Eldest Souls - Thoughts

I wish I could dodge sooner after an attack.

That single sentence is what delivers the fatal blow to Eldest Souls, a top-down boss rush that would be worthy of a recommendation if it just felt a bit snappier. I kept the thought from my mind for as long as I could, since the developer usually knows more about how their experience should play than an amateur tourist bumbling through their world. But every action your character performs is insufferably slow: attacking, charging, dodging, and casting are 0.2 seconds slower than the boss's next attack. And while I could tolerate it sometimes, being unable to dodge cancel out of the end of an attack animation wore me down by the end, especially during the game's DLC bosses. I don't think Eldest Souls is a bad game, but it's not my idea of a good time either.

As a general rule, I try my best to sympathize with the intent of a game designer. Rather than jumping to adjectives like "unfair" or "annoying" during a play session, I tell myself to remain inquisitive: what am I getting wrong about this fight? Is there something I'm missing from my repertoire? Is there a mechanic I'm overlooking? Staying open minded has allowed me to greatly enjoy unorthodox control schemes like Castlevania's fixed jump and Resident Evil's clunky tank controls. In both franchises the level design is molded around these restrictions, letting you survive so long as you take into account your own limitations. I get the gripes people have with them—deaths will come from your lack of total control—but I think the challenges they present are more interesting than they are troublesome. They taught me that limitations aren't always a bad thing; toppling a challenge while inhibited can be more gratifying than overcoming it at your best.

But man did I struggle to appreciate Eldest Souls's sluggishness. Part of it is that I think the attack animation lacks the appropriate weight: the blade swing is languid and the slash effect doesn't linger long enough, giving you the impression that the attack is over despite there being a dozen or so frames left to it. Watching your character stand in place while you jam on the dodge button doesn't feel good, even if it might make sense balance-wise to force the player to commit to their attack. I never got used to how rigid combat felt either, as even on my replay run I found myself getting caught by enemy attacks I was instinctively trying to dodge out of. Fight by fight, my enjoyment for Eldest Souls was continuously stretched thin, its restrictiveness revealing that even classic-vania fans have their limits.

Of course, another reason your character feels like an octogenarian fresh out of the hospital is because bosses are spry and quick. The first two bosses of the game are a fair and measured challenge, but after that the gloves come off and you get the real Eldest Souls experience: area of effect spam. The battlefield will light up in a tapestry colors as you blow through your stamina trying to get away, all while the boss primes their next attack (or two) before the first is gone from the battlefield. The worst offenders of this are Eos, Warden, Hyem, and the DLC bosses—which is almost half of the entire boss roster. When Eldest Souls is at its best it'll feel like a proper duel with an extra degree of danger (like with Azikel and the final boss) but for the rest of the fights you'll feel like you're trying to dodge strobe lights at a rave—except instead of taking ecstasy you've been gobbling downers. 

To offset the enormous advantage the bosses get, Eldest Souls hands you three distinct skill trees that can be leveled up after each of your victories. Throw in boss souls that can be used to modify your existing abilities, and there's a shocking amount of choice here: you can basically play through the game six different times before having to resort to a similar build. Unfortunately, since progressing your skills is gated by boss victories, you'll have to churn through the first couple fights before your build comes into its own—and by that point you're halfway through the journey. The first four bosses have to be fought in roughly the same order too (with #3 and #4 able to be swapped), further hammering in the early-game sameyness. And while NG+ lets your carry over your unique build, it ratches up the difficulty to such an absurd degree that you may as well start practicing no-hit runs after you beat it.

Beyond the boss fights, there's not much else propping up the world of Eldest Souls. The environmental art is excellent and the sound design captures your attention a shocking number of times, but all else falls by the wayside. The music is okay, enemy design is fairly cartoony, animations are barely adequate, and the story is so astonishingly paper-thin that none of it is worth reading. The lore references kings and characters you'll never meet and that never matter, pulling your attention away from the ostensibly rad, mad gods that plague the land. NPCs are one-note cryptic weirdos copied over from Dark Souls, bosses have zero dialogue, and you never really get a feel for what this kingdom was like as a whole—other than the fact that they were a monarchy that owned slaves, which doesn't really encourage you to save this wretched world.

Lastly, kudos to the developer for offering three DLC boss fights for free, but the player should beware: these are some super-charged challenges. These three nightmares flood the arena with hazards and damage at an alarming rate, easily trapping you in a death combo if you run out of stamina for dashing. Ironically I found the last boss to be the most "fair" as he had a distinct mechanic you had to play around, while the second boss (spider lady) was a serious roadblock for me. Between the slow webbing, the poison, random fountain prompts, and her absurdly-fast movements (seriously, what's with that spin attack?!), the battle encapsulated everything that drove me up a wall about Eldest Souls. These fights are a cool set of bosses on paper, but a frustrating damage-roulette in practice.

Eldest Souls certainly has its meritorious moments, but for me there's like half a dozen other top-down games that get their combat right that I can't help but chide this one when it flounders. There are other criticisms I could lob at the game that I've heard from other players—can't dash through enemies, easy to get stuck in a corner, high boss HP pool—but I feel that they're negligible compared to the lack of dodge canceling. I appreciate the developer adding in a (bafflingly) robust skill tree for such a small game, but that alone can't save it; Eldest Souls is a swing and a—wait ten frames—miss.

Kirby Mass Attack - Thoughts

It's rare for me to feel repulsed by a game. I think as long as I pick up a title willingly, I can usually find something about it that I enjoy—even if it's something as simple as the game's concept. Case in point: a sidescroller Pikmin-like with touch controls? Sure, sign me up! I had a lot of fun with games like Ninja Gaiden: Dragon Sword and both DS Zelda outings, so it seemed probable that I would enjoy Kirby: Mass Attack. Plus the fan reception towards the game was generally warm (some calling it a forgotten masterpiece) and HAL had yet to steer me wrong...

... until about an hour in, where I realized I was descending into a terrible pit or poor design choices. Kirby: Mass Attack has two only gears: boring and frustrating, leaving the game an unsalvageable mess. It is, as sad as it is to say, one of my least favorite games I've ever had the displeasure of completing.

I understand full-well how audacious the previous sentence sounds. I've played a lot of junk in my day, with only a fraction of it being stuff I've reviewed for this website. But what places Mass Attack near the top of the steaming heap is that I found nearly none of the game fun to play. It suffers from two equally damning, deadly problems: bad controls and bad stage design. I cannot understate what an awfully noxious concoction this produces; it would be one thing if the game wasn't pleasant to play, another if the stages dampened your fun, but both together renders Mass Attack a mood-cratering chore.

The first point—the controls—seem solid on first blush. You can tap the screen to make Kirby walk, double tap to make him run, and a quick scratch will fling him at your enemies. All of this works like you think it should, but the more Kirbys you add to the equation, the messier the game becomes. The pink puffballs tend to spread out rather than bunch up, and since the camera needs to keep all ten in frame if possible, you don't have a lot of screen real estate to work with. Worse yet is neither does the gang of Kirbys: prompting them to move produces definitive "winners" and "laggers", with some Kirbys reaching your stylus first and others taking a second or two to catch up. Therefore the camera doesn't have much room to look ahead at what you could possibly be running headfirst into, and if there's one Kirby missing it won't even move until he's reunited with the rest of the pack.

Plus there's a nastier consequence to holding your stylus down to usher the Kirbys along—Kirbys that reach your stylus will be sucked into a Canvas Curse-esque blob that can be ferried to wherever you draw. The problem with this is that it absolutely kills the game's momentum, as the Canvas Curse blob is not only slow but worse at wrangling the camera than your screen taps are. Most of the time you will activate this effect without wanting to use it, giving the game a very stuttery ebb and flow as you tap away to dispel the blob, and then hold on the right side of the scren to keep the train moving. So whenever you're not having a tug-of-war with the camera, you'll be watching the Kirbys at the caboose struggling (and failing) to make a jump to keep up, while those at the head attach themselves to your stylus like a newborn desperate to suckle. Though annoying only a couple hours in, you better brace yourself, because this vexing struggle is going to go on for at least ten.

Kirby games are usually not lengthy affairs. Most of the titles can be wrapped up in under three hours, with only the bigger, more prestige titles reaching the (still comfortable) seven hour mark. Mass Attack is about 1.5 hours of content spread into a vacant 12 hour container, thanks to its laborious and glacial level design. Stages in this game just do not know when the hell to end, stretching on for over fifteen minutes at a time—and that's if you don't have to replay the stage! So much of this game is designed to slow you down: mid-stage cutscenes, painfully long autoscrollers, durable minibosses, stretches of flat land, and endless patience-testing mechanics like darkness, sandstorms, rolling logs, simon says switches, block destroying, block pushing—it never ends! Hell, once you have all ten Kirbys out on the field, consuming more fruit will pause the game momentarily to add to your worthless score, which also unnecessarily interrupts your run command. Mass Attack willingly sabotages itself, resulting in the stupidest thing possible: death by innumerable speedbumps.

God help you should you aim to 100% the game, because you will receive no mercy from the designers. Completionist goals are split into three categories: grabbing all the medals on a stage, beating a level without a single death, and completing hidden bonus objectives. On my run I only had the stomach to attempt the first category, and even that was a pain in the ass to complete. Mass Attack commits the cardinal sin of storing its medals down exclusively branching paths, forcing you to replay a level to grab them all. It's not one or two stages either: 1-1, 1-9, 2-1, 2-2, 2-4, 3-5, 3-8, 3-10, 4-1, 4-2, 4-4, 4-6, & 4-11 all require multiple visits. And this isn't even counting all the stages in which you only have one chance to grab a quickly appearing medal, or if you miss one by accident, or if you just take the wrong goddamn door!

The content within the levels themselves range from dull to decent, although you're likely to notice a weird trend: Mass Attack is at its best when you're not playing, well, Mass Attack. The first four levels of World 3, 6-2's tank stage, and the surprisingly robust minigames you unlock are the closest I've had to "fun" in the game, with the key feature linking them being they have nothing to do with the 10 Kirby touch screen gimmick (I think 3-11 is probably the best regular level, but even then its leaning tower gimmick could easily be used in another one of the puffball's platformer outings). Meanwhile the game's more traditional stages were constantly hair-pulling: 1-5 has you walking around 90% of the time, 1-8 is rotten with time-wasters, 2-5's miniboss is a joyless slog, 3-7's valves take twice as long as they should to rotate, and 4-10's ship ride is like 5 whole minutes of mindless flicking. The worst offense of all is found at the end of 4-11: after a gruelingly long stage you're offered an invulnerability power-up that's often used to get medals in impossible-to-reach places. But if you take the power-up and run through the last leg of the stage, you'll destroy a key you need to unlock a chest that contains the last medal you're hunting for. I've never seen a Nintendo game bait you with a power-up that will then lock you out of getting a collectible. It's just rude and spiteful; one more blemish to add onto this ugly, bloated wretch of a game.

In a vain attempt to pity you, Mass Attack includes mid-level warps that can take you straight to the goal, provided you've completed the stage before. But these are often placed in the most puzzling areas. Ideally you'd use them if you missed an early medal but didn't want to replay the entire stage, but I often found the warps were placed before you could even grab the first medal. That, and the most easily missed medals (those you have only one chance to get) often show up at the end of a stage, rendering the warps useless. I suppose you could use them if you needed to restock your Kirbys, but you'll rarely be finishing a stage with any Kirbys missing, as even a full wipe will bring you back to your initial Kirby count. It's a complete design oversight—look at the mid-level warp in 3-1/3-2/3-3/3-4 and tell me this game is well designed with a straight face.

Even Mass Attack's aesthetics underwhelmed by the end of my journey. Occasionally the backgrounds can look pretty nice (like at the start of Worlds 3 and 4), but the game is far from the looker that Super Star Ultra and Squeak Squad are. Levels are fairly barren by design since all 10 Kirbys need space to stick together, and I was never really impressed or tickled by the enemy design. Likewise, the soundtrack underperforms for a Kirby title; sure the first stage is mildly catchy and jaunty, but the rest of the OST is filled with depressingly lackluster tracks that initially sound good but don't really go anywhere interesting—they're all bark and no bite. The best thing I can say about Sakai's compositions is that they're wonderfully varied and not starved for quantity, but they lack the texture and splendor of Ishikawa's pieces. Just compare a boss track from this game to the common one in Return to Dreamland; ignoring the difference in soundfonts, Dreamland's is much more compelling—and it's not even my favorite boss track from the game!

Returning to what I claimed at the top of my review—that Mass Attack is one of my least favorite games I've ever finished—I think what really cements this opinion for me is a simple truth: you barely even play Mass Attack. There are plenty of notoriously worse games that are deserving of far harsher criticism, but almost every one I can think of has at least some element of play to it. There are buttons to press, mechanics to learn, and strategies to devise on your terrible journey that can lead to some form of mastery (unless it's full-motion garbage like Plumbers Don't Wear Ties). Mass Attack requires only lazy inputs from the player, where your mind wanders with your stylus in one hand and your chin atop your palm in the other. Even other games with low gameplay input like Vampire Survivors and Dragon Quest  have at least some modicum of interesting minute-to-minute decisions you have to make, which can impact your survival in the long term. In Mass Attack, the most interesting problem you face is what angle to throw your Kirbys at—and it's really only one enemy (the cactus fellow) that takes advantage of this.

It summons an interesting dichotomy: I recently went trophy-hunting in Ketsui and you know what? That's an amazing video game. In a few seconds you'll be mowing down enemies, optimizing score, and needing to balance the route in your head with the bullets on the field. It's admittedly unfair to compare a Kirby offshoot to one of the best shoot-em-ups ever made, but the point I'm trying to make is that Ketsui is an input extreme, giving you full control at all times with interesting decisions to be made nearly every second. Going to Mass Attack soon afterwards felt like hitting the other end of the spectrum, where all you do is hold your stylus on the right side of the screen... and slowly watch Kirbys clonk an enemy to death. There's very little risk management, even fewer heart-pounding scenarios, and no pathing quandaries that need solving. Every other Kirby game at least gives you some substance you can sink your teeth into and play riskily if you so choose. Mass Attack consists of only 10% of that excitement at best—the other 90% is the most boring, repetitive game on Earth. Why else do you think almost nobody speedruns it?

I have no sympathy for Kirby Mass Attack; it's a tedious, dull, asinine game. What I think I struggle with the most when looking back on it is trying to understand why some fans love it so. I get being drawn in by the concept—I was too. I understand having a soft spot for it because you may have played it in your childhood. But calling it underrated? Phenomenal? The best game in the franchise? It's a circle I can't square, outrageous doublespeak I'm too shrewd to accept. I get that tastes are subjective and all that, but a masterpiece? This game? No.

You'd have to lobotomize me before I touch it again.

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Images obtained from:  ign.com, blogger.com, ebay.com, amazon.com

Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Spirit of Justice - Thoughts

[contains minor spoilers—no case specifics, just general themes]

Something is rotten in the ancient state of Khurai'in—and if that statement doesn't spark an interest you, then Spirit of Justice likely won't either. The sixth mainline title in the Ace Attorney series sees a radical shift in setting, dropping Phoenix Wright & co. into a fanatical nation on the cusp of a revolution. It's a bold change to make, but arguably a necessary one, as the class and caste of old was growing stale. Note that this doesn't radicalize the structure of Ace Attorney in any way—everything you know and love is still here—but it brings to the table more unpredictability and intrigue, two key components to any good mystery story. I don't think Spirit of Justice gets to lay claim to being the best in the series, but it does its best to compete with the better titles, and in some ways, even transcends them.

Dual Destinies—the previous entry—tried to shake up the formula with the threat of corruption undergirding the judicial process, but it was a laughable dilemma that bore no weight on the story. Spirit of Justice counters this feeble punch with a hard right hook called the DC Act: a Khurainese law that ensures defense lawyers receive the same punishment as their clients should they fail. From the moment the game starts it keeps the pressure high for Phoenix Wright, who has to put his literal neck on the line to defend the innocent bystanders caught up in vile machinations greater than them. At times it can feel a little ridiculous how stacked the odds are (especially in the last case, where the governing body itself seeks your demise), but the stakes help to propel the story forward, frequently reminding you that the nation of Khurai'in is irredeemably broken.

Along with the vibrant new setting, Spirit of Justice also introduces the player to Insights: half-minute recollections (ie videos) of a victim's last moments, peppered with stray details from their five senses. It works similar to Athena's Mood Matrix in the previous game, where you're looking for a contradiction between the prosecution's argument and how the magical retelling unfolds. For a fictitious example, if the suspect is presumed to be a man, then spotting the word "perfume" in the victim's Insight could be the saving grace your case desperately needs. Although Insights were not used often, I found them to be an excellent addition that both enhanced and evolved the player's understanding of a case; they're perhaps the best mechanic the Ace Attorney series has ever produced (sorry jury system, but Insights allow for some clever twists!)

Speaking of twists, Spirit of Justice comes packing a decent number of them, even if (as is typical with the series) you may have to suspend your logic for a second. Nearly every case has a one or two twists that will be hard to see coming, with the third and fifth in particular having some especially brilliant, memorable, and dark outcomes. Sadly, the fifth case spins its wheels for a bit too long after its greatest rug pull, as its remaining mysteries make little sense or outright fail to convince the player ("that" character's reveal is one of the most nonsensical things I've seen in a series known for its serendipitous buffoonery). Thankfully, nothing here dips as low as the Phantom arc in Dual Destinies; from start to finish, I was constantly wondering, hypothesizing, and awaiting the many mysteries Spirit of Justice laid out for me.

And of course, no Ace Attorney game would be complete without a gaggle of curious characters and quirky music to accompany them. While the witness lineup doesn't quite hit the highs of the original trilogy, there are a decent number of memorable faces like Rayfa, Datz, Uendo, Soren, and my man Dhurke (arguably the best character in the whole game). Sahdmadhi as a prosecutor is... alright overal: he fulfills the "insufferable heel" trope pretty well without ever feeling cartoonishly evil or petty. I think his biggest problem is that he takes a backseat during his own character arc, allowing a larger character looming over him to take his stead (but hey, it fits in a way). The music is a bit less catchy this time around and more surprisingly moody, albeit still equal parts fantastic; the cream of the crop being the cross examination theme for being simultaneously unsettling and sinister.

Sadly, as with all the non-Shu Takumi titles, Spirit of Justice doesn't know how to handle its characters in a meaningful way. Trucy gets an emotional moment in the second case and then is promptly forgotten about for the rest of the game, the third case features some vile betrayals that no one shows any kind of guilt over, and Apollo gets yet another "never mentioned before but it's super important" backstory. But the worst for me was Maya: ignoring the fact that she's still a 17-year-old mentally with all the same old animations, she does very little in the main game besides being relegated to a damsel in distress. It's only in the DLC case that she gets to shine as an assistant once again, and even there her colorful commentary isn't nearly as bright as it once was. After being gone for so long, Maya's presence here is frankly a disgrace.

Likewise, I think the way Spirit of Justice ties up its tyrannical government plotline is deeply unfulfilling. The tumult of revolution can be felt in the background early on, but the game never takes it seriously as a potential outcome, treating it as beholden to—rather than in charge of—Khurai'in's destiny. Instead, it's our heroic cast of foreigners and their elaborate deductions that carve a path towards tyranny's end, with the final "aha!" being so farfetched that it could only work on a die-hard constitutionalist. For a narrative that was surprisingly grim and tragic up to this point, Spirit of Justice handles regime change with unwarranted, blinding optimism.

Now obviously I'm viewing this 2016 game through a more cynical 2025 lens (gee, it's that easy to topple an authoritarian government built on brainless zeal, huh?) but it's hard to restrain myself when Capcom deliberately chose this bold of a setting. And look—I get that this is the series where multiple villains have confessed to their crime when cornered with facts and logic; expecting a Pentiment-style portrayal of the common man's plight was never going to happen. But I refuse to believe Spirit of Justice couldn't have resolved its central conflict in a more thematically cohesive and valiant manner—I mean come on, Dhurke and Datz are right there! They could have done something more meaningful!

For fans of Ace Attorney, Spirit of Justice won't be a revolution; it plays its story straight and safely, doing little with most of its characters and even less with the established cast. But for someone looking for some lengthy cases with plenty of evidence to pore over, Spirit of Justice is a wedding-size buffet of intrigue, surprises, and subterfuge. The game takes over 50 hours to finish (DLC included) and is bound to stump you at least a handful of times, which I greatly appreciated after the relaxed ride of Dual Destinies. Even though I hope for the eventual Ace Attorney 7 to shake-up to the now-stable formula, Spirit of Justice has proven that for however long Capcom wants to crank out games of this quality, I will continue playing with glee, gripes notwithstanding.

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Images obtained from: Ace-Attorney.com

Witcheye - Thoughts

When Peter Malamud Smith sat down to make Witcheye, a lone question must've plagued his mind: if Treasure made one more game for the Sega Genesis, what would it look like? I'm honestly surprised that more developers haven't asked themselves this question (where are all the fan-made successors to Alien Soldier, Dynamite Headdy, and Gunstar Heroes anyway?) Perhaps it's a tall order given Treasure's inimitable brand, since—despite producing almost exclusively sidescrollers—they rarely made the same thing twice. All of their games are filled to the brim with personality, passion, and an untouchable eccentricity, so following in their footsteps is no small feat. Yet even with that knowledge, Smith barreled ahead, creating one of the coolest (only?) bite-sized bounce-a-thons I've ever played.

The first thing you'll notice about Witcheye is that it's bursting with tremendous creativity. Smith's artstyle effortlessly pops, every screenshot a warm-colored painting even if the palette consists mostly of deep blues and cloudy grays. Backgrounds are exquisite, intermingling seamlessly with the foreground tiles while remaining clearly differentiated, ensuring you're never confused where you can and can't go. The soundtrack is frenetic and surprisingly varied, pushing you onward with the help of a sonorous, upbeat bass that you can't help but nod your head to. I think no matter your opinion on the game overall, it's impossible to deny that Smith is extraordinarily talented.

Deeper still Witcheye's creativity runs, like the roots of a mighty oak. Taking cues from both Treasure and classic Rare, every level is crafted around a distinct theme or gimmick, unafraid of introducing a unique enemy you'll never see again. Likewise, there's a smorgasbord of minibosses that range from nifty to tricky on the first go-around, but let you blow through them when properly trained. In fact, one of the coolest things about Witcheye is its brisk pace, with each level taking roughly thirty seconds to complete—though expect to spend several minutes when looking for the game's deviously hidden collectibles. There aren't any auto-scrolling stages, backtracking mazes, or patience-testing boss battles either (maybe sans the Colossus); Witcheye keeps you on a constant treadmill moving forwards, its eye fixed firmly on its next delightful surprise.

But what impressed me the most about Witcheye is that goes above and beyond for its NG+ difficulty. While it's worth buying the game for a single playthrough, the post-game's "hard mode" is where the gameplay really starts to shine, as it looks at every stage and manually tweaks them in just the right way. Don't expect the typical attack reduction or damage inflation; every enemy comes at you with a new trick up their sleeve, varying from a slight spring in their step to an evil new projectile to catch you off-guard. Likewise the stages themselves are occasionally altered, changing where certain collectibles are or tossing a new hazard your way (like the never-ending lightning storm of 4-7—lovely mechanic!) Witcheye's guiding hand may start in a gentle, grandmotherly manner—but play long enough and a werewolf's gnarled paw take shape, its endgame talons more than capable of ripping you to pieces.

(Plus, if you still yearn for more of a beating, you can try your hand at the boss rushes or NG++ 1-hit-kill mode!)

I think the only thing about the game that fits the "love it or hate it" bill is its curious controls. Screenshots may suggest Witcheye is a platformer, but it honestly has more in common with pinball than Mario. You play as a whirling eye set to bounce around the stage like a perpetually ricocheting billiard ball, able to change direction with a flick of the left stick and hover in place with a tap of the A button. Though simple, most of your struggles will come from accidentally veering in the wrong direction, as there's no indicator for where you're going or what direction your stick is pointing in. This leads to a lot of situations where you intend to move orthogonally but are instead sent at a slight angle, prompting more skewed course corrections and inevitably spiralling into a bunch of unintended damage.

Though unfortunate, mistakes will gradually diminish over time as you adapt to the controls. There is a noticeable chasm between how you play as an greenhorn vs a seasoned eye-bouncer, with 1-tile wide gaps transforming from your worst enemy to a shrug-inducing speedbump. You'll come to embrace unintended tilts like an awkward in-law, capable of pulling a friendly U-turn out of the worst trajectories. I mean, if someone can get used to the brain-wrinkling control scheme of Alien Soldier, then Witcheye will be child's play in comparison. Even when the game's latter stages start to turn up the heat, Witcheye stays light and breezy thanks to its snappy stages—any death you suffer is a thirty second setback at worst.

Witcheye may lack the replayable depth of a Treasure title, but it's a worthy student of the Genesis gems in just about every other way. It's well-paced, punchy, relentlessly pretty, and frequently brilliant, displaying a ton of variety for such a relatively simple game. And that's to say nothing of its superb level design, measured difficulty curve, and host of challenging extra modes for the hardcore. For the astonishingly low price it's set at (it goes for $2 on sale!), Witcheye is an essential purchase that devotes every second of its playtime to pure, unfettered fun.

(... although the cutscenes do tend to linger for a little too long)

Red Ronin - Thoughts

It takes a lot of guts to look at sliding block puzzles and think, "You know, if only there was a way to fit some Hotline Miami in here!" Despite reeking of a drunken 2AM epiphany, Red Ronin seeks to do exactly that, marrying ponderous ice physics with violent, frenetic action. And while this blood-soaked Sokoban appears to be a smash hit in its first chapter, Red Ronin's ugly bits will eventually unfurl as its concepts vie for attention. The puzzle side of the game will argue for more complex and methodical setups, while the violence demands more reflex-based traps and harder boss fights. Red Ronin likes to believe these two concepts can work out their differences, but their incessant tug-of-war-ing will come at the cost of the player's patience—and sanity.

At the very least, Red Ronin shows that its premise has legs. Enemies are restricted to moving a square at a time but the protagonist can zoom across the arena until she collides with an obstacle, slicing up any opponents in her path. While you'll feel like a murderous bolt of lightning in the first chapter, each subsequent chapter introduces its own unique speed bump: patrolling bots that kill upon contact, enemies with 2 hp, lasers that sweep across the arena, and plenty more. As mechanics are added the odds will be increasingly stacked against you, forcing you to lean heavily on the game's two collectible resources: time-stop and mid-direction change.

These abilities are integral to Red Ronin as a puzzle game, as a good chunk of the challenge comes from where and when you'll use them. At first these power-ups seem like a cool way to allow for some player expression in battle, letting you take shortcuts to the end of a fight with smart ability use. That, and any leftover power-ups can be taken into the next battle, which can give you a leg up on a tricky opening. But as the game goes on your freedom to use these power-ups diminishes, until you're forcibly chaining them together in a conga line atop a tight rope. The game is absolutely better with the power-ups than without them, but the level of restriction Red Ronin prefers is that of a straight-jacket, offering little room for personal flair, style, or even mistakes. Puzzles often have one solution, and dallying outside that golden zone will undoubtedly result in a swift and decisive death.

Despite the game's numerous issues (which I'll get to shortly), what miffed me most of all was the lack of a rewind function. A good portion of the game's eccentricities may boil down to personal preference, but how do you miss adding a way to undo actions in your turn-based puzzle game? This is an issue that only gets exasperated as the game gets harder, seeing as deaths send you back to the start of a battle, instantly undoing an upwards of twenty or thirty inputs. And since there's little flexibility in how you move through a level, you'll often be memorizing the exact inputs required to get you to the spot you previously died at—and then you better pray you can figure it out from there. Stage inputs will be burned into your retinas as you run through the first half over and over and over again, with small mistakes weeding their way into your actions due to sheer fatigue. The lack of a rewind function may start as an understandable omission, but it won't take long before you'll see it for what it truly is: inexcusable.

While no rewind is a slow-killing poison for Red Ronin, a more immediate and pressing problem the game has is that it isn't strictly turned based. Laser traps and bosses break out of this constraint, operating independently of your turns and actions. This means that as you're sitting there trying to work out your next best move, a boss can put you in his crosshairs and blast you all the way back to the start of the fight. However this rule-breaking is also strangely infrequent (barring Stage 6), meaning you never really get to train the reactions required to play Red Ronin like a coked-up samurai. It's an uncomfortable pivot; for 90% of the game you'll be allowed to play as slow and methodically as you want, but the last 10% thrusts you into a Guitar Hero duel, where missing a single note incurs a reset. Naturally, it's here where you'll rack up most of your deaths, as you'll be backed into dead ends constantly via bad judgment, sloppy execution, or (most likely) a sad combination of the two. For the slower players out there, the bosses are likely where Red Ronin shall bury them.

Strangely, however, reactive players don't get a much better treatment since the game lacks (noticeable) input buffering. Hitting a direction mid-slide doesn't queue that movement up when the slide ends, which makes the protagonist feel sluggish and unresponsive, as if she's taking a leisurely breath between actions. This can lead to a lot of stupid deaths where you're thoughtlessly inputting a correct sequence of actions (up-left-up-right-down) but if you don't wait for each animation to finish an input gets dropped somewhere (up-left-right-DEAD). Worse yet is that activating your abilities can freeze the real-time bosses but only when they're between their actions, meaning occasionally you'll miss your window to pause the boss fight due to a lingering animation. And then the boss with throw bombs at your feet, then the game will pause (but not the bomb timer), then you'll be frantically trying to unpause the game, and then finally blow up mid-slide to safety.

Even if the issues I mentioned so far weren't present, I still wouldn't call Red Ronin perfect. Not only are its puzzles too exacting for a game trying to be stylish and smooth, but critical information is easily muddled by the amount of enemies on screen. Foes lack a visual "danger zone" that lets you see their striking range, hiding the fact that they both move and attack adjacent squares. Although you'll learn this lesson very early on (the hard way), I think it would still be helpful to see their striking range with the press of a button. As more enemies are added into the fray it can be hard to parse which of them will move in what direction too—like, if there was an enemy to your bottom left and one to your bottom right, figuring out which of the two will move into the bottom middle spot first could be integral to your survival. This only gets worse as big guys and far-reaching foes are thrown into the mix, muddying things until there's not much else you can do besides blindly search for the correct path. Ultimately, as fights grow more chaotic and frustrating, you'll come to rely on trial and error to find the way out, which isn't nearly as satisfying as outsmarting your opponents.

Lastly—and I'm hesitant to even mention this—but the story is surprisingly not good. A "cyberpunk revenge story" doesn't need much besides a good aesthetic and cool tunes to listen to, but I was surprised by just how unfulfilling Red Ronin felt. It's main character is a selfish, thoughtless, bitter human being, bosses are weirdly flippant when staring down their would-be murderer, and any pathos the game shows in its dossiers is gone as soon as characters open their mouths. On top of this, the game opens with a cliche, in media res hook of falling of a building—and that scene is nowhere in the game! The whole thing ends on a cliffhanger! For most other video games I usually handwave away the story when it's not that strong, but here I was left flabbergasted by just how hard Red Ronin missed the mark. And it was such an easy mark to hit too!

I don't regret playing Red Ronin but I can't help but feel overwhelmed by its disappointments. I think part of it is that I find the concept really fascinating; most of the time action games get infused with puzzle elements, and not often the reverse. Throw in the fact that Sokoban puzzle games are a dime a dozen, and Red Ronin manages to shine all the brighter: it's nakedly violent, constantly creative (new mechanics every level!), and isn't afraid to give the ol' noggin a workout. But its strengths are diminished by too many asterisks, its two-faced nature splitting the experience in half instead of coming together. If you decide to try it, enjoy the first level—because it's all downhill from there.

Jetboard Joust - Thoughts

Jetboard Joust is a weird game that flounders like a fish out of water. Don't be fooled by its sharp retro aesthetics and vibrant art—there's a lot going wrong under the hood. You may be able to wrangle its chaotic gameplay and eradicate its volatile enemies in the first few stages, but gradually Jetboard Joust spirals into madness, eventually exploding—gleefully—into a fireball of noise, pixels, and flashing lights. Most of the game's issues can fit under the general umbrella of "needs tweaking", but I'm not convinced months of edits and updates could save Jetboard Joust. The rot at Jetboard Joust's heart is less tangible and more philosophical: it doesn't know what to do to make itself fun to play.

In Jetboard Joust, you're tasked with fending off an alien invasion on five worlds, each world comprised of eleven stages. For each stage you'll have to eliminate an unspecified number of alien waves while protecting itty-bitty alien kids from abduction. Should the alien babies get whisked off to the top of the screen, a super strong enemy will spawn... which isn't that big of a deal as a single joust can obliterate it. Sure, you'll lose a little bit of money at the end of the stage as a punishment, but ultimately saving the tiny tots is optional. Hell, it might even be preferable to let some of them get vaporized, considering how often the abduction alarm will be ringing in your ears. That, and the unskippable "civilians saved" animation work towards making you actively detest the helpless dummies you're trying to protect.

Luckily they'll be an afterthought most of the time, as you'll be dealing with a wide variety of alien menaces. As negative as my impressions are for the game, there are a decent amount of weapons and enemies to play around with, both of which expand as you make your way through the campaign. The most common enemy you'll face are fellow jetboarders, which can range from cannon fodder to aerial assassins—depending on what weapons are mounted to the tips of their boards. Like you, jetboarders have access to a huge assortment of armaments—specifically, your armaments. But unlike you, they're not bound by ammunition or feeble human reaction times, allowing them to wipe the floor with you should you misjudge the reach of their firearm. And that'll happen a lot, given how absurdly chaotic the screen gets as enemies rapidly populate it, all of them salivating for your demise.

Jetboard Joust's obsession with swarming the player is the first of its many pitfalls, as it turns the game's later worlds into an indecipherable gamble. Both the number of waves and enemies contained therein increase the further you get into the game, to the point that a single screen can be jam-packed with twenty or thirty foes you need to be reacting to. Worse yet is that enemies can vary wildly in firepower, capable of dealing anywhere from a sliver of damage to half of your health bar, and you have nearly no invulnerability frames, which allows a single misread to tank a run. Not since Wizard of Legend have I played a game where death is so effortlessly paid out to the player!

That's not to say Jetboard Joust is a hard game however, as it's fairly lax outside of a few glaring instances. Health and ammo are guaranteed to drop as long as you're doing a little bit of damage to your foes, a merciful mechanic that you'll need in order to survive the game's longer waves and boss fights. You'll heal to full health in between each stage and saving up enough money will allow you to purchase an extra life if you happen to fall in battle. Plus you're guaranteed an extra life before the big boss fight that caps off each world, which you can use to get a good handle on their capabilities.

But the real crapshoot is in the game's guardian battles: special encounters that occur at the end of individual levels. The enemy pool for this is vast and fairly random, handing you anything from easily-dispatched trash mobs to a battalion of Enforcers: enemies that can easily demolish you even with your best weapon at the ready. God forbid they warp in with a sniper rifle or shotgun, because in either case you'll be space dust in seconds. Almost no other game I can think of has such polarizing finales, where defeat or victory can be determined in the first five shots—and you often have no idea on which side you'll end up on until the particle effects finally fade.

Of course, even during some easy encounters you'll still have a chance to bite the big one, largely because parsing the game's visuals is a challenge unto itself (turn off screen shake ASAP!!!) While screenshots make it look sleek, Jetboard Joust's adherence to two primary colors creates a lot of unintended noise on the battlefield, especially since a lot of the info given to you (ammo, health, lives, abductions) is presented in the same monochrome shade. At the very least, the game needed to offer the player character more colors in order to make them stand out more easily; having each weapon come with its own unique palette would've been an easy way to tell which armament you have equipped, instead of forcing you to rely on a small text blurb at the top right.

Jetboard Joust's weapons are unfortunately another aspect that ratches up the game's zany factor, ranging from Goldeneye's klobb-esque tickle machines to screen-clearing explosions. Two weapons will be granted to you at the start of a run and then you'll have to seek out the rest on the map selection screen, often foregoing valuable treasure or upgrades to do so. This pushes the player to rely on the armaments they're randomly given, especially since any new weapons acquired arrive at their lowest level, requiring thousands of dollars of investment to get up to snuff. But in an effort to get you to swap weapons often, Jetboard Joust reduces your ammunition to a comical degree, granting only a few shots before you have to change your weapons up. And did I mention you can only carry a single weapon at a time? The rest of your firepower will be scattered around the stage as tiny pick-ups, blending into the background and often getting in the way of much-needed power-ups like health and ammo. In order to survive you'll have to swap weapons constantly, especially when you start to rub up against the game's wholly unnecessary durability system (yes, really) in later worlds.

The only other weapons innate to your standard board are a largely ineffectual pea shooter with infinite ammo and the titular joust ability. Jousting is a neat concept—it's a high-powered horizontal attack that's doubles as both a dash and bomb—but when and where joust restocks pop up are completely random. At times you'll be well-stocked and able to joust across the screen to your heart's content, but other times you'll be frantically searching for a single drop in order to safely dispose of a pursuing Enforcer. Along with your weapons, you're able to upgrade your jousts (and armor) for an increasingly high price—but where weapons scale asymptotically jousts scale linearly, meaning they'll be a sunk cost for the endgame. At that point jousts are mainly used as a quick escape so you can go surface skimming for the right power-up.

While most of the game is a kaleidoscope of exploding pixels, boss fights are where Jetboard Joust's high-octane madness slows to a crawl. These head honchos have an awful combination of bad traits: every boss is equipped with astronomically high health and hard to hit weak points, factors which are barely tolerable on their own but a waking nightmare when paired together. Without the right weapon fights can go on forever, as none of the bosses (besides the last) are effective at killing you, let alone hitting you. Sadly, you'll be struggling to hit them too, blowing through your best weapon's ammo as they rapidly jiggle around the screen. Eventually you'll get lazy and slip-up, all in an attempt to speed the process along, and maybe even dying—which means you'll have to do the fight all over again from the beginning! Worse yet is that bosses can appear randomly in stage waves later on—and sometimes multiple in the same wave! It's completely random!

All of these flaws meld together to form a game that feels barely enjoyable, but what really kills my desire to touch the game again is its padded length. Jetboard Joust is interminably long for an arcade shooter, taking roughly four hours to beat if you know what you're doing. Add in the fact that it's a permadeath roguelite and you'll feel like putting it down for good when you die three hours into your run on the last world. Thankfully you can unlock warps to future stages as you play through the game, but you won't be able to keep your prior upgrades and weapons. Instead—bafflingly!—you'll be given a random assortment of better weapons and upgrades, meaning you're almost encouraged to die and start from each warp point in case you're having trouble. Sure, it robs you of the true ending, but you'll have to play the game from start to finish without warps to achieve that. And considering that every stage is exactly the same barring which enemies spawn in and where, you'll have felt like you've played the game ten times over by the first time you reach its end.

Like a moth to a flame, I continued to play Jetboard Joust, even after I knew I wasn't going to enjoy it. But I was curious just how much craziness was left, as the horizon burst into coins, laser beams, and random doodads scattered about the floor. In a way I was reminded of some horrendously balanced PS2 games like Chaos Legion or Extermination, in how they urge you to press on because you don't know how it could get worse—but you know that it will. Given how much love and attention was poured into Jetboard Joust I feel it's unfair to simply write it off as a bad game, but I know one thing: it certainly isn't a good one.

Wolcen - Thoughts

A genre I didn't expect having so much resistance to is the Action RPG. I was an active participant in its heyday, having grown up on the unforgettable one-two punch of Diablo and Diablo II. But I suppose in retrospect I didn't play them a lot—or rather, I didn't play them as much as my peers tended to. After finishing both games, my relationship with ARPGs was mostly casual: I played Diablo 3 a decent amount, bounced off of Titan Quest and Path of Exile, and liked Grim Dawn but sadly never finished it. I've always kept my eye out for projects on the horizon that looked interesting despite my own personal struggles with the genre, because I was waiting for an experience to finally click with me.

Yet there's also an irrepressible, morbid side to my desires. I'm enthralled by broken dreams, overambition, and an out-of-depth arrogance. I love writing about games that fail the player, because even though I may detest the title while playing it, it's fascinating to pick apart a game's design and ponder what went wrong. That's why Wolcen has always had a giant red bullseye on its back, begging me to play it. The game released to aggressively mixed reviews on Steam and had its fanbase quickly burn out, despite receiving numerous post-launch updates in an attempt to resuscitate the community. And if the fans of the genre abandoned Wolcen, a game that by all impressions looks pretty good, then what hope did it have for me, a jaded apostate that has abandoned the genre?

Well guess what? Wolcen is fine. Well... "fine" is a bit of an oversimplification—Wolcen is a mediocre action romp that looks and sounds great but fundamentally misses the mark. It's not a game that will leave you itching to try out a different build or strategize around unique gear you discover; Wolcen is firmly a "play, theorycraft, and wipe your hands once done" type of experience. I think that kind of thing can be a huge disappointment for ARPG addicts looking for the next juicy hit to keep coming back to, but for someone like me that bounces quickly from game to game, it was an unexpectedly fun ride. Personally the best part of an ARPG is near its start anyway, when you first get to submerge your hands into the gooey, squishy clay that is character building—and Wolcen's clay reservoir is practically overflowing.

Besides its above-average presentation, the best thing Wolcen has going for it is a massive passive skill tree that puts Diablo IV to shame. It's not as mind-bogglingly large as Path of Exile but it's still deeper and wider than many of its contemporaries, giving you a ton of pathways and connections to mull over. You start by picking one of three core "builds" to focus on, and as you spread out you'll run into two secondary builds further in and four tertiary builds on the outer rim. You can also cross into adjacent builds pretty quickly and rotate bits of the web to make it easier to beeline for a tertiary build from the start. Additionally, there are larger nodes that grant build-defining skills sprinkled throughout, although most of the ones on the outer rim tend to come with a downside that make them risky to take (at least for my build). Still, no matter if you're big on experimenting with wacky triple-class shenanigans or laser-focused on damage of a single type, it's hard not to find something to love within Wolcen's giant web of possibilities.

The downside to all of this is that Wolcen's active skills fail to support the range of options here. Similar to the passive tree, there are three core active skill types: melee, range, and magic. You can pick up as many as you want (provided you have the money) but your access to them is limited by the weapon you have equipped (ie if you wield an arcane staff you can't use melee or range skills). While that may sound like an acceptable restriction, what kills the game's variety is that skills are woefully scant: there are 18 skills for magic, 13 for range, and only 12 for melee. With 6 skills able to be loaded into your hotbar, and most of them being simple do-damage doodads, it's going to feel like there's not much room for build variety. Wolcen tries to remedy this with a rune system similar to Diablo III (but with 16 skill runes instead of 5), but I never felt this made up for the lack of active skills on offer. If anything it made the game slightly more confusing to sift through, as a skill's true value was often hidden somewhere amidst its runes.

For my playthrough, I kept my build in Wolcen deliciously simple: I was a big strong lad that liked to smash things with his right-click hammer. I knew to follow ARPG 101: get a good damage ability, get a quick escape ability, and then everything else is supplemental (AoE, utility, buffs, debuffs, etc). Due to Wolcen's limited skills, the three non-damage supplemental abilities I picked up were the only three the melee class offered: a shout, an AoE buff, and a summon of all things. Everything else would compete for resources against my big bonk attack, and pretty early on I found the bonk to be unparalleled at pulping foes. I zipped across the passive skill web to pick up as many +physical damage nodes as possible, and when I ran out of those I doubled down on becoming a tank, pumping my resistances up to 55% across the board. It was a fun experience that kept me engaged for the most part—but I couldn't help but feel everything was so... arbitrary.

For instance, I spent a long time trying to figure out if I should be going for high HP or high resistance. I received plenty of gear for both builds and could easily pick up nodes to support whichever choice I made, seeing as they were both major pillars for melee builds. But what truly muddled my options was that raw and multiplicative numbers are hidden—you're only given the total of your statistics, not the raw value nor what it's being multiplied by. This forces you to flick back and forth between your stats tab and the passive skill tree with each change, as you're never really sure just how much "10% more resistance" adds to your overall resistance (for me it was closer to 2% total). The same is true for all damage types, attack speed, crit chance, force shield—basically every upgrade on the passive skill tree gets put into an equation you never get to see.

That's why it was so hard for me to figure out my defense strategy. Is 10% more resistance better than 8% more max HP when I can't see the cumulative total for either until after I level up? And considering the lightning-fast speed at which new gear dropped ("rare" quality? More like I "rare"ly get anything else), I was changing out my equipment so fast that old comparisons I made were immediately outdated. I wound up waffling between the two defense stats, ultimately looking for gear that provided both but willing to lean into resistance if the stat was high enough. I encountered a similar hurdle when I found a unique weapon near the end of the game, one that gave a huge amount of arcane bonuses if I switched to that damage type. But since Wolcen doesn't offer a way to save different loadouts or view your total stats while respeccing, I spent 10 minutes remaking my character to an arcane-melee man, saw my damage would be a tiny bit less, and then spent 10 minutes trying to rebuild my original bonklord. Thankfully respeccing is fairly cheap, but the process was so tedious and unproductive that I never again considered altering my build.

As far as the campaign goes, Wolcen does an admirable job, although the first three acts aren't anything to write home about. The story here is unabashedly about Warhammer 40k marines in a fantasy universe (so Warhammer?), bombarding you with an incredible amount of side chatter in an attempt to endear you to its lore. For some folks this will provide a great incentive to care about Wolcen's grim universe and quippy cast of characters, but for those used to every other ARPG, the dialogue will only get in the way of whatever media is playing on your second monitor. That, and the prose itself isn't particularly gripping; it reminds me most of 90s comic book writing, the kind you'd find under a Liefeld-esque cover where a gallon of blood drips off the main character's spiked gauntlets. As you play it you'll realize that Wolcen suffers from a self-consciousness problem: it's trying to be what it thinks is cool, and you can't help but notice the "trying" part while playing.

Wolcen's final act however, is definitely one of the most interesting things about it. In it, a big bad demon is coming to attack your hub city, and each time you embark on a mission he gets a little bit closer to arriving. In order to give yourself a fighting chance you have to pick and choose missions that will weaken him and his forces, along with bolstering your city's defenses and productivity. The final boss starts at roughly 15 levels above you, so your first attempt at tackling him will likely end in crushing demise. Afterwards, you'll be whisked back to the start of the demon invasion with only your gear, levels, and a few town upgrades intact. It's a cool idea with a tiny roguelite spin on it that I vastly prefer to the boring, dungeon-delving act structure that most ARPGs religiously follow.

But just like the rest of the game, Wolcen's final act is poorly thought out. Upgrading your town is cool in theory, but in reality you only have about two dozen upgrades to choose from, with a good chunk of those being "increase productivity for your city". Early on I thought the idea of a garrison was great since it could gather gold and items for you between missions, but the gold they accrued was pitifully low (2000?! When it costs 15k to build anything?!!) and the gear was worse than the whites I'd stumble across laying by the side of the road. Mission variety—while decent—was severely imbalanced too, with some missions taking over 10 minutes to complete while others (specifically headhunter) could be wrapped up in under 10 seconds. And the weirdest of all is that a bunch of postgame stuff (building structures, bounty maps, hunt trophies) would show up during this act but you can't interface with any of it until the final boss is slain. Like, why give me a bounty map or show me the trophy vendor when I can't access either? Why prevent the player from building the transmutation forge or enneract lab or salt baths until after the hardest battle has concluded? Ultimately the final act felt underbaked and aimless, reaching for greatness but falling short the way a middle schooler would playing college basketball.

Make no mistake: I liked my time with Wolcen. I don't feel comfortable calling it a good game, but it definitely didn't feel like a bad one—it's mostly just janky and imbalanced. Imagine a shiny new office desk with plenty of papers atop it, ready for you to scribble down your zany character builds. But on closer inspection you'll see that the desk's nails were never fully hammered in, the screws only slightly turned, and the panels assembled from disparate types of wood. The desk is sturdy enough that you can write on it for some 20 hours or more, but to spend longer than that—to feverishly draw harder than you have been—is to send the whole thing toppling down. Wolcen is a fine experience, but at the end of the day the classics of old will outlast it—and it won't be a surprise why.