imagery, marveling instead at its grandeur. You'll pass under spinal archways, climb atop flaking steeples, and operate machinery that mimics the human body: disgusting, yet indescribably ornate. Even the way creatures congregate together can be strangely, uncomfortably beautiful, with disemboweled corpses in the latter half of the game posed in a serene, nearly-orgasmic state together. Like Giger before them, Ebb Software deliberately blends pleasure and pain together, turning every wretched hallway into a painting, every pulsating health station into an blessed confessional. You'll adapt to its wriggling hell, giving up on finding a way out in favor of discover what happens next.


Scorn is simultaneously tortured and beautiful, narrowly treading the line between fetishistic grotesquerie and high art. It's clearly not for everyone—especially for those with a tender disposition or fans of concrete stories—but if you shut off all the lights and immerse yourself in its world, Scorn provides an awesome experience. It's a game that's nearly impossible to predict, pulling you in a dozen different directions before climaxing in an ungodly carnival of pain. Scorn emphasizes that death is not the goal of life; rather, more life is. And that should scare you more than anything you can possibly imagine.